Yay, finally a bit of time to reply to this thread.
The Victory didn't use Thunderbolts for S&R duties either though - if you eject, you're brought back in in a Shuttle - so that interpretation doesn't make much sense unless you think that either a) Confed is sufficiently short of carrier-capable fighters it's pressing a design which had previously been relegated to S&R work into frontline service (and apparently you don't agree that the TCSF is low on fighters - personally, I agree that it likely has hundreds of thousands of fighters but they may not have received the adaptations which allow them to operate off carriers, and these may not necessarily be straightforward) or b) Blair has reassigned all his combat-capable fighters to that duty and pressed the shuttles into S&R duties; something which might explain why the Midway-class (where he was involved in the design) does the same.
Right. First up - looking through the WC3 novel, I doubt now that this is what the author meant. Given his detailed description of the roles of the different fighters, and his addition of the support squadron (he thus single-handedly boosted the Victory's ship compliment by a fight, to about 50 ships!), it seems that he would have mentioned it more specifically, had he wanted to imply the Thunderbolt doubles as an S&R ship.
However, it remains a possible explanation, so let's toy with it a bit. I don't think I've really analysed it too much previously. What does it mean, in the WC universe, to adapt a fighter for S&R duties? The answer is, not that much - we see Sabres and Broadswords performing S&R all the time in WC2 (especially Sabres). Presumably, you need a tractor beam and an airlock to bring the pilots onboard. You probably need a rear turret to operate the tractor beam (though this is not a given). We don't know of anything else you might need. We know the Thunderbolt has a turret, we don't know if it has a tractor beam (WC3 does not mention this - but unlike WC2, WC3 does not actually make tractor beams a gameplay feature, so it has no need to mention it - meanwhile, in WC2 every ship that had turrets had tractor beams). All in all, it definitely wouldn't be unreasonable to assume the Thunderbolt is capable of S&R.
This doesn't mean the Thunderbolt would be used exclusively for S&R, mind you. WC2 almost seems to imply that Sabres are the main S&R ship on the Concordia... but they also remain one of the best strike fighters. Heavy fighters in the WC universe simply tend to have multiple purposes.
However, it's still a difficult (at best!) explanation for the 'H' - because it's still the only H-fighter we see in WC. We see S&R Sabres, but they're just plain F-57. We see S&R Broadswords, but they're just plain A-17. Then again, we also see plenty of heavy fighters in WC, and the Thunderbolt is still the only one with an H.
All in all, even if such was the author's intention, the HF cannot mean a heavy fighter. If it was intended to mean a ship modified for S&R, that's possible, but also pretty weird. The explanation, I suppose, would be that the Thunderbolt didn't originally have a turret, and maybe some variants still don't, so the ones with a turret & tractor beam are HF, while others are F; and the Sabre is just plain F, because all variants were designed from the ground up with a turret. It's actually a reasonable explanation - but a stupid-sounding one
.
I suppose, in the end, we can only agree that we don't know what HF means. We know what it might have been meant to mean, but when working with a big universe, the intentions of one author don't change anything unless he spells it out - which, in this case, didn't happen.
Ahh, but can we? You've argued earlier that the limiting factor in the strength of the TCSF's fighter squadrons is its supply of trained pilots. The existence of the Golden Sun medal - an active encouragement for pilots to eject - also suggests that this is the case. If it is true that pilots and not either carrier-capable fighters or the logistic bottleneck in delivering fighters to carriers (I have always assumed that your average Confederation carrier probably has many more fighters than pilots aboard when it leaves spacedock) is the limiting factor in the strength of air groups, then the time taken to retool factories from Raptors to Sabres is well-spent, because it increases pilot survivability.
Now, hang on there - I certainly do believe that trained pilots would be more of an issue for Confed than the availability of fighters... but that doesn't mean fighters are a non-issue. When you have a fighter squadron, it's not as simple as having ten fighters for ten pilots. You need a constant stream of replacements. Whether a pilot ejects or not doesn't matter (of course, it helps not to have to replace the pilot), in the sense that one way or another, you lose the fighter and you need to replace it. And there's more to it than that - fighters wear out, we know that there's a lot more maintenance involved than merely replacing shot-through armour panels. And all of this must happen constantly - if you have a hundred fighter squadrons spread out on a hundred different planets, you'll need to have a hundred streams of replacement parts and whole fighters. Stop this stream for a few days, and you just may wind up putting a planetary defense squadron out of action in time for a Kilrathi raid. And I intentionally only mentioned planetary squadrons so far, because carriers are a whole different kettle of fish, and far more troublesome. A carrier is a ship that sails forth with a full fighter compliment and (seemingly) endless stores of spare parts, then returns to base a few weeks or months later with half that compliment gone, as well as half the spare parts. In a few weeks on a carrier, fighters probably see more intense usage than in months on a planetary base, because carriers don't just float about randomly in space, they go where the action is (or to kick-start the action themselves). So, when a carrier comes home, it needs to be resupplied (often very rapidly, because there just ain't enough of the buggers to go around, so you want to get them back out there ASAP). For that, you need big reserves. And if you don't have them, your carrier gets immobilised.
So, for Confed to operate a particular type of fighter doesn't just mean producing them once-off. It means producing them constantly. The moment your supply chain breaks you're racing against the clock to restore that stream before the enemy notices your problem. The reduction in supply may well mean that by the time you're through transitioning your fighter factory to a new design, you'll be facing acute shortages all over the place... and the factory, post-transition, just won't be able to keep up with demand.
Keep in mind also, when I said "we can assume that the same principles apply, on a bigger scale, in Wing Commander", I was referring to the issue of engines, as well. A fighter is not built all in one factory. You'll have factories out there that produce engines, others that produce guns, others that make radar equipment, etc. - the fighter itself is basically just an airframe with lots of parts attached (and the genius of the fighter's designer is to know which parts will work best). When you switch to a new fighter design, chances are that it doesn't use all the same equipment as the previous fighter did - so now you have to deal with the fact that your factories are making too many Engines A (because you're no longer producing the ship that requires them), and not enough Engines B (because now you need more of them)... and you cannot ramp up production of Engine B, because that particular factory is currently making Engine C, which you need for a completely different ship. During WWII, there were many cases where extremely promising aircraft were killed in planning simply because a given engine design could not be produced in sufficient quantities.
This is why it was often difficult to remove a fighter from service even once it had gotten behind times. For the Germans, replacing the Bf 109 would have translated into improved airpower in the long term... but heavy defeats in the short term, not to mention an increase in Allied bombings over Germany, which could well stop production entirely. And what reason have we to believe this is not the case in Wing Commander?
It goes without saying, fighters did nonetheless get replaced - for the Germans, the big breakthrough was the fact that, where everyone else were trying to design a better Bf 109, with the same engine, Focke-Wulf came up with a design that used not only a different engine, but indeed a different type of engine, produced by a different company. It was a lucky combination, you had a manufacturer who was not at the time producing any critical aircraft, proposing to use an engine that was only being used by a few planes the Germans could do without. It was still something-for-something, however - more FW 190s meant leass Ju 88 bombers.
I've gone into way too much detail here, to illustrate a really simple point - replacing a fighter is not easy, and always happens at the cost of another design. The trick is that the design being replaced must not be critical. You cannot replace the Rapier with the Hellcat. You can replace some other, less critical, fighter or bomber with the Hellcat, which in turn will give you the possibility, further down the line, of replacing the Rapier with some other aircraft - but it's going to be a drawn-out process with multiple stages.
And the only fighter we know goes through a large number of alterations while remaining in service is the Rapier II.
The only fighter we know - well put
. But we don't even know what revision of the Hellcat or Thunderbolt we're looking at, for example. We also don't know how long the Epee (in its fourth revision) has been around, and we don't know how the Raptor and Scimitar (both pre-war fighters) in 2654 compare to their original versions. How many revisions had the Scimitar gone through, in its hundred-year-long service?
Of course, the problem with this is that the Confederation is probably a relatively decentralised society due to the nature of running an interstellar economy and we only ever see a small part of it. The fighters which are the most cost-effective when you're outfitting the Concordia's air wing in spacedock over Luna are almost certainly not the most cost-effective if you have to ship them ten jumps to get to wherever it is the Victory was mothballed to during the False Armistice; and the calculus is different once again when you're considering garrison duty at New Detroit. It's very unlikely that Confederation fighter wings are particularly homogenous.
I would definitely agree with that. I've always liked the notion, for example, that Stilettos are a "colonial" craft, that you'll only get to see in Gemini because they are produced there, or somewhere close by.
Carrier and cruiser flight wings, which are probably a much smaller group and likely to have to operate with each other, may well be at least in theory - it's entirely possible that in, say, 2660, Rapier II variants were the only medium fighters that flew off TCN flight decks.
Possible, but unlikely - we certainly did not see this kind of homogenity in the real world, and WWII was fought on a much smaller scale than the Kilrathi war. In 1945, the Americans had upgraded many of their fighter squadrons to Hellcats and Corsairs, and additionally Bearcats were starting to come into service... but the Wildcat was not only still being used, it was still being produced even.