CT Only: Do Grav "Tanks" look like Tanks?

[Whipsnade]

Sorry in advance, but I am hard wired to instinctively 'push back' a little and test any statement presented as an 'absolute' ...

Don't apologize and asking questions is always a good thing,

For a Grav vehicle, the platform is stable and the weapon needs fine adjustments ...

And how do you make those fine adjustments without adjusting the entire vehicle? By allowing the weapon to make adjustments independently of the vehicle.

If one desires a vehicle to fight like a tank...

Isn't that the idea? It's called a grav tank because it fights like a tank. It's not an attack speeder, it's a tank.

I'll also point out that the attack choppers people keep using as counterexamples have weapons in turrets or use weapons which guided after launch. Helos too allow their weapons to be aimed independently of the vehicle as a whole.

Ooops... sorry... that's too much of an absolute statement because unguided rocket pods which are aimed by aiming the helo do exist. Change it to "Helos too allow some of their weapons to be aimed independently of the vehicle as a whole."

 

[mike wightman]

The term grav tank is a misnomer, the last TL where grav tanks is mentioned is TL11. As LBB4 clearly states:

Tech level 12: All vehicles have sufficient free-flight performance that ground combat vehicles effectively no longer exist, having merged with aircraft. The primary weapon of the heavy gunships include plasma B guns, VRF gauss guns, and tac missiles. VRF gauss guns are also widely mounted on personnel carriers, as are plasma A guns.
Tech level 13: The first damper fields allow protracted storage and transportation of elements with short half-lives. The first major use of the damper field militarily is to enable the manufacture, storage, and transportation of 2 cm californium rounds, fired from auto-cannon mounts in remotely piloted drones. Each round is hollow and collapses on impact, the collapsed round having sufficient mass to go critical, thus causing a small nuclear explosion. More conventional gunships mount plasma C guns or fusion X guns along with missiles.
Tech level 14: More sophisticated damper fields render the californium drones obsolete. Gunships now carry fusion Y guns or rapid pulse X guns.
Tech level 15: Gunships mounting rapid pulse X guns and heavier Z guns are virtually indistinguishable from orbital craft. Lower performance personnel carriers mount rapid pulse X and Y guns and missile systems.

Ok, I realise I have already lost that one
Trying to model the battlefield parameters of a TL12-15 weapon system by analogy to current MBTs and attack helicopters is bound to fail - the nature of the battlefield at TL12+ must be considered.

A grav mobile gunship should have a crew compartment protected from all lateral movement by inertial compensation the way TL9+ ships are - the crew are likely immune to the g forces produced by the 6g maneuvering of their gunship - not to mention the 'g forces' produced by turning such craft. I would have the entire hull of the ship capable of spinning to bring weapons to bear a lot faster than any mechanically driven turret can do today.

Fire control will include stabilisation and fine adjustment using electromagnets and gravitic fields for plasma and fusion guns, laser mirrors are easier to fine tune.

Grav 'tanks' (I really wish fanon hadn't ignored LBB:4 gunship nomenclature) are not flying MBTs, nor are they heavily armoured attack helicopters, they are a different beast entirely.

 

[whartung]

Aircraft suffer from having to balance lift and maneuverability with overall weight (including, notably, armor).

Grav vehicles, in theory, do not suffer this. Thus we get fast, high flying, heavily armored gunships.

I think a Grav Tank stands out from a gunship simply because it is more heavily armored.

As we know just from our own history, especially recent history with very (very!) light weight aircraft, low performance aircraft such as drones, we don't need a lot of, well, anything to hoist and position a weapon in to the air.

Missiles tend to be more versatile than guns, but suffer from cost and ammo supply.

But a modern drone likely would not perform well in a modern battlefield, because of all it's features. Too slow, too light weight. But outside of a dedicated missile, a drone is a handy, and cheap way of bring weapons aloft.

So, it seems to make sense that despite the near "universal" capability of a grav tank, there is still a need for lighter, cheaper armed (even armored) vehicles. I posit that these lighter vehicles would be considered "gunships" in contrast to a "tank". Many situations a grav tank is overkill. Just too much capability and, more so, money (cost), to do the job.

Tanks, gunships, armed transports, air-jeeps. Those are probably the broad characterizations of future combat vehicles, even though the can all fly fast high and low.

 

[mike wightman]

TL12+
no grav tanks, just gunships.
The fan base couldn't adapt to the term, and after a while neither could the authors

I suppose it could be put down to yet another example of the OTU setting not using the rules as written

 

[Whipsnade]

TL12+
no grav tanks, just gunships.

Which also means:

TL12-
grav tanks and gunships.

It's just like people saying fighters have no use in the Traveller when they really mean to say that fighters have no major combat role in fleet clashes after TL ~13.

It's a matter of being both shortsighted and using shorthand. After a while, people forget what was implied by the shorthand and take it for a blanket statement instead.

 

[gchuck]

Grav tanks

Back in the early days of CT (1982), Dwafstar Games released a small boxed game called 'Grav Armor'. Very useful for tank duels.

 

[Ulsyus]

TL12+
no grav tanks, just gunships.
The fan base couldn't adapt to the term, and after a while neither could the authors

I suppose it could be put down to yet another example of the OTU setting not using the rules as written

That wouldn't be the first time people haven't been able to run with the possibilities offered by the system. Thinking outside the known and comfortable paradigm can be difficult at times.

The next step from not thinking in terms of tanks but atmospheric gunships is how much automation and independence they have to operate inside their allocated tactical area of responsibility. That's heading down the road of battle-bots, which may be easier to imagine the Zhodani doing than the 3I, but it's out there. A cultural justification for them not being taken up would be the issues with Virus resulting from the Rebellion, but that may be too late for some fans' thinking if they want something related to the 5FW.

 

[BRJN]

A cultural justification for them not being taken up would be the issues with Virus resulting from the Rebellion, but that may be too late for some fans' thinking if they want something related to the 5FW.

- The legends of HAL, the Terminator, and the Berzerker stories, would be a factor for Solomani.
- Ziru Sirka -era texts describing an automated war machine that was (or became) mis-programmed so it shot at everything that crossed its path. Equipped with energy weapons so it would never run out of ammunition.
- A Sylean experimental program that failed in the opposite direction: would not engage anything unless shot at first by it. The enemy picked them off one by one. Hidden or camouflaged ones never took part in the combat.
- Imperial Research Station Omega: constructed a squadron of AI-run vehicles that were sent to engage each other as part of war games and equipment tests. They effectively smashed civilian construction (or even the landscape) in the process.

There may be some effective warbots out there some where and some when, but there are so many failures - usually involving scorched earth and friendly fire - littering the worlds and history of the Imperium that nobody will propose it as anything more than small scale, temporary stopgap, and desperation measure. It's like inviting the conditions of WW1's Western Front.

P.S. Gamma World just assumes that using an artificial intelligence on a high-tech battlefield results in fried electronics and an uncontrollable unpredictable mobile weapons platform moving about on its own.

 

[Maksim-Smelchak]

- The legends of HAL, the Terminator, and the Berzerker stories, would be a factor for Solomani.
- Imperial Research Station Omega: constructed a squadron of AI-run vehicles that were sent to engage each other as part of war games and equipment tests. They effectively smashed civilian construction (or even the landscape) in the process.

BRJN,

Which Imperial Research Station Omega do you mean? In which sector is it?

Shalom,
M.

 

[wellis]

Regarding grav tanks, do you imagine they might be like the Minbari Shriek tank in that they can be used as a really fast low-flying gunship?:

Its gravitic engine allows it to turn fast enough it doesn't need a turret, or so it claims.

Anyways, thanks to its ability to fly and hover, it carries an armament underneath the main body of the tank as well.

 

[BlackBat242]

- Imperial Research Station Omega: constructed a squadron of AI-run vehicles that were sent to engage each other as part of war games and equipment tests. They effectively smashed civilian construction (or even the landscape) in the process.

BRJN,

Which Imperial Research Station Omega do you mean? In which sector is it?

Shalom,
M.

All I could find was this quote on http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=26907 :

Super GURPSie goodness... Research Station Omega... delving into time travel and alternate dimensions...

 

[BRJN]

Which Imperial Research Station Omega do you mean? In which sector is it?

Hey - I made up something that sounds official enough to persuade the officials!

I found a listing/map of Research Stations by sector (don't remember where) and noticed that there were few / no 'Research Stations Omegas'. But it sounds like a good name for something that "ought to be" and could be wand-waved away as a Top Secret project tucked away somewhere - maybe in a Depot system.

In the context of a project to produce an AI-controlled war machine, they would be designed, constructed, and tested in a controlled environment - such as a Research Station - before being brought out for public use.