BCS Assumptions

[mike wightman]

But there is a physical reason why nukes behave the way they do in an atmosphere. There's a reason Particle Accelerators DON'T work well in an atmosphere. But there's no reference that suggests that meson blast behave any differently in or out of an atmosphere.

You mean apart from the numerous Traveller space combat games that have them behaving a certain way in space combat and Striker which is ground combat?

A meson gun makes a gazillion super energized particles decay, suddenly, pretty much anywhere is wants. All of these particles explode in heat and gamma rays.

Which is what a nuke does...

 

[aramis]

Which flavour text? I don't recall anywhere in canon where a single bay meson gun mission kills a ship.

JTAS 13, article on CPAWS. Amongst a few other references I am too lazy to dig for.

 

[mike wightman]

You mean this one, which has no mention of effects at all?

A very potent weapon of the future could be the meson accelerator, or meson gun. A meson gun is actually two very high energy accelerators, one of which accelerates electrons and the other positrons. Both of these beams are directed to a point in space, and the two collide. One of the by-products of this collision will be mesons, produced in such a way that most of them will travel in the direction of the target. Mesons themselves are relatively harmless, and do not effect matter in any way, passing through planets as if they weren't there. Mesons, however, decay very rapidly into other sorts of subatomic particles, which will do great damage. The point at which the component beams meet will determine when the mesons are formed, and where they decay. The main difficulty with a meson gun is for the mother ship to correctly calculate the proper meeting point and energies of the two component beams in order to hit the target with the decaying mesons. Such a system will require a very large, very fast computing system, well beyond present day capabilities. The creation and use of a meson gun will be a true technological marvel.

I have dug through every reference to meson guns I can find and nowhere do they have the destructive fluff that would imply the Striker rules are anything but an abstraction for battlefield use.
MT SoM offers little more, but the adventure Knightfall has an interesting take on a meson bombardment where PCs run the risk of damage from the debris explosion of a nearby blast (obviously they are not caught in the actual blast... :devil:
I'll keep digging.

 

[robject]

Poll Summary So Far (Oct 2016)

Three months. Here are the items that received a vote from at least half (10) of the voters:

14 Battleships are worth the investment
14 A +2 TL difference constitutes a strong advantage.
13 Engaging tactical movement is important.
12 Turrets form a point-defense screen.
11 Layered defenses are effective.
10 Warships represent at least some level of abstraction.

These items received fewer than half, but more than a third:

9 Battle Riders can go toe-to-toe with battleships.
9 Secondaries can't normally kill battleships.
8 Fighter swarms are direct threats to battleships.
8 Missile salvos are direct threats to battleships

These items received the fewest number of votes (6):

6 A warship is a very highly detailed, "simulated" entity.
6 Energy allocations [should be] handled right.
6 Incremental damage is modeled across all components.

 

[flykiller]

achieving "Battleships are worth the investment" and "Battle Riders can go toe-to-toe with battleships" will likely require favoritism in the ruleset.

"Battleships are worth the investment" and "Fighter swarms are direct threats to battleships" are mutually exclusive, as are the former and "Missile salvos are direct threats to battleships".

 

[robject]

Right. And seeing the obvious preference that battleships be valid for, say, the Fifth Frontier War period, means it trumps the other three (battle riders, fighter swarms, and missile salvos).

 

[flykiller]

allowing a pre-determined result to trump ruleset choices results in a deformed ruleset.

 

[mike wightman]

Can we please go back to canon - the Imperium favours BR as line of battle ships when operationally advantageous because a BR can destroy a BB many times its size.

A BatRon of BR brings a much more cost effective number of spinals to the battle due to the silly BB can only have one spinal rule.

What the BB can do it jump to avoid operational disadvantage. Which is why on the frontier the fleets are BB, but the off board reserve is made up of BR and tenders.

In the 3I setting the IN should seriously consider building jump 1 BBs carried by tenders for strategic movement.

Jump fuel takes up so much of a BB that the BR will always have the advantage in an engagement - unless you change the setting assumptions.

 

[robject]

I dunno... it looks like less than half of the voters didn't think that was a good idea.

 

[Condottiere]

Naval doctrine in the Sixth Millennium is pretty hazy, if virtually non existent.

And rules evolve.

If the enemy is over reliant on battle riders, you could pin the riders when they're in battle formation, and send a task group after the tenders, then jump out of the system.

 

[mike wightman]

I dunno... it looks like less than half of the voters didn't think that was a good idea.

So canon is to be retconed on the strength of a poll?

It's worth reading up on warships on project rho - the point is also made there that a ship without massive fuel tanks is going to be more capable than a ship saddled with them.

There is a reason why there are no BBs anymore here in the real world, in the 3I the BB still has an important role but is not a match for an equal tonnage off BRs (note that 1v1 the BB should win out over a lone BR, but there should be a minimum of four riders to each BB).

 

[mike wightman]

Naval doctrine in the Sixth Millennium is pretty hazy, if virtually non existent

It's laid out pretty clearly on S9 and the order of battle for FFW.

And rules evolve.

Yup, let's use Battle Rider - oh wait...

If the enemy is over reliant on battle riders, you could pin the riders when they're in battle formation, and send a task group after the tenders, then jump out of the system.

Meanwhile my secret tender defence ships neutralise your attempt and my cloaked fighters attack your pinning force from behind. They swoosh down and destroy your ships at dogfighting range with a massive salvo of torpedoes.

Ok, silly example.

You need a force equal to my BRs to pin them, you need a further force to go hunt the tender. That means I am outnumbered and that is the sort of engagement that lead to the doctrine of ships for immediate frontier protection and tender/riders for reserve.
(tender would jump and BR would break off by acceleration to rendezvous in the outsystem with tender).
When I bring up the reserves I am not going to pit individual BatRons of BRs against you, you will be facing a fleet of them...

 

[whartung]

If the enemy is over reliant on battle riders, you could pin the riders when they're in battle formation, and send a task group after the tenders, then jump out of the system.

The cost of failure is too high when a fleet shows up tanks dry. Certainly there may be desperate examples where this happens, but through a combination of intelligence, planning, and luck, the attacking fleet isn't planning on showing up for a fair fight. It's showing up prepared to decisively reduce their targets.

if it was as simple as "you could pin the riders", don't you think the fleet planners may have perhaps figured that out? And make preparations to ensure that doesn't happen? Leave some riders in reserve, bring along some auxiliaries? Heck, bring the tenders in with the battle fleet, keeping them close. The defenders then get to chose to spend their precious weapon shots trying to cripple the tenders, or defeat ships that are pounding them. The tenders are OFFENSE-less, not necessarily DEFENSE-less. They'll have screens and lasers and such. Also, there's the basic tenet that it takes big ships to hurt big ships, and tenders are really big, so it's not as if you're going to send in a DestRon circling around to mop up women, children, and first aid wagons. It's going to have to be a serious amount of power, power that may better be spent trying to not get destroyed in the first place.

Hurting the tenders is a strategic option, not a tactical one. The riders are going to keep chewing you up with our without the tenders. The tenders only keep the riders from leaving, and the basic premise is that they didn't show up with the expectation that they going to be leaving anyway. You can try and kill the tail, but the teeth remain. Remember, the cost of failure is so high (i.e. destruction of the fleet), that moves are made with the highest confidence of success. Paraphrasing Heinlein, "There's nothing more expensive than a 2nd place military". They came to win. They're going to have a very good idea if they ARE going to win as soon as they show up, and can chose to simply not engage at all. Similarly the defenders can go "uh-oh" and just get out while the getting is good.

You can go after the tenders if you like, split your fleet, the riders will win the day and have a nice 2 week period to wreak all sorts of havoc on the system facilities until reinforcements show up to try and deal with them. They could head out deep outer system, waiting for recovery, maybe get lost in a local asteroid belt.

The primary reason to go for the tenders is basically a last ditch suicide ploy to try and strategically cripple the battle fleet. The system is lost already, but if you can take out the tenders, you can at least slow their advancement, make the attack that much more expensive for the attacker. But the defender will have to do that in lieu of reducing the attacking riders, and let them have their way with the defenders.

 

[Condottiere]

You only have to get lucky once, and that would strand the opponent's primary strike forces.

And remember the context, trying to figure out the cost benefit of large numbers of battle riders, and the enemy targetting it's most vulnerable component.

Battles tend to be inherently unfair, but rolling the dice on some audacious action can pay off.

 

[flykiller]

rolling the dice on some audacious action can pay off.

yeah, if you're around afterwards to write the history. "I was brilliant and daring!" otherwise your opponent writes the history. "he made a foolish mistake ...."

lots of assertions, can't make head or tail of any of them until they're gamed out.

 

[Condottiere]

It's a game, and as any wargamer will tell you, you're relying on the prevailing rules, and each side will optimize their forces to take advantage of them, and improve likely outcomes.

 

[flykiller]

relying on the prevailing rules, and each side will optimize their forces to take advantage of them

the primary reason to keep the ruleset natural and well-formed.

 

[mike wightman]

You only have to get lucky once, and that would strand the opponent's primary strike forces.

And you are unlucky a million times - who wins?

And remember the context, trying to figure out the cost benefit of large numbers of battle riders, and the enemy targetting it's most vulnerable component.

Can't be done in isolation.

For the same money you can build a 500kt BB or a 250kt tender carrying 5 50kt BR.
The latter will beat the former every time one (tender+riders) for one (BB). One BR will struggle against the BB, so 1v1 the BB is superior due to its extensive secondary batteries which can scrub the BR, but that's not a fair fight
5v1 the BR get 5 chances to spinal the BB.

A BatRon of BBs may be eight BBs, I would want at least forty BRs to go up against them.

Battles tend to be inherently unfair, but rolling the dice on some audacious action can pay off.

Those are exceptions not the norm.

War is won by planning and logistics, not one plucky cavalry charge.

 

[Condottiere]

Who says it wouldn't be planned?

Before Pearl Harbour, the Japanese were going to lure the American Pacific Fleet to the Philippines and let them get a taste of the Yamatos, those units that managed to get that far.

The Japanese identified the American weakness as having to fight at the end of a long line of communications across the Pacific, and the remnants being unable to escape a Vernichtungsschlacht and the follow up pursuit.

 

[mike wightman]

They failed to achieve their victory conditions at Pearl Harbour - they really should have launched the final wave; the US out planned and out logistic-ed (yey a new word for the English language ) the Japanese in the following months. Plus the had not intention of falling into the Japanese trap that they knew all about due to superior intelligence.

The US was able to intercept Japanese communications for the full duration of the War.