How often do you use ANY Traveller ship combat rules?

[Condottiere]

From the design rules I recall from Fire Fusion Steel, make it fast enough to reach the target in one round from launch, maybe two with mid course correction.

Tactically, up the kilt shot or down the throat should split the target.

 

[vegascat]

The sling propelled rock, the original weapon of mass destruction, just ask Goliath.
If you want to figure out real ship to ship combat, join the Navy. Take a good look at the direction naval combat has been going over the last few thousand years.
Weapons used to attack other ships changed from thrown rocks to machine thrown boulders to a battery of explosive thrown balls to larger batteries of explosive thrown exploding balls to shaped explosive projectiles to larger guns with more range trying to penetrate thicker and metal armored sides to single or paired larger guns throwing shells farther and faster to penetrate thicker armor.
Last century, fleets of ships launched aircraft to drop shells on the thin decks to penetrate for maximum damage.
Now missiles are fired from over the horizon by ships or aircraft with large warheads to destroy or disable ships with a single hit. Many ships only carry a single cannon that is used only when all other measures have failed.
Weapons are being developed to increase range, rate of fire, accuracy, and lethality. Throughout the ages, as a new weapon was developed, new defenses were developed just as fast. Electronic warfare is expanding and is a side development used in concert with everything else to multiply effectiveness.
New weapon systems like railguns, lasers, hyper-speed missiles, stealth weapons, guided torpedoes, stealth aircraft, and next decades brain scratchers will all have their day before someone creates a defense.
Trying to knock sense into weapon systems and defenses hundreds or thousands of years from now is an exercise in Science Fiction.
Use the past to get a direction of where things may go. Read some good sci fi stories to see where others have conjectured where things may go. Look at past authors and see where their ideas lead and how accurate they were. Heinlein was about 60 percent correct. He was a high scorer in predictions. H G Wells actually predicted WWI and WWII with accurate dates, but saw only a single conflict without a pause and had a good estimate of future weapons.
Always remember, What is impossible today will be tomorrows boring old tech. When people go to new places, they take their tech with them, spreading it to primitive cultures without a thought. The primitives will want the new magical stuff by trade, theft, or making it themselves. Just remember original Star Trek when Kirk and company found gangster world and found out it was because a previous visit left a book among the creative natives.
What will be out there as groups of Travellers journey among the stars.

 

[Werner]

In general most space battles are going to be ruinous even if you win, I would expect most ACS avoid it like the plague.

A major major event to have several million CR worth of equipment explode in less then an hour.

What happens if you engage with a pirates corsair, and it was carrying 100 tons of gold in its cargo hold when you blew it up? What are the chances of recovering the gold afterwards, assuming it's in an expanding cloud of gold coins and bars mingled with debris of the ship, how would your collect you treasure?

 

[BRover]

In general most space battles are going to be ruinous even if you win, I would expect most ACS avoid it like the plague.

A major major event to have several million CR worth of equipment explode in less then an hour.

SFB made this point too--spend years and tons of cash (or whatever StarFleet uses instead) to build a nice, shiny new ship--and then see it get trashed beyond repair (if not exploded) in the first combat. Which gave a rationale for the PFs: they needed cheap attrition units that wouldn't break the economy in a war.

 

[whartung]

SFB made this point too--spend years and tons of cash (or whatever StarFleet uses instead) to build a nice, shiny new ship--and then see it get trashed beyond repair (if not exploded) in the first combat. Which gave a rationale for the PFs: they needed cheap attrition units taht wouldn't break the economy in a war.

This was made clear during the Rebellion.

In Traveller, ships take a LONG TIME to build, but the powers managed to burn their fleets up in the opening days quite quickly to the point that they could no longer press offensive operations due to lack of ships.

There may have been some ships in the yards, awaiting completion, but that's years away.

Thus the impasses and stalemate as no faction had enough ships to make an offensive punch, then, of course, Virus wielded its heavy hand.

 

[Straybow]

And TNE addressed all of that with its "hard" handwavium, specifically gravitic focused lasers and bomb pumped laser missiles.

They acknowledged those issues and came up with the "tech" to help solve the problem.
...


IF kinetic kill vehicles were viable, then laser defenses would likely obsolete them readily as the attack vehicles are sitting ducks to lasers. (Another reason for the bomb pumped missiles detonating "far away" from the target.)

Or they skipped them for the same reason we just "Don't Talk About" C-Rocks.

"we could add kinetic energy kill weapons but, that wouldn't be very fun -- would it."

I don't know TNE, but CT missiles are far too small for bomb-pumped lasers. They're about the size of a short range, heat-seeking air-to-air missile. Maybe they can make a nuke for the laser really small, but making a multi-G missile with range in tens of thousands of km would be huge, comparable to an ICBM (15-20 m), even with a gas core nuclear rocket with ISP over 10k. By starship rules they couldn't be built with a fusion reactor and maneuver drive much less than several dTons (even larger).


I think such missiles would be effective, since they would need only close to something less than 1000 km. But a typical Traveller small ship could only carry a few, unless built as a dedicated missile combatant.

 

[kilemall]

What happens if you engage with a pirates corsair, and it was carrying 100 tons of gold in its cargo hold when you blew it up? What are the chances of recovering the gold afterwards, assuming it's in an expanding cloud of gold coins and bars mingled with debris of the ship, how would your collect you treasure?

Well, fair chance in the Far Future that industrially created gold is No Big Deal, so I don't know that you'd bother.

But let's say it's any brand of Unobtanium. I'd say that's No Big Deal for technologies that do asteroid mining. There is money in that dust, techniques to recover it, and so specialized collectors to scoop up any amount of it. Between whatever is keeping fusion bottles, nuclear dampers and gravitics, some combination of highly efficient 'herding particles' tech exists.

A more relevant point is whether the richstuff dust is in a nice settled cloud sticking together, or expanding in a sphere from the point the explosion blew it apart. A few hours of expansion and even the best belter crew isn't going to recover enough to bother with densities dropping by the minute.


I imagine that's beside the main point, which I would interpret as 'piracy as economic proposition involves not blowing up the goods'.

Several ways to skin that cat. Among other things, that millions of credits of ACS would likely involve some low-impact piracy standards- heave over 10-20 tons of the cargo before jumping and you go in peace sort of stuff.

Actual boarding would often be the crazy sociopaths that you need to resist to the bitter end, or wartime raiding or total piracy/Q-ship or Very Necessary Personnel Capture.

Another thought, most pirates wouldn't risk big ships anyway. The corsair or whatever wouldn't bother with the actual boarding, it's more of a base of fire/loot hauling ship. The actual boarding ships would be faster disposable small craft.


CT actually had a mechanism that dealt with this. Big investment in the computer/software suite included the option for a fire control program called Select. This program allowed you to direct your fire on a specific component, Power Plant, J-drive, weapons, etc. You disable whatever the subsystem you want to, or threaten to, and the target ship will be more in the state you want it in when you approach.

Or vice versa, they may shoot your M-drive out but leave the jump drive so they can board, drift to 100D and then jump out.

Most modern ship computer Traveller versions don't have that, it's pretty powerful. If you incorporate that into a more current version, I'd make it expensive and dependent on having knowledge about the target ship. Standard ship designs, no problem, Annic Nova on first contact might make the program break down in AI fits.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Oh, I can see that...

"That last hit blew off half of their maneuver drive! Wait, what? Their M-drive has a target lock on us?!"


"No neutrino emissions from their power plant -- it's disabled. Target the upper hull with laser fire and demand they surrender."

(or)

"Their power plant is radiating neutrinos like crazy -- I don't know what they're powering up with it but I don't want to be in range when they open fire!"