Planetary meson batteries?

[The Thing]

Since a meson cannon can, according to most canon, fire thru atmosphere, armor and even whole planets I wonder why a lot of planets in traveller aren't defended by honking huge meson battery complexes that use sattelite data for targeting and are so huge and powerful they can blow up a tigress class dreadnought in one shot despite any meson screen she can carry. (The planetary meson battery might be bigger than the whole dreadnought, it ought to be able to overwhelm her meson screen.)

Any ideas on this, or would such defenses be so expen$ive that only sylea and a few other planets be able to afford them?

 

[veltyen]

Since a meson cannon can, according to most canon, fire thru atmosphere, armor and even whole planets I wonder why a lot of planets in traveller aren't defended by honking huge meson battery complexes that use sattelite data for targeting and are so huge and powerful they can blow up a tigress class dreadnought in one shot despite any meson screen she can carry. (The planetary meson battery might be bigger than the whole dreadnought, it ought to be able to overwhelm her meson screen.)

Any ideas on this, or would such defenses be so expen$ive that only sylea and a few other planets be able to afford them?

Deep Meson defences are certainly canon.

IMTU most productive planets will have several regardless of TL. The lower TL planets just need to import specialists (and spares) to maintain the installation.

With neutrino detectors you can also have the sensors buried deep underground with the Meson weapon, meaning (IMTU at least) a deep meson facility consists of several large fusion powerplants, several smallish meson weapons and multiple high quality neutrino detectors. All of these buried 5-10 km into the crust, with significant distribution to counter ortillery fire. At that deep the facility also requires a fair degree of life support machinery (for temperature, pressure and air quality regulation).

Cost is certainly significant, in the same ballpark as a meson equiped battleship (though possibly at the higher end). It however is pretty much immune to smaller weapons (even nuke mining gets dicey while under meson fire) and far less likely to be lost in a mis-jump. Cost is hard to calculate when it comes to large engineering projects, as things like large scale fusion based mining machinery are hard to estimate the value of, let alone labour costs that will vary widely from world to world.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

There was a whole thread about this ages ago, I think. Some people had reasons for not making it work, but I don't recall what they were. Search past threads for it.

 

[The Oz]

Deep meson gun sites (DMGS) are one explanation for how planets like Jewell manage to hold out for years under Zhodani attack. If the DMGSs are not easily silenced, then even if enemy troops land on the planet their progress will be slowed by logistical difficulties (it must be difficult to run supplies to the landed troops with DMGSs blasting your supply ships, or the ortillery support vessels), not to mention the direct fire support a battleship-sized DMGS could provide to friendly ground troops.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

FF&S1/2 have rules for building DMGS.

 

[savage]

DMZs

I'm a fan of DMZs. Sure every weapon has its limitations and downside but a significant planet shouldn't fall to a major force if it has a minor navy and a DMZ system. !-2 meson batteries really don't help if your up against any significant force.

Good stuff.

 

[Captain Midnight]

I'm new to these forums (though not to Traveller in many of its incarnations), but I have always loved the idea of deep meson gun sites. They're the Traveller equivalent of "shore batteries". They're not as invulnerable as you might think; it's hard to keep the locations secret, and by definition, they can't dodge.

One other complication that I've never found a good response to is how you defend against commando assault via teleport, which would seem like a perfect special-ops mission. You can defend against a teleporter carrying a nuke by constantly keeping a damper field going over the entire installation, but it's hard to defend against a platoon of highly-trained Consular Guard troopers who manged to get covertly inserted to the planetary surface. (The problem then becomes, "How do you prevent covert insertion?, and that's really hard, too.)

You can certainly come up with ways that the attackers cannot use the captured installation (via biometric lockouts or other similar tactics), so you can essentially "spike the guns", but they can certainly take it out of action permanently.

Any further thoughts?

 

[mbrinkhues]

Defense against the Zoo:

+ Do PSI-Shields work against Teleporters? IMHO they do so shielding the whole installation (A must anyway) should help

+ Internal security. Lot's of small compartments and closed hatches, marine guards and automatic weapons

+ Small number of Psi-Commandos. Even with the Zhos the number of Psi's isn't all that high and Teleporters are only a small fraction of the talent base.


Problems with DMS:

+ C-Fractional bombardment of the Planet from outside the guns range

+ High speed fly-bys from Black Globe Equiped ships that drop Precision Guided Ammo

+ At least one Traveller Variant (TNE) has no Neutrino Sensors, a second (GT) has them optional resulting in exposed sensors (see PGA above)

 

[The Oz]

I think that psi-shields do not work against teleportation, or any other psionic power except telepathy. So Zho commandos could teleport into a deep meson gun site if their director knew where it was from clairvoyance.

But....

A deep meson gun site is =deep=, usually way, way underground. Teleportation is restricted to altitude changes of no more than 400 meters in one jump and no more than 600 meters over one hour because of the gain or loss of heat from the change in potential energy. So a deep meson gun site is protected against psionic commandos by its location, just as it would be against regular commandos.

However....

If a clairvoyant did get a location on a deep meson gun site, s/he could give that location to a friendly meson gun-armed ship, which could easily knock out the deep meson gun site (since it can't dodge). So the real danger to Imperial deep meson gun sites are Zho clairvoyants, not Zho teleporters.

 

[Captain Midnight]

Well, that shoots that idea down.

I had remembered the distance restriction, but not the altitude change restriction. Oops.

It only becomes an issue if they're attempting to infiltrate from the surface -- is there anything else that is at that depth? Submarines, seafloor arcologies, mineshafts, covert insertion craft? (Now I'm imagining a secret Zhodani plan to infiltrate mining and drilling companies...)

The question then arises of just how deep they'd need to go, and if the sites can be located. I'd expect that neutrino detectors or densitometers can pinpoint them pretty exactly; I'd also expect that that sort of construction project is too big to keep really secret for very long -- after all, the Zhodani have been kicking around various plans for attacking Jewell for several hundred years, and when you have telepathic spies, discovering secrets (or suborning people who already have those secrets) gets a lot easier. If you have to abandon old sites every few years and dig new ones, it's going to be expensive.

I'm also getting Cold War-style ideas about Zhodani agents putting secret sensors on quasi-neutral freighters (or just freighters with overly greedy captains), and collecting updated scans of various worlds on a regular basis. You could also have scenarios where they are trying to affix a beacon to an unwitting gunner on leave through various dastardly methods.

 

[jcrocker]

Defense against the Zoo:

Problems with DMS:

+ C-Fractional bombardment of the Planet from outside the guns range

Ouch!

Of course, it's only a 'problem' if you want to actually have a planet left after you slience the meson guns.

Then again, any time you play 'accelerate the rock down the gravity well' with a rock big enough to kill a deep meson site, you'd probably be in the dinosaur-killer scale of event.

Wiping out planetary populations is a good way to signify that you're in a war to the extermination of one side or other. Which hadn't been the Zhodani pattern in five frontier wars. Just as well, really.

 

[The Oz]

Looking at the sensors in MT (since CT doesn't really talk about sensors) the best densitometer available at TL15 can only penetrate 1km of material. So if deep meson gun sites (DMGS) are buried more than 1 km deep even a high-penetration densitometer can't detect them.

And while neutrino sensors can detect the poweplants running a DMGS that only works when the powerplant is running, and only finds the powerplant, not the gun itself. Since I would think that most DMGS would have the ability to draw on several powerplants for energy, and those powerplants could be at any distance from the weapon, finding and knocking out the powerplants for a DMGS might be a long and costly endevour, since the DMGS will be shooting back the whole time.

 

[fredofmars]

<snip>The question then arises of just how deep they'd need to go, and if the sites can be located. I'd expect that neutrino detectors or densitometers can pinpoint them pretty exactly<big snip>You could also have scenarios where they are trying to affix a beacon to an unwitting gunner on leave through various dastardly methods.

On a densitometer scan, a DMS would look like another cavern. Depending on how good the densitometers are, you might be able tell artificial from natural. Perhaps some DMS sites would "repurpose" existing natural caverns with minimal mining to reduce the amount of artificial digging that would give a site away to a good densitometer.

There are lots of caverns in a typical underground area. Caverns are a very common place to pick up gold pieces after slaying the orcs...oops, wrong RPG.

Fixing a beacon to a gunner suggests a reason for all those UFO probe stories we get. Perhaps it's not comfortable getting such a probe. :devil:

 

[mbrinkhues]

I can just imagin the "ZhoTrans" freighter stopping at the spaceport near a DMS and the security officer going into "Panik" mode.(1) Will the Crew act stiff as a board and have a saxionian accent?

But yes, "neutral" freighters seems like an option. With the various client states near the 3I/Zho Border and the SolConf/3I border there should be enough around to add a few. And by mixing tech (i.e a TL15 thruster in a TL13 ship) you can easily create some space.


(1)DeuTrans was a GDR transport agency operating in the FGR and rumored to be a front for eastern espionage

 

[mbrinkhues]

Ouch!

Of course, it's only a 'problem' if you want to actually have a planet left after you slience the meson guns.

Then again, any time you play 'accelerate the rock down the gravity well' with a rock big enough to kill a deep meson site, you'd probably be in the dinosaur-killer scale of event.

Wiping out planetary populations is a good way to signify that you're in a war to the extermination of one side or other. Which hadn't been the Zhodani pattern in five frontier wars. Just as well, really.

Actually I can do C-fractional with rather small missiles and a pinpoint accuray since I know/can compute where to hit. Sure, a nearby town might get affected but no "Dinosaur-Stamper" will be used. The idea is to drop a number of small, deep-penetrating projectiles that simply come in unpropelled and fast.

 

[jcrocker]

Actually I can do C-fractional with rather small missiles and a pinpoint accuray since I know/can compute where to hit. Sure, a nearby town might get affected but no "Dinosaur-Stamper" will be used. The idea is to drop a number of small, deep-penetrating projectiles that simply come in unpropelled and fast.

I'd have to run the numbers, but how far down could a 'pinpoint' munition reach? If the deep meson site is at the bottom of, say, an old nickel mine carved out of bedrock a few kilometers below the surface, I doubt they'd be able to reach it.

It would be expensive to build there, but it would be pretty effective.

Of course, then you'd shift to conventional weapons fire directed against the sensor arrays, which would be vulnerable, so then there would be backup and remote sensor arrays with tight-beam datalinks, which would lead to plenty of adventure ideas for groups of PCs.

 

[RandyT0001]

Caverns are a very common place to pick up gold pieces after slaying the orcs...oops, wrong RPG.

Gold pieces? Man, you've got wealthy orcs. Most of the ones I've encountered might have some copper pieces and maybe the occasional silver piece.

As far as DMS are concerned they might not be a need for a nuclear/fusion power plant with it's neutrinos if the planet has geothermal power.

 

[jec10]

A long time ago on TML ('91-'92?) some of the regulars suggested the perfect weapon - the meson sub. Build a big sub and put a Type-J in it. Cruise around at several hundred metres below the ocean surface. Takes away the immobility problem mentioned earlier in this thread of deep-sites.

 

[whartung]

A long time ago on TML ('91-'92?) some of the regulars suggested the perfect weapon - the meson sub. Build a big sub and put a Type-J in it. Cruise around at several hundred metres below the ocean surface. Takes away the immobility problem mentioned earlier in this thread of deep-sites.

Oh, that's painfully clever. The game there would be ensure that you can point the sub in any direction, and keep it stable enough to get off a shot. Plus the communication details to get the sub positioned quickly enough to be useful.

But, rather than building a submarine, why not simply upgrade the hull of a Battle Rider type of ship to take the several 100 meter water pressure. Then, when the invading fleet arrives, the ships bee line for the planets oceans. I mean, heck, it worked for the Battleship Yamato in Star Blazers...

I've never seen a design sequence for a submarine, but wouldn't they be pretty close to a starhip for most everything else? They already have the life support issues, sensors, fuel, power plant, etc. The only difference is an M-Drive of some sort. Granted, they could have smaller fuel tanks if they were willing and capable of running purificaton plants solidly to convert sea water in to LHyd. But otherwise, seems like a similar ship, particularly in game terms.

Then again, maybe meson tunnels don't like salt water. But, there's nothing that says they have to exposed. If a meson gun can fire through entire planets, I don't think a meson tube capped off with a few inches of hull plating to make it water tight is going to be a problem.

Just an FYI, a Trident Submarine is 18,750 DTons submerged. Just to give a sense of scale.

 

[The Oz]

The main trouble I see with the meson sub is that it has to carry its powerplant around with it and =if= that powerplant can be detected then it gives away the position of the sub.

A buried deep meson gun can't move, but the gun is almost indetectable and as long as it has several power sources (most of which remain off-line until needed) and can switch between them as needed, it ought to be fairly difficult to take out all the powerplants supporting the meson gun.

The real vulnerability of the planetary defense meson gun (besides Zhodani clairvoyants) is the fire control sensors and the powerplants.