Starships - Are We Bringing Enough Guns?

[Condottiere]

I don't doubt it's continuous.

If combat rules had kept it as an abstract six minutes, it wouldn't have mattered, since all spacecraft components would have received their due allocation for those six minutes.

Breaking that up into sixty subrounds, however, requires a more refined accounting as to actual energy generation per six seconds, and it's allocation to any number of spacecraft components, to perform as intended.

 

[kilemall]

So you are making up something not in the game, a house rule. The power plant outputs its full generation capacity every second to power drives, weapons, screens, computer... there is no mention of the actual distribution system, banks of capacitors and the like.

We are told the EP needed for every system, that is power required, ie continuous generation and transfer of energy.

The capacity is based on a twenty minute turn so it is 300,000 megawattseconds of energy per EP capacity.

The EP is a power generation factor, not an energy generation factor.

We are told the total EP capacity of the capacitors - what happens if you continue to feed power to them is they are fully charged...

75kg of TNT per EPturn stored...

Jump capacitor charging for 2 turns. That’s 40 minutes of charging, or 2400 seconds of whatever EP level. So by definition those capacitors are not one EP-second rating.

The power distribution aspect stems from the EP discharge rules in the black globe section. I am clearly saying I house rule extended use so I don’t get how calling that out is some gotcha, but I’m basing those on how the relevant rules that are there have to work to achieve what they say happen, and they say the capacitors cannot discharge over the power plant capacity.

Far as I knew an EP is 250MW, not sure where 300 came from.

Yes it is continuous power, and the capacitors can absorb and discharge a whole turn as opposed to generate as per a reactor. So they have that level of storage, else jump at the least is a different thing than expressed.

Finally 75kg of TNT is destructive but not guaranteed ship destroyed. It probably would for our RL low tech tinfoil hulls but not Traveller rough space hard steel on up. Make it 75000kg and yes it will vaporize.

 

[kilemall]

I don't doubt it's continuous.

If combat rules had kept it as an abstract six minutes, it wouldn't have mattered, since all spacecraft components would have received their due allocation for those six minutes.

Breaking that up into sixty subrounds, however, requires a more refined accounting as to actual energy generation per six seconds, and it's allocation to any number of spacecraft components, to perform as intended.

Which is where I got into this whole topic, power allocation subgame and more interesting 100 second action turns rather than 1000 second turns. Weird trip romping through the rules to get there, oddly enough starting with parsing power allocation through the CT LBB2 phasing.

Not everybody’s cup of Earl Grey, but good to at least review assumptions and steal better stuff for our tables.

 

[mike wightman]

It is 20 minutes, it is High Guard being discussed not MGT.

Jump capacitor charging for 2 turns. That’s 40 minutes of charging, or 2400 seconds of whatever EP level. So by definition those capacitors are not one EP-second rating.

Who is claiming they are?
They get fed xEP for 2 turns, 2400seconds, 250MJ of energy in total. I'm not sure where you are plucking EPseconds from?

The power distribution aspect stems from the EP discharge rules in the black globe section. I am clearly saying I house rule extended use so I don’t get how calling that out is some gotcha, but I’m basing those on how the relevant rules that are there have to work to achieve what they say happen, and they say the capacitors cannot discharge over the power plant capacity.

I'm not looking for a gotcha, I was misunderstanding what you were intilially talking about. If you are talking about using the jump capacitors for energy storage there is no need, the ship power plant can output all the enery needed every second. According to the errat for HG you actually have to stop the PP generating energy while you use stored jump capacitor energy from black globe use.

I don't think anyone ever playtested or used those rules

Far as I knew an EP is 250MW, not sure where 300 came from.

250 (MW) x 1200 (seconds in 20 mins) to give total energy in units of MWs - why not just stick to MJ?

Yes it is continuous power, and the capacitors can absorb and discharge a whole turn as opposed to generate as per a reactor. So they have that level of storage, else jump at the least is a different thing than expressed.

Finally 75kg of TNT is destructive but not guaranteed ship destroyed. It probably would for our RL low tech tinfoil hulls but not Traveller rough space hard steel on up. Make it 75000kg and yes it will vaporize.

That is for 1EP stored, since 1 ton of jump capacitors is 36 EP then that is 2,700kg TNT equivalent.

A 5,000lb bomb exploding inside your ship's jump drive section... per ton of (full) capacitor.

 

[kilemall]

The idea of fitting starship turrets or small craft with autocannons, gatling guns, and VRF gauss guns has been around for about as long as I've been playing.

Point defense for ships and craft is handled by sand against lasers and to a lesser extent, per Mayday (p. 8), missiles; IMTU sandcasters can also be used to fire grapeshot canisters as anti-missile point defense.

As a fan of The Expanse, I'm certainly open to the idea of point defense cannons (PDCs) - the aforementioned autocannons or VRF gauss guns - and rail guns - mass drivers - as shipboard weapons but I haven't put the time in with Striker to make it work.

One issue you have to address is defining what the warheads are doing and how far out do they detonate and therefore how close the Striker type PDs can hit, or not. Bomb pumped lasers for instance might be firing at 1000km and need something between VRFs and starship lasers.

 

[whartung]

A 5,000lb bomb exploding inside your ship's jump drive section... per ton of (full) capacitor.

"WARNING: Jump Capacitor. Do not strike with a wrench to see how full it is. K Thx -- Scott"

 

[Condottiere]

If you can convert the explosion of a hydrogen bomb directly into electricity, that would be an energy surge.

 

[Rupert]

If rated power is constant throughout the round, we either would have a continuous beam from an energy weapon, or redundant power output.

However, if only by inference through other spacecraft components. it's a total amount for those six minutes.

If energy generation, by, say, a fusion reactor, is constant, rather than surges, the way an energy weapon system works would be by accumulating the energy, possibly in some form of a capacitor, and then releasing it.

Which brings up an interesting question, as to when, or at what point of the six minute round, enough energy has been accumulated.

In theory, a beam laser would infer a continuous stream of energy, but that may only be in relation to a pulse laser, say one second to one millisecond.

Per six minutes.

Now, more interesting is a laser drill, which should be rather continuous, perhaps continuity requiring that lower range.

Striker makes it clear that a beam laser is continuous, or nearly so, while a pulse laser fire discrete pulses (and thus requires 'batteries' to store power between pulses). As those batteries need storage in MW-s equal to the input in megawatts, we can infer that they have a pulse rate of at least one pulse per second.

The rules imply that a beam laser counts as if it fires 20-39 times in 15 seconds, and pulse lasers can vary from once per 15s to 639 per 15s.

Other rule sets imply other things. TNE/FF&S is quite explicit about how all this works, and it's base assumptions are different.

 

[Rupert]

That is for 1EP stored, since 1 ton of jump capacitors is 36 EP then that is 2,700kg TNT equivalent.

I get a lot more than that. 250 MW x 1200 seconds x 36 = 10,800,000 MJ. One kg of TNT is equivalent to 4.2 MJ, so the energy in one DTon of capacitors is about 2.5 kilotons of TNT. Boom!. Assuming the energy can be (very nearly) instantly released, of course.

Also, at this point, who needs micro-tactical nukes or thermobarics? Even if these capacitors are considerably denser than water, a Litre of them is good for many tens of kg TNT equivalent.

The fundamental issue is that Striker declared 1EP to be 250MW of power - about 50% more than the output of an Iowa-class battleship's propulsion system at full power (and enough to power something like 20,000 homes). If this had been set at 25MW (or better yet, somewhere around 1-5MW), the numbers would be far less exciting. It's not as if HG spaceships don't become perpetual motion engines at 5 km/s anyway, so making the power per EP lower won't break physics much worse than it already does, and makes numbers elsewhere a bit saner.

 

[Condottiere]

That's the issue with ground combat - it's applicable in space.

What's sauce for the Mongoose, is sauce for the Mongander.