Conventional Spaceflight

[epicenter00]

A quick question here ...
Is 2300AD based on the same GDW Rule System as TNE?
Is FF&S a valid tool for 2300AD?

No, it's not the same rules. FFS doesn't work for it. 2300AD actually is a stand-alone rules system. It's a lovechild of Twilight: 2000 (1st ed) and Traveller. It's an ancestor to the House System that would come later - you can see GDW toying with a lot of the concepts you'd see in the House System later, but the actual mechanics and number ranges are very different.

It's also a bit unfinished and I sometimes wonder how well they playtested it (It's not uncommon for a human to be able to throw a hand grenade 250+ feet in 2300). If you play 2300AD for any length of time, you end up making a lot of changes to the system.

Are the spacecraft weapons tremendously powerful to overcome typically tough spacecraft armor... or are they minimally damaging weapons (emphasis on the targeting and actually hitting of targets) but appear effective due to relatively thin-skinned spacecraft design?

I tend to think of 2300 ships as being tough but not really armored. They're relatively thin-skinned. They're tougher than modern aircraft, but they're not the flying better-than-tanks of Traveller.

Why you ask?

2300 lacks anti-gravity technology. Many of these ships can make re-entry and fly off into space themselves. This means they have to do it the Hard Way just like us right now in the 21st century. While canon examples of human ships that can make landings have Armor 0, some Kafer interface ships like the Hotel stutterwarp fighter and the Lima conventional lander both have armor.

In particular, the Hotel even has a 4 armor rating, which is better than the majority of human military vessels. A Hotel-class fighter is described as being able to "make repeated planetary landings on a single fueling." I'll assume this is just narrative chrome, which cannot be borne out by physics and reduce it down to a single landing and takeoff. Even then, that means that Armor rating 4 (which reduces damage down to 60% of normal) is light enough to fit on something that can reach escape velocity using conventional thrusters of a type that derived from something that exists currently (the Kafers do not have any magical thrust technology, even if the GDW designers ignored the ship generation rules to make their ships).

Since it seems highly doubtful that you could get something twenty or thirty times the size of a modern MBT yet has as much armor as an MBT into orbit using conventional thrusters, without the thrusters being simply enormous, I'd have to say that starship armor is pretty light, probably optimized versus thermal damage (I'd imagine that stutterwarp can use its anti-collision system to stutter-evade micrometeors, so that's probably not a threat to 2300 ships). Starship weapons are probably relatively light as well. Armor 0 is probably closer to like a light-duty military vehicle - rugged and resistant to small arms but not much else. Armor 10 is probably massively armored, like better than a modern MBT (since these ships don't appear be designed to make landings).

 

[whartung]

No, it's not the same rules. FFS doesn't work for it. 2300AD actually is a stand-alone rules system. It's a lovechild of Twilight: 2000 (1st ed) and Traveller. It's an ancestor to the House System that would come later - you can see GDW toying with a lot of the concepts you'd see in the House System later, but the actual mechanics and number ranges are very different.

I would think that converting 2300AD ships to TNEs rule system for combat would be straightforward. I'm not super familiar with 2300ADs system any more, TNE is certainly a descendant of it.

TNE has rules for lasers, even as ortillery. The detail is whether you accept the detection ranges and modifiers give in the system or not, specifically the capability to detect, say, an MBT on the ground from a starship in orbit. That may well be fudgable, but once detected, the combat system will handle it -- it talks about lasers in atmosphere, it handles long ranges, and the ship mounted lasers can certainly track such an object. In TNE you CAN fire a 25mm auto cannon at a starship, you can even mount one on a starship, and figure out the results. (And they should not be disregarded -- auto cannon are quite vicious in TNE). A 100-200 dTon "close support" ship bristling with auto cannon would be a welcome visitor, assuming it's on your side. C-130H on steroids, better armor, and that ever so warming HePLAR fusion jet. MMm...Toasty!

For ground based installation, Lasers are actually a very good planetary defense system against orbiting vehicles. You can tune them to the atmosphere.

Where 2300AD lasers fail compared to TNE lasers is in the gravitic focusing tech that TNE has, this is what gives the lasers their great range.

 

[epicenter00]

I understand where you're coming from. From the feel of 2300, drawing mostly from Invasion it seems that in 2300 for whatever reason nobody shoots lasers as artillery at the ground. They do apparently use KKVs dropped from orbit for bombardment, but that seems relatively indiscriminate. Otherwise, you need to get close the atmosphere and use aircraft to bomb stuff.

I don't think there's anything preventing people from using lasers as orbital artillery in 2300 but as a GM I've always found it a buzzkill in Traveller that my players can be on the ground and just get obliterated from orbit by orbital support, pretty much out of the blue. Players rarely have sensors to scan orbit for stuff shooting Meson Guns or lasers from orbit. That it's the "logical" thing to do makes it a bit worse for me - there's little reason for the Marines to deal with players - heavily armed, skilled people who are few in numbers. Marines could overpower them, but they'd lose Marines in the process. It always seemed like they'd just ortillery them instead to save themselves lives.

As a GM I've always gone with 2300's "feel" for support of people on the ground mostly because it feels like it empowers the players to feel like they can do something about it. They can at least see or have sensors that can see a Kafer fighter-bomber or its precision guided bomb. Then then can try and use an AA missile or something to shoot it down. Or evade it and know there's someone who's on to them and they need to change their plans accordingly.

Blasted by Meson fire that's being sighted in by orbital ships or satellites or high altitude observers has always bugged me. I've had it "hit very close" before, but then it has that feel like when you have some elite Kafer Hathcock sneaking up on your players with a Flashlight sniper weapon and...well there's honestly no reason why this guy isn't going to kill someone. Either the sniper guns down a convenient NPC (leading to the 'redshirt' thing), kills a player (I'm not a big fan of deaths that are that random - yeah it happens all the time IRL but RPGs aren't supposed to be that IRL to me), or misses (aka "Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise" wait, what?)

 

[whartung]

I don't think there's anything preventing people from using lasers as orbital artillery in 2300 but as a GM I've always found it a buzzkill in Traveller that my players can be on the ground and just get obliterated from orbit by orbital support, pretty much out of the blue.

Imagine if you're an extremist terrorist in Terra ca 2010.

We do this right now, using drones or, of all things, B-1s flying CAP (Combat Air Patrol) with a unallocated ordnance waiting for a call to be delivered.

Back in the day, a bomber would go out with a specific sortie and plan. Today, they can simply orbit high in the sky and drop a 2000lb bomb on a GPS coord marked by a grunt on the ground, literally on demand (within minutes of the request). This is really no different from ortillery, the B-1 isn't coming in, flying NOE to make a tactical strike. It's quietly cruising 10's of thousands of feet up, downloads the coords, flies to where the computer says is "close enough", opens the doors, and bombs away. Likely nobody on the ground ever hears, or sees, the actual bomber.

Rather, some combatant is holed up in some building, an infantry unit lays down some fire on the building to keep them contained, mean while someone whips out a box, notes a GPS coordinate, bounces a laser off the target, 100's of yards away, gets their GPS coordinates, and forwards it up the chain of command. 5 minutes later, there may be a whistle, a dark streak in the sky, and *BOOM*, a pile of rubble.

Land based artillery doesn't have quite the punch of 2000lb bomb, so reducing a building like that would take more time, and rounds, and drama. And there's no reason you can't have a "smart seeker" on a piece of orbital deadfall KKV ordnance, rather than explosive ordnance. As I understand it, the GPS seeker heads on the iron bombs are dirt cheap, like $2000 each. It's pretty reliable and quite accurate.

What it highlights is simply the lethality of modern/future combined arms. If your players don't want to get "snuffed out" from space, they need to go unnoticed, or get too close to something that's not worth taking out (even a precision guided 2000lb bomb isn't as "surgical" as folks would like, and that's a factor that limits its deployment).

Modern infantry is for door to door room clearings or finding bad guys so they can call down rocks on them.

 

[McPerth]

Considering spacecraft or our age, they are made of metal sure but are incredibly fragile, taking damage from even micromedeorites and such. A machine gun would riddle them.

Sure, but those spacecrafts are note expected to make a landing and launching each week, as whould any spacecraft in 2300AD if it has to be commercialy profitable. So my guessing is that they are better armored (even if not seen as armor) than today's. I quite agree with Epicenter here.

Looking at the Kafer Sourcebook (the only suplement I have with combat vehicles described), Kafer APCs (Bugbus and Crawler) have armor about 1, while Deathsled hovertank has 120 frontal and 40 other faces. I think those could be extremes for spacecrafts.

 

[rgrove0172]

I made some similar comparisons with other vehicles with 1-5 or so on the light to no armored end, all the way up to 80 for a main battle tank. Looking at armor levels on ships, again from 1 to 9 (Kafer bad boys) it seems a factor of x 8 armor 9 makes sense. This would have light commercial vehicles with the armor of heavy trucks and the like, smaller military ships with armor like that of an APC or something and the big ships of the line fully armored up to tank level.

 

[McPerth]

Just one thought more here (after reviewing a friend's Traveller 2300):

Laser and plasma personal weapons in 2300 AD had its impact Mj (megajoules) equivalent described, so we can make a conversion form Mj delivered to DP (as 0.35-0.40 Mj deliver 1 DP and 0.7-0.8 Mj deliver 2 DP, I'd say 2.5 DP/Mj).

A ship's laser with a damage multiplier of 1 uses 1 Mw from your power plant, so 1 Mj per second. Do we assume its a contiunous beam laser or a pulse one?

If it is a continuous beam, the use of 1 MW fro m the power plant means that it delivers 1 Mj/sec, so, if we assume it keeps focused on the target for about 0.5 sec (taken out of my hat, we should discuss this a little more), then the ship's lasers deliver 0.5 Mj per impact, not too far form hand laser rifles...

If we assume it's a pulse laser (as I do, as I believe they must be quite more powerful than laser rifles), the PP recharging some kind of capacitors that then convert the energy stored to laser pulse, then the energy of each pulse will depend on how often does it shoot. If we assume only one shot is done per space combat turn, then the energy delivered would be 60 Mj per shoot. That would be my take. keeping with the numbers above, those lasers will deliver about 150 DP.

If you find them too powerful we can assume the energy being distrubuted among 2-3 shoots a minute, only one being reflected due to general difficulty to hit, so that the DP would be "only" 50-75 DP.

Off course, Particle Accelerators use 2 Mw from PP and have a x2 multiplier, so numbers would be doubled...

Now, from here we could try to extrapolate armor.

 

[rgrove0172]

My understanding of ship-mounted laser weapons was that they salvoed many rapid shots at a multitude of different possible target locations, more or less a barrage. They are never quite specific as to exactly how many individual shots this encompasses but the fact that they occure weighs distructive power of each.

StarCruiser Page 4 "Lasers rely on several high-energy bursts to blanket several possible course endpoints for the target."

"bursts" and "blanket" seem to indicate a good many shots per turn of firing. (I have nothing but my imagination to base this on but I see a dozen or more for a single fire weapon, more for the mounts with designations allowing multiple hits.)

 

[McPerth]

If you assume a dozen shoots per minute, each shoot would be about 5 Mj, so its damage equivalent against infantry would be about 12 DP.

 

[rgrove0172]

Now that seems reasonable but sure makes the point for thin skinned space craft.

 

[rgrove0172]

This thread has kind of derailed toward the weaponry thing but since we are there... how do you attribute the way armor works in spacecraft v.s. vehicles?

In vehicles its straight forward.. if damage exceeds protection, it hurts more on a linear basis, but in space combat armor simply gives a chance that the damage is stopped or if it fails, comes through in total. Why the different system?

 

[McPerth]

If you assume a dozen shoots per minute, each shoot would be about 5 Mj, so its damage equivalent against infantry would be about 12 DP.

Now that seems reasonable but sure makes the point for thin skinned space craft.

See, though, that this makes ship's lases less powerful that some personal plasma weapons, whose DP against armor may be up to 24 (tamped explosion 6 DP). or that man-held anti vehicle missiles, whose explosive DP go up to 40.

This thread has kind of derailed toward the weaponry thing but since we are there...

Pehaps it should be merged with the Small Scale Weapon hits on Spacecraft thread (after all, posts have merged both issues)?

 

[rgrove0172]

I can imagine many cases where non stutterwarp driven vessels could perform operations in orbit or even short interplanetary travel. If opposing vessels of this kind were to meet in combat, how would you handle it in your game.

Lets say 2 planetary defense fighters (fusion driven, orbit only, autocannon and conventional missile armed) are scrambled to defend a refueling instalation being attacked by 3 similar craft, launched from a disguised freighter.

Would you wing the maneuvering? Generate some sort of of tactical display with an improvised scale? Would you use the basic vehicle rules for weapon ranges and such?

Our first game session is in a couple weeks and an encounter similar to this is the opening scene.

 

[McPerth]

For such armed spaceplanes (that's how I see them) fighting among them, I'd personally use the vehicle rules, giving them evasion numbers and such. If they try to fight the freighter that launched them, then we move again to the Small Scale Weapon hits on Spacecraft thread.

 

[rgrove0172]

MgTr2300 lists stutterwarp orbital velocity as the efficiency - the planet gravity x 10,000 k/h

Assuming an efficiency 2 ship, it would orbit an earth like planet at 10,000kph

The space shuttle orbits at almost twice that... so

How would stutterwarp appear at that slow speed? As I understand it the cyclic rate of the reaction remains the same, its the distance of each jump that changes, so would the ship be jumping thousands of very small jumps each minute? (thousands of them)

Would this appear as a ship sort of flickering by?

 

[McPerth]

What is clear in 2300 AD is that inside the 0.1 G threeshold conventional drives have more efficiency, so having less speed than the Shuttle is not a surprise to me.

In any case, see that orbital speed is the one at which centrifugal force matches gravity, so, this orbit at this speed would be probably unstable, hinting that it can be maintained just for a short time (to discharge the stutterwarp) and latter exiting the 0.1G threshold for safety and maneouvering.

 

[shaunhilburn]

How would stutterwarp appear at that slow speed? As I understand it the cyclic rate of the reaction remains the same, its the distance of each jump that changes, so would the ship be jumping thousands of very small jumps each minute? (thousands of them)

Would this appear as a ship sort of flickering by?

The human eye & brain can resolve about 10 separate image per second. The standard frame rate for cinema motion picture is 24 frames per second (1,440 per minute).

Thousands of jumps per minute would appear like fluid motion to the naked eye. The less the image shifts between "frames", the slower and more fluid the motion will appear.

 

[aramis]

The human eye & brain can resolve about 10 separate image per second. The standard frame rate for cinema motion picture is 24 frames per second (1,440 per minute).

Thousands of jumps per minute would appear like fluid motion to the naked eye. The less the image shifts between "frames", the slower and more fluid the motion will appear.

The actual numbers perceived are about 16-25, with some rare individuals exceeding 30, depending upon individual and current conditions. I know a bloke who can't stand 8mm film because he sees it flicker... at 16fps. *I* also see flicker in 8mm, but not when tired.


If drive flicker duration is faster than the wavelength can traverse the body, the body will appear solid.
If the drive flicker duration is slow enough that the wavelength can pass through the body, then the ship will appear translucent and/or transparent, depending upon how much of the cycle is spent actually between flickers.

Given that the number of flickers is measured in kilohertz or more... you'll never "see" the flicker except in very deep space. And then it likely will be a ghost of a radiator glow so low in photon count as to be hard to notice.

At 1kHz, and 3LY/day, that's 3*365.24*24*3600/1000*3600*24 LS per hop... giving a hop length of 3*365.24/1000 LS per cycle... roughly 1 LS per transition. Divide that by the kilohertz rating for number of hops per second, and you get hop length. Now, the apparent magnitude of an object visible for less than 1/20 sec is going to be proportionately reduced... a 1kilohertz cycle means 1/500th of its normal visual signature... that 10kW radiator looks like a 20w radiator.

in-system tactical speeds, tho...
6 hexes per turn seems to correspond to WE3, which I've used above.
60 second turns, 600,000km hexes.
6*600,000/60,000= 60km per flicker at 1kHz... 60m per flicker at 1mHz

Dim streak at all speeds. But sensors with 10kHz capture rates are known, and so they would suffer far less...

but note that T2300, p. R.20, notes several hundred meters per hop. Which means to get from 300,000km to 0.3km, we shift to GHz range flicker. The ship will, in all likelyhood, be a dim blur. Even on sensors.

 

[rgrove0172]

If you were drawing up an orbital defense ship, non stutterwarp spaceplane or what have you. How would you list it maneuverability? In that it would be using neutonian thrusters I assume you would give its acceleration. There doesnt appear to be any such listing in the 2300 rules/supplements. Craft there are stutterwarp or atmosphereic, nothing in between or both.

So what would use? Would you give your ship a number of Gs in acceleration? A cruising Delta V at which it typically travels in orbit and is able to maneuver effectively at? What would you use to compare it to other vessels it might encounter in the course of its duties?

 

[rgrove0172]

Sorry to pick this thread back up but I think we have arrived at the core of my question. How would conventional flight, and the engagement of hostilities, be represented in your game?

Like the Vehicle Combat rules? My thoughts too but..

Looking at the combat example in the Director's guide for a minute we see that the vehicles appear to be moving, according to their given movement rates, across some sort of map or display. There are descriptions of objects being between this vehicle and that one etc. They are obviously consulting some sort of map to help invision the action as the vehicles move about and fire on one another. This is typically the way, even if abstractly, most combats are worked out.

We have no such provision for conventional space combat in the core rules. Starcruiser presents such a mechanic for large scale stutterwarp engagements but anything closer/slower is considered immobile and just a microscopic part of one hex.

I believe we need a scale to work with, approprate stats for thrust and attitude (perhaps a simplified vector movement system ) and ranges for sensors and conventional and starship weapons at this scale of combat. Then of course there is the matter of the damage crossover between starships and vehicles, which is the topic of another thread.

Does this narrow down the problem Im having? Is there a more simple solution? Maybe some conversion work on Mayday or Full Thrust? (with a downsized scale of course) But it seems it shouldnt be that involved.