system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[General science fiction] Are one-man military starfighters pointless in a more realistic science fiction setting?
gpt
While a manned starfighter is pointless in a battle near a carrier, one could make the argument that a manned starfighter could be used in long-term or long-distance missions. In a realistic setting, a drone will lose most of its benefits if it ventures further than a few light seconds from its "mothership." If a small craft is needed for a mission far away from a fleet/mothership/base, one could reasonably argue that a human pilot would be the best way to ensure that the craft performs optimally and intelligently. While computers are good at Go and Chess, they still struggle with tactics and surprises that most humans can instinctually respond to. If the enemy uses a tactic that the computer has never seen or been programmed to respond to, then it will probably perform suboptimally. If a human ends up in the same scenario, they have a chance of figuring out a counter-tactic that no computer could ever dream of... not that computers can dream anyways.

However any problem that needs a human pilot to solve could probably also be solved by a swarm of guided torpedoes, missiles, or other smart munitions. Your missile doesn't have to be smart enough to think its way out of an ambush if there are thousands of other missiles just like it, all homing in on the same target. Any military capable of waging interplanetary war is probably going to have enough resources to afford a munitions cloud like that. Now, a case could be made that a human life is worth less than x amount of missiles, and at a certain point sending in a long-range strike team of trained human pilots is more cost-effective than a swarm of missiles... but that tipping point is going to depend heavily on the setting.