Fighter craft



A fighter craft is a military air/space craft designed primarily for air-to-air or space combat against other air/space craft, as opposed to bombers and attack craft, whose main mission is to attack ground targets. The hallmarks of a fighter are its speed, maneuverability, and small size relative to other combat aircraft.

Many fighters have secondary ground-attack capabilities, and some are designed as dual-purpose fighter-bombers; often aircraft that do not fulfill the standard definition are called fighters. This may be for political or security reasons, for advertising purposes, or other reasons.

A fighter's main purpose is to establish air/space superiority over a battlefield. The success or failure of a belligerent's efforts to gain supremacy hinges on several factors including the skill of its pilots, the tactical soundness of its doctrine for deploying its fighters, and the numbers and performance of those fighters. Because of the importance of air/space superiority, since the dawn of air/space combat armed forces have constantly competed to develop technologically superior fighters and to deploy these fighters in greater numbers, and fielding a viable fighter fleet consumes a substantial proportion of the defense budgets of modern armed forces.

The Union Fleet is one of the few civilizations known[1] as of 5030 OTT that uses small fast space craft called fighters. Between the time of it's founding until 5016 when the Dai joined the Union, only the Terrans used fighter crafts in space at the time of their joining the Union[2]. As a result, until 5016 nearly all fighter related traditions came from the United Earth fighter command[3].The traditions of United Earth's Space Fighters in turn mostly came from Pre Astro Terran traditions.