Well, perhaps, but at least one
someone works on these concepts in quest Star Trek.
Yes, but the Apiata "fighters" are half-megaton parasite warships, which is a heck of a lot bigger than most of us are visualizing when we talk about 'fighters' and 'carriers.' The Caitians, whose doctrine seems similarly to revolve around a mix of small swarmers and explorer-sized parent vessels, are in pretty much the same situation.
And while the fighters themselves aren't the million-dollar missiles, torpedoes are, and a big enough spread can kill basically any ship.
Yes, but we simply do not see much evidence of truck-launched photon torpedoes or whatever being a common threat deployed against orbiting starships that forces people to keep their cruisers and explorers out of a planet's translunar space or whatever.
I think we're getting mixed up here.
My point is that so far as we can tell, there is no
littoral environment as distinct from the normal conditions of deep-space combat in Star Trek. The key elements of the littoral environment in real life are:
1) It lends itself to asymmetric naval warfare, with small ships, mines, and shore-launched weapons
easily being able to wreck large ones.
2) Moreover, ships do not need to be very heavily armed, because even with relatively light weaponry they are still a threat to anything that can operate in or near the littoral zone. Bigger ships that can support large air wings or troop detachments or huge missile armament are desirable, but it makes more sense to have them hang back away from the littorals.
3) Therefore, to fight effectively
IN the littorals, it is necessary to have numerous smaller vessels that can absorb losses from surprise attacks and asymmetric threats, while being able to return fire effectively and spread out to 'blanket' the area you're fighting over.
In Star Trek
on the whole, there is no specific environment where (1) applies. The obvious candidates (planetary orbit in particular) don't seem to pose that kind of threat, regardless of what we would or would not expect. Furthermore, (2) is not really true. At a bare minimum a ship needs heavy torpedo armament to be a major threat, and there does seem to be a practical minimum size for ships with heavy torpedo armament. The torpedoes themselves may not be any larger than a modern real life cruise missile, but that doesn't mean you can just strap four of them to something the size of a real world B-52 and call it a day. By the time you make the ship big enough, you have something more the size of a
Miranda, and less the size of a
Bird-of-Prey.
Due to (1) and (2) put together not really being true of Star Trek, (3) is not a particularly valid conclusion to draw from the available evidence.
The equivalent of littorals is not terrain features, but installations. Starbases and outposts create a large area where operating without detection is extremely difficult, plus a protected zone where their weapons will outclass any single ship.
The catch is that "operating within torpedo range of a starbase" is not a common enough requirement to justify an entire category of ship. If you're within torpedo range of a starbase, you don't really need an armed ship of your own; you need a search-and-rescue craft. Conversely, as soon as you are significantly outside the starbase's weapons range, you start needing to worry about whether your ship can stand up to enemy ships on its own merits.
It becomes purely a cost calculation on whether basing additional somewhat mobile but still limited weapons on any given starbases is worth the expense. In peacetime this could just be corvette-sized patrol craft or, well, essentially police boats. In wartime? You'll get armed shuttles and "fighters".
Assuming for the sake of argument that you do attach such craft to a starbase, they effectively represent a fixed component of the starbase's defenses. Not something that redeploys, operates off of mobile 'carrier' ships, and in general acts the way most participants in this discussion have been visualizing fighters.
I don't really buy the speed issues. For a variety of reasons, combat at speed is not equivalent and need not be equivalent to maximum warp. There may well not be issues with flying fighters around at Warp 5 and then burning their limited deuterium on extra impulse power in the engagement zone.
The trick is that in Star Trek there are two separate functional measures of speed.
One is strategic and operational- which is determined entirely by a ship's warp factor.
The other is tactical, which
seems to mostly be a question of the ship's impulse power, though some tactical situations may involve maneuvers at low warp in close proximity to the enemy.
If fighters have good tactical speed but poor operational speed, they can't function without a "carrier" because they can't physically reach the battlefields a lot of the time. Plus a fleet cannot advance or retreat at high warp without leaving its fighters behind, or docking them with a faster carrier. BUT in this case the fighters don't work very well with a "carrier" concept that hangs back out of range and avoids being threatened. Your carrier has to look more like a 'battlestar,' with the ability to withstand enemy fire.
And at that point, either the 'fighter' needs to be so large that it becomes a good-sized escort in its own right, or the carrier needs to turn into something like a battleship. This is (again) the situation the Apiata and Caitians find themselves in.
If they have good operational speed but poor tactical speed, they just get chased down and shot to pieces by enemy escort starships.
While sublight and supralight combat need not be identical or equivalent, the point is that 'fighters' must excel at
both in order to have any
