Fighters other than the Rampart

[pendragonman]

Could more old timers please chime in? For some reason the week before last we had a plethora of postings all over from old time posters and gamers of this BBS, now not so much, only the usual suspects.

Dang kids! Get off my lawn! Sorry, couldn't help it. Old guy checking in.

snip snip

With all that in mind, my thoughts on fighters are as such; I think I heard someone on the Star Fleet Battles BBS compare SFB/Star-Trekian fighters to WW2 Hellcats and Zeros; i.e. they offer fire support for mainline units. But WW2 fighters, unlike SFB fighters, actually have a deep strike capability. And where SFB fighters don't have anti-shipping weapons, WW2 fighters did, though they didn't pack the wallop of an Exocet or Harpoon (heck, can you even fit a Harpoon on a Hornet or A6?.... probably not).

Incorrect young Padawan. SFB fighters carry drones. Ask anyone who has faced a Kzin fighter squadron or a wad of Z-Ys if they can't kill a ship.

As to deep strike capability, packs can give fighters a strategic range of "1 Hex", helping to give rise to the Space Control Ship-the traveller equivalent would carry a bunch of 50 dton fighters AND a half dozen 5-10 kton Riders.

I really didn't think that to be true, but that was the only tentative conclusion I could draw as space-fighters, one of the more obvious sci-fi staples, never seemed to be thuroughly addressed.

Phew. I got that out of the way.

So, what does all this mean? Well, it means that I've got some adventures that I'd like to complete that involve space fighters, and I'd like to know the old grognards opinion and direction on the topic.

So, oldbees, if you're lurking, post away and enlighten me.

Truth be told, if you are playing traveller as an RPG (which is how its meant to be) fighters are as badass as the GM wants to make them.

If you are playing traveller as a tabletop ship combat system, other than at the lower to mid tech levels fighters are worthless and can be ignored. At low to mid tech levels they can mess up a fleet of equivalent tech level.

 

[warwizard]

Ok on the subject of fighters, bigger with a large boom is not exactly where you want to go. Eventually you get designers relizing that big = a big signature = easier detection and target lock

lower tech levels have a hard time getting a decent missile (ignoring the erratta introduced drive) the missiles can go fast for a little time (chemical) or go slow for a long time (Ion, Fusion rocket, experimental fusion rocket, daedaelus and bussard ram) so at low techs you have big missiles with a fusion rocket pushing them along at 2 g's nearly forever, not so good if the target has as much or more delta v, so it's payload is a swarm of small chemical rockets that sprint in for the attack, or a detonation laser head. For the folks that allow reactionless drives, at about 10 tons you get a reactionless drive missile that's reasonably fast, and can carry chemical sprint missiles or a laser, I guess if you put a man in it you could call it a fighter, but it's not all that survivable and should be concidered a one way mission.

TL 13 gives us usable Heplar missiles with under 9 square meters of surface area that give about 20 g's for several hours, they are in the 3 MW range on power output, but some stealth and EMM and military black coatings help it stay unseen, volume of the missile needs to stay under 2.5 m3 to avoid raising the visable and active radar signatures. Now the problem is that a decent sensor makes this bird cost quite a lot, go over this size budget, and go a lot slower, so a command guided missile is perferred. If you can get a MFD in close and keep it alive long enough to guide the missile to target you can shave seconds off the sense tgt movement, order missile maneuver command loop, making it much more likley to score a hit. Therefore the offensive fighter mission at TL 13 becomes one of getting close and staying alive through stealth and or maneuver, and guide command guided missiles in on the targets.

How do we do that? ECM, stealth coatings, EMM measures, and military black or ultra black coatings, combined with a naturally low signature in the first place. How close can you get without dying?
TL 13 BB will have something in the range of a 14 sensitivity in passive and a 12.5 sensitivity in active sensors the signature - range factor + sensitivity needs to be 0 or less to avoid detection and below 1.5 to avoid target lock.

The baseline signatures will be in the -1, -.5, 0 for visable IR and active. subtract another 1 from each for two levels of defenses, for a -2, -1.5, and -1. no detection range against passive becomes range 12.5, and no target lock (with ECM jammer) is down to 10 to 10.5 range, which is 50,000 KM to 100,000 KM, so call it .4 LS and they're not able to target you. That should give you a command loop time of 1 second, at 6 G's an evading ship can change it's position by all of 30 meters in that time, so there is a really good chance of guiding a 20 g KK missile into direct hull contact on a big ship.
The ship will just shoot down the missiles you say? The missiles are quite hard targets to hit, smaller than the fighter and much more nimble they can evade by 40 meters at .1 light seconds range before the lightspeed point defenses can react, and the missile has a body size of less than a meter... hit chances would be less than .0001% per shot. In addition the missiles have been accelerating at 20 g's for an hour or more, 200m/s/s times 3600 seconds= 720 Km/s (against a target with no vector), call it 45 seconds till impact, OR the laser head nuke can go boom. Final protective fire against a kenetic kill missile needs to take out all the fragments as well as just hit the thing, so fusion guns are perferred for this defense, and sand casters for the laser head ones.

At TL 14 the power plants are not any better, but they can be made smaller so the missiles can shrink to under 1m3 for the propulsion and fuel, even smaller and harder to see and shoot, but the same speed.

At TL 15 the power density doubles so the heplar missile goes up to 40 g's, and at TL 16 they reach speeds of up to 82 g's and as small as .25 m3.

The TL 16 robot drone I mentioned up thread, can play around in front of a BB at .1 light second and be stealthy enough to not be targeted, for a .25 second command loop on it's flock of missiles handed off from the missile boat over 32 light seconds out.

The only way to rid yourself of these fighters and drones is to send small craft out that are fast enough to get close and shoot them. You have about 1 Hr to do that before the missiles start showing up.

 

[mike wightman]

Bay mounted missiles are bigger in CT - Striker tells us so and the missiles special supplement also mentions larger missiles than the 50kg standard turret mounted weapon.

There are 25 launchers in a 50t bay and 50 in a 100t bay. They can fire 1 missile every 30 seconds according to Striker.

 

[Icosahedron]

So did I! The MF-1 "Mosquito" was what I called it. Yeah, that's about as small as I could get them to go, but currently I have about 6 basic designs that average around 20-30 tons. I figure those are my "Tomcats" n' "Eagles" and the 6-15 tonners are the F-16's.

Great minds think alike: I never can figure out why people are so opposed to the roving battery model of fighters in HG - it's about the only way to effectively use them at all without doing too much fudging.

My house-rule requires a second bridge and computer (equal in size to the number of flights it will control so a Model 5 can control 5 flights at once) on the carrier dedicated to flight control and coordinating the strikes. If there is a command and control ship in the fleet at the time it can take over the same operation if the carrier loses it's "Flight Bridge" (which BTW can't function as a second emergency or battle bridge of the main bridge is destroyed so carriers - as my game's flagships actually have 3 bridges - Main/Emergency Battle/Flight).

And as fighters get shot away in the battle the "battery" is reduced just like on a ship.

So how do you do it?

Wow, 7 pages overnight!
Caveat: Mine was a simple mechanic that has never been extensively playtested and refined because most of my Traveller is dirtside or shipboard RPG rather than fleet-scale slugfests.
Basically, fighters can join formations with an odd number of 'turrets' (if you have a flight of 5 fighters and one of them is destroyed, your flight acts like a 3-turret flight for the next two kills). dispersing or regrouping takes one non-combat turn. Otherwise, the 'turrets' follow the normal battery rules.
The formation rules are used with my Close Range rule - craft less than 1% (or 0.1%, I never made my mind up) of the size of their target can get within the big ship's turning circle. It cannot bring its spinal to bear and can only bring its bays to bear if the ship commander has high initiative. If a bay fires and hits at Close Range, the explosion may harm the big ship. If the big ship has a fighter screen, craft cannot enter Close Range until the screen is 'broken through'.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell. Feel free to playtest it for me.

As for the rest of the thread:
I think the weapon-scrubbing way fighters are used at TL12 probably makes sense, but I think the TL14+ uselessness problem is just a rules cock-up that was never fixed. I agree that smaller craft should be more agile than big ones and I don't think fighters should be ship-killers individually, but like the Lilliputians they are, they should be able to do some damage when grouped together. My houserules went some way toward this before I put the concept on the back burner.
That's my 2Cr.

 

[sabredog]

Bay mounted missiles are bigger in CT - Striker tells us so and the missiles special supplement also mentions larger missiles than the 50kg standard turret mounted weapon.

There are 25 launchers in a 50t bay and 50 in a 100t bay. They can fire 1 missile every 30 seconds according to Striker.

Thank you for finding that - I knew it had to be somewhere! Though I imagined they'd fire them faster than that. More like salvos of 5 or 10 of the things at a time (more likely to get "leakers" through the defenses), but I guess that depends on how the launchers are configured; I always figured box launchers similar to a VLS but more "aimable" maybe, and reloaded from below the launch tube.

And after looking over the figures I see that at TL-15 the things would be great for scrubbing off external systems but not too good for penetrating unless nuclear. Which jibes with HG since the damage results for nuclear missiles are better than HE (and more likely to get that infernal "non-critical" fuel tanks shattered result).

So I guess we are back to some finagling to make a more powerful missile (KK?), use only nukes, or just go back to doing it however we want depending on how we play: RPG small ship, or wargame big ship battles.

 

[sabredog]

Wow, 7 pages overnight!
Caveat: Mine was a simple mechanic that has never been extensively playtested and refined because most of my Traveller is dirtside or shipboard RPG rather than fleet-scale slugfests.

me too, but the big battle sometimes happen and I let the players do the rolls for some of it to give them something to do if needed. But mainly they jsut try to run away (along with everyone else) when 500kt battlecarriers and their battle groups start jumping in.

But my house rules have been used since HG came out (a lot more of us were wargamers prior to and while playing RPG's than it seems like players are nowadays) so we saw the problem right away. One school was to use just add them into the missile defenses by only allowing them for that, but I preferred the "flying column" approach of roving batteries to use as anti-missile defenses or to hammer smaller warships and generally just be a force multiplier. My ex-Navy buddy came up with the need for a Ticonderoga-style centralized control system for the flying batteries and it worked fine.

Basically, fighters can join formations with an odd number of 'turrets' (if you have a flight of 5 fighters and one of them is destroyed, your flight acts like a 3-turret flight for the next two kills). dispersing or regrouping takes one non-combat turn. Otherwise, the 'turrets' follow the normal battery rules.

We did the same thing but didn't think to facotr in a regrouping time - we figured the long combat turns allowed for it without any more book keeping than the game already needed. Though we liked that, too - we used big rolls of butcher paper to draw with multi-color pencils the vectors of missiles and ships for smaller role-playing ship battles. It looked like something from a ship's plotting board but was fun.

The formation rules are used with my Close Range rule - craft less than 1% (or 0.1%, I never made my mind up) of the size of their target can get within the big ship's turning circle. It cannot bring its spinal to bear and can only bring its bays to bear if the ship commander has high initiative. If a bay fires and hits at Close Range, the explosion may harm the big ship. If the big ship has a fighter screen, craft cannot enter Close Range until the screen is 'broken through'.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell. Feel free to playtest it for me.

ooooh....that's good! I wouldn't want to try to plot the meson shots that way, nor catch the spillover from a missile salvo! I'm going to pencil that in for future use....

As for the rest of the thread:
I think the weapon-scrubbing way fighters are used at TL12 probably makes sense, but I think the TL14+ uselessness problem is just a rules cock-up that was never fixed. I agree that smaller craft should be more agile than big ones and I don't think fighters should be ship-killers individually, but like the Lilliputians they are, they should be able to do some damage when grouped together. My houserules went some way toward this before I put the concept on the back burner.
That's my 2Cr.

And a fine 2Cr it is, too. I never thought individual ones should, either, but jeez, a hundred of the little buggers launching 2 missiles each (or even one big nuclear one each) at close range and high speed ought to do something more than just ruin the battleship's nose art.

 

[far-trader]

There are 25 launchers in a 50t bay and 50 in a 100t bay. They can fire 1 missile every 30 seconds according to Striker.

Heading for bed and too tired to look it up now but afraid I might forget so I'll just ask now. Is that 1 missile every 30 seconds for the entire bay? Or per launcher?

If for the bay then that doesn't sound too bad at 40 missiles (big) per 20 minute turn. But then why are bigger bays better? Unless they have bigger (big) missiles? Like small missiles for turrets, medium for 50ton bays, and large for 100tons bays?

If per launcher it can't be big missiles, that would be 1000 missiles (would have to be small) per turn for 50ton bays and 2000 missiles (again, small). And even then (as small, turret sized missiles) that is lot!

Still, the swarms of hundreds of small missiles meme is not a bad way to go necessarily

EDIT: Hmm, ya know, 1000 standard (small) missiles would be 50tons, and 2000 would be 100tons of course. So the bay launches a full load of missiles per turn seems to work nicely You need some cargo space for magazines though if you want to fire more than once (too bad so few of the canon designs have any cargo space of note)

 

[sabredog]

Nope, it's right here....Striker says they are 25cm missiles with either drone, target designation, or homing guidance packages otherwise designed as tac missiles with HE or nuclear warheads (so I guess you can customize the speed and range,too if so inclined). Still seems kinda small to me, though. I'd have figured twice that size at least.

Turret missiles are 15cm warhead jobs and LBB2 points out a single guy in a small, cramped turret can load them by himself.

I think those 25 launchers probably ripple fire the missiles - that jibes with the timing, and are then reloaded from behind with autoloaders for the next shot. Of course this opens another can of worms:

How many missiles do bays have for reloads? AAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

 

[sabredog]

You need some cargo space for magazines though if you want to fire more than once (too bad so few of the canon designs have any cargo space of note)

First ed. HG had a magazine requirement, but only if the ship was going to bombard as ortillery. But I don't remember what the volume requirements were. It'd be easy enough to use that rule for ALL missile bay equipped ships to make the whole missile swarm realistic - otherwise, as you just pointed out, you might be empty in one shot.

 

[AndreaV]

My this thread has legs.

I'll repeat what others have said. There is no weapon that a 10Dt, 20Dt, 100Dt fighter can carry that a 100,000Dt battleship can not carry a lot more of, fire faster and be considerably more survivable whilst doing it. So given that the swarms of fighters will require a considerable outlay of tonnage to carry them to battle, the fighters need some "edge" to work.

Our current (20th-21st century naval) carrier based fighters' edge is two fold, firstly that they operate in a different environment that allows them more speed and agility; but their huge advantage is that they act as a range extension for the weapon system.

In Traveller, space fighters are operating in the same environment as their targets and do not have a significant performance advantage. Which leaves the range factor. Sadly given we're talking weapon ranges measured in light seconds that gets hard to justify, but lets run with it.

Now if Traveller fighters can carry a one shot ship killer (lets call it the Hans Waven torpedo), then under HG they could be viable, working rather like tiny battleriders, but they would radically change canon. As in wet navies, they would rapidly render the battleship obsolete, so after 100 years at TL 15 we can expect to find battleships only as museum pieces.

Naval combat would resemble current wet navies where the carrier is king and all other ships act as their consorts (with the added benefit of no submarines). It would make for an interesting setting and if it floats your boat, more power to you. Personally I like my dreadnoughts, so I won't be going down that path, but its your Traveller universe to do with as you will.

 

[sabredog]

Huh, and we were just winding this down to a new area of discussion about the kinds of missiles bays actually use and here you go and just repeat yourself. Forget the "it's your universe do as you like" rant and add something new to the discussion.

Like how many missiles does that dreadnought of yours carry now that we know how big they are and the ROF of the bay mounts?

And nobody ever said a single ship-killing missile should exist - just that some kind of missile should exist that a small craft (like a 20-40 ton fighter) could use to effectively damage a capital ship. Something akin to today, which, given all the sci-fi futurism ought not to be so darn difficult to do.

But apparently it just gets everyone's knickers in a twist so I give up. I'm taking my fighters with ship-killer bay-weapon sized missiles and going home now.

 

[AndreaV]

Piratical lesbian aslan fighter pilots from a feudal technocracy using near-C rocks

(Translated, fighters have long been a "hot" topic in Traveller)

 

[McPerth]

just ask the crews of the Yamato, Bismarck, Arizona, Hood, etc... several of which were in fact victims of tiny airplanes dropping bombs smaller than what came out of their main guns.

Your affirmation is true, but examples not so (IIRC)...

Yamato required repeated air attaks to be sunk, but it's true it was sunk mostly by bombs...

Busmark and Arizona were crippled (the former) or sunk (the latter) by air deliered torpedoes...

Hood was sunk by the main weaponry of the Bismark (a true critical hit, magazine explosion).

Akagi, Kaga, Hiriu or Soryu are better examples, but they are carriers, not BBs...

Oktober Revolution (a USSR BB in the baltic fleet, WWII) was sunk by a Stuka

 

[McPerth]

No, I said that the missiles carried in the large bays should be bigger than the ones fired out of turrets because that is logical. Why otherwise pack the equivalent of one hundred triple turrets into one bay that can be taken out in one shot when they can be spread all over the ship and provide say around 10 batteries of missiles.

And since the code for the bay is higher that seems to point towards either an incredible load of swarming missiles - which is just stupid as I pointed out - or fewer, but larger, faster, more powerful missiles. Which makes a whole lot more sense. It's how it works today, why wouldn't it work that way tomorrow?

IIRC in HG is not specified, but in MT is specified that a 50 ton bay launches 50 misiles in 2 salvos, while a 100 ton launches 100 missiles in 2 salvos, and its missiles are intechangeable with those of the turrests (as you need only splecify how many do you carry, not divided among turret missiles and bay missiles).

EDIT: I don't own striker, nor have I been able to read it.

And remember that the same weapon-1 that destoys your bay destroys also your 10 triple turrets. It just destroys one battery.

 

[McPerth]

A fighter dominated Trillion Credit Squadron, might see me field 2 such carriers & 4,500 fighters (around 80% of the budget?).

TCS usully gives also a pilot limit...

 

[whartung]

The problem with ship killer fighters is simply that they can't carry ship killing weapons.

While we have "missiles", they're not kinetic kill missiles. We don't have kinetic kill weapons in the starship game, in any of the systems. C Rocks are mentioned, and the passion they bring. Kinetic kill missiles are the C rocks of space combat.

We have nuclear and HE missiles, but they're wrapped in handwavium, because whatever damage they're doing, it's not because they're smacking in to the hull of the ship.

Even though kinetic energy is the "cheapest" way of bringing hurt upon another target, as we've been learning through the ages via assorted guns and projectiles and as we try to move beyond to energy weapons and mass drivers, and the difficulties in doing so.

So, a 10 ton fighter, with reasonable mass, accelerating at 6G and colliding with another vessel -- that's just a bright flash and OMG Sparkle Ponies time. In that way, a "fighter" can be a ship killer.

Save, we don't have a system to support that.

So, we have energy weapons, whether that energy is brought to the target as a laser, excitable particles, collapsing mesons, or simply searing heat and nuclear radiation.

Mount something that can bring the "heat" to a target on a fighter, and the fighter can become effective. But the problem is that to get the power necessary requires big power plants and fuel, and, apparently, large apparatuses. Too big for a "fighter".

People talk about fighters, the effect being up close and personal with the big ships, and using "Pilot skill" to dodge and jink and what not.

The various ranges in the game are measured in the 10's of thousands of kilometers. A hex in the TNE games is 30,000 kilometers. 30,000km is 1/10th of a light second. With a anti-aircraft gun shooting at 3000M/s, 1/10 of a second is 300m. That's not very far. 1000 Meters, 3/10ths of a second, within human reaction times.

30K Km IS far. If you're in "visual range" you're in the 10's of kilometers. 1 or 2 10,000ths of a second reaction time to light speed weapon. There is no "jinking", "dodging", or "swerving" at 1/10,000th of a second, and even if you could, you're not moving very far. If you're within 100K km of a target, with it's 3/10s travel time, yea, that may be within a human reaction time -- but there's no warning. You can't dodge the "gun flash". By the time you know you're being fired at, you're being hit. Detecting the fire IS the fire. It's like feeling the bullet, then hearing the shot.

So, Pilot skill is great if you need to manually dock the ship, or get it landed when the computers are down, or make a main engine burn while "keeping the moon in the window".

But combat? Against light speed weapons? No. Hardly. Our slow processing meat sacks are out their league. You're in a game where the ships with the shortest internal wiring win because they have less propagation delay and can process sensor information faster.

 

[Blue Ghost]

My this thread has legs.

I'll repeat what others have said. There is no weapon that a 10Dt, 20Dt, 100Dt fighter can carry that a 100,000Dt battleship can not carry a lot more of, fire faster and be considerably more survivable whilst doing it. So given that the swarms of fighters will require a considerable outlay of tonnage to carry them to battle, the fighters need some "edge" to work.

Our current (20th-21st century naval) carrier based fighters' edge is two fold, firstly that they operate in a different environment that allows them more speed and agility; but their huge advantage is that they act as a range extension for the weapon system.
*snip*

Yeah, that's the other key element here. Aircraft are valuable because they take advantage of travelling in a differium medium; air. That, as opposed to slogging through water like a ship, or trudging through earth and mud like an infantryman or mechanized unit.

In this regard space is an equalizer for all things. Ergo a fighter better have some kind of advantage in order to be usable. But, this is where YTUMV, because high-adventure is cinematic. Ergo X-Wings become useful because they can maneuvre like an atmospheric fighter and carry really cool weapons and electronic friends (your version of an X-Wing may vary as well on this).

With that in mind, I guess it's essentially no-holds barred for your Traveller space-fighter. You either go with the ultra-cinematic Star-Warsish stuff, or stick with the ultra-real "fighters can be shrugged off because of physical paramters" avenue.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Dang kids! Get off my lawn! Sorry, couldn't help it. Old guy checking in.



Incorrect young Padawan. SFB fighters carry drones. Ask anyone who has faced a Kzin fighter squadron or a wad of Z-Ys if they can't kill a ship.

As to deep strike capability, packs can give fighters a strategic range of "1 Hex", helping to give rise to the Space Control Ship-the traveller equivalent would carry a bunch of 50 dton fighters AND a half dozen 5-10 kton Riders.



Truth be told, if you are playing traveller as an RPG (which is how its meant to be) fighters are as badass as the GM wants to make them.

If you are playing traveller as a tabletop ship combat system, other than at the lower to mid tech levels fighters are worthless and can be ignored. At low to mid tech levels they can mess up a fleet of equivalent tech level.

Oh, I suppose that's true. I guess the reason I brought up SFB was because there seemed to be a real paradigm between negotiating the justification for having fighters in Star Fleet Battles and Traveller. In other words how cool would it be verse the realism and practicality of such units in a space combat environment.

I guess the bottom line is how cool does your group think they would be, and how effective can you make them based on that coolness factor?

Me, I'd like to stick with the ruleset, but realize that I can essentially make up anything I want for any published work.

Thanks for the response.

 

[Matt123]

TCS usully gives also a pilot limit...

yep, my bad. I've been playing campaigns too long...

& of course pilot limits are put in precisely to avoid tournament fighter fests, the authors knowing how effective fighters are.

 

[Matt123]

Now if Traveller fighters can carry a one shot ship killer (lets call it the Hans Waven torpedo), then under HG they could be viable, working rather like tiny battleriders, but they would radically change canon. As in wet navies, they would rapidly render the battleship obsolete, so after 100 years at TL 15 we can expect to find battleships only as museum pieces.

And given that fighters dominate from TL8 through to TL12/13, I personally think by TL14/15, its timely that the Dreadnought gets some time in the spotlight again.

& the reason Dreadnoughts do not fare well, during those earlier centuries? Fighters are simply too effective at mission killing them.

I like fighters & thats a big reason why I enjoy gaming at TL12/13. If you want fighters to be meaningful in a game based on the OTU, stop playing at TL15.