Stellar Combat

Introduction
Throughout ages of technological innovation, aspects of the universe change to reflect new emerging ideas and concepts. Stellar Combat has been heavily innovated and restructured throughout the years, making some doctrines or vessels rapidly obsolete, while others have withstood the test of time and continued to be effective and/or practical.

Below is a chronology of how space combat evolved over years of change and its present state.

Technology
At the beginning of the era of interstellar navigation many civilizations ventured out through the stars and made contact with each other. These civilizations were extremely diverse in their technology, culture, biology, ethics, and anything that they could argue over. Some brought technology and enlightenment to other civilizations, while others oppressed and conquered those they met. Soon, through communication and travel, most active civilizations in the galaxy shared a common level of technology and knowledge of their known slice of the galaxy. With equal footing, wars became less of domination for those who were advanced, but more tactically involved, with strategy and politics becoming a major part of the new galaxy.

Early Stellar Combat
The beginnings of tactical combat in space mostly mirrored that of maritime naval combat, with a few new twists brought by the lack of atmosphere and gravity.

Fleet Composition
For the most part, stellar naval fleet composition remained similar to maritime naval, smaller capital ships such as corvettes or gunships were relatively versatile and could support friendly larger ships, and these same ships could also be used to screen fighters seeking to attack the larger ships. Larger ships, such as destroyers, frigates or carriers, generally had more armor and weaponry, but less maneuverability and versatility. Inside of these two categories grew many specialized vessels tailored to perform effectively in their niche purpose.

In terms of specialization, larger ships generally had a tenancy to lean towards artillery and armor roles, with smaller ships filling the gaps and protecting the larger ships, this is due to the fact that more mass in space, meaning more inertia, makes it more difficult for a ship to accelerate, giving it a worse reaction time and versatility, a trait which generally is suited for artillery or armor roles.

Spaceflight
The mechanics of space flight are considerably different from atmospheric flight, changing the way fighters function. Top speed is non-existent in space due to the fact there is no drag to slow down a projectile, as long as an object can apply thrust to itself, its velocity will increase, with no limit. More important than speed in spaceflight, is acceleration and burst thrust. Acceleration in battle determines how fast a fighter can be deployed, react to a change of orders, and otherwise how fast it can reach a set speed in a given amount of time. Burst thrust is a short burst of power that can allow a fighter to dodge an incoming missile or collision with another fighter, this is usually powered by some form of a combustion based accelerant.

Because objects in space can continue on a constant velocity with no limiting factors and no continual thrust required, fighters use very little fuel when passively flying, in space, only making small adjustments to their velocity, this means they can considerably lighten their frame by drastically reducing the amount of fuel, or other energy source required, meaning fighters are generally short-range and reliant on capital ships to ferry them in interstellar flight.

Usability
Fighters were useful because of their speed and maneuverability, which allowed them to slip past enemy defensive batteries which would be able to obliterate otherwise larger, slower targets. While this did give them an edge over the slow-firing, massive batteries of capital ships, countermeasures that already existed in naval and atmospheric combat were quickly converted to defend against space fighters such as seeker missiles, flak batteries, and point defense. Still, specialized anti-capital bombing fighters (usually referred to as bombers) can inflict a massive amount of damage to capital ships when protected by other fighters.

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These stellar naval doctrines that were closely translated from maritime naval doctrines remained in practice for a few years, but as time progresses, so does the push for new technology and innovations

The Invention of CVP
CVP (Calculated Velocity Prediction) is a technology developed by a military research department that could automatically fire a weapon at a target with extreme accuracy. It was so accurate in fact, that it completely eliminated the need for people to crew any kind of gun emplacement, even on starfighters.

Fighter Combat
Not only was it accurate enough to replace living beings as gunners, but it was so accurate that, along with the curve of technology yielding fast rotating turrets in a few years, it made conventional fighters completely obsolete, such that a capital ship battery could shoot down a conventional fighter extremely accurately with a single shot, and never miss.

This technology was based on the fact that in space, assuming no force is applied, everything moves at a constant velocity, and as such, given the speed of the projectile, the velocity of the target, and a few other environmental factors, every shot would land perfectly, as it can just predict where the target will be in X seconds, where X is the amount of time it takes for the projectile to reach that point.

The only flaw with this is its first and only assumption, that from the time of firing the projectile, the target and the projectiles velocity will not change. This wasn't much to worry about as most projectiles could move at a fast enough speed that the target wouldn't have time to react and also that most capital ships were large and couldn't possibly move out of the way in time.

This represented a flaw fighters could exploit and be reinstated as practical. The newest line of fighters have built in Anti-CVP Burst Thrusters which apply a quick burst thrust in a random direction every few seconds, to make fighters' movement unpredictable and thus unhittable by batteries using CVP. This also made fighters extremely difficult to control and require only the most skilled pilots to be effective. A good pilot can disable the Anti-CVP system in their ship and continuously jink in a random direction manually, allowing them to control their aim better.

Capital Ship Design
Before CVP was invented, capital ships that found themselves outmatched would accelerate to a breakneck speed and evade the enemy, not in hopes to outrun them, as given enough time they could parallel, or even exceed the escaping ship's speed, but because accelerating to such a high speed causes G-force which messes with the gunners ability to fire. This no longer affects batteries using CVP, as CVP is not affected by G-force and has auto compensation builtin for G-force affecting the rotation speed of its subject turret.