A Couple Missile Opinions

[nobby-w]

[ . . . ]
IYO how important is it to have that 'fast as ship' missile speed?

I see no particular reason why missiles should be that slow. Sprint pulled 100G or so at launch in 1960s. From a game balance viewpoint it means that the missile will close with the ship a turn or two quicker. The ship still has an opportunity to shoot at it with point defence weapons.

[ . . . ]
Second opinion, lately I've been visualizing missile warheads as delivering an optimized to-hit pattern of solid AP penetrators accelerated the last few 1000km with an explosive charge.

However, it occurred to me that like PA fire or plasma/fusion guns, missiles could fire off several HEAT bolts that do not dissipate quickly in space due to no atmosphere or charged particles. Is that reasonable?

The kinetic energy of a missile travelling at 10's or 100's of km/sec (10G for 1,000 sec gets your missile up to 100km/sec) is large enough that even a single fragment will do a lot of damage. At 3 km/sec the kinetic energy of a solid projectile is equivalent to the explosive yield of its weight in TNT. This is a quadratic law. At 30km/sec the kinetic energy is equivalent to 100x its weight in TNT. At a little over 100km/sec the kinetic energy is equivalent to 1,000x its weight in TNT.

This means that a single tungsten fragment the size of a golf ball (about 42cc volume, weighing 0.75kg) travelling at 100km/sec relative to the target will have a kinetic energy in the region of 3.75x10⁹J, equivalent to the explosive yield of 890kg of TNT. A fragment the size of a BB (weighing about 2.4g) would have kinetic energy of 12 millon Joules, equivalent to just under 3kg of TNT. By comparison, this is about 50% more than the muzzle energy of a 120mm APFSDS round.

At these velocities the kinetic energy of the warhead dwarfs any explosive effects you will get for a given mass, so simply maximising the number of fragments with a small bursting charge is optimal for a warhead intended to be used in a vacuum.

In an atmosphere the fragments might burn up quickly, so missiles intended for use around the margins of a planetary atmosphere might have a different design.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Mechanically from a rules standpoint with Mayday, if you get within the Missile maneuver envelope, they hit. Just how they work.

In that sense, with that rule base, missile act like moving mines. Anything within their zone of control (i.e. their maneuver envelope) is going to get smacked, so it behooves the target to stay out of that envelope.

This is also a reason traveller missiles historically don't have much maneuver (notably fuel for maneuver). A lot of missiles are 6G missiles with 12Gs of fuel.

They adopt the vector of the attacking ship.

So, in a simple example, you can see a ship moving with a vector of magnitude 10 (i.e. speed 10, 10 hexes). The ship launches the missile, which immediately adopts the same vector.

It can use it's 6G drive and 12Gs of fuel to make a 6 hex correction on its vector to get it in place. But after that, it just coasts. It's now a 6 hex radius bubble waiting to pop. If the target ships vector crosses that bubble, the missile burns the rest of its fuel (up to 6Gs) to "correct" it vector and smack the ship.

A missile floating around is a force to be reckoned with, it's "controlling" quite a bit of space (almost 100 hexes).

For example, if the launching ship has a vector of magnitude less than 6, then the missile can use its initial maneuver to "stop". Leaving a "mine" with a 6 hex radius zone.

In game terms, there's really no maneuver here. It's not a Sidewinder jinking and turning. Missiles just maneuver like ships, they just have the ability to maneuver last. Actually, I think they get to maneuver "whenever". The get the benefit of the doubt. If you have a ship with a high vector, it's easy to see a turn where they start outside of the maneuver envelope of the missile, "pass through it" and end up, again, still outside of the envelope. i.e. image a ship going "16", starting head on to the missile 8 hexes out. It tried to maneuver "through" the missile, and at the end of the turn, it's now, still, 8 hexes out, but behind the missile. But the missile still gets its shot in simply because the ship crossed the envelope. Just makes the game play easier, they get an exception to the normal rules.

That's how it should work. I didn't see that in the Mayday rules, and as such I couldn't make much sense of its missile combat. Rules-as-written appear to have required a "counter-on-counter" intercept rather than a "target penetrates missile's danger space" intercept. The latter is almost certainly a more plausible interpretation.

For greatest precision you'd want something like a set of cones (in 2-D they'd be triangles - or more precisely ice-cream cones) of potential locations for target and missile graduated by time within the turn, with the angle of the cone based on vector (length) and thrust capability (width of base). But that might be adding complexity that isn't needed. You could also break up the movement into fractions of a turn and fractions of thrust capability to resolve the intercept.

And if you're using Agility for evasion, that manifests as a last-moment attempt to shift the target outside of the warhead's fragmentation distribution rather than trying to evade the missile entirely.

 

[mike wightman]

I see no particular reason why missiles should be that slow. Sprint pulled 100G or so at launch in 1960s.

And it could maintain 100g for how long?

The kinetic energy of a missile travelling at 10's or 100's of km/sec <snip?

Kinetic energy is relative. In Mayday/LBB2 terms you should subtract the target's vector from the missile's in order to find the missile's relative vector and then calculate relative KE from that.

 

[BlackBat242]

The Sprint was a two-stage, solid-fuel anti-ballistic missile (ABM), armed with a W66 enhanced-radiation thermonuclear warhead used by the United States Army.

Mass 7,700 pounds (3,500 kg)
Length 26.9 feet (8.20 m)
Diameter 53 inches (1.35 m)

Operational range 25 miles (40 km)
Flight ceiling 19 miles (30 km)
Speed 12,250 kilometres per hour; 7,610 miles per hour; 3,403 metres per second (Mach 10)

The first stage was exhausted after only 1.2 seconds, but produced 650,000 pounds-force (2,900 kilonewtons) of thrust. On separation, the spent first stage disintegrated due to aerodynamic forces. The second stage fired within 1 to 2 seconds of launch. Interception at an altitude of one to eighteen miles' altitude (1.5 to 30 km) took at most 15 seconds.

W66 nuclear low kt
The W66 was 18 inches in maximal diameter and 35 inches long, with a weight of approximately 150 pounds.

So, Sprint's probably ~4,000lb (or more) propellant was exhausted in no more than 15 seconds or so.

 

[nobby-w]

And it could maintain 100g for how long?

It could maintain 100g for long enough just as easily as a canonical 50kg anti-ship missile (as mentioned in Book 2) could maintain 6G for one or two 1000 second turns. This level of performance would actually require a rocket propellant with a specific impulse about two orders of magnitude higher than any known chemical propellant. There are plenty of online rocket equation calculators, so I'll leave analysing this as an exercise for the reader.

The point being that there is no reason that a missile should be restricted to 6G. There might be a point about it being able to sustain that acceleration for long enough to be useful in ship-to-ship combat at ranges of 10,000's or 100,000's of km. How one might achieve this IYTU is also left as an exercise for the reader.

Kinetic energy is relative. In Mayday/LBB2 terms you should subtract the target's vector from the missile's in order to find the missile's relative vector and then calculate relative KE from that.

I did actually mention relative velocities in the answer. In fact, the relative velocity might be even higher if the ships started the engagement on vectors moving towards each other. There are many variables, so it seemed most appropriate to pick a nice. simple round number in the right range, and do a worked example based on it.

I had, unfortunately, assumed that people here would not have needed this pointed out, and indeed that bracketing the discussion with this sort of qualification might actually have made it less clear. Evidently this was not the case.

In summary, according to the maths in LBB2 the velocities in starship combat (relative or otherwise) will typically run into the 10's of kilometres per second, if not 100 or more. At velocities in this range kinetic energy is by far the dominant component in a collision or missile impact, and the yield of a non-nuclear explosive is relatively insignificant.

 

[whartung]

The problem with kinetic impact is compounded by those velocities. A difference in a millisecond via reaction time, course correction, etc, is a difference of 10-100 meters. Ships are big, they're not necessarily THAT big. And a millisecond is not much time, even for automation.

So, anything that introduces any uncertainty in to the ballistic profile is likely to produce a miss.

With light speed weapons, it's very difficult to "dodge" the attack, it's better to just not be where they think you are. But with high speed kinetic munitions, the opposite is the case. it doesn't take much at all to potentially get the attacker behind the reaction curve and simply miss.

This is why kinetic munitions at those speeds aren't particularly practical and one reason Chadwick switch to bomb pumped lasers, turning kinetic weapons to close range light speed weapons.

 

[Straybow]

The Sprint was a two-stage, solid-fuel anti-ballistic missile (ABM), armed with a W66 enhanced-radiation thermonuclear warhead used by the United States Army.

Mass 7,700 pounds (3,500 kg)
Length 26.9 feet (8.20 m)
Diameter 53 inches (1.35 m)

Operational range 25 miles (40 km)
Flight ceiling 19 miles (30 km)
Speed 12,250 kilometres per hour; 7,610 miles per hour; 3,403 metres per second (Mach 10)

The first stage was exhausted after only 1.2 seconds, but produced 650,000 pounds-force (2,900 kilonewtons) of thrust. On separation, the spent first stage disintegrated due to aerodynamic forces. The second stage fired within 1 to 2 seconds of launch. Interception at an altitude of one to eighteen miles' altitude (1.5 to 30 km) took at most 15 seconds.

Hmmm, looks like you'd need one dT of storage and handling space/equipment for each missile. It is 150 times as big as canonical CT missiles, which are a fraction of the size of a short range air-to-air missile.

 

[kilemall]

Well I don't know that I buy the automiss argument, in the last 10 seconds of missile approach the most any given standard ship would be 600 meters. We're probably talking about a cloud of penetrator something like a SAM/AA warhead, so it's not just 15cm/25cm of missile body width (if we take Striker stats as canon in a CT/HG context).



HG does have agility as a primary miss factor, with ship size as a modifier. As noted the Missile Supplement has autohit if you get the missile within X range. So with the supplement the missile avoidance happens before the terminal close, to generate a major miss. With HG it's sort of baked into the rolls.


The kinetic hit increase in the missile supplement requires a direct hit with the missile body, so not just the warhead penetrator/laser detonator/HEAT plasma stream but the whole body including engine and leftover 'fuel'. That's a lot more mass.



Regular attacks are 'interceptions' where the missile has to come within 25mm of the target plot, but an impact requires the plot of the missile to actually go through the target ship plot. Impact also requires a contact detonator or a command detonator set to act as contact, and either a first turn hit under power or the more advanced 'variable engine' options for tries during later turns.



So there could be last second jinking that throws it off if the gunner running the missile is not on top of his interception game.



Impact attacks are serious- they double the number of hits.



In addition, there IS a variable speed impact modifier, which says for every 300mm of vector difference a hit is added (round down). Obviously if the target has more vector going away the missile doesn't hit. The wording could be somewhat vague, it says if the missile contacts it's target then apply the velocity 'bonus'. I've always taken the contact phrasing to mean an Impact attack.


Other to-hit factors are computer difference for HG, and less abstracted CT plus to-hit for the computer Predict programs vs. potential Evade module buy/design into the missile.


My goal is to have HG systems and tables to an extent be used with CT movement, so I don't know that I would recreate all of the missile supplement's play options, but direct kinetic impact vs. more likely intercept cloud needs to be part of the equation.

 

[kilemall]

Hmmm, looks like you'd need one dT of storage and handling space/equipment for each missile. It is 150 times as big as canonical CT missiles, which are a fraction of the size of a short range air-to-air missile.

If we take the Striker stats as the standard for bay missiles, we know they are 25cm in width (warhead for Striker ortillery purposes), and they ARE 1dton or at least the missile and it's bay launcher. 50-ton bays are 50 missiles, 100-ton bays are 100 missiles.


I would further argue that the missile bay dton is not laid out like the typical floor plan of two 1.5 meter squares. Instead, it's one 1.5 meter square twice as high.

 

[kilemall]

Alrighty then, a few working numbers and thoughts.


According to the missile supplement, the standard small missile is 50kg, can fit 12 in a turret area with their protective canisters, and according to Striker is 15cm in diameter.

One bay missile fits in 1 dton slot in a bay and is 25cm in diameter.

Or at least the effective warheads are, we can assume a few more cm wider potentially in body and skin.


Partially out of the thought that without the canisters you could fit 20 of the small missiles in a dton and partially because it's darn convenient, I am going to assume bay missiles are 1000kg, 20x the size of standard missiles.
So for the simplest of conversions, you can make a missile as per normal, then multiply it's cost and warhead by 20.
The example standard homing missile of Cr5600 would then be Cr112000, with a 20D warhead (sufficient under CT combat to ensure critical hits on most every critical system and a fair chance at flatout destruction, of ANY of the ships).

But there is a problem- the anti-missile point defense problem is vastly simplified, since it's much easier to ensure a hit on 1 missile then 20.

We would have to assume that all of the good systems such as Evade and Smart would be built into a six figure cost missile, but still a laser hit effectively disables most small craft, definitely on the second one.

And a bay missile is smaller then small craft, much less room for backup systems or hits that pass through empty volume. I just don't see homeruling 2-3+ hits to bring down a bay missile (unless someone has a good argument).

So I'm thinking kill two birds with one stone, reduce that 20D warhead to 10D and declare the 100kg space repurposed to a mini-sandcaster. Less sand then a normal sand canister, but high velocity dischargers that shoot it out with enough velocity to stay ahead of the bay missile during it's last 100-1000km into the target ship. Same price as the warhead, so the math is easier.

 

[Condottiere]

I don't think the mathematics makes sense, either then or now.

I will say that in Mongoose First, from a certain point of view, you could have saboted a compacted missile with a warhead from a multi warhead missile in a sandcaster canister.

 

[kilemall]

I don't think the mathematics makes sense, either then or now.

I will say that in Mongoose First, from a certain point of view, you could have saboted a compacted missile with a warhead from a multi warhead missile in a sandcaster canister.

Heh, games- what are you gonna do?

On the other hand, even this costing system built into an HG budget or TCS campaign would be far more logical then the 'free' the lack of rules imply.

I suppose you could argue it's part of the maintenance cost, but when a single 100 missile bay's load costs out to 11 million plus credits using just the monkey model example, that number doesn't work for me, much prefer that the no-energy 'savings' a missile bay implies gets costed through loadout.


I do have an alternative missile build system that hopefully will seem a little more logical costwise, it was always kinda crazy that missiles cost as cheap as they did even given the pure CT ECM/anti-missile shootdown rate of something like 75% of all attacking missiles. Works out to something like Cr6500 per effective hit vs. say a lifetime 50 effective hits (including anti-missile) of a beam laser being Cr20000.
Also, this second missile build system also makes them a bit more logical logical, as opposed to all of use scratching our heads about reaction fuel missiles or retrofitting/homeruling grav propulsion.


Oh, one other standard thing I worked out- a 50-ton HG bay attack is two bay missiles, a 100-ton HG bay attack is four missiles. So each bay type has 25 shots- or the 100-ton has 50 50-ton shots if you choose to let gunners have that option.

 

[warwizard]

I've done some serious designing and thinking about missiles using fire fusion and steel for both TNE and T4.

First assumption I got was that the 6g limit was using a gravetics drive and the endurance was due to the power density of the battery / accumulator. So your limit would be 6g's and the endurance is as stated for TL=9, as the tech level rises you get more efficient batteries and the missile gets more endurance (antimatter batteries at around TL=21 are small enough to be used here) However the design sequences for fusion power plants is not nice at lower tech levels, at about TL = 13 you get a useful missile that can self power for days using a grav drive. These I assumed would be your recon drones. TL 15 the fusion power plant is only 1 kl and a practical unlimited endurance chassis can be built.

And then there is HePLAR... has to have a fusion power plant, it's a plasma rocket using the waste heat from the fusion plant and then throws in the full output of the fusion plant into heating the hydrogen gas to bare ions, bottom line lots of thrust in a teenie tiny package. Practical TL 15 missiles with a lazing rod array, fusion plant that goes boom on command and 50 G's of thrust for multiples of 3600 s can be built. TL 16 and the practical missile gets up to 80+ G's.

OK so these are the military missiles, they have ability to turn on and off the thrust, they have radar absorbing coatings, are black, have passive sensors, and a laser comm back to the launching ship and can do 50 g's for the entire duration of the engagement. They only need to get within .05 ls of a target to deliver their attack, and have a full up volume of 14 kl and mass perhaps 2mt.

Point defense missiles also exist, these are approximately 2.8 kl in volume (box launcher) and they get much closer to the max of 100 G's at TL = 15 There is a small blast fragmentation warhead and only enough fuel for an intercept at .06 ls which is about 300 seconds. It uses command guidance and a standard radio antenna.

The thoughts about target agility...

1) If you thrust in the wrong direction it takes you 3 times that thrust to overcome that error. So a missile needs to have 4 times the target's thrust to ensure a interception.

2) Thrust used to counter the target's agility cannot be used to add to the missiles final relative velocity at interception.

For CT and mayday and missile supplement usage, the 1 and 2 above mean that a 6g missile can intercept a 1g agility target for a hull contact interception with a 2g effective vector. Please note that most civilian vessels do NOT have agility of 1, they have agility of zero, and many military ships have zero agility when pumping for jump.

 

[Carlobrand]

Through all the Traveller variations, missiles are game-driven. CT hits unless some bit of software or defensive fire prevents it, MT missiles have a chance of a miss (which could be a software thing if you fudge a bit). CTs throw multiple hits, MT's get one hit and have to deal with armor that starts at Battleship-armor strength and then gets thick enough to shrug off mini-nukes. To borrow a term from Spaceballs, the missiles fly at "Ludicrous" speed for burn durations that, at the lower techs, would make whatever motive source they use a major breakthrough in terms of energy density for other items of technology. By extension, they impact at a wide range of velocities ranging from "just barely got there" to "hell with the warhead, I'm gonna go in, all the way through, and out the other side." And then there's the angle of impact against the hull, a wildcard that really isn't considered in the games. There's not much of either reality or consistency involved; what matters is the effect they have on gameplay.

So, really, whatever missile rules you want to come up with should be "rule of fun": whatever makes gameplay more interesting. Faster missiles, better warheads, whatever makes things interesting. Only real consideration is the degree to which they might alter the canon: sufficiently effective missiles with sufficiently large nukes could pre-empt the need for spinal mounts. On the other hand, I think we all have the feeling that, at least as far as High Guard/MT are concerned, the missiles as written are in need of some sort of upgrade or it's not really worth mounting them except as ground-support weapons.

Practically speaking, a missile has to be as fast as, or faster than, its target or it can't hit: you can be perfectly lined up, and in the last second the target jigs 30 meters to one side while the missile only manages 25 meters and sails past aft of the target. That's not an issue if you've got a proximity warhead of some sort, only a piece of the missile needs to hit, but distributing your mass among several impactors means the individual impactors don't have quite the punch of a single concentrated mass. If you're doing some variant on High Guard, the proximity missile has a weaker penetration modifier than the standard missile but maybe gives several hits; the armor rules make these mostly a weapon against lightly armored targets.

The high-G missiles should carry much more punch than standard missiles - a bit more than the proximity type if they're a single-impactor contact type. If you're drawing on the grav and battery rules, short-range hyperkinetic missiles show up around TL10 and the long-range ones show up at TL13 (they're both much more deadly in close proximity to a world, and the short-range ones can reach long range if fired from close enough to a big enough world). Planetary defenses on worlds of significant size capitalize on the improved performance of gravs to field long-range hyperkinetic missiles at TL-10.

It's been a while since I ran numbers, but I don't recall bigger HK missiles being much better since most of the missile mass is drive and battery. With the High Guard rules not making any provision for ammo, I liked to assume the bays included their own missile reloads rather than allowing for bigger missiles. Of course, that was pre-MT, but I still prefer it. Bay tonnage could give you a simple 100 salvos with a quarter of the bay tonnage still available for load-and-launch systems and suchlike. I figured the larger Striker warhead just meant the bay launch design allowed for bigger warheads to be attached to the missile for orbital bombardment purposes.

One thought is to come up with some element that looks at some way that the target mitigates damage by trying to control the angle of impact. Maybe agility subtracts from the penetration rating of the missile.

 

[whartung]

The thoughts about target agility...

1) If you thrust in the wrong direction it takes you 3 times that thrust to overcome that error. So a missile needs to have 4 times the target's thrust to ensure a interception.

How did you arrive at this? Not questioning it, just curious about your logic/numbers.

 

[warwizard]

1g turn in the wrong direction
1g turn to cancel that vector
but you are now further away from the previous vector, need 2 g turns now to catch the target.

The maneuvering target is inside your guidance loop if you are controlling the missile from the ship.

Example target is 2LS out from your ship, you are using active sensors or LIDAR to paint the target energy goes out 2 seconds later it reflects off the target, 2 seconds after that your sensors receive that reflection, there is then a delay due to electronics determining the target's current vector, analysis of target's rate of change in attitude and acceleration, then the tight beam laser comm sends directions to the missile, 2 seconds later the missile pivots to change vector and is off after the target. Minimum decision loop is 6 seconds, but likely is closer to 7. The target then has 7 seconds to make the missile miss.

 

[nobby-w]

[ . . . ]
That's not an issue if you've got a proximity warhead of some sort, only a piece of the missile needs to hit, but distributing your mass among several impactors means the individual impactors don't have quite the punch of a single concentrated mass. If you're doing some variant on High Guard, the proximity missile has a weaker penetration modifier than the standard missile but maybe gives several hits; the armor rules make these mostly a weapon against lightly armored targets.

Fragments at high speeds can be pretty destructive due to the quadratic law governing kinetic energy. The maths from the Book 2 rules imply impact velocities in the 10's or 100's of kilometres per second relative to the target. As an example, you might get an effect something like the following:

At 3km/sec an object has kinetic energy approximately equivalent to the explosive yield of its mass in TNT. At 6G a missile accelerating for 1000 seconds is travelling at 60km/sec; at 2000 seconds it's travelling at 120km/sec. A 10G missile is travelling at 100km/sec or 200km/sec respectively. Compensate for whatever vector the target is travelling at. You're likely to come out with a relative velocity in the 10's of km/sec.

A tungsten or depleted uranium fragment the size of a golf ball weighs approximately 700g.¹ At 10km/sec relative to the target the kinetic energy of the impact of a 700g projectile is 35 million joules. That's roughly 5x the kinetic energy of a 120mm APFSDS round or 20,000x the kinetic energy of a 5.56mm rifle bullet. At 100km/sec relative to the target the kinetic energy of the impact is 100x higer, approximately 3.5 billion joules. This is roughly equivalent to the explosive yield of 833kg of TNT, approximately 9x the explosive filling of a Mk 82 500lb bomb.²

Without going too far into the physics that will vapourise the projectile and a substantial chunk of whatever it hits, and scatter high speed fragments around the interior of the target. Internal armoured partitions would limit the damage but the impact is a pretty large bang, particularly at higher velocities.
_______________________
¹ - Tungsten and uranium both have a specific gravity of approximately 18.
² - The explosive filling of a Mk 82 bomb is approximately 200lb (89kg).

 

[Condottiere]

Wouldn't impact be minimized if you run hell for leather in the other direction?

One of the few occasions where overclocking the engines would be worth the risk.

 

[Carlobrand]

Fragments at high speeds can be pretty destructive due to the quadratic law governing kinetic energy. ...

I'm familiar with that, yes. Still, take the mass and divide it by three and each submass carries 1/3 the total energy, assuming they divide equally. High Guard grabbed Striker on its way to evolving into MegaTraveller. In those systems, if your mass has a penetration of 40 and the energy gets divided 3 ways, you end up with a penetration of 27. If your mass has a penetration of 80 and the energy gets divided 3 ways, you end up with a penetration of 67. If your mass has a penetration of 120 and the energy gets divided 3 ways, you end up with a penetration of ... wait for it ... 107. It's just the way the armor table curves: divide by whatever, and you get the same reduction in rating from the starting penetration regardless of what the starting penetration is (except at the low end of the table, but that wouldn't come into play for spacecraft).

So, take your high-speed mass and divide it into 2, 3, 4 or so submasses, and you get a pretty sharp drop in penetration. For MegaTrav, that means a -3 for a mass that divides into 2 submasses, -4 for 3 submasses, -5 for 4 submasses, and so forth. For a Striker-based system, you'd have to refer to that table they created (and it'd be a plus to High Guard's table, since Megatrav's table is an inversion of that). There's a distinct difference in penetration for proximity weapons.

 

[kilemall]

Been away for awhile, I appreciate the responses.

While I haven't been on the board, I have continued to work this rules 'problem'.

I should emphasize that my ultimate goal is CT maneuver with HG designed ships with my own damage resolution system that satisfies me. I was then looking to retrofit it to either CT/SS or regular HG use.
That last part means the interactions would work out differently for each version. I'll go ahead and post on them, but I'm not expending special effort to 'make them work' completely alike or to your taste. Just a potential jumping off point for your own wonky tastes.

With that understanding in mind, the big variable with the general understanding of the kinetic effects and therefore damage potential rests in large measure with the fuel and G rating of the missile.

I decided to simplify things by deciding the missiles are working literally off a miniaturized version of the M-drive.
However, the M-drives for 10-ton and larger small craft have a secondary function of eliminating the waste heat, but the mini M-drive cannot. Therefore the missile MUST dump heat through fuel expenditure. This eliminates the missile wandering for days through space or retrying attack passes ad infinitum or getting to C-fraction speeds by themselves.

That led me to decide that the missiles and ships are based on the same G limits per TL. But of course we need missiles that can run down ships. So I have a limiting factor for human crewed ships, inertial dampening, which lags behind potential G ratings. Missiles of course have no such problems.

Then I have tailsitters as an option, vertical deck designs as opposed to horizontal, which 'normalizes' 1 G worth of acceleration. In combination with ID, an extra G can be handled, at the cost of possibly inefficient ground/surface cargo loading/expeditionary operations, maybe needing gantries or Upport station handling.

So the ships could go at X speed with no effects, tailsitters 1G faster, then when it's combat/run away time everyone can strap down and take some hurt/limits, but not quite Expanse accel drug levels.

That works out like.....

TL Potential/Dampened/Tail
8 2/0/1
9 4/0/1
A 5/1/2
B 6/2/3
C 7/3/4
D 8/4/5
E 9/5/6
F 10/6/7


So functionally tailsitters can turn and burn and on average lay on 3G worth of effects on the characters, bellyfloppers get 4G max (which hurts). Pretty much the effect I wanted. Among other things you are going to be in battle dress or you are going to have to slow the ship to inertial dampening levels to fix it, one of those play subtleties I love putting in. Not to mention what happens when you are using agility as a negative DM to hit, would also make holding that spacewrench and avoid loose parts/wreckage as missiles. ENGINEERING DRAMA!


IMTU tailsitters are the norm until TL A, then it's a mix of commercial/cargo/possibly combat landers with the traditional horizontal decks and military ships being vertical decked (which nicely explains the AHL design, although tradition more then need by that TL).

Note I drop TL7 from the M-Drive, concept being that the M-drive is tied to gravitics and you are just reaction drive TL7 and eariler.

Of course the missiles get more capable as both the Gs go up, and the reactor percentage goes down leaving more space for more fuel and therefore greater range and velocity.

Burn rate is 1% per G burned per turn.