Defending other ships from attack

[Thunderbolt]

If I've understood the High Guard rules correctly, a ship can only use its weapons and screens to defeat attacks on itself.

I'm kicking around the idea that certain ships might dedicate power and hardpoints to defensive weapons to the benefit of others. There might be classes of ships designed with lots of repulsors or nuclear dampers for example to stop missiles.

They would flank the edges of a formation and act as the first layer of defence.

I'm not even sure it has any game advantages, but I liked the idea that a ship might use it's formidable array of repulsors, sand or dampers to protect a freighter, or envelope a research station with its meson screen.

Anybody explored this idea or came up with hit tables or rules ??

 

[The Oz]

Yes, I have a house rule for "escorting" where a ship (or ships) are assigned to protect another vessel. The escorts cannot fire offensively (except against fighter squadrons using my "visual range attack" house rule) but can use their weapons to protect the ship they are escorting. I don't allow the escorts to use their screens (nuclear dampers or meson screens) to protect other vessels, just their turret/bay weapons.

There is a limit as to how many escorts a single ship may have; that limit is half (rounded down, with a minimum of one) the highest computer rating of any ship involved, either as the escorted ship or the escorting ship.

Escorts cannot protect each other but can use their weapons to protect themselves. Escorted vessels cannot protect the escorts but can use their weapons and screens to protect themselves. The escorts weapons basically become additional batteries for the escorted ship to use in missile/beam defense.

There are additional interactions with some other house rules of mine (fighters, missiles with X-ray laser warheads). The general effect has been to create two battles: the big ships slug it out with the meson guns as normal while the escorts are whittled away by the other side's missiles (or fighter strikes).

 

[Ptah]

I've a modified form of HG combat that uses Escorts, a detailed outline is here:

http://www.travellerrpg.com/cgi-bin/Trav/CotI/Discuss/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=000911

This has been inserted into a modified combat sequence but it originally started out as simply modifying HG to include an Escort box, in addition to Line and Reserve. Ships in Escort could only fire on missiles or fighters targeted at themselves or a ship in the Line. Since part of this involved interposition of the Escort between the attack and the line, I allowed the attacker to redirect the attack at the Escort.

As a result, dedicated escort ships mounted armor, lots of anti-missile batteries and lots of small batteries to attack fighters, but no spinal mount or large bays of weapons that were poor in the anit-missile role. I assumed fighters were attacked and attack escorts at short range regardless of the range between the ships in the Line.

 

[Thunderbolt]

Thanks for the replies. The revised combat thread looks interesting, thanks for highlighting it.

 

[Richard Saunders]

Hello.
I cant see why all ships cant fire at any target.
If you can only fire at thing's targeted at you the best attack method will be to fire all missiles at a passing range of 20,000 kilometers with laser heads and nobody can fire at them because nobaody knows who there targeted at.
THIS IS SILLY.
No real world target waits until the missile is targeted at it and only it they will fire at anything even remotly targeted at them (within targeting peramiters). Otherwise all missiles would fly into a targets area on a none intercept path until it reached final attack range when it would turn and attack giving minimum warning to its target.
So in my game if you can detect it you can shoot it, Meson's only protect the ship carreing it unless you specify the ships you are placing yourself between and you only stop some of the mesons (your meson screens factor), you also loose any maneuver benefits ( if you dodge you uncover the target).
BYE

 

[Scott Martin]

Mrr?

In the "real world" (tm) it is often difficult to determine the exact target of a specific missiles fired at a task group. Your basic alternatives are to split up widely (tells you who the target is, but you lose interdiction support) or keep a moderately close formation and try to destroy *all* missiles fired at the group.

Were I programming the targeting systems of space missiles I would probably have them track the centroid of a task group, and then home on a target within parameters at close (probably less than 60,000 km) range just before tracking the centroid would result in a "miss" based on the difference between the target's maneuver envelope and the missiles maneuver envelope. That's probably close enough to play hob with your targeting "decision making" anyway, so you're stll best off shooting down all the missiles.

Ptah's system lets you actually do that with something close to the HG rules.

As for trying to interdict incoming meson fire, you may want to look at the ranges involved: you need to know where the firing ship is (within fractions of a thousandth of an arc second) and where the defending ship is *going* to be (so it isn't doing any evasive maneuvers)

YTU may vary, but that sounds like setting the "screened" ship up as a very large Piniata (*Thwack!*)

Scott Martin

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi !

Doesn't HG(2) already separates between "to hit" and "to penetrate" just like MT does ?
If so, its quite easy to use the given rules to simulate escorting.

Let to hit tasks as they are.
For some additional "to penetrate" rolls let any protecting ship that wishes (and is in range) provide its beam weapons defense batteries.
In order to use short range active defenses (e.g. sandcasters or repulsors) the escorting ship has stay close (in the same hex) to the protected ones. Here agility is reduced to the one of the protected ship.

I would allow the use of passive defenses or screens just as Lionel stated, of course only against one enemy, but perhaps with an additional piloting challenge (if enemy is in same hex) and the effect, that penetrating hits hurt the escort.

But anyway the most things to handle this case is given in the rules...

Regards,

Mert

 

[Bob Weaver]

As for trying to interdict incoming meson fire, you may want to look at the ranges involved: you need to know where the firing ship is (within fractions of a thousandth of an arc second) and where the defending ship is *going* to be (so it isn't doing any evasive maneuvers)

Scott,
If I understand you correctly, you are saying this can't be done. I agree. It's not possible to predictively interdict meson beams or particle beams or lasers. These are all light-speed weapons. The way you know it's there is that it hits you.
Further, it will take some stretching of the commonly understood operation of screens/repulsors/sand in HG to allow a ship to 'project' the defensive weapon past its own hull. Remember that even ships in the same hex (a la Mayday) can be thousands or tens of thousands of miles apart. Only missiles, which posess mass & volume and move slower than SOL can be actively defended against.

Cheers,

Bob

 

[Merxiless]

Otherwise all missiles would fly into a targets area on a none intercept path until it reached final attack range when it would turn and attack giving minimum warning to its target.

There are real-world missiles that do exactly this, 10 years ago, or earlier.