Fighter Performance

[Khan Trav]

On fighters like the rampart shown in the deck plans section are there any special loadouts for them?

I am particularly interested in the 2 place version and specialty loadouts like recon cameras and such.

Also interested in shipkilling weapons on par with modern day exocet or harpoon.

 

[rothesay]

I don't have an answer for you, but I have often wondered about the lethality of fighters. Given the limitations of a single weapons mount, it seems to me that they are of no danger to a ship of size or with any kind of serious computer.

I would welcome a discussion of the value of fighters, especially since I'm considering them in a Broadsword class context down the road in my campaign.

 

[dean]

On fighters like the rampart shown in the deck plans section are there any special loadouts for them?

I am particularly interested in the 2 place version and specialty loadouts like recon cameras and such.

Also interested in shipkilling weapons on par with modern day exocet or harpoon.

Unsure that any change in loadout is significant. CT never really discussed nuts-and-bolts detail like that. Make up anything you want for your campaign.

There are no shipkilling weapons in CT like exocet or harpoon.

You might want to search this BBS for threads analyzing the value of fighters in CT at various tech levels. At some point, using the standard rules, they become either useless or indefeatable. Can't recall which.

 

[dean]

I don't have an answer for you, but I have often wondered about the lethality of fighters. Given the limitations of a single weapons mount, it seems to me that they are of no danger to a ship of size or with any kind of serious computer.

I would welcome a discussion of the value of fighters, especially since I'm considering them in a Broadsword class context down the road in my campaign.

Small numbers of fighters are next to useless. In a player-adventurer campaign I am sure a clever ref can find a suitable use for them. But in general, I think you need gobs of the damn things.

 

[Khan Trav]

As far as Broadsword Class Mercenary Cruisers, I love them. I use one as a recurring contact in my campaign. It is based at Regina/Regina and is Imperium Navy Reseve vessel used to train Marine and Naval Personnel. Primarily used for reserve cruises. The players either encounter the Mameluke on some mission or are on board her for a specific reason.

She is normally found either in Regina space near the jump radii or Jenghe. She will have a few regular officers on-board and two to three times the number of normal crew which are mostly reserve officers conducting their reserve obligations and recertifications. The Ships troops are limited to a squad of marines which leaves much more bunk space for the reserve naval officers.

There may also be a small team of marine force recon aboard which will be made up of a two man sinper/recon unit and others. Any non-coms onboard are likely to be regular service and not reservists.

Mameluke is also carrying fighters and at least four of the naval and marine reserve officers will be doing their fighter pilot re-certs.

This particular ship with its reservist crew were instrumental in the satisfactory resolution of the Ocelot Incident of 1104.

 

[mike wightman]

In a small ship LBB2 setting fighters can be ship killers - equip them with nuclear missiles and they can take out just about anything. Even some of the conventional warhead missiles from the missiles special supplement are going to put a major dent in a capital ship.

In a HG setting they are almost useless unless house rules about squadron based fire are adopted.

 

[sabredog]

As those above have pointed out, HG pretty much rendered any kind of small craft pointless in combat. But in CT's LBB2 system they can be dangerous, but still need tweaking to make them worth using over say, a pinnace or cutter that can be just as heavily - or more heavily armed and carry troops n' such for a boarding action.

I have ship-killer torpedoes IMTU small ship game by using nuclear missiles that do 2D6 hits and 1 automatic critical. That pretty much does in anything so it becomes important to have anti-fighter fighters to screen the capital ships.

Fighters can carry 1 or 2 lasers, and 6 or 3, respectively, standard (not torpedo) missiles on wing racks. No reloads, but they can launch as many missiles as the pilot wants to at one target in a single action. Want multiple target capability? Just add a back-seat gunner and you can target as many threats as you have missiles to launch.

Fighters get a save against missiles equal to half the pilot's skill. No other small craft gets that.

Fighter crews have ejection pods with rescue beacons if they get blown up or disabled - just roll 10+ (DM= skill level) to punch out before the thing goes blooey.

Torpedo/bombers carry 2 torps but only have one beam laser to the rear for defense against chasing fighters. The guy in back can EITHER launch and guide in a torpedo..or...use the defensive laser. The pilot can only fly the thing.

"Growler"-type fighters (similar to the Prowler or F-18 Growler) act as mobile ECM platforms to protect nearby craft. Any other fighters or ships at close range are treated as if ECM is running in the computer. Growlers also carry 2 ECM decoy drones that are one-shot anti-missile defense weapons. Fire one off and all incoming missiles are drawn away that turn. Growlers carry no other weapons and have 3 crew.

Fighters are small, nimble, hard to hit (the pilot's skill is a DM against incoming attacks), and well, just plain cool. But......

When hit they are either damaged, disabled, or destroyed. Roll one die for damage and you get:
1-3) system damage...DM's from pilot no longer apply/ second result means weapons offline
4-5) disabled..drives or something else goes down and ship is dead on last vector line
6) Kablooey! Better make that ejection roll.

 

[Khan Trav]

I like the Growler idea, a broadsword class could run a modular cutter as a growler and two fighters with the nuke warheads for strike operations.

 

[Jeffr0]

"Growler"-type fighters (similar to the Prowler or F-18 Growler) act as mobile ECM platforms to protect nearby craft. Any other fighters or ships at close range are treated as if ECM is running in the computer. Growlers also carry 2 ECM decoy drones that are one-shot anti-missile defense weapons. Fire one off and all incoming missiles are drawn away that turn. Growlers carry no other weapons and have 3 crew.

Hey... your Star Fleet Battles is in my Traveller!

 

[Matt123]

As Dean above mentions & Bill would state, fighter combat dominance depends on tech level.

Up to TL 12-13, fighters dominate Fleet actions. Providing you give them the best available computer. One of the reasons, is that fighters (with the best computer) can only be effectively hit by Bay missile weapons (code 9 & on a 10+). Put another way to have a 1 in 6 chance of hitting a fighter (& pretty much auto killing it), requires 1000 ton of ship to support the Bay. To 'guarantee' a kill each turn requires 6 bays supported by 6000 ton of ship. Fighters 'defeat' opposing ships by weapon scrubbing and making it safe for capital ships to go in & finish the job.

For the numbers, missile 9 (any TL) hits on 2+. Modifiers are Fighter Agility of 6, computers cancel each other out and the fighters get a size modifier of -2. Meaning a missile 9 battery hits on 10+ (1 in 6 chance).

There are ways to defeat fighters at these techs, but that starts getting into fleet strategies & designs etc. Other threads cover that. Suffice it to say, it is very paper scissors rock with most people fielding paper (big ships) and a few fielding scissors (fighters).

From TL13-15 Big Ships dominate (computers for fighters become too expensive, Big Ship defences are better, etc) and Fighters generally perform secondary roles. (Scouting, pickets, chasing merchants/pirates, beating up on lower tech opponents, ground attack, enforcing blockades, etc)

Fighters with less than the maximum computer for thier TL, in general should be assigned to secondary roles.

Cheers

 

[dean]

Well written Matt. Thanks for stating what I could not, off the top of my head.

 

[Orr]

Fighters 'defeat' opposing ships by weapon scrubbing and making it safe for capital ships to go in & finish the job.

Weapon "scrubbing" or fuel loss.

Fuel hits result in either the loss of 10 dTons or 1% of the full designed fuel load whichever is larger. Seeing as ships often enter battle with partially filled tanks and seeing that the damage from weapon hits must be evenly applied, crippling fuel losses can often occur before a vessel's weapons suite is significantly degraded.

 

[BlackBat242]

So how did the winner of the TCS contest do so with a mostly-fighter force if fighters are useless in high-TL large-ship book 5 combat?

 

[dean]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.

Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.

“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.
....
“In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet,” Lenat said. “It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out.”

It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.

 

[Orr]

So how did the winner of the TCS contest do so with a mostly-fighter force if fighters are useless in high-TL large-ship book 5 combat?

Eurisko didn't build "fighters" and, the New Yorker article aside, didn't build "PT boats" either. A big part of the Eurisko designs depended on an application of the tournament's drop tank rules which many feel was broken.

Also many things about the article, which is based solely on Lenat's version of the events, are slightly different from what the GDW people remember. Lenat's been dining out on the Eurisko story for decades now, but only his side of the story has ever really been told. No one in the gaming community knew Lenat had been crowing about his coup in the IT community until well after the events occurred and too late for the story to be checked.

Edit: Here are the Eurisko designs as saved from a very old email to an old BBS. Apologies for the odd formating.

Winning TCS fleet - TL 12

Four Garter class:
TB-Garter TB- K1567F3- B41106- 34009- 1 MCr 17,584.104
Bearing C 1 EE 7
12,000 tons
Batteries C 1 EE 7 crew=3D170
Agility=3D4; Fuel=3D840; Cargo=3D4.3 low=3D170
Note: L-Hyd drop tanks add 6000 tons of fuel and mass,change the
agility
to 4, and cost MCr6.01.(TB-K1344F3) The ship is designed to manuever when
carrying up to 72,000 tons of drop tanks and one Wasp fighter.

Four Cisor class:
BD-Cisor BD- K9525F3- E41100- 340C5- 0 MCr22,291.175
Bearing 1 11 1U 19,980 tons
Batteries 1 11 1U
crew=3D ?
Agility=3D0; Fuel=3D999; Cargo=3D19.1 low=3D95
Note: L-Hyd drop tanks add 9,990 tons of fuel and mass, and cost MCr10.
(BD- L9313F3) The ship is designed to manuever when carrying up to 29,970
tons of drop tanks.

Three Queller class:
BH-Queller BH- K1526F3- B41106- 34Q02- 1 MCr27,802.392
Bearing Z 1 NN1 N
19,600 tons
Batteries Z 1 NN1 N crew=3D263
Agility=3D0; Fuel=3D1,176; Cargo=3D10.72 low=3D232; marines=3D200
Note: L-hyd drop tanks add 9,800 tons of fuel and mass, and cost MCr9.81.
(BH-L1314F3) The ship is designed to manuever when carrying up to 29,400
tons of drop tanks and two fighters (one Wasp and one Bee).

Seventy-five Eurisko class:
BA-Eurisko Ba- K952563- J41100- 34003- 0 MCr13,030.385
Bearing 1 11 V
11,100 tons
Batteries 1 11 V crew=3D131
Agility=3D2; Fuel=3D555; Cargo=3D8 low=3D0; marines=3D35
Note: L-hyd drop tanks add 5,550 tons of fuel and mass, change the
agility to 1, and cost 5.56. (BA-K931363) The ship is designed to manuever
when carrying up to 16,650 tons of drop tanks.

Seven Wasp class:
IL-Wasp Il- A90ZZF2- J00000- 00009- 0 MCr896.75
Bearing 1 1,000 tons
Batteries 1 Crew=3D19
Agility=3D6; Fuel=3D60; Cargo=3D0 low=3D0

Three Bee class:
FF-Bee FF- 0906661- A30000- 00001- 0 MCr127.945
Bearing 1 2 99 tons
Batteries 1 2 crew=3D2
Agility=3D0; Fuel=3D5.94; Cargo=3D0

 

[Khan Trav]

I am starting to get a better feel for what you are referring to. My campaign is very simplified with the players only encountering standard ships such as those we can easily share deckplans for. The campaign is pbem and they see ships like 100 ton scouts, free traders, far traders and the like. They are currently using a 400 ton subsidized merchant with launch rails welded in the front and rear cargo areas. A two place rampart is parked on each position. One at the front and one aft. They have essentially converted the vessel into a pocket carrier. The fighters will not likely go up against anything meaner than a Gazelle Class C/E.

 

[Matt123]

They are currently using a 400 ton subsidized merchant with launch rails welded in the front and rear cargo areas. A two place rampart is parked on each position....

sounds like a hoot. I'll bet the aquisition of those Ramparts was an adventure in itself.

Look up Q-ships in WW1. It may give you another adventure thread. In essence they are apparent merchants with a very nasty armament designed to take out pirates, privateers or in WW1 commerce raiders. The subsidized merchant with Ramparts will be excellent at it.

Another adventure thread is merchant escort, similar to those merchants in WW2 equiped with catapults to launch Spitfires & Hurricanes (one use only...) to shoot down enemy long range reconnaisance aircraft.

And don't forget, they can't forget to pick up thier documentation proving legal ownership of the Ramparts before leaving for the next system. Each system will be very interested in this 'cargo', obviously modified and with pilot/passengers available for immediate use.

Cheers!

 

[Khan Trav]

As for the ramparts, they are Imp Navy. The players are on a mission for the Office of Naval Intelligence and have been recalled to active duty. One of the opposing force vessels happens to be a Q-ship that was converted from a subsidized liner. Lots of Zhodani Commandoes aboard her also. There will be plenty of surprizes to keep em busy.

 

[Khan Trav]

One of the opfor vessels present in the system is a Gazelle Class Close Escort. The idea is that this vessel should be able to control the system and if anyone gets too close to the secret Zhodani fleet staging area the Gazelle should be able to board em and take them as a prize and space any witnesses. Or off to a Zhodani gulag...

Could a 2 place rampart handle missiles and a laser?

 

[rancke]

One of the opfor vessels present in the system is a Gazelle Class Close Escort. The idea is that this vessel should be able to control the system and if anyone gets too close to the secret Zhodani fleet staging area the Gazelle should be able to board em and take them as a prize and space any witnesses. Or off to a Zhodani gulag...

A single ship can control one point in space -- well, one globe of a modest size -- at a time, provided it is strong enough to intimidate any potential target and provided there's only one target at a time. A Gazelle should be able to handle the usual run of free traders. The big companies have freighters that could take on a Gazelle and hope to live to talk about it (Though that's not to say that a merchant captain may not refuse to take the chance). They also have their own squadrons of para-military ships out hunting for pirates and their lairs. The Duchy of Regina Navy[*] and the Imperial Navy also conduct anti-piracy patrols. Such a patrol might be four or six Gazelles or a Kinunir and two Gazelles or a brace of Chrysanthemums or something along those lines.

[*] Or the Regina Subsector Navy if you prefer.​

Bottom line is that the Zhodani could not be sure ahead of time that a single Gazelle would be enough to provide site secutity. It might be, if they got lucky, but it wouldn't be if they got unlucky. But why should they even try? Like the Imperial Navy, they Consulate Navy must have thousands of destroyers and escorts, enough that they can spare a squadron or two on something like that.


Hans