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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 1704475" data-attributes="member: 5948">That would be a big 'no'.  In naval warfare, especially in the Pacific theatre, the only aircraft that could seriously bother a cruiser-sized ship (or larger) was a dedicated dive- or torpedo-bomber carrying a single big, ungainly piece of ordnance.  The torpedo, or bomb or whatever, reduced a plane's performance enormously and made them sitting ducks.  Hence fighters - to kill your enemy's lumbering bombers, and to protect yours from the enemy's fighters.  While fighters could carry small bombs, doing so made them pretty much useless in a dogfight, and they couldn't carry enough to bother a big ship anyway.  Destroyers and the like maybe, but nothing bigger.  And sure, you could shoot up the decks of a ship, but any naval vessel is going to be laugh at any weapon mounted on a fighter.  You may succeed in damaging radars, killing exposed antiaircraft gunners and so on, but that's about it.I think how it should be is that bombers pose a real threat to capital ships (though probably only once, until their ordnance is expended), and fighters kill bombers.  This isn't reflected very well in TV and movies though - space combat scenes tend to be more about movement and spectacle than tactical logic.  Babylon 5's Starfuries never seriously bothered a capital ship on their own, as far as I can remember, although they were useful against other small ships and for police-type duties.  I can't comment on Star Trek - I've never really watched it.  Star Wars - well, I love Star Wars, but I'm never, ever going to even try to pretend that there was any sort of logic or thought put into the battle scenes beyond 'ooh, that looks cool!'  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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