Boarding Actions: Do those really happen?

[Max]

Aramis, it wasn't so much forgetting roll as considering irrelevant. If rolling were a standard practice than pirates would adopt simple technology to defeat it.


Example a sticky harpoon with 2000m rope and a reel with a smart clutch should be enough to counter pretty severe rolls if fired from a 100m distance. If the target vessel were rolling at 1 rotation per second and had a diameter of about 50 m, the 100 meter cable would result in the boarder moving from rotation relative to the surface of the ship at 400m/second. Accepting 2Gs from the clutch to "slow" his motion relative to the rotation of the ship would take the boarder 6 and a fraction seconds and around 1200m of his cable to equalize with the target. At this point the boarder would be rotating at 1 rotation per second on the end of a rope about 1000m from the target (the cable looped around the ship).

And now that I look at this I see that this is impractical, the rope would have to have an astronomical strength. Just eyeballing we're looking at a million newtons of centripedal force. Hmm, a really strong rope.

 

[aramis]

Thing to remember about a spinning body: your most effective location to apply counterspin thrust is as far from the center of spin as possible; that also happens to be the spot where the impact energy is greatest, and where grabbing will be hardest due to centripital force.

The ONLY ways to grab a spinning body in 0G are
1) impact a side and use some form of attraction to hold before one is flung free
2) on the axis center of spin.

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<===[X]===>            Y
          v[/FONT]

If you try to grab at the ends, you have high impact speed, but high torque if you can grab and hold on. If you grab at the flat above the X, you impact with low speed, but also have very little torque.

If you instead grab along axis X, you can actually match up without impact forces... but again, your torque is minimized, But at least in so doing, you can safely weld on, because you can match spin, and not worry about centripital force pulling you off; if you're even a bit off, however, you cange the center of mass and center of spin, OR you get flung off.

If you come in from point Y, you get spun like a gear yourself. yes, it's going to slow it down, but no, it's not good for either ship's structure.

Until you KO their drives, trying to de-spin them is not a terribly efficient exercise....

 

[BlackBat242]

A variant on the "shuttle ramming the victim" theme is used in Michael Gear's Spider trilogy [The Warriors of Spider, The Way of Spider, & The Web of Spider].

Marines (in combat armor/battle dress) board enemy ships by using special assault shuttles... the bow is heavily armored & the main structure is designed for heavy impacts. The shuttle is rammed into the target ship, then bars are extended from the forward part of the hull (inside the target ship's hull) to lock the shuttle in place. A portion of the bow then opens, allowing the Marines to disembark directly into the target ship.

This method pretty much negates rolling/yaw as a defense, as the shuttle doesn't bother trying to match surfaces, just to impact the target ship's hull at approximately a 90° angle. With a 6G assault shuttle, this is fairly easy.

 

[CosmicGamer]

Strangelove, you may have missed what I was getting at. I wasn't talking about the weld, I was talking about the strength of a piece of hull plating verses the strength of the frame.

 

[Max]

while the boarding shuttle is a nice idea, and would work for military boardings, is it practical for pirates? I cannot imagine your boarding shuttle would be usable again without at least a major overhaul. How much damage does it do to the target, could you jump the target ship away? I'm perfectly willing to throw away people, they're cheap but spaceships, although not as pricey as starships, are still not things I's be willing to risk.

(That's my major objection to using warbots, they are just too expensive to use where they might get destroyed. I cannot see piracy being a good idea if you have to risk several MCr every time you try to take a ship. Soldiers are cheap thanks to Mercenary, it's the equipment and transport costs that kill you. Governments, where profit is not a factor, are one thing but the independent pirate has to keep her eye on the bottom line.)

 

[aramis]

This method pretty much negates rolling/yaw as a defense, as the shuttle doesn't bother trying to match surfaces, just to impact the target ship's hull at approximately a 90° angle. With a 6G assault shuttle, this is fairly easy.

Not really gonna happen, since unless you are along the axis of spin, you're going to wind up with rotational crunch and while you'll reduce their spin by (your mass)/∑( your mass, their mass), while imparting spin to yourself of the same fraction of rotational velocity...

 

[sabredog]

This would depend a lot on the type of drive and the agility of the ship. If the
ship can move "sideways" at any reasonable speed, you are right, but if it can
only accelerate "straight on" with minimal agility in other directions I do not
see the problem.

IMTU I don't assume agility means that a ship can jink and roll like a 10 to fighter when it is a 1000 ton freighter, or even a destroyer. An agility 5 50kt warship just means to me how quickly the ship can make acceleration changes and some gross changes in direction, but its just not going to be able to make fast changes relative to a smaller ship with the same or even less agility. Mass and inertia work against it.

I use this chart to determine agility with the Book 2 ships:

I assign potential agility to Book 2 designs by tonnage. The actual agility the ship then gets is equal to the acceleration of the maneuver drive to the max potential. So 6-G fighters get 6, but an 800 ton cruiser can never have more than 3 no matter how big the drives are. Straight line acceleration is easy, but pushing the mass around laterally quickly takes more time and effort.

1-99 max Agility 6
100-300 max Agility 5
301-600 max Agility 4
601-800 max Agility 3
801-1000 max Agility 2
1001-2000 max Agility 1
2001 + no agility

Agility is based on the maneuver drive number up to the max allowed for the tonnage of the ship. For example, a 200 ton ship has a max agility potential of 5, but if the M-drive is only rated to 3 then that will be the agility.

Roll rates and all that notwithstanding what would a space opera be without and exciting chase or two followed by a boarding action as the pirates/BEMs/etc. lock onto your ship and force their way onboard to capture the ship and players so they can make a daring escape later and rescue the female lead before the BEMs make their unholy intentions known?

Also, what is to stop an enterprising crew from counter-boarding when the two ships are next to eachother when they are stationary? Or sending across a warbot of thier own? Maybe a cheap anti-pirate warbot could be leased by merchant captains to take along in exchange for a lower insurance rate.

 

[rust]

Also, what is to stop an enterprising crew from counter-boarding when the two ships are next to eachother when they are stationary? Or sending across a warbot of thier own? Maybe a cheap anti-pirate warbot could be leased by merchant captains to take along in exchange for a lower insurance rate.

It would not even have to be a warbot, a normal cargo bot could be a
good start.

Your post just reminded me of a similar situation in an earlier campaign,
where the characters used a tracked AUV (Autonomous Underwater Ve-
hicle) to spread chaos in an installation as a diversion. The beast was
unarmed, but armoured for a depth of 9,000 meters, and had very strong
manipulators - and the order to transport all life forms in the room into
one of the room's corners and keep them there.

 

[Strangelove]

Strangelove, you may have missed what I was getting at. I wasn't talking about the weld, I was talking about the strength of a piece of hull plating verses the strength of the frame.

Ah, I see. In that case I'd still think the attachment of the hull plate to the ship's frame would be vastly stronger than any attachment you could make from the "sticky-bomb" spike to the hull plate. Though this is based on how I envision the ship being constructed, YMMV.

One caveat would be if the hull armor is some sort of Whipple Shield that is designed to defeat high speed impacts but is not necessarily attached to hull with tremendously strong joints. When dealing with kinetic impacts having bits of the hull plate tear off, or ablate, could be very helpful in carrying away a bulk of the impact energy. It would require lots of repair but would be very effective since you are not so much trying to stop a KE penetrator as you are misdirect it or shatter it (in the case of the whipple) over a wider area.

So if you assume the hull plates are designed to tear off as a function of their design then I think you'd be spot on in saying that the "sticky bomb" might do little else but weld itself to a piece of the hull that will not be attached to the target ship for long. It really depends on how you envision your hull plates; either as monolithic slabs welded to the frame or effectively bolt on like the ceramic tiles on the space shuttle.

Here is a picture of a tank from WW2 employing something like Whipple Shield to help defeat attacks. The spacing between the plates is an semi-efficient way to get results without the expense of laminate armor like modern tanks use. Another option would be some sort of applique armor like shown here.

 

[Max]

The ONLY ways to grab a spinning body in 0G are
1) impact a side and use some form of attraction to hold before one is flung free

Well this is the problem, but how much are we talking about here? If a 50m diameter ship is rotating at 1 RPS you are going to get about 80m/sec (290KPHish) which is rough but we could build a crash container to enable a person to survive these days - throw in the inertial compensation/CG tech which already exists in Travellerand it would be no problem to create a boarding device. Being strong enough to stick doesn't seem to be a problem, even if we assume a boarder with equipment masses 200Kg it wouldn't take an outrageously strong electro-magnet to hold the boarder onto the ship or an outrageously strong epoxy.

I've been trying to think of a cheaper low tech ways to handle it though, perhaps a "sticky" rope with clutch system which would play out along the hull as the boarder brought his rotation up to that that the ship or a sphere-in-a-sphere with an internal magnet which spins along the hull until the ship has slowed to the speed of the boarder. Unless the target is rotating at some absurd rate we don't have to use that much energy to slow it down or compensate for an extreme amount of force, just enough to push a 200KG (more likely half that) boarder to the speed experienced at the hull of the ship - and the longer we can spend to slow the ship down the easier it is.

 

[aramis]

Chemical adhesives in vaccuum have MAJOR issues.

 

[Max]

Could you expand on why chemical adhesives are a major problem in vacuum? There would probably be problems with some adhesives ie binary epoxies might have difficulty starting polymerization (outgassing of the catalysts before polymerization starts) but once polymerization starts I cannot see why vacuum would be a problem. Not my field, but while I can see adhesives for vacuum being different from atmospheric adhesives, I cannot see why vacuum would affect the fundamental idea of chemical adhesives. If chemical reactions resulting in stronger bonds can occur in a vacuum then they should be able to be used to create chemical adhesives - lack of gravity or micro gravity might be a bigger problem.

 

[aramis]

Max, the problem is volatilization. If it is fluid enough to make a bond, odds are its boiling at 10mB or less...

most of the chemical adhesives work by either
1) chemically bonding to the surface
2) physically flowing into crevices and hardening, for a mechanical bond
3) liquifying one or both surfaces to allow the source material to perform 1) or 2)
4) electrostatically bonding to one or both surfaces*
5) liquid pressure change resistance.**

*rather new stuff, read about it first in 2006.
** this mode fails in vacuum. Heck, it often fails at altitude.

Vacuum capable adhesives are, shall we say, interesting. Most of the ones I've seen are specified vacuum stable, not vacuum appliable. The ones that are vacuum appliable are silicone derivatives with hour+ set times.

 

[atpollard]

The "Spinning Ship Defense" has internal limits as well.

If the force exceeds the G-rating of the hull your ship may break apart.

If the force exceeds the G-Compensation of the ship then the crew may be plastered to the outside walls (and most non-military ships have only 1-2G MDs which should require only 1-2G compensation capability).

 

[the angle]

Not to mention that the g-force at the ends of a wildly tumbling vessel will be far greater than those near the "hub." On a smaller vessel (<1,000 tons), I doubt that the compensators can be modulated for such extremes. The people inside the ship will suffer quite a lot if the tumbling goes on for very long, like being subjected to a centrifuge for half an hour or more.

I'll fall back on my earlier statement -- If the ship I want to board makes it impossible for me to do so, and I'm a pirate or an enforcement agency of some type, then I'm going to turn my weapons on them until they comply or they're destroyed.

Steve

 

[far-trader]

The "Spinning Ship Defense" has internal limits as well.

If the force exceeds the G-rating of the hill your ship may break apart.

If the force exceeds the G-Compensation of the ship then the crew may be plastered to the outside walls (and most non-military ships have only 1-2G MDs which should require only 1-2G compensation capability).

Good point. I'm not sure it's really addressed in the rules though and wonder where one would begin to figure it out. I think it needs a simple generic solution. Something along the lines of treating the hull as a sphere and limiting the spin based on size and maneuver drive.

This is something I've thought lacking for a while. No way a big long ship should be able to come about as quickly as a small compact ship. The big ship would be putting much more stress and experience many more gees at the ends than the smaller ship for a flip in the same time. That's what agility should (imo) reflect.

Anyway, anything along that line will be ATU but interesting and worth discussing. Related enough to the topic I think (but I'm not sure I'm thinking on all cylinders yet ).

 

[sabredog]

Good point. I'm not sure it's really addressed in the rules though and wonder where one would begin to figure it out. I think it needs a simple generic solution. Something along the lines of treating the hull as a sphere and limiting the spin based on size and maneuver drive.

This is something I've thought lacking for a while. No way a big long ship should be able to come about as quickly as a small compact ship. The big ship would be putting much more stress and experience many more gees at the ends than the smaller ship for a flip in the same time. That's what agility should (imo) reflect.

Anyway, anything along that line will be ATU but interesting and worth discussing. Related enough to the topic I think (but I'm not sure I'm thinking on all cylinders yet ).

This is why I came up with a chart reflecting that larger ships might have a high acceleration but lateral movement of even the smallest kind would take more time than that done by a smaller ship. Anyway, I use a two tiered measure of agility- one is for HG ships and used in combat as a DM, the other is for determining how maneuverable the ship is relative to its mass. No matter what the ship's acceleration, the smaller ones are more agile than the bigger ones.

 

[Shadowfax]

Wow! This post took off and got away from me! There is a lot of info here! I'll try to touch on a couple key points.

Far Trader said: "I have to strongly disagree, any maneuver left will make it bloody dangerous if not downright impossible to even get close. All the defending pilot has to do is touch his thrust at any time and you have how ever many dtons of momentum swinging and smacking you hard. Very very hard. Sure if will damage his ship as much as yours (relative to size and armor), but they're not the ones with much to lose at that point.It's hard enough matching to board with a randomly pitching and rolling ship that isn't changing that dynamic at whim."

I agree with what he said very much. This was pretty much one of the major reasons I don't see people doing this kind of stuff REALISTICALLY.

With regard to all the people who are saying "traveller is better when it is not so realistic." like Whipsnade does. I understand and I am with you. IT wouldn't be fun if it was too realistic. I wanted to talk a bit about the realistic aspects of boarding actions though even if I do come away from them myself in my games.

Strange love - That's an original " 007-esque" idea! That would work very well in the theatrical game, but I don't see it working in the realistic game. Cool idea though. I suppose anything is possible.

With regard to all the conversations about pitch and yaw and rolling around to avoid being boarded. It think the pirate (or boarding vessel) would ahve to put a stop to or arrest the target's movement, before any kind of boarding could take place. I guess pirates might have to have something like a manipulator arm to move the target ship around. Star Trek took care of all of this with the good old tractor beam. In traveller we have repulsors, but no tractor beams and I just don't think a grappling hook will help. Either will sticky missiles.

I really like THE ANGLE's idea about honor! that is a cool new angle (sorry for the really bad pun) on this. So the captains duel it out. Cool idea for the game. I don't know how realistic it is but its a cool idea. However in option A) I don't think the pirates will blow the gyrating prize - its too valuable. In option D) No body is going to self-destruct their ship so they don't fall to pirates. People basically want to live. In a military action you might get some destructs, but not with Merchant crews. They are just going to want to get out of this alive.

I still see these pirates disabling the ship and pulling it out of the shipping lanes, so that they can slowly reduce the crew through negotiating and siege. Sooner or later the crew will either surrender or make a break for it. Would there be a way to attach to a ship and jump with it forcing it to jump without ripping your ship apart. If there is a way to do this that is definitely another option that pirates would try.

Max- I like everything that you said with regard to hijacking, but do you really think that all the crews are going to run around armed all the time? You can do a lot without weapons or with rudimentary spontaneous weapons like a knife from the gally a fire extinguisher, a bottle or anything heavy like a piece of pipe or something from the cargo hold. Maybe our hijackers are well trained bruisers, martial artists or psionics. I also think no matter how well you get paid there will be someone who thinks that they can get paid better. If a lot of the pirates out there are actually clans who operate as privateers with support from rogue governments then they may even be able to build false IDs for the sleepers that they slip on board. I just think that hijacking will be more prevalent and more successful in most cases than a boarding action.

I also think you have to take out the maneuver drive and shoot off most of the other ship's weapons before you can board.

Also, using a breaching charge to breach the hull is going to lower the value of that ship significantly too right?

Shadowfax idea Number 1:
One thing that I thought about that might be cool is some kind of EMP weapon that temporarily shuts down fire control and the maneuver drive, allowing the pirate to board and take the ship in one piece. Sure there would be defenses Vs this kind of weapon and it would probably be very short ranged. That would mean the pirate would have to close an duke it out a bit and then overwhelm the other ship's EMP defense to black it out. The black out wouldn't last long and ships with Fibre optic Back-ups would be less vulnerable.


Shadowfax idea Number 2:
One last idea is a "burst emitter array". My guess is that in addition tot he Xboat system every ship jumping in System from somewhere else will be queried by the systems computer network node. There will be in internet protocol (if you will) that compares the actuality (topicality/"currentness") information and news in the ship's Data-base to the current information in the System's Database Node. New or more current information from the incoming ship will be tagged and all the data will be sorted into categories like "commercial", "public knowledge", "warnings and advisories" etc. The ships computer and the Node computer will exchange information so that the ship's DB is brought up to date with the information about the system that they jumped into (weather reports, tourist information, news, warnings and advisories, want ads, etc, etc. ) and the system's database node will be brought up to date with the most current information about the systems that the ship has recently visited. Each ship and system will have bought certain information rights and while some information will be traded freely other information can be bought and sold at pre-arranged prices based on classification. This incidentally brings a new element into the game that may make some of your merchant runs more profitable, ans even sustainable because ships can buy and sell information and advertising when they jump in to the jump point. There are just sensor buoys floating out there in any system with a descent techlevel and therefore an imperial network node. You might say "Great idea (I am patting myself on the back for thinking of it as we speak. Pat-pat), but what does all of this have to do with piracy?" Well, you see a pirate can use a burst emitter to screw with the target ship's computer. The pirate fires a burst at the target ship's receiver array and makes it think that a system buoy is querying it. Unless the target ship's computer programmer did a good job with the anti-virus program, the pirate may be able to inject malicious code into the ships computer, disabling weapons, the maneuver drive and even the anti-hijack program! Of course there would be a whole ECM / ECCM race going on here. Programmers would always be fighting to keep the ship's computer safe from attack and pirate programmers would always be trying to find new ways of using the array to get it. What do you think?

 

[far-trader]

Wow! This post took off and got away from me! There is a lot of info here! I'll try to touch on a couple key points.

Welcome to CotI Some of us don't have games so we play with the game and can and will go on and on and on...

I still see these pirates disabling the ship and pulling it out of the shipping lanes, so that they can slowly reduce the crew through negotiating and siege. Sooner or later the crew will either surrender or make a break for it. Would there be a way to attach to a ship and jump with it forcing it to jump without ripping your ship apart. If there is a way to do this that is definitely another option that pirates would try.

Yep, doable, canon, and also sensible, IF you can disable the target ship.

You don't want them trying any funny stuff while you're towing* them or during the jump. And after a week in jump space, with power running low or gone (emergency batteries good for 1D days) and life support also running out (most times), the crew and pax is probably ready to surrender if they're still alive. Or they've had a week to make repairs and cook up a plan :devil:

* it's called a jump net, Supplement 9 has an example on page 22, naturally a smaller ship would be more desirable for most pirates and that's doable

 

[far-trader]

Interesting ideas, may need a little ironing out.

Shadowfax idea Number 1:
One thing that I thought about that might be cool is some kind of EMP weapon...

The thing there is Traveller ships seem pretty much immune to that kind of effect. Hardened drives and circuits, and really effective radiation protection being the norm in CT, and computer fib option in HG specifically defending against weapon nukes. Anything that would temporarily shut down the systems is likely to do not-so-temporarily, as in permanently fried, destroyed beyond repair, and probably kill the crew too. Not the soft "kill" you're looking for. It would also probably be the equivilent of a spinal meson weapon. Not too practical for most pirates.

I'd suggest (ties in with your next idea) instead a Hijack variation, attacking the computer with a virus or hacking it to disable the ship. That won't be a cake-walk either, unless the target is lazy.

Shadowfax idea Number 2:
One last idea is a "burst emitter array"...

Yep, I think that'd be the norm too, and it is detailed in later Traveller lore, leading to Virus (the capital V version) of TNE. Briefly, all ships make use of a special semi-sentient natural chip to make unbreakable security handshakes and info exchange. It's a sealed black box tech with a simple on/off switch and serious penalties for friviously turning it off (since it makes you ship practically invisible to system monitors) but allowed so as not be easily targeted by pirates and such. So the system is in place, it's just unhackable. Until those semi-sentient natural chips became sentient. I seem to recall some thinking that the Imperium had codes that would allow them to take control of the ship but I don't think that would fly the way the Imperium is laid out.