Planetary meson batteries?

[Gadrin]

it might be "maskable" if the powerplant signature can be duplicated and the game becomes "will the real meson gun powerplant please stand up"
of course there won't be many shots at getting it right unless there's a lot of ships in orbit, or if they can land teams on the surface with the correct
detection equipment.

neutrinos ? be the culprit ?

it might be the lead-in to an actual neutrino comm device, or at least a chaff-like signal that can be projected, to decoy the hunters.

 

[RandyT0001]

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

An Ohio class SSBN which carries the Trident 2 missiles have a submerged displacement of 18,750 tons (as mass). That is not the same as dtons in Traveller. The Ohio is about 1300 dtons (Traveller). (The Ohio is about 12.8m in diameter and about 170m long making it about 22000 cubic meters in volume.)

 

[Captain Midnight]

I'd been going with the GURPS Traveller numbers -- my MT & CT materials are somewhere deep in storage. According to those numbers a GTL 12 (TTL 15) densitometer has a penetration of 1,250 miles; I don't remember anything about the range of neutrino sensors, but since the crust is not all that deep (about 25 miles, using Terra as an example), I figured it could be handwaved.

I didn't figure an attack with no significant advance intel would be very likely to do well against a DMS. Instead, I've been assuming that there will be significant efforts in a pre-war setting to discover the location and details of enemy DMS's, and figuring how that could be used in cooperation with a planned attack. If an attacking fleet jumps in with reasonably complete details of the locations of all DMS's in a system, they're much more likely to stand a chance of taking them on successfully. It might also be an interesting part of a "Cold War"-type scenario -- if the Navy discovers a note taped to the site commander's stateroom door saying "Pwnz0red, noobs! Much love, the Tozjabr", will they shut the site down and spend the money to rebuild it someplace else, or will they accept that the Zhodani have their location known?

I have no clue about what sort of geothermal installation would be needed to supply the kind of power needed to operate meson guns and meson screens and life support and everything else associated with it, but it seems doubtful that you could get that much juice out of it. Wikipedia estimates that Iceland could manage 1700 MW for a long time; it also mentions fields like "The Geysers" north of San Francisco as producing 750 net MW. Running the power plants offsite is also going to require an enormous electrical distribution network, which probably isn't something you can hide, either. (Is there canon about superconductive materials?) GT lists a single large-caliber meson gun in the 100,000-120,000 MW range; adding in screens and other stuff just makes it more of a power suck.

There's also going to have to be a way to get in and out of the site, and that will provide more clues as to its location; there would be crew transfers, supply runs, maintenance issues, and other stuff I'm not thinking of right now. It's not like you're going to hump in all the personnel and gear for these installations with a mule train, after all.

If you've got cheap access to space (and presumably to asteroid belts), would there be any need for deep nickel mines, or anything like that? I would expect there might be a lack of old mines to convert to DMG's, especially ones that were big enough to serve adequately.

 

[Gadrin]

how many EPs to power a significant weapon ? I've forgotten the range for meson bay weapons in High Guard.
edit: Lasers, particle accelerators, and meson guns are most effective at short range. Meson guns
are +2 at short range.

anyway any ship that can mount a meson weapon (meaning it has the MW or EP to safely power one) will do. those can be pre-mothball items.

they might even be pilotable via telepresence since CT allows for that.

of course the scenario is rapidly become one engineered for the "perfect setting"... something the Navy or the Scouts could probably do very well.

edit: I'm not certain, but I think GURPS allows most Traveller ships to operate underwater, probably after reactionless drives become ubiquitos.

 

[mbrinkhues]

Design sequence:
=============

Design sequences for Warships from Hornblower to Nimitz where in two Challenge magazins, at least for MegaTraveller. Including a nice adventure (That in turn had some useful watercraft). We definitly need a CD compilation of Challenge Magazin! Not sure about TNE but IIRC there was one too at least for pre-steam ships.


Densiometer:
==========

The Penetration Depth of a Densiometer sound a bit large. OTOH that is IIRC also it's total range. And 1500km is very close to a planet. Unless you are using that thing on a Spyship and find a way for that spyship to circle the planet often enough for a complete scan WITHOUT making the locals suspicious(1). Otherwise you will likely find the DMS the Viking way(2)

Communications:
=============

TNE, GT and MT have Meson Comms. No problem talking with the sub


Missile subs:
=========

The Challenge article on ships/ship design had an example of a submarine used as a mobile Planetary Defence Missile site.


(1) In Traveller ships don't orbit for long, they either land or dock at a highport. If there is a congestion, ships will likely be kept at 10Diameters to prevent cluttering close orbit. And the Highports will likely be in stationary orbit at 20000+ km (depending on size)

(2) Bunch of Vikings want to settle a problem with a neighbour. The final way. When they approach, they can't find him but believe they see movement in his house. Since it is dishonorable to burn a house over a warriors head (and he does not answer), one of them climbs the roof and tries to look through the reeds. Next thing he drops down, mortally wounded. One of his comrads "Is Magnusen at home?" The dying: "I don't know about Magnusen, but his Warspear sure is"

 

[Captain Midnight]

The Penetration Depth of a Densiometer sound a bit large. OTOH that is IIRC also it's total range. And 1500km is very close to a planet. Unless you are using that thing on a Spyship and find a way for that spyship to circle the planet often enough for a complete scan WITHOUT making the locals suspicious(1). Otherwise you will likely find the DMS the Viking way(2)

Or you put it in the back of a truck, and drive the truck around on (or just above) the planet's surface. GT Starships lists the standard size as 1 space, and the mass as 12.5 tons. Do this for a couple of weeks, and send your recordings off to Tozjabr HQ. Coming up with a plausible situation for offworlders to be driving a vehicle around for two weeks... I'd say that's another roleplaying opportunity. How many PCs would be slavering at the opportunity to figure out a way to smuggle in a grav vehicle that has super-secret spy gear in the back, and then get to run around in it for weeks?

The rules also say that you can build more powerful units; for each +6 to scan, the range, cost, space, and mass all go up by 10. You quickly get into something that you're not going to be able to hide in a ground vehicle (or grav vehicle, but you take my point), but it's easy to get a piece of gear into a good-sized freighter that will reach all the way from geostationary to the planetary mantle. Dock at the highport, keep Customs out of that cargo bay, and give your crew "two weeks vacation -- except for the anchor watch, or course." You could even claim to be doing maintenance, as long as you keep nosy Starport Authority techs from finding out what you're actually doing (or you could actually do some maintenance on other areas of the ship).

For that matter, you could just decide to come to a downport and park the ship. Arranging something beforehand to require your ship and its crew to land should be simple. Complete the rest of the task as above.

Without recon efforts, it's going to be difficult to attack a deep meson gun site, but with some work (and long-ranged scanners) beforehand, you can get some idea of the location of the sites. It won't help in case of a lightning attack, but very little will.

 

[mbrinkhues]

For the non-GT crowd:

1 Space is 500 cubic foot in GT. Standard containers come in 1,2, 4 and 8 space sizes

And yes, packing the stuff in a 40ft container equivalent should work (You'll need space for a powerplant and operator stations) and driving it around is roleplaying.

And you can always try the "Island Fortress Cleaning Service" from Undercover Brother. Nobody sees the Cleaningwoman.

 

[Gadrin]

Too bad, I was hoping the Famille Spofulam Catalog had some insight on finding the Deep Meson Site, unfortunately they only talk about a proposal for a weapon to deal with one already uncovered.

 

[savage]

Meson Sites Rule

I like meson sites... I've designed several for mtu. Hunting sites...well ya really shouldn't start there.

Blind it...Knock out the sensors first... unless there using a mine field strategy or forward observation...

 

[mbrinkhues]

Well, most Solomanie Deep Meson sites are quite easy to find. They are always build on small, remote sites mostly settled by still-rebellious conquered Imperials and difficult to reach due to terrain restrictions. The guns always come in twin, heavily bunkered installations with over-eager but incapabel SolSec agents and second rate garrison forces as protection.

Biggest problem is that they are always guarding the one gas giant where an Imperial Evacuation Fleet MUST refuel and that we only find out naval bombardment did NOT work a few days before so the 3I has to use improvised command teams led by gruffy Vagr to blow up the guns.

Well, it's a better job than rescuing the 1LT that knew the plans for the Assault of Terra and misjumped into a Solomanie System. Now the guy is in a High Security Prison and we have at least one traitor in the team...

 

[veltyen]

Ahh. The "Where Beagles Dare" Scenario.

(Though that should be Vargr assaulting 3I fortresses.

 

[Theophilus]

Remember, the spherical volume needed for a deep meson site.
A 300 meter meson "tube" requires how much volume?

I design deep meson sites as spherical hulls, add the equipment to train and target the gun and use external power sources, geo thermal works if you want to avoid neutrino detection of your power plants.

One weakness is that you can only hit what you can see. Use jaming to blind the active sensors and EMS for the passives, add multiple false neutrino sources "wild weasels" etc and make it hard for meson sites to target your ship.

 

[Gadrin]

There's a V-shaped plan of a meson gun in the Traveller Adventure.

 

[Commander Drax]

Deep Meson Guns were covered extensively in the MegaTraveller canonical materials as they were exceptionally hard to knock out, so most effort went into knocking out their deployed surface or orbital sensors (linked) in order to make the gun blind. Most TL15 installations were buried way below the 1KM limit of a TL15 densitometer, as for nuetrino emissions, yes they could be traced by those but only if the powerplant was mounted alongside or near the gun emplacement. In the interest of making the guns harder to find, power plants and sensors were significantly far apart that 'carpet bombardment' would be a poor use of resources when trying to destroy the gun emplacement.

However, in the Rebellion Milieu, these gun emplacements were taken out quickly simply because the fighting factions were all former Imperial units that had insider knowledge of the gun's locations. For those guns built since the start of the final war in 1116+ enemy units used deep recon missions and data gained through intelligence to discover their locations, before deploying small commando style units to infiltrate and take out the gun prior to a bombarding fleets arrival.

In the wake of virus it was reported in TNE materials that often the only survivors on some worlds were the crews of deep meson guns.

 

[aramis]

BTW: Psionic screens (on bridges at least) also prevent clairvoyance and thus teleport, not just telepathy. See AM Zhodani and SMC.

 

[The Oz]

BTW: Psionic screens (on bridges at least) also prevent clairvoyance and thus teleport, not just telepathy. See AM Zhodani and SMC.

I can't seem to find any references in either AM Zhodani or SMC about psionic screens blocking clairvoyance. Could you provide me with page numbers or quotes, please?

This would make quite a difference in Zhodani battle tactics.

 

[aramis]

I misremembered. There is an inference in RegSB... Ref's Lib Data... on both artificial psionics and on psionic countermeasures.

ANd there is a blocker in T4 Psionics

(but the ref's data says it doesn't work.)