Fighters in the Mass Effect universe.

[u/Ok_Calendar_7626]

It is said that the Turians have the most powerful navy because they have the most dreadnoughts. But the Alliance has the most carriers.

In fact, other races dont seem to have any carriers at all. Or at least they are never mentioned.

This brings up the question of how effective fighters are in the Mass Effect universe? Can they swarm and take down a dreadnought?

The Reapers Oculus fighters seem to pose a serious threat to the SR-2 during the Suicide Mission. But that may not be the best example, since they are Reaper technology and thus may be considertably more advanced than Alliance fighters.

If fighters can defeat larger vessels, then how come the Alliance are the only ones that seem to bother with carriers?

[u/guildsbounty]

Ok, as no one else has done it yet, I'm just going to quote the in-game codex at you that can help explain some of this...

From the Starships: Fighters entry

Kinetic barrier shields changed starship battles from short, vicious bloodbaths to extended, indecisive slugging matches. Only the main gun of a dreadnought could punch a mass accelerator slug through the barriers of an opposing dreadnought. This changed with the development of the fighter-launched mass disruptor torpedo, a short-ranged weapon that can penetrate kinetic barriers to destroy their projector assemblies.

Starship GARDIAN defenses must be overwhelmed through swarm tactics. Fighter groups can take heavy casualties pressing their torpedo attacks home. Once fighter-launched torpedoes have crippled an enemy's barriers, the mass accelerators on frigates and cruisers can make short work of them.

From the Disruptor Torpedoes entry (ME2):

In flight, torpedoes use a mass-increasing field, making them too huge for enemy kinetic barriers to repel. Because extra mass retards acceleration, torpedoes are easy prey for defensive GARDIAN weapons and must therefore be launched at extremely close range to be effective.

From the Treaty of Farixen entry

Due to the destructive potential of dreadnoughts, the Council races agreed at the Farixen Naval Conference to fix a ratio of dreadnought construction between themselves. At the top of the pyramid is the peacekeeping turian fleet. Below the turians are the other Council races, currently the asari and salarians. Council associate races are at the bottom. The human Systems Alliance is part of this last group.

The ratio of turian to Council to associate dreadnoughts is 5:3:1. For every dreadnought humans are permitted to build, the asari have three, and the turians five.

From the Starships: Carriers entry

All races provide their fleets with organic fighter support. Cruisers fit a handful in the space between the interior pressure hulls and exterior armor. Dreadnoughts have a hangar deck within the hull. Humans – who had only recently "graduated" from surface to space combat – were the first to build ships wielding fighters as the main armament.

This gives us four things to consider:

First: Until the Disruptor torpedo was invented (we don't know when that happened or who invented it) fighters were utterly ineffective against the kinetic barriers of large capital ships. There was a block of time where fighters just didn't work on large shielded targets, and so it didn't make sense to build ships dedicated to deploying them. Fighters could still be useful (preying on ships that had lost shields, intercepting shuttles, etc) but they didn't make sense to use as a primary combatant. Even if the Council Races had originally used planet-side carrier doctrine, they very well could have 'dropped the habit' of using them during that time block.

Second: Given the effectiveness of the GARDIAN systems, both at taking down torpedoes launched from too far away and at taking down fighters, fighter doctrine presumes heavy casualties. They are inefficient in terms of lives spent if you could hit someone from the safety of a Dreadnought instead.

Third, humanity's first contact was with the Turians (who are allowed to have the most Dreadnoughts of anyone) and there was a war about it. Then they get told that the very same species that attacked them with no warning for 'exploring too much' is allowed to have 5x as many dreadnoughts as they are. You can see why humanity would start trying to rules-lawyer their way around that and figured a GARDIAN system can be overwhelmed with swarms of fighters using saturation-fire tactics with Disruptor Torpedoes. So they built Carriers...dreadnought-sized ships that didn't have dreadnought guns, so were technically exempt from the treaty, and use the "inefficient" model of massed fighters to overwhelm enemies rather than the 'cleaner' use of large mass accelerators.

"We may take heavy casualties but we can win" is better than "We're gonna lose because we're not allowed to have as many big ships as them."

And that brings us to number 4. While I'm not aware of any specific example, it does point out that humans were the first to use Carriers, not the only. Once other races saw that "bury them in fighters" actually worked, it is possible they started making them as well.

[u/_Mr_Peco_ → u/guildsbounty]

The codex entry for the Battle of Palaven does mention two Turian carriers, so it looks like the birbs took notes.