Not really. The thing to remember is that meson guns are (a) speed of light, (b) kill tanks, and (c) can hit anywhere. All you really need as far as heavy weapons are meson guns and spotters. You do need armor to protect against the light threats, but grav tanks have little purpose.
Technology and Warfare in Traveller
- Thread starter Renaissance Man
- Start date
Major B
SOC-14 1K
It seems to me that what we are proving through the course of this discussion is the theory of interdependence.
There is no "best" solution (think rock, paper, scissors). Every element is vulnerable to something but every threat has a counter. And the element that provides the counter has its own vulnerabilities...
The trick is to find the balance or better to find whatever part of the balance your enemy lacks and capitalize on it.
There is no "best" solution (think rock, paper, scissors). Every element is vulnerable to something but every threat has a counter. And the element that provides the counter has its own vulnerabilities...
The trick is to find the balance or better to find whatever part of the balance your enemy lacks and capitalize on it.
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Well, at the 30000 ft view, all wars have a political dimension. The detail is simply that Back In The Day, The Body Politic tended to be rather isolated from the battles, if the Body Politic really had any say in the campaign whatsoever.
At the military level, (let me get my black and white paint brush out here), it's Duty and Mission. "Politics are above my pay grade", etc. Rather, adhere to the Rules of Engagement, perform the mission, and get home with your buddies in one piece.
All that said, I do not think Ortillery changes the battlefield dynamic as much as you think it does. It's "simply" air power. We had a crapload of air power in every engagement from WWII on. But, no matter how much you have, it's still a limited resource, and in all cases, it's more limited than the ground forces.
Now, things like Grav Tanks can muddy the argument. They're effectively NOE skimming, armored air power. But when the fleet arrives with the equipment, you're going to have a lot more shorter range but equally effective gun barrels on the "ground" than you are on the ships. Off shore artillery was certainly useful in WWII, but it was still artillery, and expensive artillery at that. Better to make a hole, make a beach head, and land more "cheap" artillery than rely on the expensive stuff floating in orbit.
You also have the issue of cost of loss of the unit. It's "cheaper" to lose a crew served, autonomous weapon than a larger platform. Harder to kill 10 tanks with fusion guns, than a ship with 10 fusion mounts, plus they're more flexible to deploy, and take damage at a more granular level than a ship. Also a lot cheaper to man.
Give me a 1 or 2 dozen meson sleds with a 500 klick range to one spinal mount with a 1Mkm range any day of the week.
But also recall the asymmetry of force between the Afghans and the Russians. American Stingers effectively paralyzed the Russian Campaign. When you have an air-mobile doctrine, without air, you're not very mobile. When you have the Aghans blowing the roads out from underneath your armor, and dropping them in to canyons, your columns stall and you can no longer bring the fight to them.
The Afghans leveraged their terrain VERY well, and the Stingers worked to offset the one advantage the Soviets had. We're having a frustrating enough time as it is now, and it's mostly the terrain we're fighting as well.
Basically, what changes the game is not the technology, it's the rules of engagement. And that's ALL political. Things like being careful of civilians, avoiding culturally sensitive installations.
The orbital units can provide intelligence, and quick response firepower. But that firepower doesn't have the fine resolution that ground forces have.
If you just want to pound the opposition in to paste, i.e. a very loose set of rules of engagment, then ortillery may offer some advantage with high powered energy weapons or deadfall ordnance. Large meson guns obliterating 100 yard radius circles at a time can have quite an effect on an enemy.
But when the rules call for more finesse, their usefulness starts becoming more limited.
Renaissance Man
SOC-12
Very good comments here. This is a lot to think about.
Especially this ^
The ROE from the leadership on both sides is a major factor in a ground engagement. An invading force may want to preserve the population, the economic and cultural infrastructure of a theatre. Likewise, an insurgent force may not be prepared to kill civilians or civilian institutions, tying a hand behind their back when dealing with an invading government.
But historically speaking, when the chips are down, ROE tend to get increasingly relaxed. For both sides. And there are always those who believe that military success garners political rewards, subordinating political objectives to military ones.
The point is taken though - we're looking a full toolbox again.
Especially this ^
The ROE from the leadership on both sides is a major factor in a ground engagement. An invading force may want to preserve the population, the economic and cultural infrastructure of a theatre. Likewise, an insurgent force may not be prepared to kill civilians or civilian institutions, tying a hand behind their back when dealing with an invading government.
But historically speaking, when the chips are down, ROE tend to get increasingly relaxed. For both sides. And there are always those who believe that military success garners political rewards, subordinating political objectives to military ones.
The point is taken though - we're looking a full toolbox again.
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Captain Midnight
SOC-12
It's also important to remember that meson guns are TL 15, weigh 60,000 kg, and according to the "Field Artillery" table on p. 49 of Book 4, they've got a 50-kilometer range. You're certainly not going to have enough spotters to cover that whole area, or even the area that enemy weapons could be effective over. If the enemy can do anything to make himself harder to spot, you could have a problem.
If you expect to fight against meson accelerators, you're fighting the most technically-advanced opponents in the universe, and you probably don't want a lot of grav tanks. If you're fighting anything else... then those tanks just might come in handy. It's really hard to attack a position defended by meson guns, but my first thought would be swarms.
The battlefield meson guns in Striker are somewhat smaller.
In striker, a battlefield meson gun equivalent to a HG Factor 1 Meson Gun. We know from the Snapshot interface to HG that Meson guns on ship have ranges to the thousand+ kilometers. So it's the field portable meson gun that's 50km range.
Oh, and striker also says that a meson gun destroys an area "1cm" (10m) per HG Factor. With an A Meson being 10, so 10cm=100m. By destroys, that means, turns to dust... totally ruined.
In striker, a battlefield meson gun equivalent to a HG Factor 1 Meson Gun. We know from the Snapshot interface to HG that Meson guns on ship have ranges to the thousand+ kilometers. So it's the field portable meson gun that's 50km range.
Oh, and striker also says that a meson gun destroys an area "1cm" (10m) per HG Factor. With an A Meson being 10, so 10cm=100m. By destroys, that means, turns to dust... totally ruined.
Peter Newman
SOC-12
Why aren't you going to have enough spotters to cover that whole area? Right now we've got remote cameras that can be used with small flying objects. They could probably be made with civilian technology with a webcam and a toy plane, for under $20 [Cr 6] or so. If you've got the money for a Meson gun why wouldn't you have a few million of these to cover the area, unless you're constrained by Traveller rules that don't cover them?
Assuming we go with a flat plane, not the sphere they can really fire in, than a 50km circular range will cover a little less than 2,000 square kilometers. With 2,000,000 bug drones you can put 1,000 per square kilometer, which is one every 25 meters or so. Oh sure, the camera bots will die like flies from any hit, but whoever takes them out is just announcing where they are, and then you just shoot your Meson gun at that general area.
You need comms for that many drones and somebody / something has to watch them all.
Money shot reply! (as we are discovering with the limited array of sensors we already have - information overload is more of a problem than getting the raw info - how do you sort the wheat from the chaff?)
On mesons, we have had this discussion on another thread - they are not all powerful. They need a forward observer to give them the coords of the target, he needs to communicate that to the meson fire control. The forward observer needs to get the coords of the target at the time the meson fires - how does he do that with a speeding grav tank? If he uses some sort of rangefinder with a datalink back to the meson fire control then he is no longer stealthy and will be the target of return fire.
Lets say he uses some sort of passive sensor that still gives exact coords and can cope with a fast moving target and is small enough for a backpack, he still needs to get that info back to the meson fire control. If he uses a meson communicator so the comms can't be jammed or intercepted, then he is no longer stealthy because he needs a vehicle and/or a powerplant for the meson communicator (plus it costs a bomb). If he uses a tightbeam laser/maser then the meson sled needs to be in LOS to him - hence a target itself.
Meson guns make fixed positions and fortified defences obsolete to be sure, but in fact put a premium on mobile forces.
Jec:
Logical flaw: the FO never needs LOS to the meson gun. Only to a chain with contact to the meson gun.
So fo might use a laser comm to hit any one of the friendly tanks, who then relay (probably automatically) to the meson-comm Commo truck out of the LOS of the FO, which then sends a discrete message to the meson gun. Lag, probably a tenth second at most. Especially if the FO is using a hand-comp and map box... squirt the corrections, and the gunner approves them.
In theory, the gunner is simply prioritzing the fire missions based upon e-requsts he's got coming in.
Logical flaw: the FO never needs LOS to the meson gun. Only to a chain with contact to the meson gun.
So fo might use a laser comm to hit any one of the friendly tanks, who then relay (probably automatically) to the meson-comm Commo truck out of the LOS of the FO, which then sends a discrete message to the meson gun. Lag, probably a tenth second at most. Especially if the FO is using a hand-comp and map box... squirt the corrections, and the gunner approves them.
In theory, the gunner is simply prioritzing the fire missions based upon e-requsts he's got coming in.
Renaissance Man
SOC-12
This is probably how most battlefield communications would work - like the system of roots for a tree. The fancy word is "rhizome." Currently the largest and most sophisticated rhizomic communications system we have is the internet. You can take out any one part of it, but the whole will continue to work. Using a collection of radio and laser transceivers spread out over thousands of troops and vehicles, you could have a cloud of battlefield information to draw upon at all times. A little slower than direct communications, but harder jam or knock down. Expert AI systems would manage the information flow.
Incidentally, you could add cameras and other sensors to every soldier's communications package, and be able to use the network to gather intelligence simultaneously from every place where you've got someone on the ground. Like a google search, you could bring up every current contact with the enemy, every request for return fire, etc. etc.
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1/10th sec delay means the grav tank has moved 33 metres if its at 1200kph. And if the communications delay through the various relays is actually more like 1/2 sec (which still sounds plausible) then its moved 165 metres.
The gunner is prioritising these requests coming in over the "combat web" - he does this how fast? And he makes sure its not going to be blue-on-blue how fast? Where is the grav tank now? Maybe its gone behind a hill, or otherwise out of LOS of the observer.
The gunner is prioritising these requests coming in over the "combat web" - he does this how fast? And he makes sure its not going to be blue-on-blue how fast? Where is the grav tank now? Maybe its gone behind a hill, or otherwise out of LOS of the observer.
Trees have a few problems with bottlenecks and points of failure. That being said they have advantages for routing. This will be more important with fast moving units. Having messages bounce around a mesh trying to find a way to the FDC would be a bad thing. Tell someone email isn't instant, then try telling someone who's requesting a fire mission.
A lot of this will have to be based on units knowing where everybody else is to be able to route traffic.
A lot of this will have to be based on units knowing where everybody else is to be able to route traffic.
Peter Newman
SOC-12
You could go to a toy factory in China and simply have the camms and radios put in the toy helicopters and still get them for uder $20 with batteries (if you're buying millions of them). The something that is watching them is the computer network you already have doing everything else, computer processing power is chep and getting cheaper. Think real world 'robots' not expensive, restricted by Traveller rules written decades ago, robots.
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Renaissance Man
SOC-12
True, true. But for battlefield orders, you'll be trying for the most direct link to your FO. And if you have a number of data points (e.g. a number of observers), your computers can predict a model for the object's behaviour that accounts for the time lag. Yes it's true - you might even miss every once in awhile
Except, of course, that the real world robots and systems are pretty much irrelevant, since what's being discussed here isn't the real world, it's the world which is described by those Traveller rules (or a rewrite thereof).
Captain Midnight
SOC-12
I'm thinking about the bandwidth needed to handle two million video feeds in realtime, even if they're just little webcam feeds. Wow. Then I'm thinking about what would happen to this flying swarm of toys if an artillery round goes off anywhere near them, especially one with a thermobaric warhead -- then again, I'm sure fusion guns have some serious shock associated with them, too. Then I'm thinking about how awful the picture is from a webcam, and I'm thinking about how these little flyers will ever manage to keep up with high-speed forces. Finally, I'm thinking about milspec production, and how much space and weight would be taken up by this collection. I think 20 Cr would be definitely on the low side.
Surveillance drones may indeed be an answer, but not like you're proposing, I think. There's also issues with spotting units under concealment, and dealing with communications jamming, which leap to mind. Also, while I'm not as attached to the whole Traveller canon as some, I do think we ought to keep it in mind when discussing these issues. Sure, computing power is increasing past what was originally put forth in the CT rules, but after all, it is a game we're discussing here.
They're both EM and propagate at light speed so the lag on the signal is going to be the same. The laser has a higher theoretical data rate but it's not important unless you're pushing high traffic volumes.
I can just see it, "Troops, we've got new drones spotting for the arty. The Chinese factory swears they've followed the spec. No, swallowing them will not give you a date-rape drug."
Seriously though, you're talking about a lot of devices flooding limited bandwidth with a ton of data. You're going to need some heavy comms infrastructure just to handle that number of links. Think of trying to make a mobile call in a crowded city on new years eve. We had new years text messages rolling in over the next day. The problem is that the device is cheap and easy to get, but the network behind it is a major piece of engineering. The other option is to move a lot of the processing into the drone itself which adds cost / complexity to the device.
I have no doubts that sensor drones will be used but they'll be more capable units in fewer numbers rather than millions of simple units. I'm sure someone will insist on a 'man in the loop' to verify the targets. This person in a van somewhere becomes the spotter and has to watch the feeds from drones bleating for attention.
All of this also assumes that you're not suffering from enemy action against your comms infrastructure. That's when things get interesting in a Chinese curse kind of way.
