Not all small weapons - meson and particle weapons of all sizes take the Agility penalty.
Agility - thoughts
- Thread starter Carlobrand
- Start date
Even as (mis)printed, the distinction is not turret and bay vs. spinal. It's missile/laser/energy vs. PA/Meson.
That:
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mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
No one build ships with PA bays or meson bays. Bays are for missiles and repulsors.
Honest opinion: A discussion of whether a misprinting, clearly identified as such, in JTAS and I guess early printings of HG80, is some sort of hidden genius game variant is only marginally (if at all) more productive for the topic at hand than a discussion on whether ships sunk by torpedoes count as such.
Unless, like me, you do.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Just as a matter of interest how long does it take to work out one turn of combat between say a force of three destroyers and six escorts vs two light cruisers and a squadron of fighters using your rules?
Assume every ship can fire missiles. How do you keep track of all your rule minutiae and do the people you play this with understand it all too?
I only ask because all the various house rules, caveats, look up tables, options that you have posted over the years make it look like a very involved system. And that is speaking as someone who plays Attack Vector and Squadron Strike.
Assume every ship can fire missiles. How do you keep track of all your rule minutiae and do the people you play this with understand it all too?
I only ask because all the various house rules, caveats, look up tables, options that you have posted over the years make it look like a very involved system. And that is speaking as someone who plays Attack Vector and Squadron Strike.
TBF Avenger vs SDB Dauntless would be a lot of the reason Dauntless got a lot more kills, midway, TBF sqdn went in first, on the deck got wiped out flying low and slow perhaps 1/4 of the torpedoes got dropped, drew all the air cover to the deck and the cover was looking for survivors in the water so they can strafe them when the SDBs appeared over the carriers and had no fighters to deal with until after they dropped the bombs. B-17's dropping bombs from high altitude at ships aware of the attack and under way, missed every time. Early war the US torpedoes had a number of defects, magnetic detonators were not calibrated to deal with the earth's magnetic field in the AO for patrols, impact fuze would crush instead of going boom if the impact was close to 90 degrees. One sub attack had a beautiful 4 torpedo spread with all 4 torpedoes exploding, sub CO astonished as the jap carrier continued unharmed. (all 4 exploded about 100 yards short of the ship's side due to magnetic exploder issue.) One sub had a frieghter that lost it's screw when the torpedo hit the screw directly, (no boom) the CO then had preventive maintenance performed before firing the torpedoes one at a time at the broadside of the target, in every case torpedo did not go boom, CO returned to pearl (I think he retained one torpedo for examination). Granted the air launched torpedo was a different model. Another tactic that helped the bombs was the medium bombers attacking at mast high with a good dose of .50 and 20mm from the nose mounted guns and a bomb right through the side. This tactic was not used against warships as far as I know. The early issues with torpedos would have informed the tactics of air strike planners, as well as the poor performance of the TBF, and the fact that few TBF that attacked carriers ever got to attack a second time. The last year of the war, the TBF replaced and the problems with the torpedos fixed allowed torpedoes to be used more often, lack of targets became the problem then.
Now for traveller beam combat at speed of light active sensors and beam weapons distance counts. Sensor pulse travels to target, reflects off target and returns to sensor do that twice for vector or three times to get change in vector. (command loop delay here), Beam fires and travels to the predicted target future location. At .1 LS distance you can have a beam on target in .3 seconds (+ your command loop delay), in .4 seconds you can shoot at the future position of it's current vector, and at .5 seconds you can take into account the target's average change in vector in the past .4 seconds. .1 seconds after you fire the beam arrives in the area of the target. How stabilized and hence how much circular error probable (CEP) the beam has is largely a function of technology. Then you have the issue of accuracy of pointing, if your hull is maneuvering under high G with lots of direction changes, your hull is going to flex, throwing off your boresighting. The response to this is to fire the weapon at perhaps 1% power levels till you get a splash from the enemy hull .2 seconds later you fire full energy shot, having just proved your boresight with the current maneuvers.
Now if you are trying a meson gun shot, you have to deal with X, Y, and Z instead of just X and Y. here ECM systems can recieve your pulses and return them back to the sensor, but louder than the ping would be and with misleading frequency shifts causing your sensors to miscalculate the target's Z vector, and the boresighting trick does not work with mesons, your hull's flexes cannot be compensated by shooting "test" shots.
Now at .1 LS even 6g agility is not going to get your hull completly out of the beam weapon CEP, even if your hull is a fighter. At 1 LS yeah fighters @ 10 DT can likley get off the dot to not be in the CEP, which means put a human in charge of observing the maneuvers and shoot where you guess the fighter is going to be based on the past dodging it has been doing. He has 3 seconds to dodge the beams or about 27m if accelerating in a straight line in a 10m hull. A 30m 100DT hull will still get clipped, and would need to be 1.5 LS out to dodge. At 10 LS you have 30 seconds to dodge, even the largest battleships can get off the dot. This is where missiles come in, they get to .1 LS and set off the nuke W lazing rods.
It’s not really designed as a full on wargame despite appearances, more like creating space drama.
The missiles are pretty easy, just another ship to track on as each turn fires off a gob of them, effectively a mini fleet. Resolution on ‘arrival’, not even specific targets before then, just battery strength and source ships for computer ratings.
I’m reffing so more like I give them options/choices, so not necessary for them to understand all rules. Rule minutiae is no problem since I designed it, and especially for simple handling.
The rolls are a lot faster as the damage is tonnage, particularly spinal weapons. The CRT is basically like the CT LBB2 one with various mods for surface/radiation/internal meson etc.
Armor is simple, pen/no pen and so a whole class of weapons are rendered moot at longer ranges, further reducing rolls.
Where it would get involved is 100 second phasing by move and power/fire allocation. I would tend to apply that towards player and nemesis ships and everything else gets 1000 second turns.
To answer the precise question, assuming 1000 second turns, depends partially on how much each side stayed together as a fleet- just moving two fleets plus missile ‘fleet’ per turn would be easier. Smaller ships so no spinals, initially just missile exchanges until closing to beam range so that would go faster.
Big choice if fighters would go for a kinetic heavy strike or not. I’d say depends on just how many fighters vs capability of the escorts, otherwise may be more valuable screening a disabled light cruiser.
Marcatlas
SOC-12
That was one engagement. The overall situation was: 1) the torps early in the war sucked. 2) It was FAR easier to hit a ship with a dive bomber than to make a torpedo hit from an aircraft against a moving ship due to the distance one was away from the target when dropping a torpedo. Subs had a much more sophisticated method of aiming than torp planes and even they had trouble. So, in conclusion dive bombing was always going to be more effective in WW 2
American torpedoes in the early war sucked, and in numerous different and exciting ways. Those of other navies not nearly so much (though everyone who tried magnetic exploders got it wrong to start). Also, until late in the war a torpedo bomber had to be low, slow and close to the target, whilst a dive bomber only had to be close. By the war's end the torpedo could be dropped from much higher and faster, and had more range while at the same time AA gunnery had gotten vastly better, so dive bombers were suicidal and torpedo bombers were not - just in time for air-launched missiles to make both dive bombing and torpedo bombing obsolete as anti-shipping technologies.
Now for missiles: The supplement for missiles allowed for 12g burns for the rocket motors. I do not see much reason to restrict missile agility, as they have a lot of defenses to dodge, and need to get close to deliver their punch. I would have the .1LS and .2 LS stand off nuclear missiles with the lazing arrays should NOT have to penetrate nuclear dampers. The lazing arrays are formed with 10's of thousand to 100's of thousand lazing rods, (100 thousand for the .2 LS), and should attack ALL ships in a 2 (or pick your angle) degree cone. I could envision a lasing array that encompasses a full spherical shell around the nuke for use in a minefield application. The idea of the lazing array is that the rods are formed with a tiny divergance such that the X-ray beams appear in a 5m or 10m grid at the specified distance. The .2 LS array has better (more expensive) foccussing, and delivers it's full penatration at .2LS. Agility would not be very useful against such an AOE attack.
Hundreds of thousands of lasing rods? How big is your missile?
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Technology drives doctrine (and training).
Industrial base drives technology.
Budget drives industrial base (through procurement).
Technological achievement drives budget.
Operational experience tells you what works.
Industrial base drives technology.
Budget drives industrial base (through procurement).
Technological achievement drives budget.
Operational experience tells you what works.
It's how small are the lazing rods, they work on X-ray frequencies X-rays have a wavelength in the range of 0.01–10 nm, corresponding to frequencies in the range of 3×1016–3×1019 Hz and energies in the range of 100 eV to 100 keV. They are shorter in wavelength than UV rays and longer than gamma rays. So the rods are between .005 nm and 5 nm in length. the resonating cavity is half a wavelength long and only that frequency will resonate in the rod. The exciting photons are the gamma rays emitted by the nuclear weapon, and the energies involved vaporize the lazing rods, but this takes longer than it takes to generate the burst of X-rays from the laser rods. There is no effort made to focus the beams on the TL-15 .1 LS lazing arrays, but there is a nano grav lense on the TL=16 .2 LS arrays that lets the lasers retain destructive energy densities at .2 LS. No I do not know what materials are used in the X-ray lazing rods, after all I'm only in a TL-8 society.
I'm familiar with the Project Excalibur effort, which ultimately failed but we were like TL7 at the time. Problem I'm seeing is you're dividing blast energy among a lot of emitters, and the classic CT/MT missile is rather small. The standard missile as described in CT SS3 has only 12 kg assigned to payload. The nuclear warheads described in SS3 are too big, which means we're either designing a bigger missile that needs a bay launcher or we're mining Striker for smaller warheads.
Dividing the yield among so many small emitters means the typical laser pulse is going to be less than 1/100,000 of the energy, probably a good deal less since you won't have perfect efficiency. Best guess is 12 kt gets you individual pulses something like a typical TL13 turret laser. Per SS3 that's a MCr12 missile noticeably bigger than a standard missile, emitting neutrinos and therefore detectable, and therefore a priority target for opposing lasers, and it needs to be bigger still if it intends to have more powerful laser pulses. And most of the energy is flying off into empty space since its using that grid pattern.
Fewer rods on a drone-type missile accepting targeting information from a launching ship or a ground base would mean more energy finds a target. If you mine Striker for warheads then you have anything from 0.1 kt at TL7 to 50 kt at TL15 at Cr10,000 per kt, which some might argue is too cheap but it's right there for the picking. Keeping it the size of a standard missile means it looks like any other nuke and won't draw special attention. There's still the debate over how strong the pulses are and what effect they have, but that's a separate conversation. When I did them, it was 30 rods on a missile, designed to emulate a laser battery to make it easier to apply existing game rules to them, but there were a heck of a lot of them.
That’s kind of my take on detlasers in Traveller- perhaps avoid PD shots but at too high a price for effect.
Absolutely necessary in 2300 due to those squiggly stutterwarp drives.
Well that grid pattern might get one hit on a fighter unless it's a needle config and is pointing at the missile when it goes boom. A battleship, well it has a lot of surface, so it gets a lot more surface explosion table hits, and is good for scrubbing off surface features or causing system resets on the larger sensor systems. I design my missiles in FF&S 2, generally around 1m3 using a HePlar drive and fusion power plant, usually at the minimum plant size for TL 15, so a 1m3 sphere, spins on a dime and jets off in a different direction about every 1/2 second, sort of like brownian motion. At .1 LS for a .5m2 with 9g's agility or higher target, it may be able to survive to fire it's shot. Each one that fires gives an EM pulse and blocks sensor locks in that .1 LS hex per brilliant lances and T4. I admit that the tiny size of the lazing rods limits the energy in the lasers, think of the ones that go boom at .1 LS as penatration aids for all the ones that want to fly in to make contact detonations. Imagine this if you will, missile swarm launched from turret launchers with a load out of 10 missiles per 1 DT turret, that gives 100 missiles per 1000 tons of ship. distance to target is 80 hexes, missiles have 9g's of accelleration, assumming 6g targets run from the missiles, that is distance travelled at net 3 g's per half hour in .1 LS: 1.5, 4.5, 7.5, 10.5, 13.5, 16.5, 19.5, 22.5 (target engaged after 8 1/2 hr turns distance to target after turn 7 is about .6 LS or 6 hexes) One missile goes boom in each of the last 5 hexes, and 90 go boom in hex 79, with 5 going for contact hits in hex 80. perhaps one will pen the nuclear damper and deliver a nuclear surface explosion and the other 4 just surface contact with a vector of about 2 LS per 30 minutes or 1.2 million km/h (missiles evasive maneuvering last 6 hexes so no net vector gain). 1.2 million km/h for a one mt object should punch a hole through anything without a black globe, and the energy dump may overload the globe's capacitors. Frankly I'd be very afraid of the missiles even if they had no nuke on board, just a blast fragmentation warhead to get multiple compartments. This is why missiles get a -2 at short range, they are not going fast enough. Note: the TL 15 1m3 missile only has maneuver fuel for two turns so it's range of powered flight is 14 hexes with a 420km/h velocity against a non maneuvering target at zero vector from launching platform.
Now cost: big ticket item: TL15 power plant .6 m3 .6 mt 60,000cr 3.6 MW. total full up missile with blast fragmentation warhead in rough ballpark of .1Mcr per missile. TL 16 power plant .5 m3 .5mt (do not remember cost) 3.5 MW (.514m3 if you want the 3.6MW).
