Capital Ship Ruminations

This occurs to me while I'm watching Star Wars for the 800th time. When the Millenium Falcon escapes from Mos Eisley, there are no TIE fighters. Three star destroyers, yes, but no TIE fighters. Why is that? Why aren't the Imperial ships flying a regular combat air patrol? To the best of my recollection, CAP is being flown whenever star destroyers are present in the rest of the films.... although, now that I think about it, there wasn't much CAP (or ground support) being flown in the attack on Hoth. Maybe TIE fighters can't enter the atmosphere; if that's the case, then the Empire certainly needs to develop and deploy a ground attack craft that can enter the atmosphere and control a battle space. Would've been useful on Endor, too.

The Imperial Star Destroyer of the Star Wars universe is a hybrid battleship/aircraft carrier, capable (according to Wikipedia) of carrying 72 TIE fighters plus auxiliaries, but also capable of fighting it out ship-to-ship. I'm not sure that we ever get a really clear sense of which kind of fighting the Imperial Fleet prefers, since the Fleet does nothing during the Battle of Endor. A battlestar in both variants of Battlestar Galactica is also a hybrid. The original Galactica carried 150 fighters, while the ships from the newer series seem to carry about 40 or so (more on Pegasus, less on Galactica. Again, the BSG ships in both series engage in direct combat against Cylon Baseships, which in the second series in particular seem to resemble aircraft carriers much more than battleships.

All of this makes me wonder why the ships in Star Trek are so clearly cruisers and battleships, rather than aircraft carriers. As far as I can tell, no race in the series employs vessels that act as motherships to large numbers of fighters. Indeed, I suspect that the Enterprise (in all of its variants) would run into considerable difficulties if it were attacked by a swarm of small craft. Its phaser and torpedo banks seem designed to fight large ships, rather than to provide close defense against small craft. The same appears to be true of Klingon, Romulan, and other ships.

Anyway, back to Star Wars. There's no point in wondering what George Lucas intended by not having the star destroyers fly CAP off Tatooine or Hoth, because Lucas almost certainly wasn't thinking about it at all. But we can come up with an explanation on our own. The Russian Air Force and the Chinese Air Force don't fly nearly as much as the US Air Force, partially because jet fuel is expensive, but also because the Russians and Chinese are worried about the pilots flying away with the planes. Or at least the Chinese are and the Russians used to be; you get my point. Maybe the star destroyers don't fly CAP because the wing commanders are worried about pilots defecting to the Rebel Alliance, along with their TIE Fighters. I mean, the Alliance seems to have lots of good pilots, and it stands to reason that those pilots must have been trained somewhere. It's hardly unreasonable to believe that the Empire trained those pilots, who subsequently defected. We know, that, by the time of New Hope, the Imperial Army is no longer full of clones, but has been forced to recruit from the general population. Even if the pilots receive better treatment than your common stormtrooper, there are probably quite a few that defect because of the discipline, or because of ideological sympathy with the rebellion.

This would imply that there are a lot of TIE fighters sitting around in rebel bases, which we've never actually seen. That's not all that unreasonable, though, because as players of the games X-Wing and TIE Fighter will recall, TIE Fighters kind of suck. Very maneuverable, but not much hitting power and no shields. So the defection problem could be one reason that we don't tend to see much CAP by the Empire, except around the Death Star. Presumably, only the most loyal and elite pilots would be assigned to the Death Star. The other option (not mutually exclusive with this one) is that training and discipline in the Imperial Army are just, in general, kind of crappy. Officers who don't know what they're doing or don't care may just not order CAP, or may not want to deal with the maintenance problems associated with running consistent CAP. This accords with our general knowledge of storm troopers, including their inability to hit anything they're shooting at.

Further discussion here.