Perhaps, but it caused a fuss at the Tournament. That is all I remembered. So it is a THING.
Fighters/PT Boats in the Traveller Universe
- Thread starter Carlobrand
- Start date
We have discussed AI in many posts, and I was thinking of AI drones and swarming a capital ship. Missiles, for the most part, are "dumb", but a drone equipped with the maximum G thrust possible, a computer with evade/targeting/jamming software (possible networking?), and a nuclear warhead could provide some advantage to an inferior fleet. A single drone is useless, but 1000 drones launched against several large targets could overload the automatic targeting software and slip through the defensive line of escorts and midsized vessels. I also thought the drone could be set up as a MIRV-type configuration that would create more targets.
There are several things that exist that fall outside the "idealized" combat of LBB5. Another example would be concentrated fire and Time-on-target that could combine multiple salvos from multiple ships into a single attack to overwhelm defenses [Represented in GAME MECHANICS by higher Weapon Factors for the To Hit and Penetration matrix.] What happens when MISSILES reach A-Z Weapon Factors?
That just falls outside the simplified rules (but begins to enter DRONE territory).
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Grouping bays into batteries to achieve factors above 9 - done that.
Making nukes the equivalent of spinals - no DM for factor less than 9 - still get the -6 on the surface explosion table - done that.
Allowing small spinals to be in capital bays for ships 100,000t+ - done that
Allowing fighters to combine weapon factors and attack as a squadron - done that
Fighter range - agility is no longer a DM for turret weapons - done that.
Making nukes the equivalent of spinals - no DM for factor less than 9 - still get the -6 on the surface explosion table - done that.
Allowing small spinals to be in capital bays for ships 100,000t+ - done that
Allowing fighters to combine weapon factors and attack as a squadron - done that
Fighter range - agility is no longer a DM for turret weapons - done that.
Just to clarify (for someone that doesn't use LBB5 combat much) these are all your House Rules and not later "OFFICIAL Changes", right?
It is hard to track the rules bloat when they scatter it throughout magazines and other books.
IMTU-
For missiles, I backtracked through the CT Striker redefinitions and turret battery, settling on 30 missiles for turrets and 2 bay missiles for a 100 ton attack. Each bay missile is 15x as big as a turret missile, which yields a 750kg missile by the missile supplement standard.
The bay missiles have more room for a full EW penetration suite plus sand and decoys, and I allow for armor and terminal computer upgrades. Turret missiles, not so much room for such plus powering it.
My conception is that they can’t concentrate more missiles into the same attack space ‘window’ without incurring fratricidal problems. So, upper limit of what can be put into an attack fits a battery.
Increased damage comes from kinetic strikes, either via the missile supplement for LBB2 or customization for LBB5. My value is one battery factor up per combined vee of 5, you’ll have to figure one out if using trad LBB5 tables.
Sidenote, Striker has 15cm and 25cm nuke warheads, perfectly matching with the turret and bay missile descriptions. So I use those for missile building nowadays.
Of course the big ugly in the room is using small craft sized drones for kinetic impact. Maybe carriers are less small craft bases and more missile barges?
For missiles, I backtracked through the CT Striker redefinitions and turret battery, settling on 30 missiles for turrets and 2 bay missiles for a 100 ton attack. Each bay missile is 15x as big as a turret missile, which yields a 750kg missile by the missile supplement standard.
The bay missiles have more room for a full EW penetration suite plus sand and decoys, and I allow for armor and terminal computer upgrades. Turret missiles, not so much room for such plus powering it.
My conception is that they can’t concentrate more missiles into the same attack space ‘window’ without incurring fratricidal problems. So, upper limit of what can be put into an attack fits a battery.
Increased damage comes from kinetic strikes, either via the missile supplement for LBB2 or customization for LBB5. My value is one battery factor up per combined vee of 5, you’ll have to figure one out if using trad LBB5 tables.
Sidenote, Striker has 15cm and 25cm nuke warheads, perfectly matching with the turret and bay missile descriptions. So I use those for missile building nowadays.
Of course the big ugly in the room is using small craft sized drones for kinetic impact. Maybe carriers are less small craft bases and more missile barges?
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Yes they are all house rules I have tried at one time or another, and there are a lot more.
Ooh, torpedoes.
You could put rails on your fighters and give them the ability to salvo three of them before returning to your carrier to reload.The High Guard nuke, from that 100 EP bit, appears to have a 12 ton yield, which is about the smallest one can manage and get a kaboom. Bigger nukes are definitely a good idea, though I don't know to what degree cost would become a factor. How are you handling damage with the bigger nukes?
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
If you strap them to the outside the performance of your fighter degrades as it is now over tonnage.
Marcatlas
SOC-12
Cool! I would think so.
I treat the black globe damage bit as 10 tons per EP. So say two nuke bay missiles at factor 9 hit, that’s 9000 tons of surface damage and another 9000 tons of radiation. I split the damage into two halves, so 2 4500 tons surface and 2 4500 tons of radiation.
Hulls are huge damage sinks, tons equal to total ship tonnage plus or minus some. Radiation affects hull too- neutron embrittlement. Fuel of course is a major damage sink, but with radiation it has a new effect- it goes unrefined.
Occurs to me that if one has gone to the trouble to make home rules for something, one could make home rules to allow this as well. One could address the issue in the design stage, for example, allowing a half-dTon for ordnance and then fashioning a form-fitting depression for them perhaps, or a tube if one is absolutely wedded to the idea of an unbroken hull. Tube might work better since you won't have to deal with the question of what happens to them if the fighter takes a hit that does minimal damage. At 15x as big, those puppies amount to 1.5 kiloliters each, about 1/3 dTon for the three.
Striker gives 0.1 kt a penetration of 97 using the collapsing round table, and Striker's conversion translates an HG armor rating of 15 into a Striker armor rating of 85. MT doesn't have nukes that I know of, but their other weapons correlate pretty closely to their Striker counterparts, and they'd say an armor rating of 85 is a -15 DM, so amounts to the same. Allowing for the +6 for nuclear missiles, I think the 0.1 nuke still comes up with a -19+6=-13 Megatrav DM? Or +13 HG? That's a shot at interior explosions even for a 15 armor craft. That's pretty wicked, especially considering the warhead isn't very big by Striker standards, and at about a thousand credits each they're not that expensive compared to the cost of the missile itself. I have no idea how to figure a contact penetration beyond that point, but at some point the roll becomes moot and you're just going straight to the crit table.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
It either fits in the hull volume or it doesn't. if you want to house rule it that you can strap missiles to the outside of ships at no penalty then I can have 1000 anti-missile missiles on the outside of my 1000t destroyer.
I like the idea of an antimissile, but forget antimissiles: Macross Missile Massacre! Although 1) I held it to 3 because I figured the fighter's native fire control system would top out at 3 since it could only handle a turret with 3 missiles, so maybe cap it at 50 per launch for your destroyer since a 100 dT bay has 50 launchers (at least in Striker), and 2) the more I think about it, the more a tube launcher makes sense over a rail since we otherwise have to come up with rules for what happens when someone plays lasers over your destroyer's hull, the torpedoes being outside of the armor if they're on rails, and tubes would mean about 6 dTons per salvo in torpedo tubes. Which would be really cool if those 50 torpedoes were deadly enough, and assuming a reload is something you'd have to do between battles. Launching torpedoes is kind of a destroyer thing, after all.
At lower TLs (12-) when nuclear dampers are less available/brand new (thus expensive) tech how would the use of higher yield nukes change the use of PT boats?
So @Tobias says that the 10kt nuke barely penetrates a proper warships armour. What about 150mt?
If a 50dton boat can race around and drop two high yield nukes before running for home do you think that’ll cause a proliferation of faster smaller ships (cheaper when destroyed, larger numbers therefore more targets/missiles on target, etc) or will there be heavier ships with immense armour capable of ‘tanking’ a few shots?
So @Tobias says that the 10kt nuke barely penetrates a proper warships armour. What about 150mt?
If a 50dton boat can race around and drop two high yield nukes before running for home do you think that’ll cause a proliferation of faster smaller ships (cheaper when destroyed, larger numbers therefore more targets/missiles on target, etc) or will there be heavier ships with immense armour capable of ‘tanking’ a few shots?
Jehosephat! Tsar Bomba came in around 50 Mt. This 150 Mt beast could probably kill a battlewagon a couple of miles away from it.
Only downside to high yield nukes is they're expensive if you're using Striker's costs, so you'd have to be pretty sure it got to the target to justify the price. 150 Mt would be MCr1500.
I chose 150MT because it is a very high yeild nuke, about the upper limit (so I have been told) of what we would be capable of deploying today if we were still building big nukes instead of MIRVs.
The cost does seem immense but it actually isn't that bad compared to real costs. If we assume a credit is roughly a dollar in 1977 - that means our 150MT nuke would cost $754,113,318.37 in 2023. The actual cost of a MIRV on a nuclear sub is apparently roughly $200 million (though it is hard to find data from any source that isn't rabidly anti-nuke so accuracy may vary.)
If we use a B-83 (1.5MT) as a basic cost I think we'd be down to about Mcr15 a unit - which is around $7m basically chump change in defense spending.
Just FYI: You have a math error in your cost calculation. 1 Credit = (1977)$1 = (2024)$5.27 ... let's round to Cr 1 = $5 for simplicity.
@Carlobrand gave a price of Cr 1,500,000,000 (1.5 billion credits) for each 150 MT nuke ... that would be over $7.5 billion dollars per shot ($7,500,000,000)
[Potentially a price worth paying for a weapon that will eliminate a SOTA USN aircraft carrier task group with a single shot.]
