Fighters

[Renaissance Man]

All this talk about cruisers, and the various size breakdowns of warships got me thinking. Most of the stuff I've read recently about Traveller is from T4, and in T4, the advent of using fighters in fleet battles was decisive in favour of the Imperium.

What do you folks think? Would there be a point to a "carrier" class ship in space combat? Are masses of fighters effective against larger ships? Some people have already discussed how a cloud of missiles can pretty much take out anything - what about a cloud of agile armed small craft?

If fighters work, then a greater emphasis has to be placed on point defence, altering the overall effectiveness of large capital ships.

I'm starting to think that however kewl they may be, the economics and dynamics of space combat do not favour bloated battleships.

 

[Major B]

I've been giving fighters some thought lately, mostly in the context of how they would assist in a planetary assault but also how they would support the fleet.

I can't say what canon will have to say on this particular subject, but I think there would be two distinct types of fighters - atmospheric and non-atmospheric.

Non-atmospheric fighters don't require streamlining so they are cheaper and they can afford more armor (imagine a bunch of flying bricks being launched to defend the fleet). These "fleet fighters" would have variants based on their roles:

Light fighters intended to engage at (relatively) long ranges using lasers.

Heavy fighters that get as close as possible to avoid enemy defenses - heavily armored so maybe a bit slower and mounting fusion guns.

Strike fighters - missile carriers that hold the middle ground between light and heavy fighters.

Patrol fighters - long endurance craft with a mix of offensive weapons intended to perform recon, screening, and something analogous to combat air patrol.

The atmospheric fighters would be broken down into light, heavy, and strike variants and would be designed with speed in mind. Since grav vehicles have taken some of the roles of the attack helicopters and fixed-wing fighters of today, the atmospheric fighters would be designed for extreme speeds to hit enemy planetary defense targets prior to the drop troops being released. This would be a phase of the operation where extreme speed would help keep the fighters safe and the light fighters might be able to stand off and use their lasers to hit pinpoint targets from beyond the enemy's range (depending on how they array the defense). They'd also hang around after the troops drop to provide on call support.

Then again, all of this is nothing more than a product of my brain housing group - do these roles make sense in game terms?

 

[atpollard]

I suspect that the answer is very rules version dependant.

In CT book 2 combat there are no Bay Weapons or Spinal Mounts, so a swarm of 20 dTon fighters might overwhelm a 2000 dTon warship.

In CT High Guard combat it is an easy matter to create an armored ship immune to all but the largest spinal mounts – fighters would be harmless gnats to be swatted at leisure (without some house rules to change that).

Other Traveller versions would probably fall somewhere between these two extremes.

 

[Plankowner]

It all depends on what weapons are allowed on your fighter and how much damage it can do.

Current atmospheric fighter can carry enough fire power to knock out the largest atmospheric ship and cause significant damage to sea and land-based targets.

If you envision space fighters having that same kind of fire power, then Fighters will be very effective and cost effective.

Using HG, fighters cannot damage large, high tech ships, so their effectiveness is limited to smaller or lower tech opponents.

A fighter is very effective against Scout or Free Trader but worthless against a Tigress.

 

[Renaissance Man]

Hurm. Assuming one wants to play with the 2nd law of thermodynamics in full effect, weaponry should always be a step ahead of armour at the same TL. Thinking back to my lego days, it was always easier to break something than make something.

It makes sense that a warship should be able to pack enough armour that a single fighter would be hard pressed to do any significant damage before getting picked off. But it is counter-intuitive to see such a vessel as an impregnable shell, without any vulnerabilities against a fighter. Sensor arrays have to stick out, M drives are visible, hardpoints, communications, etc. - these have got to be vulnerable to fighters - even if we take it as a given that structural armour is too thick for their puny weapons.

And fighters, if they are able to close to less than a kilometre, have got to be troublesome to hit with a spinal mount. I'd say pretty much impossible. So that means warships have to invest in some degree of anti-fighter point defense weapons.

Well, we'll see what T5 has to say on the matter. I'm also planning on setting my game pretty far back in Imperial history, so maybe TL is also a factor.

 

[PFVA63]

I suspect that the answer is very rules version dependant.

In CT book 2 combat there are no Bay Weapons or Spinal Mounts, so a swarm of 20 dTon fighters might overwhelm a 2000 dTon warship.

In CT High Guard combat it is an easy matter to create an armored ship immune to all but the largest spinal mounts – fighters would be harmless gnats to be swatted at leisure (without some house rules to change that).

Other Traveller versions would probably fall somewhere between these two extremes.

Hi,

As noted by atpollard, above, the effectiveness of fighters and carriers is probably dependent on what rules you are using, as the way fighters are treated kind of seems to very somewhat from rule set to rule set.

Specifically, the 1st Edition of CT doesn't really include fighters but all other small craft tend to be fuel hogs. In the game MayDay fighters are added, and in that game the fuel consumption impacts are reflected in terms of how many turns a small craft can accelerate. In MayDay, the fighters provided have a maximum maneuver rating of 4G's and a maximum number of fuel burns of 12 turns.

In the 2nd Edition of CT, fighters are added, and their fuel consumption is greatly reduced (effectively eliminating any limits on fuel burns for game purposes).

In Book 5 - High Guard, fuel consumption is similar to 2nd Edition CT but the book adds limitations on launch, recovery, and stowage.

In Traveller 4, stowage requirements for small craft, including fighters are increased beyond that in CT, and the maneuverability of standard fighters range from 6G for light fighters to 4G for heavy fighters.

Unfortunately I can't find my copies of TNE or MegaTraveller right now, but you can kind of see how things vary from version to version, and you can also see that in many cases the maneuvering rating of many of the standard fighter designs provided are only on par with other vessels. As such, in some ways fighters in some versions of Traveller may be less along the lines of modern real world atmospheric fighters (which are relatively fast and maneuverable in comparison to the ships they operate around) and more along the lines of just really small ships of similar speed and maneuverability of the larger ships they operate around.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

Regards

PF

 

[Starviking]

Tne

I saw fighters in TNE as being scouts and a harrying force. With TNE's fuel limits a force could extend it's sensor and attack reach by carrying fighters - which generally had a lot of g-turns.

The standard missiles in TNE had limited g-turns - 12 I think, so fighters could also extend the missile engagement range of a fleet by bringing them closer to the target.

Starviking

 

[Captain Midnight]

As many others have pointed out, it's going to be very dependent on whichever set of rules for ship construction, operations, and combat that you're using.

While it's possible to make capital ships that are essentially invulnerable in game terms to the weaponry that can be carried on a fighter (always excepting the handy-dandy nuclear warhead), it's significantly harder to build everything in the fleet to that standard, especially at tech levels lower than "top of the line Imperial". Fighters will generally be really fast for whatever TL they are built at, and it will be somewhat harder to hit them. However, their cost per displacement ton built will be somewhat higher, as you will have to be buying multiple copies of all the things that a single hull of equivalent size would only be carrying one set of. On the other hand, you get a lot more hardpoints available (and thus, a larger number of deployed weapons) for a given displacement tonnage, too.

There are advantages and disadvantages to having a lot of little ships. You can cover multiple locations by simply sending some of your force to one place and some more of it to another, whereas a single hull doesn't have that luxury. You can't have the entire force knocked out by one lucky hit from a big gun (presuming you've launched); instead, that meson gun will only knock out one fighter per round, if it can even hit them. However, it's more expensive (especially when you include the cost of the carrier), and it's harder to do massive damage in a short period of time, and it's potentially harder to train a lot of qualified pilots.

In general, for situations that fit actual scenarios that might arise (as opposed to generic Trillion Credit Squadron "two fleets enter, one fleet leaves" games set far from any notable astrographic feature), fighters have some utility for purposes other than "engaging the enemy battle line". Is that utility enough to make them worthwhile? I'd say "probably, in some contexts". If your ship design rules let them be faster than anything else around, that's helpful. If they bring more guns to the party than anything else, that's also helpful. If they let you scout out more space than you could possibly cover any other way, that could be helpful, too.

 

[navywarlord]

It makes sense that a warship should be able to pack enough armour that a single fighter would be hard pressed to do any significant damage before getting picked off. But it is counter-intuitive to see such a vessel as an impregnable shell, without any vulnerabilities against a fighter. Sensor arrays have to stick out, M drives are visible, hardpoints, communications, etc. - these have got to be vulnerable to fighters - even if we take it as a given that structural armour is too thick for their puny weapons.

And fighters, if they are able to close to less than a kilometre, have got to be troublesome to hit with a spinal mount. I'd say pretty much impossible. So that means warships have to invest in some degree of anti-fighter point defense weapons.

Renaissance Man makes an excellent observation in that no matter how well armored a ship may be, there will "exposed" areas on the hull that a fighter's weapons can damage and destroy. Given enough of this "minor" damage - the capital ship's fighting ability will be reduced or nulified... Even the biggest gun is useless if it can't be aimed - a battleship without sensors or communications will have difficulty hitting anything....

Another thing to point out is that while the capital ship's weaponry is focused on the fighters, those fighters that are carrying missiles (especially nukes) will be getting close in shots... A nuke exploding in contact with the enemy hull will take a huge chunk out of it - and open another weak spot for fighters to concentrate their guns...

 

[Renaissance Man]

Part of the problem with my questions here is that I'm I total newb. I end up calling out all you old hands and rules experts who dutifully research the canon, and then I turn my nose up at it because it doesn't make logical sense.

Just letting all you folks out there who have been helping me out know that I AM interested in the canon answer, though I may not want to use it in my game if I can't think of a good explanation for it. I want MTU to have some solid consistency, and a good answer for any question I or my players might have.

Now for fighters, I'm thinking that they are on their own of limited utility. But because of their ability to hit vulnerable targets on even large warships, and their agility, they represent another aspect of fleet combat that cannot be ignored. In addition, if they ARE a threat, and can draw the attention of a ship's spinal mount or bay weaponry, they are tying up crucial resources that might otherwise be used against an larger opponent. They are useful for harrying a fleet, scouting, and raiding vulnerable ships (e.g. freighters). The big boys better have some good point defence, or even better, fighters of their own to engage in dogfights.

I do NOT think that fighters can carry weaponry that can reliably destroy a warship single-handedly (except with maybe several direct hits on a specific area, a near-impossible feat in a combat situation.) That is 20th and 21st century thinking that may not be analagous to the Traveller era.

What I am for is Major B's toolbox analogy. Fighters are another tool in the toolbox, turning fleet combat into something more than just hammers and nails. Incidentally, that goes for the ecm/eccm discussion as well.

Thanks to all of ya, BTW. Ideas are flowing at an almost intoxicating pace on this board, and I'm loving it

 

[Antony]

In TNE fighters cannot destroy a large warship though the combat rules mean they can blind such a vessel by the process known technically as hull scraping. This being where nuclear detonation missiles remove sensor and targetting arrays from large ships.

This is not so much a limit on fighters as on the size of warheads available in the rules which will not penetrate the sort of armour found on heavy cruisers and battlewagons. Smaller warships though are vulnerable, especially if the fighter is used in a stand off role to add more nuclear detonation missiles to a basket being controlled from another ship.

 

[R_Chance]

I'm just now pulling up all my old MT stuff, but IIRC fighter's were no threat to capitol ships with maximium armor / nuclear dampners. One thing about "fighters" -- as was mentioned above IMTU I have a distinction between deep space fighters and orbital / atmospheric. I use vehicle design rules to produce the orbital gravitically powered stuff which are referred to as fighters, etc. The orbital fighters generally don't mount the weapons necessary to challenge large warships -- they deal with smaller opponents. The space based boats are referred to as Missile Boats, Gun Boats etc. In my game they fulfill the roll of PT Boats, etc. in a wet navy. Given that they operate in the same environment as starships the distinction between orbital and space "fighters" seemed relevant and gives some color to the game. BTW I usually refer to ships carrying boats as tenders and save the carrier designation for ships carrying orbital fighters (for planetary seige / assault operations). There are a fairly large nuber of Assault cruisers and Seige Carriers with Marine fighter squadrons on board...

 

[Captain Midnight]

Renaissance Man makes an excellent observation in that no matter how well armored a ship may be, there will "exposed" areas on the hull that a fighter's weapons can damage and destroy. Given enough of this "minor" damage - the capital ship's fighting ability will be reduced or nulified... Even the biggest gun is useless if it can't be aimed - a battleship without sensors or communications will have difficulty hitting anything....

That's the reason for those "Weapon-1" hits on the High Guard damage tables up near the end. There's also more to "armoring" a ship than just giving it a thick skin; there are ways to brace and reinforce any parts that have to be exposed, and to protect and replace many others. It's easy for a ship to have many many sets of antennas, and only extend them outside the hull when battle damage forces them to; see Niven & Pournelle's "Mote in God's Eye" series to see how that might work.

Remember that the starship combat results are an abstraction, as are things like "weapons factors" and "armor rating", and they're a pretty high-level abstraction at that. We aren't given a lot of detail in the ship rules about what is or isn't practical -- to cite one example from Renaissance Man's post above, how do you know that M-drives are able to be hit by fighters and their direct-fire weaponry? All you can go by is the results from the damage tables, and for ships with sufficient armor, there's no way for anything besides a nuclear missile (or a factor-A or greater weapon) to get a "Maneuver-1" result on the "Surface Explosions" table.

Another thing to point out is that while the capital ship's weaponry is focused on the fighters, those fighters that are carrying missiles (especially nukes) will be getting close in shots... A nuke exploding in contact with the enemy hull will take a huge chunk out of it - and open another weak spot for fighters to concentrate their guns...

Unless, of course, the capital ship's nuclear dampers aren't working. Again, for most rulesets, this is a pretty high-level abstraction, but for ships built at TL 14 or 15, they can shrug off anything besides enormous salvos of nukes, which fighters by definition can't provide.

If you want nuclear missiles launched by fighters to be the weapons of decision, you're going to need to operate either outside the TL spread of most Imperial ships, or come up with house rules.

 

[atpollard]

A nuke exploding in contact with the enemy hull will take a huge chunk out of it - and open another weak spot for fighters to concentrate their guns...

While I agree completely on a personal level, let me argue for the other side for a moment:

Superdense armor is made from partially colapsed matter - like the stuff that forms in the core of big stars (but not quite neutronium or black hole density) so the armor may be able to shrug off a nuke. Bonded Superdense uses active fields to strengthen molecular bonds. Even without nuclear screens, TL 13+ ships might be Nuclear resistant.

The rules are the rules - some make sense and others don't - I was just offering an argument from a logic perspective to support invulnerable battleships if you want them.

 

[atpollard]

I'm just now pulling up all my old MT stuff, but IIRC fighter's were no threat to capitol ships with maximium armor / nuclear dampners.

MegaTraveller had some interesting rules about picking what you hit when the range gets close.

 

[R_Chance]

MegaTraveller had some interesting rules about picking what you hit when the range gets close.

I had some house rules left over from my CT / HG days that allowed them to target some things (i.e. sensor or communication arrays, turrets, etc.) at point blank range. Things that essentially projected beyond the hull armor to function. Still, annoy a capitol ship (shorten it's sensor range, harass it, etc.) they could, but not take it down.

 

[atpollard]

I had some house rules left over from my CT / HG days that allowed them to target some things (i.e. sensor or communication arrays, turrets, etc.) at point blank range. Things that essentially projected beyond the hull armor to function. Still, annoy a capitol ship (shorten it's sensor range, harass it, etc.) they could, but not take it down.

What, in your opinion, would be the result of a fighter shooting a coventional missile 'down the barrel' of a spinal mount at visual range?

A fighter disabling a spinal mount seems like a possibility to me - not an easy task, but possible. That could have a Tactical impact on a battle.

 

[R_Chance]

What, in your opinion, would be the result of a fighter shooting a coventional missile 'down the barrel' of a spinal mount at visual range?

A fighter disabling a spinal mount seems like a possibility to me - not an easy task, but possible. That could have a Tactical impact on a battle.

I usually rated the armor of exposed components at half that of the ship. Commo masts, scanners, etc. Also personnel airlocks, launch tube doors, etc that required access to space or a better view / fire arc like turrets. I would imagine the business end of a spinal weapon would have a cover, to keep it clear of debris, prevent sabotage etc. How well armoured it would be is a question... probably better armoured than exposed components. Hard to say. If it's a spinal meson mount it might not need any hatch -- just shoot right through the hull armor that covers it. Mesons penetrate matter until they hit their decay point and release their energy. PA covers might just snap open for a second to fire (like an iris valve)... I would think if their was any significant chance of a down the barrel shot they would minimize it. Depends a lot on how you imagine the spinal mount firing -- continuos beam fire or just short powerful bursts. I favored the latter myself. I wanted fighters / boats to be able to harass the big ships, but not blow them away. In short I expected space fighter / boat superirity to give a tactical advantage, not win the battle in a fleet confrontation.

 

[sandmanninja]

My thinking is:
If a Capital Ship is hardened against small-ship attacks by conventional weapons, I don't see the problems of equiping them with Tactical Nuclear Warhead missiles.

High Speed missiles with a 50-kiloton nuclear bomb would do wonders for breaking up a Capital ship.

The (new) Cylons have no problems deploying them...

 

[Captain Midnight]

MegaTraveller had some interesting rules about picking what you hit when the range gets close.

GT has rules for picking a target as well, and for critical success letting you bypass much of the armor, although the "visual range" thing doesn't really seem to matter. Traveller ship combat, with 10,000 mile hexes, 20-minute turns, and significant velocity differentials isn't a good way to recreate either "Battle of Midway" or "womp-rats in Beggars Canyon".