I'd be more concerned about the fact that superiority fighters are inferior to large battlecruisers. There's not really a consensus about how space battles will be conducted (if at all), but massive motherships will equally massive guns seem more likely to dominate rather than fighter groups.

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@Halfthawed - not necessarily. If the weapons are effective enough that armor against them isn't practical and small/cheap enough that swarm tactics become viable, then your massive motherships become sitting ducks and evasion becomes the primary mode of survival, at least until an effective screen against those swarm attacks can be developed. See: armored knights vs muskets, battleships vs torpedo boats, tanks vs shoulder-launched antitank weapons, and heavy bombers vs single-engine interceptors, among others.

@Salda007 The limits of armor in space aren't the same on Earth, i.e. it's entirely conceivable to have mile-thick hulls. (See Live Free or Die for a good example.) But if that's the case, then the fighters will just be flying glass cannons, basically.

See Star Wars: A New Hope for my rebuttal. ;-)

AI in space is useless because it have so much space and data it either compute ad infinity or cannot decide when to fire. Humans just pull the trigers.

@SZCZERZOKŁY that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

@StarfishPrime AI compute so much data it goes into a loop or it have so much options to choose from that it cannot decide which to choose.

@SZCZERZOKŁY no-one would make an AI that does that. There's no reason an AI would have to do that. It makes as much sense as an AI exploding because someone told it that they always lie.

I Suggest Using Unnecessary Camel Case in your Story's Title.

@StarfishPrime Movie "WarGames". You stop AI from going into loops by using it for humans don't want to waste time. Automation. AI calculate 8 trillions possibilites that can end in succesfull hit. Then human need to decide which one to chose. Human just need to make that cross thing overlap target and press fire.

@SZCZERZOKŁY The premise of WarGames is nonsensical if you know anything basic about AI.

@SZCZERZOKŁY the human will be dead because they think at the speed of a meat glacier, and the enemy AI, which was made to be useful, not to be a hollywood plot point invented by nontechnical people, will have shot them.

Is there any reason you can't make the players play as on-board AIs or remote drone controllers? You could have "realistic" space fighters unencumbered by life support and capable of G-forces that would render a human into salsa, and your players would still get to see everything through the various sensors and act via the controls. Or consider that both a drone controller and a player are just a human sitting in front of a display and a keyboard (or joystick). Well, drone pilots don't die if their drones get shot, but can't you have Vader-esque officers who don't tolerate failure?

@StarfishPrime The question is how to make the thing believable. It is believable that AI using missiles think in 3 dimensions PLUS time while human don't think. "Green point on enemy good. Grogg shot arrow". A matter of landing 100 1dmg hits by human versus AI landing 1 95dmg hit. A case of Luke "I shot that hole" Skywalker versus C3 " the possibility is approximately 3,720 to 1"PO

@SZCZERZOKŁY no, it is not believeable, and no, using starwars as a reference for a believable AI design is not a credible argument. Wargames was bad enough, and this is not an improvement.

@Zovits: and every escort mission devolves into ‘Cant these useless meat bags go any faster??!?”

Not an answer, because it's not a solution to the question: For anyone with any knowledge about space, there is no believable way. Any explanation will have holes the size of a Death Star. Yet Star Wars and Star Trek are still entertaining, both in film and in games, even among space nerds, because no one expects them to be believable. My suggestion would be to just ignore realism and never even mention it. If your game is entertaining enough, people won't mind. They will most likely still mind if you try to lampshade it with some bogus explanation though. The less said, the better.

You mention "starfighter dog fights" in "a realistic game". Can you elaborate on this? The reason I'm asking is that the classical dog fight scenario from Star Wars or Wing Commander isn't very realistic in the first place. Space fighters wouldn't move like jet planes in space. For instance, they'd be capable of changing direction quickly without changing orientation. This might mean that they can evade missiles better than fighter jets could. But it really depends on what type of dog fight you envision.

Please don't make WW2-esque dog fights in space. It's not realistic.

@Schmuddi "they'd be capable of changing direction quickly without changing orientation" - I'd describe it the opposite way. It's easy to change which way you're facing (your orientation), but it's really hard to change which way you're moving (your direction).

Half an answer, so it goes in comments: remote-piloted drones would have to deal with sensory and input lag. If you're trying to control a drone on the moon from earth's surface (or rather, you're at an equivalent distance in space, no atmosphere), you have a delay of 1.28 seconds for each trip. That is, 1.28 seconds to see what your drone is seeing, X time to react, 1.28 seconds for your instructions to reach your drone.

@zovits the reason I want human pilots is because I don't really want FTL communication/travel to exist in this universe and thus RC over long distances would suck. That is a good idea though, but I'm still not sure how to make missiles worse than RC ships, because if your enemy can jam missiles, it would make sense that they can jam RC ships

@Schmuddi Yeah, by realistic I mean that there's no air resistance, inertia is preserved, etc. So you could fly in a direction, and the fire RCS thrusters to spin around while still going in the original direction. I also want more believable military tactics and better justification for having such fighters in the first place, but I'm fine with just handwaving if it doesn't work out

@StormFalcon "how to make missiles worse than RC ships" Have all combat-viable spaceships necessarily contain some kind of big and/or expensive component (reactor, engine, shields, etc.), which renders single-use missiles prohibitively expensive.

Illusions, smokescreens, and decoys are possible forms of "electronic warfare" that could screw up an intelligent missile but can't be blocked by Faraday cages and don't require "hacking" since they're outside the missile's onboard computer.

If you are willing to have fantasy elements, then give your organic pilots precognition or something else that gives them an edge over drones. Although, in that case, you would probably end up with disembodied, augmented brains wired directly into the controls instead of actual pilots.

If you don't mind a bit of handwavium physics you can invent something like the Minovsky particles from the Gundam universe, which render radar, guided weapons and other long range technologies useless for military purposes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

@IanKemp What's so unbelievable about War Games premise? Imho it gets many things pretty right, albeit the final solution and the fixation with the kid and his hacking in parts along with the tech talk about the backdoor etc are quite ... amusing. But the general theme seems quite on spot and way better /closer to something realistic in the near future than many modern humanized AI versions. I do agree that WOPR's size and learning speed can hardly be used against AI in OP's scenario - unless he designs it such that AI compatible computers have to be huge in that world.

@workerjoe that's a good point, but with the way things are going, I'm not sure that future missiles would be fooled by such things. Unless there's some way to make smokescreens and decoys more advanced? Maybe I'll invent some magic mines that look the same as real ships to thermal, radar, and lidar. Like they are cooled, and made to be invisible to radar and lidar, but they broadcast their own IR, radio, and lasers back at the enemy to look like the actual ship.

@zovits that is pretty smart. Maybe I could say only chemical rockets are cheap enough to justify putting into missiles, but ships have access to nuclear rockets that can easily outrun chemical. Or something like that

Is energy an issue? Meaning do your ships have basally unlimited energy? Could coming up with the mass for missiles be an issue? Maybe only having energy weapons could solve this.

@TimothyAWiseman done!