Fighters

[R_Chance]

Batteries bearing was always a function of size. I don't recall it factoring config in CT, and it doesn't in MT.

MT is purely size.

Looking in my reprint of HG (my original LBBs including both versions / printings of HG are boxed elsewhere) I can't find it either... have to check around. Could be I'm remembering a different game, although it makes perfect sense for the config to effect batteries bearing.

 

[R_Chance]

I agree that it would be implicit that the capitol ships would have to execute a High Guard version of the Tojo Turn to bring the spinal guns to bear, but that begs the question of the language and rules used in High Guard and Trillion Credit Squadron for conducting the battles.

It says on pg 23 on the Batteries chart that "the number of batteries which may bear in combat is affected by the size of the ship." The rules for laying out and resolving the battle say for the ships to fight in a line which screens the secondary line. In fact the fleet must move at the rate of the slowest ship in the line because that is how initiative is determined. And further, that the player may fire as many or few of batteries bearing as he wants modified only by the pg 23 size chart.

On page 29 in HG it says that ships will change attitude to make sure the maximum batteries are bearing. They can't all be clustered on the front of the ship, so that logically means the batteries are along the flanks.

All this, and having participated in Trillion Credit Squadron matches (where we literally lined our ship figures up like we were playing Wooden Ships & Iron Men) at cons in the 80's has always has always given me the impression that the battles would resemble a line action. We didn't face of and pass eachother like in Babylon 5 or something - though that would be kinda interesting..... In fact on pg 38 the phrase "line of battle" is used.

But, given that spinal weapons being what they are means that the capitol ships must point them directly at eachother, and agility seems to play such an important role in hit resolution, AND, considering that the ships are realistically going to be at greater ranges than Nelson's, then it's not unlikely that the capitol ships fire the spinal guns first, then turn to present the secondary batteries so they can interdict the incoming missiles, etc.

BTW: where is it that the configuration of the hull can also determine batteries bearing? I can't find it in TCS or High Guard but if you have something like that I'd love to see it because if there is some way of computing batteries bearing based on configuration, too, then that would make more sense to me than just basing it on size.

It doesn't say which way the line is pointing A forward facing line screens the line behind it just as well as a side facing line. The idea of pointing toward the enemy also makes sense of the dancing back and forth in range between long and short range based on initiative -- it's much more difficult to close on an unwilling foe in a broadside line. You could read this either way of course, and the system is so abstract it could work either way. I like the forward facing line. It minimizes the "jigging" back and forth to bring main batteries to bare on the enemy and positions you to close with or (by spinning in place and presenting your MD to the enemy) breaking away. Personally I'd like to keep my guns / sensors on the enemy at all times (unless I'm running like the wind...).

The batteries bearing thing is sticking in my mind, although I can't find it at the moment. It's not in the later printing of High Guard. Could be homebrew, or obscure. I'll check. I distinctly remember thinking back in the day that the cone / wedge configuration was a better bet because of that (just "wedge" in the later printing of HG)... maybe in Space Opera (a close cousin of Traveller and a bit derivative of it IMHO). Anyway I'll poke around for it.

*edit* Just thought of something else, for missile batteries exact positioning might not matter as much as for energy batteries (LOS weapons). Could just be verticle launch tubes. Sand casters seem to be unguided once launched (IMO) and might need to bare directly). Meson guns might not need to either -- as long as you don't time the decay of the mesons inside your own ship (or accidentally precipitate that decay with a meson screen) you could fire through your own hull... on my designs there is no open barrel for meson weapons btw (obviously there is for particle accelerators, plasma / fusion guns, and lasers). I feel further modifications to the "batteries bearing" rule coming on (assuming I modded it for config to begin with...).

 

[sabredog]

Yeah, it's pretty abstract, but it gets the job done well enough for stage dressing. If you find the info on configuration please let me know. It's a good concept.


Now back to fighters and their care n' feeding........

How many fighters do you design for, what do they carry, and why? Maybe that'll get us back to original question?

 

[R_Chance]

Yeah, it's pretty abstract, but it gets the job done well enough for stage dressing. If you find the info on configuration please let me know. It's a good concept.


Now back to fighters and their care n' feeding........

How many fighters do you design for, what do they carry, and why? Maybe that'll get us back to original question?

You are an optimist

I have fighters, carried aboard assault / seige carriers, as well as missile boats (etc.) carried aboard fleet, light and escort tenders. The fighters are small (sub 10 dt) and for use in atmosphere to orbit. They are airframe designs using gravitic drives (rather than thruster plates). They are essentially built on a vehicle scale rather than a starship scale. They might swarm all over a ship in the right circumstances of course (in orbit, dipping fuel froma gas giant, etc.). My MBs (and gun boats etc.) are used in deep space, fullfilling the role of torpedo boats / recon aircraft for fleets. They are more typical small craft for the TU. Boats with displacements running from 20 to 100 dt's and thruster type MDs. They have a fairly long duration due to the nature of their missions (weeks rather than the single day or less of a classic "fighter"). They have a smaller role in battle due to the limited effectiveness of missiles against capitol ships.

 

[dccarles]

In battleship combat, unlike the old days of sailing ships, the guns were designed to arc the shells into the target and drop through (hence the term) the deck armor and superstructure armors.

They weren't designed to do this, so much as long ranges and muzzle velocities limited by by the speed of the expansion of burning powder forced them to. Because the deck was hit at a very acute angle by shells, deck armour could be only 1-2" thick and still resist enemy shells at realistic engagement ranges. 2000 lb AP bombs carried by late-war aircraft, on the other hand, were like a Lawn Dart through a paper boat.

The punching through the deck ship-killing method was why Billy Mitchell declared years before (and proved) that aircraft made the battlewagons obsolete. The Arizona, Bismark, YAmato...the list goes on, proved him right.

At the time - 1921 - he was wrong; the tests were more a propaganda exercise than a real test of battleship survivability. Also note that the Bismarck was disabled by torpedo bombers, the Yamato suffered a combination of bombs and torpedoes, and the Arizona was lost to a bomb that detonated her magazine that could not have penetrated her armour - either a hatch was left open, or powder was stored on deck. (Courtesy of Wikipedia; it's not like I carry my two Conway's All The World's Fighting Ships with me all the time.) Early/mid-war battleships had more to fear from torpedo bombers than dive-bombers.

The heavy armor belts around the hulls of battleships were for torpedo defense, along with spaced armoring called torpedo bulges.

The heavy armour belts predated the locomotive torpedo, and were there to stop AP shells. Their anti-torpedo benefits were minor - damage from torpedoes came from shock and flooding, which an armour belt wouldn't stop. Certainly the difficulty and expense of sloping them wasn't justified by anti-torpedo benefits.

Now you could argue that that rule shows that fighters could do the same thing to a 100kt battleship in High Guard that planes did to the Yamato WW2 and always try to do the bomb runs in the areas where the batteries had been scrubbed off. The planes didn't sink the Yamato, but they got close enough to cripple her and she would have been easy pickings for any nearby battleship as a result.

They did, actually. She was listing, but was destroyed by a magazine explosion caused by a fire.

Maybe a torpedo run against a capital ship should somehow have it factored in that if the torpedo craft ( a large fighter with a missile bay sized nuke missile) approaches inside these damaged areas then it can get close enough to fire the nuke into a vulnerable area and damage the ship in a real way?

'Scrubbing' is an interesting idea; Wikipedia states that strafing caused casualties among the AA gun crews of the Yamato, and while this isn't likely in High Guard, the damage tables imply that weapons and fuel aren't fully protected by armour envelope.

High Guard also implies that fighters have a place in the fleet with the initiative roll. The larger fleet gains a bonus of +1, and every craft capable of moving and firing counts. That +1 can make a big difference if you're facing a meson- or missile-armed fleet (that is, almost always.)

--Devin

 

[dccarles]

Looking in my reprint of HG (my original LBBs including both versions / printings of HG are boxed elsewhere) I can't find it either... have to check around. Could be I'm remembering a different game, although it makes perfect sense for the config to effect batteries bearing.

The first mention of configuration having any effect on batteries bearing was, I'm pretty sure, in Traveller: The New Era. It was in Brilliant Lances and Fire, Fusion and Steel. High Guard based batteries bearing exclusively on ship size, which doesn't make much sense. (Why is a spherical 100kt ship able to fire a smaller proportion of its batteries than a spherical 10kt ship?)

--Devin

 

[dccarles]

You are an optimist

After my megalong post on aircraft vs. battleships, I am much chastened.

Fighters are actually pretty useful, even at high TLs. Many posts have pointed out novel uses for fighters. Not every operation is a combat operation, and not every combat operation is a toe-to-toe meson slugathon between two mighty fleets. High Guard assumes that contact between enemy fleets has already occurred, and fighters can be critical in making (or avoiding) that contact.

I also find them useful for commerce raiding and defence. Any small cargo ship in a convoy can become an escort carrier.

The fighters I design, then, are either heavy or light. Heavy fighters include the best possible computer and a bridge: they're for direct combat against enemy warships. (If reconnaissance isn't necessary, they're often powered by capacitors rather than a power plant, in order to reduce weight and cost.) Light fighters, on the other hand, have enough processing power to deal with a typical small (<1000 dt) ship and often have a beam weapon for the ground strike role.

--Devin

 

[far-trader]

...High Guard based batteries bearing exclusively on ship size, which doesn't make much sense. (Why is a spherical 100kt ship able to fire a smaller proportion of its batteries than a spherical 10kt ship?)

It's an abstraction. The simple answer is it takes longer to spin a 100Kt ship than a 10Kt ship (at speeds that don't mess up the ship) so it can bring batteries to bear on a specific target in the time required to aim and fire. And the bigger the ship the longer it takes. And don't forget that somehow the ship is able to continue to bring effective batteries to bear even after some are damaged and will eventually be bringing 100% of it's active batteries to bear. Again, it's just an abstraction probably not meant to imply too much beyond being a rule for game interest.

Thinking about it now, configuration may be canceled out by this same factor. A shape that allows more batteries to bear (like a Needle/Wedge) is likely to be more prone to high stress under sudden reorientation. While a shape with fewer batteries bearing (like a Close Structure or Sphere) is likely to be less prone to high stress.

Seems like using size will work just fine, and it is easy

 

[spank]

idea?

I was reading the rules for feul hits, as someone said something about them earlier, and a question occured to me, why should a 100,000 Dton ship loose more feul to a hit than a 100 or 1000 dton ship, shouldn't the size of the leak be based on the size of the attacking weapon, not the target?

what about using an upper limit on feul spills based on the weapon that makes the hit?

 

[far-trader]

I was reading the rules for fuel hits, as someone said something about them earlier, and a question occurred to me, why should a 100,000 Dton ship loose more fuel to a hit than a 100 or 1000 dton ship, shouldn't the size of the leak be based on the size of the attacking weapon, not the target?

what about using an upper limit on fuel spills based on the weapon that makes the hit?

Shouldn't all damage be based on the size of the weapon hitting? Like more than just Drive -1 whether it was a puny single turret laser or whopping big bay or spinal mount?

But wait, the damage is related to weapon punch after all per the tables and actually hitting.

And for fuel specifically it's the tankage not hull size (though they are related). And given that fuel spaces are typically damage buffers it doesn't seem that unreasonable.

HG is very grainy, and it could be that the fuel hits are simply for ease of calculation and a presumption that it will all even out in the end.

Not that I disagree with you, and I recall a house rule that said it was a straight 10tons per Fuel-n hit rather than a percentage of the fuel tankage. And it was capacity loss, not necessarily actual fuel loss.

For example a ship with 220tons capacity but only 20tons remaining stood a good chance of not losing any actual fuel and still being able to fight, but they would have lost the ability to refuel and jump away before undertaking repairs.