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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 9729776" data-attributes="member: 725">Depends, what kind of story is being told, what kind of atmosphere is being set, and what kind of technical designs are being implemented. What would Star Wars be without the X-wing and Tie fighters?As for nuke it from orbit, why don't we do that now? We have the capability, we threaten with it, we have had a long cold war with them... And why does the an A-10 Warthog have a HUGE 30mm gatling canon in it's nose? Besides a TON of missiles and bombs? I would say purpose and role are still very important. And the modern F-35A was still equipped with two 25mm cannons and the B and C variants can use external pods with similar cannons...There's always a constant arms race, at one point missiles were more important, but other things might again take the lead. Things like anti-missile defenses have been either other missiles or rotary cannons that can saturate the airspace the missile is flying through. These days militaries are developing laser systems to shoot missiles, drones, or even airplanes out of the sky. Things like railguns were also in development as both offensive and defensive weapons, but apparently the US spend way too much, couldn't make it work quickly enough and killed the project, while other militaries still work on developing railgun systems (some are already beyond where the US was). No one imagined how successful Ukrainian troops would be with commercial drones, even though military drones have been around for decades. And IEDs are still the bane of modern troops, even big militaries like the USSR and the US underestimated those for the longest of times and often not learning from history.The war in eastern Europe would be going very differently if such laser systems against drones were already in heavy use/distribution. Our own Dutch military went from generic to very specialized after the cold war, but now we need to go back to being larger and more generic again due to the mess in eastern Europe (of our own making)...If people could see the future, the US military wouldn't have spend $500+ billion on railgun research... <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=";)" /> If people already have such a large issue with predicting future arms developments a couple of decades into the future, how will they fare a couple of centuries into the future... I doubt that in 1825 anyone sane would have predicted how current warfare works. I suspect that what we suspect warfare will look like in space in another couple of hundred years will be quite different from how we imagine it now. Think Jetsons flying cars vs everyone having a tiny computer in their pocket or on their wrist with which they can call everyone in the world...Again, in our fantasy sci-fi settings we can have all we want! Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without the X-wing/Tie fighter, but something like Star Trek is a whole other beast, while the Honor Harrington series is a whole different beast for space ship combat all together. Battlestar Galactica without fighters would be a whole lot duller series, while the capital ship combat is still incredibly epic! And while I say fantasy sci-fi, even the 'hard' sci-fi is more often based on fantasy/imagination then actual facts. It's all about giving a setting/story a certain atmosphere and you can do however you want to do that, in either style there are good and bad stories. We can explain a lot by hand weaving, and one person will accept the one hand weave, but not the other, because how people's heads work is so different (and often influenced by their preferences).</blockquote>

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