Actual dTon of a Space Viking Nemesis?
- Thread starter Quint
- Start date
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
That's a big fuel bill.
Pretty big, but IIRC fuel wasn't an issue in that universe (Atomic power -- too cheap to meter, right?). Has to be pretty big though, as it was meant to be more than a match for entire planets of TL-6 or so.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
I remember in Perry Rhodan, commentary was that the one mile dreadnought sphere was supposedly large enough to sardinize the population of Earth.
We tend to blame Star Wars for the "Big Ship Universe" of Book 5 and later, but it's worth remembering the sheer scale of 'big ships' in lots of early scifi...
D.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I liked how EE Doc Smith escalated his ship sizes...
and in Lensmen they went from battleships to throwing anti-universe FTL planets through hyperspace at the bad guys...
and in Lensmen they went from battleships to throwing anti-universe FTL planets through hyperspace at the bad guys...
I blame it for a 'big ship' universe where fighters also exist and apparently work.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Depends on whether you make rules to make it so. In my CT/HG fighters can create EW screens, get suicidally close to fire energy weapons with greater effect, tie their fire control to ships they escort for higher computer fire for PD shots, or accelerate and lend their inertia to missile vee and thus do more damage/penetration.
Last edited:
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
You have to look at weapon system effects, and potential casualty estimates.
I'm working to establish the light bomber as the principle spacetime strike craft for the Confederation Navy.
I'm working to establish the light bomber as the principle spacetime strike craft for the Confederation Navy.
I was attempting a joke about Star Wars, and blaming it for 'fighters' in Traveller (their existence implies that they're supposed to be useful), not making commentary on whether the things do actually work in Traveller. Prior to Star Wars, space opera didn't go in for fighters in space much. After it they're all over the place, like fleas on a dog.
[And to finish ruining the joke by over-explaining]
Now, having 'fighters' (really 'space torpedo-bombers', but hey) and big capital ships can make sense if the setting is in a transition between one fleet type and the other - as happened in WWII (which is what settings with both are almost always copying). But that's not what most SF with both shows - like in Star Wars itself, where both co-exist at the very least from some years before Episode IV through to Episode IX, a good four decades.
If fighters can kill battleships, what the hell do you build the latter for? You have carriers (as small and cheap as is practical - which might be quite large), and various escorts (if the fighters aren't able to do that too), and assorted transports, logisitcs, etc., but not large warships that aren't fighter carriers.
If they can't, the fighters and their carriers are just meat for the battleships. Now, you might, in the latter case, have escort carriers and a few fighters if they're useful for picket duties (but you'd think a ship with a crew large enough for 24/7 watches would be better) or killing small ships, but they shouldn't be all over the sky.
In neither case does it seem likely that the godforsaken 'battlecarrier' popularised by Battlestar Galactica will make any sort of sense (the same goes for SW's star destroyer's habit of carrying significant numbers of fighters, though I can make a case for them in the imperial era). A carrier should avoid battle with large ships, and so should not waste mass and volume on heavy armour and heavy weapons. A battleship, being intended for that sort of fight, should not be carrying fighter hangers into close combat where they'll just get mangled (or have to be under massive armour, a huge mass penalty).
[And to finish ruining the joke by over-explaining]
Now, having 'fighters' (really 'space torpedo-bombers', but hey) and big capital ships can make sense if the setting is in a transition between one fleet type and the other - as happened in WWII (which is what settings with both are almost always copying). But that's not what most SF with both shows - like in Star Wars itself, where both co-exist at the very least from some years before Episode IV through to Episode IX, a good four decades.
If fighters can kill battleships, what the hell do you build the latter for? You have carriers (as small and cheap as is practical - which might be quite large), and various escorts (if the fighters aren't able to do that too), and assorted transports, logisitcs, etc., but not large warships that aren't fighter carriers.
If they can't, the fighters and their carriers are just meat for the battleships. Now, you might, in the latter case, have escort carriers and a few fighters if they're useful for picket duties (but you'd think a ship with a crew large enough for 24/7 watches would be better) or killing small ships, but they shouldn't be all over the sky.
In neither case does it seem likely that the godforsaken 'battlecarrier' popularised by Battlestar Galactica will make any sort of sense (the same goes for SW's star destroyer's habit of carrying significant numbers of fighters, though I can make a case for them in the imperial era). A carrier should avoid battle with large ships, and so should not waste mass and volume on heavy armour and heavy weapons. A battleship, being intended for that sort of fight, should not be carrying fighter hangers into close combat where they'll just get mangled (or have to be under massive armour, a huge mass penalty).
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Rock, paper, scissors.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Take an acceleration factor/fifteen advanced torpedo.
Replace the warhead with depleted uranium.
Kamikaze that into a battleship.
Replace the warhead with depleted uranium.
Kamikaze that into a battleship.
Badenov
SOC-12
These hulls are constructed/armored to resist nuclear weapons, I am not convinced a KE weapon can hit it that hard.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
I went through the CT missile supplement, derived the basic joules the kinetic impact the missile body does if it succeeds in actually hitting the target and compared it to the atomic rockets boom table.
Gets into battleship shell territory quickly. Given the average ACS that is plenty.
Extrapolation by the LBB5 black globe energy valuation yields the possibility of nuclear level damage by a kinetic hit.
In BL, a hex is 30Kkm, a turn is 1/2hr. Take a ship traveling 4 hexes per turn, it's going 66,666 m/s.
Take a .30 caliber bullet, which masses 10g, and just put it in the way of the ship. So, net velocity is still 66Km/s.
Were the ship to hit that bullet, that's 22MJ of energy.
A generic TL12 laser in BL is a 150MJ weapon. (Which suggests that 150MJ is "enough" to damage other ship, in general terms.)
So, the game isn't whether something can hit hard enough. The ships are traveling so fast, it doesn't take much to do real damage.
The game is actual contact. That's a real trick. But if you can throw a cloud of ball bearings in to the path of a ship, they can tear one up pretty good.
Chadwick basically mentioned somewhere in design notes that they specifically avoided kinetic kill weapons for space combat, the energy numbers just get silly.
It's one reason why missiles don't "hit" in TNE, they get close and explode into lasers.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
They very kindly gave us the rules in FF&S to build then for ourselves though 
The only issue is you really need a look up table pre-calculated or you will be doing a relative velocity to kinetic energy calculation every time a missile strikes home.
The only issue is you really need a look up table pre-calculated or you will be doing a relative velocity to kinetic energy calculation every time a missile strikes home.
Nah. First, you fix the KE weapon damage table - as it is, it has damage scale with KE rather than with the square root of KE (which is how everything else scales). So change the top entry from PV = MJ x 4 to PV = MJ^0.5 x 13.85.They very kindly gave us the rules in FF&S to build then for ourselves though
The only issue is you really need a look up table pre-calculated or you will be doing a relative velocity to kinetic energy calculation every time a missile strikes home.
Now this also means that for a given projectile damage and penetration (treated as one and the same for vehicle and spaceship combat for a KE penetrator) are linear with collision speed. So calculate penetration for a 1 hex/turn collision and when at the table just multiply that by the speed of collision (in hexes/turn). At the velocities and likely size and type of objects involved just treat them all as simple 'AP' rounds with no penetration multiplier.
One thing that probably will need to be abstracted away is the current mass of the missile. I'd just assume that all fuel is burned, and that non-warhead components will be spread over too much area to be useful in penetrating so only warhead mass counts - vastly over-simplifying but otherwise we'd need to be modelling 'soft' missiles vs those with actual penetrators and comparing that to various types of armour construction and so on.
A standard TNE missile, at 7 m3 and about 7 tonnes mass, carries a warhead with a mass of 0.25 tonnes and has 12G acceleration for 1 turn. At 1 hex/turn it will have PV = 186. If it hits a stationary ship after burning all its fuel it'll have a net PV 2232 (and also about the same energy as that released by a 1 kt nuke) which is about what a 200 GJ PAWS or Meson gun would have - and they mass a heck of a lot more than 7 tonnes - about 300,000 tonnes for a TL14-15 meson gun of that power (and 10 hex short range). Assuming similar composition and relative warhead mass, a CT missile of 50kg total mass would do about PV = 16 and would need a relative velocity of 4+ to penetrate most small warships' hulls.
Given all this, I think GDW was wise to state that lasers' perfect ballistics and almost instant travel times at 'short' ranges would mean that getting physical contact without being 'shot down' first was effective impossible, and to design their rules around that, but if contact KE-based weapons are what is wanted, the above is how I'd do it.
Badenov
SOC-12
And this is the problem with too much physics and RL in a Sci Fi game. You can get wrapped around the axle on 'Well, you have a whole warhead's worth of mass, and thrust 13 is so many meters per second, and it's possible to convert to MJ and now you have something the game designer never planned around trumping all the in-game stuff that's really just fiat numbers anyhow, because no one's built a TL12 Fusion Beam, or whatever, so those numbers aren't based on anything meaningful, and who can really say how much damage a Bonded Superdense hull can take? There's no ballistics report. IMTU, anything that's not in the book is somehow suboptimal (less damage, no range, or whatever) for whatever technobabble reason we decide, as it's all technobabble in the end unless you're doing an all TL7 and below campaign.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Shrug, I didn’t go total gearhead, just in the ‘looks about right’ for game effect.
My assumption is that the decisions built into CT combat and ships was for specific game effect, and that the ship design rules are effectively a marketplace of game effect tradeoffs. I then went after it to alter some things to my taste without breaking those builds and plug in common ships that still make sense.
One of those is making maneuver matter, with getting closer making beam weapons do more damage, while making a missile run be a thing. Small ships get some upgrades, missile builds include bay weapons, and the damage table is thrown in favor of proportionate tonnage damage and ship/repair drama.
Plus optional power allocation based on 100 second sub turns, so there is player agency in making dramatic decisions.
Missiles aren’t auto hit, using HG to hits for probability, but the damage they do can be altered due to differential vee.
Physics? My table understands suspension of disbelief and genre, so all I have to have is plausible alternate reality that is consistent. Won’t play out hard science but that’s not what I’m going for, more story agency and game.
