I honestly can't see that many ships, especially combat ships, even having a physical crew. I would imagine that most vessels would have specialised synth morphs (for maintenance) onboard and all personal inhabiting the internal server systems. This means you don't have a pesky life-support system and all it's extra weight you just need to worry about power, heat sinks, fuel and weapons. Organic systems aboard combat vessels are a liability and a hazard to the smooth and efficient functioning of such things.

EP space combat is deadly.Fighters( which are small drones) Three las(9d10+32 each), two rails(6d10+260 and six missiles which could have nukes which make them one hit, one kill weapons.. a single fighter always kills a shuttle. 20 or even 30 points of armor stops very little and counts for nothing on a nuke or antimatter missile.

Oh and also maneuverability is affected by organic bodies - you can't make ridiculously high g... anything when you have to worry about all the hazards an organic body would suffer, even if said bodies were in specialised (and so more expensive, sensitive, pesky) 'crash bays' designed just to insulate them from that problem.

Thampsan wrote:

I'll give you that, but even then why would you not use synth bodies for that purpose. Quick sleeving time, plus none of the organic hazards.

Jovians for one would not. Nor would people have before the fall, as uploading was less common then. Now almost everyone does and most do not think much of it. I can think of reasons for ships not to have Syth crews, most warships indeed would be Syth crewed I think. The "fighters" are more or less Syth bodies driven by an Infomorph,fork or A.I.

See my linked paper for an attempt at analysing things. Basically, space warfare in empty space is a weird chess game where you set things up days in advance and then everything is over after a few minutes of intense automated battling. Warfare in orbit is even deadlier, but involves lots of sneakiness and confusion, with the win going to the side with the best intelligence - remember the 17 minute war! Extremely deadly and unfair on the character level ("You all died."), and with little chance to role-play classic roles like fighter pilots (unless you like to role-play cut-down delta forks running submunitions). Technology advantages are complex. QE comms are a must: they extend your firing range signifcantly. Sensors and overall paranoia are good, but without a really smart C3I system you will still not win. Lasers vs missiles - I still don't know. Nukes don't work well against ships. Being able to print or reconfigure weaponry to suit to an upcoming battle is good. Being able to avoid battles by having delta-v enough to run away is even better... unless your enemy is counting on it and has extra reaction mass to chase you into a really unfavorable orbit. Going up against the Jovians is stupid unless you have some serious resources. Their republic is a military junta formed around the winning side(s) of a military conflict among top tier space navies, with a stated policy that the rest of the solar system is unfriendly. Even a minor patrol ship is going to have training and weaponry that is good - their automation is going to be more limited, but they are aware of this and *will have planned for you knowing this*. So I would not try to run this as a real fight, just get some skill rolls from the PCs to see how well they handle themselves during the events and decide the overall outcome based on what suits the plot. The deacceleration tank opened with a mild whine. She coughed as the smartgel reluctantly left her lungs. She had a very fuzzy memory of the AR overloading over the past minutes as thousands of icons battled out, trying to detect each other while being blinded by the detonations as hardware vaporised left and right. At some point the evasive shaking and the information overload just became too much and she filed the experience under chaos. "... did we win?" "Ahem, Miss Jansen. I am sorry to say, but I think we lost." "Huh?" "We took a Casaba-Howitzer nuclear beam. It fried the aft part of the ship and irradiated your morph beyond its tolerances. It will cease to function in a few hours." "I'll upload to the ship mesh." "Sorry. The egobridge, all nanosystems, and the farcasting systems are down due to the particle bombardment. And in any case we are going to be intercepted in about 24 hours by the enemy after they have finished turning. We do not have reaction mass to avoid it, or in fact, change course enough to reach any inhabited place." "They sliced us up good, right?" "Very professionally done." "So I have the choice to die messily organically and leave a stack behind for interrogation, or have you do the surgery and stay for a subjective month looking forward to being boarded? Why did I ever let you talk you into getting into this fight?" "You accepted my estimate that there was 75% chance of you surviving and 60% chance of mission success. Sorry, Miss Jansen."

So, soft squishy crew at the center of the vessel. So living areas, acceleration couches, command deck. Makes sense... Except that it's a pity that means you are forcing more of your other equally as important systems to more vulnerable non-core locations. We're talking distributed servers, life support, hydroponics, fuel, water, equipment... My argument is that anyone who isn't Jovian, and isn't an idiot probably is going to eschew the use of organic beings on combat vessels because they simply cost too much to lose in a conflict - both in terms of new bodies that need to be replaced and vessels destroyed or crippled because the organic crew couldn't maintain it. And if people *really* want a body then synth bodies are infinitely more valuable aboard combat vessels because of their durability, but even then they should - for efficiencies sake, be limited because walking space means less compact and so less space to pack more armour, weapons, heat-sinks, etc in. The space-opera trope of human manned combat vessels is dead. This is Eclipse Phase, long live the rise of the un-embodied cylon armada, now good for taking over facilities and for air and space superiority.

Prophet710 wrote:

With all this talk of remote teleoperation and simple AI pilots I have to ask. Would something like QE remote control even be possible? It seems to be it could be an efficient, if expensive method of having an entire fleet/army stationed at home and then project said "tele" force to literally anywhere, conquer or harass a target without any real net loss other than material. Meanwhile your force projection is right on your enemies doorstep.

I think it is doable, if expensive. But then again, a warfleet is very expensive, so the qubits are likely not too problematic. From a cost perspective, adding an Expensive qubit container to an Expensive++ war machine is negligible, especially if it allows faster responses. They are also unjammable, a great advantage in battle. Most of the time you don't need to send much information, just orders to local automation and their reports about the state of the fleet. As things heat up the bandwidth requirements go up a lot. Again, most messages are pretty simple (go to location <34,1,-46>, attack target 354, bogey sighted at <23,20,22>), but the rate will be very high - especially when dealing with figuring out what IR spots are targets, chaff or just noise. But judging from what a qubit container can do (hours of HD video) I think this will last through a multi-minute battle. The real problem is qubit distribution. You want every little device to have qubits linked to your C3I system. That way a sensor can report where it saw something to a targeting AI that directly tells a nearby weapon to fire - this cuts down communications lags a lot, and that ups the range of your weapons. You could have all qubits refilled when the ship returns to base, but that means that they could run out on a long mission with plenty of fighting. Perhaps better is to make qubits onboard your battleship so that equipment and fighters in its bays get updated, and then there is a qubit link to HQ. Then there is security. If somebody hacks your C3I you are in trouble, of course. But if HQ is directly linked to the battlezone, that means somebody can hack you from over there. Sure, you will have the best military security firewalls you can get, but what if a basilisk hack or exsurgent virus sneaks in anyway? Uh oh...