WC's best fighter and bomber of all time

The Dragon's lack of availability post-WC4 has been discussed before, but the short form is that a) given its use as a terror weapon (biowarfare and incinerating civilian ships from the inside out are hardly SOP for Confed), the political costs outweighed the benefits, and b) the Dragon was prohibitively expensive for mass production, thanks to all of the advanced technologies included in it (cloak, capship-style matter/antimatter powerplant, and so forth).
And, to repeat one of the things I mentioned in that thread, because it was so wasteful - since it was designed to do everything, most of its capabilities were always wasted on any given mission. The only thing the higher pricetag really gave Confed in return was the option of stocking a carrier with a full wing of identical ships - which is not much consolation, when you can instead spend a lot less on a full wing of several different types of ships that, taken together, can handle the exact same roles a Dragon wing could handle.

(come to think of it, the WCP manual even spells this out for us, explaining that during the War, Confed ships were designed to handle any given task, while the post-War ships are specialised. So, the Dragon is the pinnacle of War-era fighters... but Confed chose to go in a different direction)
 
Okay, so mass producing these suckers is a bad idea.

How about the flash-pak?

I'd love to be the pilot to test those babies out against the bugs.
Inside out bugs? We'd have to rename the flash-pak to some more appropriate roach killer term.
 
Okay, so mass producing these suckers is a bad idea.

How about the flash-pak?

I'd love to be the pilot to test those babies out against the bugs.
Inside out bugs? We'd have to rename the flash-pak to some more appropriate roach killer term.

I think the big problem is that killing something in one hit is no fun, which is why prophecy changed things from just firing a torpedo to kill an enemy ship to having to hit multple systems
 
The FP was unable to penetrate later armors, like that mounted on the Vesuvius' hull, and since Nephilim armor isn't even metal, but organic material, the FP's ability to penetrate bug armor is even more dubious.

Keeping a weapon around whose primary use was for terrorism, on the slim chance that there may come along a race, in about a decade, on whose ships the FP might work is kind of silly, don't you think? :)
 
How about the flash-pak?

I'd love to be the pilot to test those babies out against the bugs.
Inside out bugs? We'd have to rename the flash-pak to some more appropriate roach killer term.
The flash-pak's usefulness turns out to be fairly temporary at best - even before it's used in WC4, Confed is already building ships that will be flash-pak-proof (...at least from the outside).
 
Do you know what it was about the Vesuvius that made her invulnerable from FPs on the outside?
Any chance the bugs don't have that technology?
 
It was the ship's armour. I don't remember if we're told anything more specific than that. I suppose, though, that it's a matter of thickness and/or material. From what we know about the flashpak, it simply conducts a lot of heat into the ship's interior somehow. Possibly it somehow drills through the armour, or maybe it just works by creating so much heat that enough of it is conducted straight through the armour into the interior. In either case, having thick enough armour would presumably protect the ship. The type of material might matter too, since some things are better conductors than others.

We don't know anything about how the bugs build their ships, so we don't know if their armour is thick enough to protect them. We do know, however, that their armour is roughly equivalent to Confed armour in the protection it offers against conventional weapons.
 
The FP was unable to penetrate later armors, like that mounted on the Vesuvius' hull, and since Nephilim armor isn't even metal, but organic material, the FP's ability to penetrate bug armor is even more dubious.

Keeping a weapon around whose primary use was for terrorism, on the slim chance that there may come along a race, in about a decade, on whose ships the FP might work is kind of silly, don't you think? :)

Well, we keep around a lot of unconventional and really nasty stuff like deadly germs and neutron bombs on the off chance that they may come in handy some day. Wouldn't hurt to have a cache of flashpacks somewhere, after all, what do the things weigh? A pound and a half? A Hornet could carry a hundred of them into battle.
 
Well, we keep around a lot of unconventional and really nasty stuff like deadly germs and neutron bombs on the off chance that they may come in handy some day. Wouldn't hurt to have a cache of flashpacks somewhere, after all, what do the things weigh? A pound and a half? A Hornet could carry a hundred of them into battle.

Neutron bombs have been banned and flash paks arent fun
 
"deadly germs and neutron bombs" aren't exactly prevalent in the US arsenal any more, the former being eventually destroyed under various biowarfare treaties, the latter not having been deployed for political reasons.

I know it's a popular notion in most fiction (even in some of mine, I believe), but "keep it around for a rainy day" is far less prevalent than it's pictured to be, and rarely as convenient outside of being a plot device.
 
Ultimately, though, we simply don't know whether or not these weapons are still used (the Lance and the flashpacks). The fact that we don't see Mace missiles in Wing Commander III didn't mean they were out of service -- just that Colonel Blair didn't happen to be using them. It's entirely possible that there are Confederation squadrons flying Lances and deploying flashpacks.
 
And, to repeat one of the things I mentioned in that thread, because it was so wasteful - since it was designed to do everything, most of its capabilities were always wasted on any given mission. The only thing the higher pricetag really gave Confed in return was the option of stocking a carrier with a full wing of identical ships - which is not much consolation, when you can instead spend a lot less on a full wing of several different types of ships that, taken together, can handle the exact same roles a Dragon wing could handle.

(come to think of it, the WCP manual even spells this out for us, explaining that during the War, Confed ships were designed to handle any given task, while the post-War ships are specialised. So, the Dragon is the pinnacle of War-era fighters... but Confed chose to go in a different direction)

On something like this, I'd tend to think that it would simply be a cost issue that might have killed the Dragons. So you waste one capability when using it for another...so what? This only means that you can launch two wings of Dragons on two different missions, and if nothing else, if a wing configured solely for a CAP suddenly ran into a couple of destroyers, they could fly back with very little turnaround time and rearm/relaunch to join the wings that were most likely launched a little while earlier to take care of it, backing up that first strike mission. Maintenance would be a cinch, as everyone would have the same parts for the same aircraft and the same mech knowledge in fixing it up.

As a real-world example, the Navy has completely replaced F-14 squadrons with F/A-18 squadrons for the same reasons I'd listed above. The only difference is, the Hornet is a lot cheaper, both in dollars and in time, than the Tomcat in terms of building and maintaining where the Dragon would be the opposite...at least in terms of rolling off the assembly line, if absolutely nothing else.

I see nothing wrong with having a deck full of one type of fighter that can fulfill every mission...it's hugely advantageous and would allow hella-flexibility in combat operations.
 
On something like this, I'd tend to think that it would simply be a cost issue that might have killed the Dragons. So you waste one capability when using it for another...so what? This only means that you can launch two wings of Dragons on two different missions, and if nothing else, if a wing configured solely for a CAP suddenly ran into a couple of destroyers, they could fly back with very little turnaround time and rearm/relaunch to join the wings that were most likely launched a little while earlier to take care of it, backing up that first strike mission. Maintenance would be a cinch, as everyone would have the same parts for the same aircraft and the same mech knowledge in fixing it up.

As a real-world example, the Navy has completely replaced F-14 squadrons with F/A-18 squadrons for the same reasons I'd listed above. The only difference is, the Hornet is a lot cheaper, both in dollars and in time, than the Tomcat in terms of building and maintaining where the Dragon would be the opposite...at least in terms of rolling off the assembly line, if absolutely nothing else.

I see nothing wrong with having a deck full of one type of fighter that can fulfill every mission...it's hugely advantageous and would allow hella-flexibility in combat operations.

It makes sense from a maintenance standpoint, but there remains the issue of pilot training.

I know Wing Commander isn't a good example of this, but even though the E/A-18 Growler is a variant of the F/A-18 Hornet, you can't expect a Growler crew to do the job of a Hornet pilot, or vice versa.

If you train your interceptor pilots to push a Wasp to its limits, they probably won't be expert bomber pilots.

Returning to the issue of maintenance, you have to remember just how complex the Dragon is. Compared to the Dragon, the fighters of the Prophecy era are simple and straightforward, designed to do a particular job extremely well at low cost, and provide the capacity for major upgrades, like torpedo racks on the Vampire or an entirely new gun armament on the Panther.
Are they Dragons or Lances???

I'm not entirely sure, but I think Dragon refers to the fighter and Lance refers to the Black Lance.
 
They're commonly referred to as "Dragons" (presumably from the designation of the flight on the strike on the Amadeus), but officially they're the Lance, with "Black Lance" being not unlike the "black" ship variants in WCSO, or the Black Hellcats mentioned in the novelization.
 
On something like this, I'd tend to think that it would simply be a cost issue that might have killed the Dragons. So you waste one capability when using it for another...so what?
Yes, well, that's pretty much what I said. Naturally, it would be great to have a cheap fighter capable of doing everything - but the Dragon is a very expensive fighter capable of doing everything, so it's more effective to use a bunch of cheaper fighters, instead.
 
It's important to note that things are somewhat reversed in the F/A-18 example we have been using here. The F-14 was retired for two primary reasons; the first is that the mission of the US Navy has changed since the end of the cold war. We simply don't need an interceptor with the capabilities that the F-14 offered.

Secondly, the F-14 was incredibally expensive to operate in comparison to the F-18. If I'm understanding people correctly here, the Dragon is the more expensive fighter than the Prophecy fighters. In the real world example here, the more expensive aircraft was the specialized one.

Now, I see the point about having a wing of fighters that are all the same to cut down on maintenance. The Navy is certainly headed in that direction, but only because air superiority is much easier to attain now than it was in years past. The F-18 will never come close to being the kind of air to air interceptor the F-14 was; but it can sure splash a few bogeys when hard pressed! :D
 
Best fighter? The one I feel to be most safe? BWU Scimitar (from Unknown Enemy)
Best bomber? Hmmm... Well, Thunderbold isn't a pure bomber, but I'd definitely prefer to fly it when we're speaking of torpedoe attack :)
 
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