Plasma / Fusion Space Weapons for T5?

[srbcoti]

I agree that it would be nice to have plasma/fusion weapons back as a short range weapon. I also agree that there is far more scope for kinetic kill weapons than the TNE/T4/Brilliant Lances orthodoxy seems to permit. I have a hard time accepting that point defence makes these things completely redundant.

For me, the key factor in Traveller starship combat has been portraying it as a dramatic game experience for the players. I'm less interested in the minutiae of astrophysics (not least because I'm no good at maths

) than I am in providing an exciting game. CT/HG/MT were IMO more interesting to players. Shorter ranges, starfighters and energy weapons just make the game more exciting and varied in my experience.

The notion of the minimum combat range being 50,000km or whatever, and weapons limited to beam lasers that can reach out over those distances just makes the whole thing too dry for me. I'd rather change the laws of physics and have a fun game. Although of course, since the whole long range thing depends on gravitic focussing, I'm arguably doing that whichever system I use.

One final thing that I find baffling. FFS2 states that the only warhead allowable for space missiles is a nuclear-powered X-ray laser warhead. Which means that anyone who has a starship with missiles on it is carrying around a number of 10kt+ nuclear warheads. I have a hard time believing that every starship captain can rain nuclear holocaust down on a planet which annoys him ! CT Bk2 made it clear that nuclear missiles were restricted to the military, which made a lot more sense to me.

 

[GypsyComet]

Shorter ranges do make kinetic kill weapons more feasible as well, as the target occupies a larger chunk of sky and light speed lag all but disappears as a factor. For targetting purposes, Plasma and Fusion guns ARE KKWs: uncorrecting ballistic loads that must impact directly.

As point defense they have a useful role: overheat a missile or frazzle its sensors and it may not hit you, or be destroyed before it can. Do the same to the ultra-sensitive targeting sensors of your opponent and his probability-space plots on you lose some number of seconds of data to "misleading blip enhancement".

If all else fails, Plasma and Fusion weapons on starships become their frontier security systems. Firing gravitically-focused lasers when on a planet is tough on the hardware, and your sandcasters never seem to be on the right section of hull. Power up that fusion turret, however, and no grav-tank built has the powerplant to outgun you (your powerplant being bigger than the entire tank...).

 

[GypsyComet]

Originally posted by Simon B:
One final thing that I find baffling. FFS2 states that the only warhead allowable for space missiles is a nuclear-powered X-ray laser warhead. Which means that anyone who has a starship with missiles on it is carrying around a number of 10kt+ nuclear warheads. I have a hard time believing that every starship captain can rain nuclear holocaust down on a planet which annoys him ! CT Bk2 made it clear that nuclear missiles were restricted to the military, which made a lot more sense to me.

Simple economics keeps the big nuclear torps out of civilian hands in TNE onward: Fire that missile and you can kiss your monthly payment goodbye. Unlike CT and MT missiles, the monsters of TNE cost a LOT. For ONE shot.

 

[Anthony]

The major reason FF&S bans kinetic kill warheads is that a realistic extrapolation of kinetic kill missiles results in Vast Swarms of Missiles Blotting Out the Sky and Destroying Everything. A reasonable kinetic missile will deliver a one-hit kill on a warship, and it's not that difficult to fire more missiles than the target has point defense weapons.

 

[Scott Martin]

Shorter ranges make kinetic kill missiles less effective, since they don't have the time to accellerate up to "killing" velocities. Short ranges are better for "low velocity" kinetic weapons (whether these are rail guns or good old fashioned CPR rounds) and energy weapons may fall in here as a high energy subset of these "low velocity" weapons.

The "OMG TNE uses NUKES!" is a lot less relevant once you realize that deadfall ordinance is a more effective (kilogram / yield) "nuke" than any nuclear warhead that you can buy in TNE even if launched from a free trader or scout.

TNE and T4 tried to remove a bunch of "handwavium" and unfortunately revealed how threadbare some of the underlying assumptions were.

Scott Martin

 

[atpollard]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by atpollard:
I believe that missiles in CT are proximity kill weapons, so they do not actually impact but detonate near a ship and deliver an energy wave to the ship (someone once explained how energy can transfer across a vacuum, I just don't remember the details any more.)

Missiles in Traveller can have proximity or contact detonated warheads - see Mayday, and Missiles special supplement.</font>[/QUOTE]Comparing the description of missiles and damage in the LBB with the description of missiles and damage in the Missiles Special Supplement, what kind of missiles is the LBB describing as the standard Free Trader missile in that turret? Custom missiles ARE possible, but are they COMMON?

 

[Anthony]

You can design a 1,000 kg/20G kinetic kill missile with FF&S2, with an endurance of about two hours. After 1 hour, it will be moving at 720 kps and will have a kinetic energy of more than 250 terajoules, sufficient to completely destroy any warship. Throw a few tens of thousands of them and you can saturate point defense, meaning the target ship simply disappears.

This does not lead to interesting battles. Hence, the reason kinetic kill missiles are handwaved into oblivion.

 

[atpollard]

With respect to kinetic kill weapons:

I just wanted to spit a stream of 25mm projectiles from a gauss Vulcan cannon (the helicopter gun and not the Star Trek race) mounted in a turret to shread those incoming missiles. Missiles are expensive, bullets are cheap.

 

[Anthony]

At the velocities of incoming kinetic missiles, cannon rounds are kind of irrelevant. Assuming you hit in the first place, you just turn the front plate of the missile into plasma, and the fragments still destroy the ship.

 

[atpollard]

Starships are impervious to small kinetic kill fragments. No matter what the real world math and science say, the fact that your starship can accelerate for a week at 1 G (refueling at a far gas giant)and not be destroyed by striking a golf ball size rock just floating in space means that they are protected from small objects traveling at high velocity.

With respect to the issue of "hitting in the first place": what is the diameter of a laser beam/pulse? How far away does it hit the target? A stream of hypervelocity projectiles should have no more difficulty hitting a missile than a laser pulse would. In the real world, the US Navy already uses radar aimed cannon to intercept anti-ship missiles.

 

[robject]

The diameter of the laser beam is probably relatively small. One may assume that it's less than 1.5m x 1.5m (i.e. the size of a deck square), and I think it's very safe (or even mandatory) to assume it's much less than that.

Laser ranges are maybe around 50,000 km -- 0.2 light-seconds. Missile ranges are 0.8 LS (for the cheapies) to 8 LS (for very heavy tracking/pursuit jobs).

Originally posted by Simon B:

For me, the key factor in Traveller starship combat has been portraying it as a dramatic game experience for the players. I'm less interested in the minutiae of astrophysics (not least because I'm no good at maths

) than I am in providing an exciting game. CT/HG/MT were IMO more interesting to players. Shorter ranges, starfighters and energy weapons just make the game more exciting and varied in my experience.

Note that CT combat can range across several light-seconds. But your point of "game fun is priority 1" should still be our mantra, and should trump reality enough to keep the game fun for everyone.

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by atpollard:
With respect to the issue of "hitting in the first place": what is the diameter of a laser beam/pulse? How far away does it hit the target? A stream of hypervelocity projectiles should have no more difficulty hitting a missile than a laser pulse would.

The problem is time of flight. Missiles can dodge incoming fire given a lead time of about a tenth of a second, and KKMs might as well move evasively during final approach. This means non-guided projectiles are unlikely to hit beyond the distance they travel in a tenth of a second. For lasers, that's 30,000 km. For a cannon, that's a few hundred meters at best.

Also, given that my sample KKM moves 72 km in a tenth of a second, plotting an intercept may be tricky. It really is easier to hit with speed of light weapons.

 

[Scott Martin]

Originally posted by atpollard:
Starships are impervious to small kinetic kill fragments. No matter what the real world math and science say, the fact that your starship can accelerate for a week at 1 G (refueling at a far gas giant)and not be destroyed by striking a golf ball size rock just floating in space means that they are protected from small objects traveling at high velocity.

This says more about the chance of hitting said matter than the "imperviousness" of Traveller starships. A golf-ball sized fragment hitting at the wrong time would make a nuke look pretty mild.

You might be able to use this argument to define how good Traveller *sensors* have to be...

Scott Martin

 

[robject]

I think tweaking FFS(2) a bit to allow energy weapons at short ranges for starships is a good idea.

 

[Scott Martin]

I'm leaning towards energy weapons having hideous damage potentials, but being very ineffective against armour. This would conveniently explain why many of the "traditional" traveller vehicles carry armour (but not enough to stop their own main weapon) The effect in game terms would be like the reverse of a laser weapon: instead of a (30 - 1/10) laser (which can penetrate 300 AV doing minor damage) you'd have something like a (300-x20) energy weapon, which could penetrate 15 AV (and do hideous damage to anything with less than 15 AV)

The offset to the ineffectiveness of armour penetration would be hideous piles of base damage (especially against "softer" targets) and massive energy density. A potential side effect would be to degrade (ablate) just about any type of "conventional" armour, which would explain why Traveller armour materials tend towards the metallic and the ultra-dense (bonded superdense anyone?) since this kind of material would be much less susceptible to thermal ablation than "tougher" composite materials. Sure that foamed aluminum is a much better armour in terms of strength/wieght than BSD, but once you lose 60% of the thickness to the *first* shot, then what are you going to do against the second one?

"Harder/Denser" armours will also suffer less ablative effects from atmospheric re-entry than "softer" materials, but I'm not sure if we really want to introduce the complexity of multiple armour types to T5.

Scott Martin

 

[Wol]

Please troops KKMs have been done to death. As I recall unguided KKM have trouble hitting anything at long ranges, guided ones have the same engineering limitations as small craft, reaction fuels are a good brake on manouver capacity anyway (long live HePlar). At short range massed MLAs would obliterate nearby ships.

Hmmm

T5 will not be using reactionless drives I hope....

This reminds me of the discussion on bombarding planets with rocks powered by reactionless drives...

 

[robject]

I think Scott's suggestion is a cool solution. It slots energy weapons into a niche; they're not like anything else, and they're specialized.

 

[Wol]

I'm leaning towards energy weapons having hideous damage potentials, but being very ineffective against armour. This would conveniently explain why many of the "traditional" traveller vehicles carry armour (but not enough to stop their own main weapon) The effect in game terms would be like the reverse of a laser weapon: instead of a (30 - 1/10) laser (which can penetrate 300 AV doing minor damage) you'd have something like a (300-x20) energy weapon, which could penetrate 15 AV (and do hideous damage to anything with less than 15 AV)

The offset to the ineffectiveness of armour penetration would be hideous piles of base damage (especially against "softer" targets) and massive energy density. A potential side effect would be to degrade (ablate) just about any type of "conventional" armour, which would explain why Traveller armour materials tend towards the metallic and the ultra-dense (bonded superdense anyone?) since this kind of material would be much less susceptible to thermal ablation than "tougher" composite materials. Sure that foamed aluminum is a much better armour in terms of strength/wieght than BSD, but once you lose 60% of the thickness to the *first* shot, then what are you going to do against the second one?

"Harder/Denser" armours will also suffer less ablative effects from atmospheric re-entry than "softer" materials, but I'm not sure if we really want to introduce the complexity of multiple armour types to T5.

Scott Martin

Really a damage from which armour is deducted would be better where armour is claculated differently for "energy weapons" or reduce damage by (pluck) 10points per AV from a wwapon damage of say 300. Presumably too range and/or damage falls off with the square of distance or worse.

 

[Zparkz]

I'm all in favour of reducing the scale of ship combat to more "realistic" ranges.

I don't think the implications of gravitic focussing technology have been properly thought through.

A small device that can produce a gravity field strong enough to bend and focus light <snap...>

However at TL 13 X-ray lasers are possible and that gives ranges that only lower TLs may only acheive through gravitic focusing. A X-ray laser will out perform a gravitic laser at the same range and TL by being cheaper, less power hungry and damage perfomance as a larger HPG may be fitted in the same volume (unless you use the Mj = TL * 50 as max power output).

 

[Scott Martin]

And you will focus an X-Ray laser *how* without gravitic focusing? This is one of the "optimizations" that I find most odious about FF&S munchkins: FF&S actually included enough text so that it was fairly obvious that the way those high-energy frequencies (out past visible light) were focused was with gravitic focusing, since any "conventional" material would be turned into melted slag due to the energies involved. But here's table "A" that says that I can use this wavelength at TL-13, and here's table "B" that says that I can choose not to use grav focusing and get way better energy efficiency...

One of my fondest wishes for FF&S-3 is a sentence saying "Lasers above frequency "XYZ" must use grav focusing."

Failing that, I'd like the specs so that I can use the material that they are focusing X-Ray lasers through as hull armour, since it'll make BSD look like cotton candy

Scott Martin