Aerospace Fighter

Aerospace Fighters are military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air and interstellar combat. In military conflict, the role of aerospace fighters is to establish air or spatial superiority of the battlespace. Domination of the battlespace permits bombers, attack craft, and warships to engage in tactical and strategic strikes of enemy targets, and helps prevent the enemy from doing the same.

The key performance features of a fighter include not only its firepower but also its high speed, maneuverability, detection range, and radar cross-section relative to the target aircraft. The success or failure of a combatant's efforts to gain air/space superiority 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.

Many modern fighter aircraft also have secondary capabilities such as ground attack and some types, such as fighter-bombers, are designed from the outset for dual roles. Other fighter designs are highly specialized while still filling the main air/space superiority role, and these include the interceptor and, historically, the heavy fighter and night fighter.