mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
No, my follow on comment was completely correct, as was the rest of the post you chose to snip that from.
Fighters/PT Boats in the Traveller Universe
- Thread starter Carlobrand
- Start date
I believe Mike is correct on this one, if you were meaning that you were planning to drop from just outside the outer atmosphere. Beyond bringing your ship too close to planetary defenses, you'd do better to give your troops grav belts and let them do a HALO jump rather than put them in pods. With the belts, they'll have a continuous method of transport while on the surface, and you could also drop some of the troops in small jeep-like combat-car size grav vehicles to support them. These could be equipped with point-defense fire controls and VRF gauss guns to provide defense from missiles and artillery as well as some anti-personnel fire support, and they could mount tac missiles for some anti-armor support. Drop capsules aren't needed if you've flown that close to the world.
It's harder to hide the guns on a lower pop world. Not the guns themselves, but their support infrastructure - the basing for their crews, for the techs, and those that support them, the transport facilities and buildings that support them, and so on. It's also harder to hide the networking, the sensors, and the command systems that let them 'see out', and it's harder to hide the power supplies and their waste heat. Likewise, it's harder to hide the firing signature of the gun. The smaller the population, and the less industry, the harder it is to hide the guns and their infrastructure and support.
And yes, they won't be the only means of defence of any world serious about defending itself. Missiles and beam weapons will be there too, and at high TLs vehicle mounted meson gun artillery could be linked into the defence net and used against ships and landers at shorter ranges.
Where did you draw this information? It doesn't sound like anything I've encountered in canon. Speculating? Or maybe a version I don't have?
Crews and techs can be dug in deep with the weapon. If you can dig in the weapon, you can dig in the crew and such. If you can't reach the weapon, you can't reach them. We did that now with our Cheyenne Mountain complex and with the crew bunkers manning our land-based missile silos; probably not as effectively as some higher tech military could do it, but the concept is clear. You could starve the meson crews out - eventually, maybe, depending on what we're saying about artificial food production from waste, and I don't know what Traveller says on that subject - but civilizations that can build spaceships and fusion plants aren't going to have trouble building self-sufficient deep underground habitats, even if it means stocking them with a year's supply of MREs. Their only real problem is fuel, assuming you find a way to isolate it from underground water sources. CT is quite clear that deep mesons can't be targeted, so there's no "the smaller the population ... the harder it is to hide the guns ..."
I'll toss you a bone here: MegaTraveller and Classic Traveller handle it differently. Classic Traveller is clear that you silence them by finding and destroying their sensors, and there's nothing I've encountered in CT that says it's harder to find those sensors on high tech worlds rather than mid tech worlds. It's easier to silence guns if there are fewer of them, ergo fewer sensors, so population is really the main consideration: how many guns can they support? There's also nothing that says you can silence mesons by destroying their power sources; power sources can be dug in deep with the meson batteries. You destroy the sensors, and you either do that from orbit while he's shooting back, or you get troops to ground and have them do it, and it's a lot easier to get troops to ground if you can first send in special forces in tiny stealthed capsules that can get them through planetary sensors so they can land and do their job of silencing enemy missile launchers that could target landing boats and grav vehicles while they're still in space making their way to the planet. As for the military's shorter range weapons, well, your military has those too; that's why it's called a battle.
MegaTraveller though - MegaTraveller has neutrino sensors. This radically changes the landscape. Neutrino sensors are passive, and they don't care how deep underground they are, so they can be buried with the gun. On the one hand, it means there's a sensor you can't detect, so it can't be silenced and the gun can't be stopped by killing sensors. On the other hand, it means you can use that same type of sensor yourself to detect and lock onto his power sources. Oddly enough, MegaTraveller's process for battling deep meson batteries does not take that into consideration: it still says you have to kill the sensors, and it makes no allowances for killing power or for sensors you can't find. That probably deserves errata, but that game really isn't being supported much anymore; everyone's moved on to the other stuff56w3]'e. But, yes, in an MT setting, you can hypothetically silence a meson PD gun by killing its power - it's just they're likely to spread that power around by making many small plants, so you're picking off power plants while he's picking off your ships. They're also likely to dig them in deep so you can't kill them easily with weapons other than mesons. Troops are no help against meson PD in an MT setting - which I think is a problem they didn't anticipate, but MT had a lot of problems.
Alternately, we can forget canon and make up our own rules. I know of no "firing signature" for a meson weapon unless we speculate that there'll be a line of decayed mesons along its path of fire that can be used to trace it back to its source, and then we're saying we can in fact detect the deep meson battery and shoot it with it own mesons, once it's fired a couple or three times so we can triangulate. That might be more helpful than trying to take out many small power plants, but it would take a house rule kind of thing.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Dashcams.
Possibly, doorbell video.
Possibly, doorbell video.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
A:7 Broadsword.
Garda-Vilis (0308-B978868-A)
population of 475 million on a planet larger than the Earth.
The starport/scout base complex, and the cities near it are defended by ground based planetary defenses, consisting of a deep-site H meson gun (with type 9 computer) and a series of surface sensor sites, some concealed, some guarded by such troops as can be spared from civil affairs duties.
model 9 computer - TL15
#H meson gun - TL14
Garda-Vilis (0308-B978868-A)
population of 475 million on a planet larger than the Earth.
The starport/scout base complex, and the cities near it are defended by ground based planetary defenses, consisting of a deep-site H meson gun (with type 9 computer) and a series of surface sensor sites, some concealed, some guarded by such troops as can be spared from civil affairs duties.
model 9 computer - TL15
#H meson gun - TL14
Since meson screens work by accelerating meson decay, you'll have a zone (maybe even a point) where the beam intersects the screen. Trace a line from the field generator to that point on the meson screen, and you get a bearig to the point of origin, to target with counterbattery meson fire.
Thus, a defender should have multiple deep site meson guns, and rotate designaed targets through them to avoid counterbattery fire. They should be as similar to each other as possible, to avoid allowing attackers to distinguish between them.
A meson gun is a particle accelerator, so there will be magnetic (or at higher TLs, gravitic) surges when it fires. Presumably these can be shielded somewhat, but I doubt that would be perfect. Waste heat can be dumped over a huge volume of bedrock, so shouldn't be a problem. There are also voids in the rock that a sufficiently sensitive densitometer would be able to detect (though telling them from natural caves might be hard - just meson gun all possible signatures). The gun's sphere would be filled with a high-density fluid to reduce the difference in density between it and the rock, but the command and control spaces, living quarters for the crew, etc. cannot be so concealed. Other things that need to be concealed are any atomic power plant, or the power feed from the world's power grid, and the entrance(s).
As a result of this I expect finding a deep meson gun is very hard, especially if the whole facility is at a higher TL than the enemy attempting to detect it. It'll be easier if the facility is new and the earthworks haven't 'healed' yet.
All this is one reason why it's harder to find guns on highly industrialised and very populous worlds - there's a lot more 'stuff' and noise to help conceal the site and the access points to it. It's also easier to conceal a sensor net, or at least a backup to it - targeting data for something in orbit can be gathered by small CCTVs mounted on building roofs as long as their locations are precisely surveyed (which you do when you mount them, prior to the invasion), and they can just link into the planetary data network. The system that aggregates their input and develops a solution doesn't need to be anyway where near the camera or the gun. Again, the more infrastructure on the world, the easier to set this up and conceal it. If a world has a couple of million people, all close to a single starport, sensors and comms set up to give a view from the other side of the world are going to be fairly obvious (though analysing all the recon imagery will keep a lot of intelligence analysts busy for a bit - but that's their job), while if there are a few billion in cities scattered over the whole world, that stuff will just disappear into all the other stuff.
This makes lightly settled worlds vulnerable to assault and invasion even if they have a deep meson gun because creating blind spots in its coverage is relatively easy, and then troops can be landed. A major world, in the other hand, is probably a hard enough target that you either just interdict the system and largely ignore the world itself, or you bombard it flat, one way or another.
As a result of this I expect finding a deep meson gun is very hard, especially if the whole facility is at a higher TL than the enemy attempting to detect it. It'll be easier if the facility is new and the earthworks haven't 'healed' yet.
All this is one reason why it's harder to find guns on highly industrialised and very populous worlds - there's a lot more 'stuff' and noise to help conceal the site and the access points to it. It's also easier to conceal a sensor net, or at least a backup to it - targeting data for something in orbit can be gathered by small CCTVs mounted on building roofs as long as their locations are precisely surveyed (which you do when you mount them, prior to the invasion), and they can just link into the planetary data network. The system that aggregates their input and develops a solution doesn't need to be anyway where near the camera or the gun. Again, the more infrastructure on the world, the easier to set this up and conceal it. If a world has a couple of million people, all close to a single starport, sensors and comms set up to give a view from the other side of the world are going to be fairly obvious (though analysing all the recon imagery will keep a lot of intelligence analysts busy for a bit - but that's their job), while if there are a few billion in cities scattered over the whole world, that stuff will just disappear into all the other stuff.
This makes lightly settled worlds vulnerable to assault and invasion even if they have a deep meson gun because creating blind spots in its coverage is relatively easy, and then troops can be landed. A major world, in the other hand, is probably a hard enough target that you either just interdict the system and largely ignore the world itself, or you bombard it flat, one way or another.
Krikkitone
SOC-12
I think one problem is that the deep meson mount can’t be moved. Finding where it is (by detection or espionage) is hard, but once you do… it can’t move. It’s like only one leg of the nuclear triad. I don’t know how many ICBM launch positions the US/Russia/other nuclear powers know about each other, but I would guess it’s not insignificant. However, there are still planes and subs, where they aren’t known if they are not continually tracked.
If a world has a non ice Hydrosphere, then I could see it being harder to crack because some of the deep meson guns are subs (designed to be stealthed from space)…once you have meson communications they can move freely in the deep ocean.
If a world has a non ice Hydrosphere, then I could see it being harder to crack because some of the deep meson guns are subs (designed to be stealthed from space)…once you have meson communications they can move freely in the deep ocean.
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How deep is "Deep"? Below the Earth's Crust is a Liquid Rock that a Meson Sub could travel through. SDBs hide deep inside Gas Giants ...
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Decoys.
Marcatlas
SOC-12
I don't think so. The screen is a field of energy. When mesons hit it and decay it results in a blast of radiation. There is no line to see. Your ship sensors simply pick up a burst of ionizing radiation that appears to originate from your meson screen. You cannot see the "beam". So no line to draw.
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This is the hot tip. Dual layer meson screens with an outer and inner layer. Any time the screen is hit, you can get a partial bearing.
As ships are hit, more data it gathered to the point that, perhaps, the sites can be located through triangulation.
It can be an expensive way to find it, but arguably any meson hit or hit that's blocked by the meson screen should give data, which can be shared with the fleet (assuming ye olde "Ship Vaporized" didn't happen).
I'm not sure I understand you. A line from a point on the screen to the meson screen generator only points to the screen generator. It doesn't point to the gun unless the gun happened to be pointing at the screen generator. It's also not at all clear that a screen generator would be capable of providing precise information on the locations where beams hit the screen.
If you have installed a network of gamma photon sensors on the hull - because the mesons are decaying into gamma photons - and such sensors are rugged enough to survive in a combat environment, they could give you a point where the beam intersected the screen, but that's only one point. The screen would have to have some depth so the beam decay formed a line, like what Wartung is describing.
Even with bearing information though, you wouldn't have information for a firing solution. You can't reach PD meson guns with most weapons, only mesons, so you'd need range information. You'd need to let it fire on a second ship so you could triangulate, which is not good news for the first ship.
I love this idea. Battlerider-size monitors hiding in the deep oceans, firing mesons at opponents in orbit using sensor data from land-based sensors. Then the opponent sends fighters diving into the ocean to try to find the monitors so the fleet can target them with mesons. Then the planetary navy gets involved, stealthed submarines firing on the fighters, atomics having devastating impacts on targets and the oceans in general ... you could work up an entire game with special rules around the concept.
Fair enough, not all shots will hit center of mass. That said, decay is probabilistic, so there would be a line (segment). The attacker would prefer that the midpoint of this line segment (the intended decay point) be inside the target, but the screen pushes it back to outside the hull (if it would have been a hit otherwise). Still, you get a directional bearing to the gun. If the target has a high lateral vector, it might be able to use parallax over the course of sustaining multiple shots to get a vague distance estimate (3D position) as well.
In fairness, it's probably not enough to get a direct meson targeting solution in and of itself. But it could narrow down where to look with other sensors, and might be good enough to enable indirect damage from a near miss from meson counter-battery fire.
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