Looking for Commonalities

[aramis]

Let's start with the broadest of points- Traveller is at it's core an RPG not a milsim.

Folks have tried to make it into a milsim, and it certainly sprung from and inspired some milsimish games, but ultimately a lot of the things you would need to know to actually run a war in the professional sense are missing and the subject of much argument and conjecture here.

MilSim was a MAJOR part of early Traveller. It's what Marc, Frank, and Loren paid their bills with... The Europa line being the most visible of Marc's wargames outside Traveller; Frank wrote minis rules and civil war sims. Loren made both of them more intelligible.

GDW was (and remained until the 90's) primarily a wargame company, that happened to also have a major RPG.

 

[CliffBates]

Let's start with the broadest of points- Traveller is at it's core an RPG not a milsim.

Folks have tried to make it into a milsim, and it certainly sprung from and inspired some milsimish games, but ultimately a lot of the things you would need to know to actually run a war in the professional sense are missing and the subject of much argument and conjecture here.

Just the most recent back and forth on ACS vs. BigShip means choosing one over the other ends up causing a radically different force, tech and tactics which would feedback into strategy and vice versa.

Many such 'how thing work' decisions end up being ultimately entertainment/aesthetic choices, even for OTU guys, the broadest of which is 'what Traveller version system to use'.

Even using minis/graph paper vs. Mayday vs. abstract ranging of various levels of nuance changes tactics.

So while I would agree with the basic fuel/map/choke point arguments most are putting on here, I would say a lot of how to characterize space combat depends on the system you use, what tweaks are put in, sensor/weapon/targetting mixes, and the aesthetic driving those choices.

Actually Traveller is an RPG that can encompass dimensions political-military-economic simulations.. if one is playing at that level. This is why it was far more attractive than SF gaming systems like Space Opera or TRSs SF-RPG system....

 

[warwizard]

So how do we see very faint signals today? We point a Telescope with a camera at the area and collect light for hours the resulting picture is then compared to previous pictures of the same location using one of several methods. (Most recently it's a digital file and a computer compares the pictures, but older pictures are used with a human wearing goggles that can switch between the images and we are great at detecting changes.) Yes some objects that we have recently seen are found in old photographs where we missed the object when we first looked at the pictures.

Obviously this does not work for space combat, we simply do not have the time to remain still for hours, and crew moving about causes vibrations that reduce the accuracy. So by necessity we are limited to detections that will provide enough photons in the limited time we have available so we lose 2 to 3 orders of magnitude on the size of the signatures we can detect compared to the space borne satellite taking long exposure photographs (Hubble) even if we have the same area of photon gathering as the instrument.

 

[esampson]

We are getting hung up on some terminology here. Sensors and the detecting of objects is mostly about being able to scan large volumes of space quickly enough then filtering through all your detected point sources to sort out between the natural ones and the ones generated by intelligent activity, and then review the ones listed by the computer as needing human interpretation.

No. Sensors and the detection of objects is about being able to discriminate a signal. It might be a large volume of space, it might not be. When we turn the Hubble telescope on an area of space that is deemed 'interesting' it isn't scanning a large area of space. It is very focused on a small area in order to discriminate minute differences from the background of space. When we are scanning for gamma ray bursters we are scanning a large area of space but we have no trouble at all spotting them because they are so powerful. This makes them very easy to discriminate against the background of space.

Ships, when they arrive, give off a really big signature. It's called Jump Flash (they also make it when they depart). From everything I've read you can forget about people not seeing them. They light up the sky like a GRB (nowhere near as powerful, of course, but much, much closer). Now that your presence has been announced you can expect to have other sensors able to discriminate minute differences turned on that tiny area of space you happen to be in.

. . .
( And the Voyager example the 20W is a radio transmitter dish radiating exactly at the earth on a known frequency, it is NOT an IR detection of 20W the isotope on board produces more IR than that, but it's not what we are detecting. )

Quite true. As has been pointed out we also know exactly where to look. The point, however, is that we are able to detect a weak signal at a very long distance with equipment that is designed to do that. We don't detect the thermal signature because we don't have equipment designed to read faint IR signatures at that distance and part of the reason for that is because we don't feel the need to be able to read faint IR signatures that far out. (There's also some technical issues, which I will address below). Of course in the Traveller universe with smugglers, pirates, and enemy warships there's a bit more incentive to construct such sensors.

So how do we see very faint signals today? We point a Telescope with a camera at the area and collect light for hours the resulting picture is then compared to previous pictures of the same location using one of several methods. (Most recently it's a digital file and a computer compares the pictures, but older pictures are used with a human wearing goggles that can switch between the images and we are great at detecting changes.) Yes some objects that we have recently seen are found in old photographs where we missed the object when we first looked at the pictures.

Obviously this does not work for space combat, we simply do not have the time to remain still for hours, and crew moving about causes vibrations that reduce the accuracy. So by necessity we are limited to detections that will provide enough photons in the limited time we have available so we lose 2 to 3 orders of magnitude on the size of the signatures we can detect compared to the space borne satellite taking long exposure photographs (Hubble) even if we have the same area of photon gathering as the instrument.

Well, that's one way we detect those faint signals. Another is that we point a larger aperture at what we are trying to look at. You are talking about optical telescopes. Our largest optical telescope is a little over 10m across. On the other hand our radio telescopes are around 100m across. This means they have 100 times the surface area to gather energy.

This is part of the reason why we can very easily pick up the signal from Voyager. 100x the area to gather the energy. There is also another reason. The signal from Voyager is broadcast in the 2.3 GHz or 8.4 GHz range. There's not a lot of stuff in between us and it that is broadcasting in that range. On the other hand when we point an optical telescope at something there's a lot of signals in that range between us and it. Even at night there's light bouncing around off the dust in the atmosphere from cities and even the other side of the planet and when you are talking about a 10m mirror (which gathers about 1.5 million times more light than the human eye) those tiny bits of light really add up. In order to pick the faint reflection of a distant asteroid out from this 'glare' you need a really long exposure time. Longer exposure means that the contrast is increased (as long as you aren't blowing out the high end). For IR the problem is even worse because the air actually emits IR, which is why we don't try and spot asteroids by their IR signature and we can't tell what the temperature is on Sedna.

This is why we built the Hubble. Even though its aperture is much smaller than ground based telescopes the fact that it is outside the atmosphere more than cancels that out. Why don't we build a space telescope with the same aperture as Earth telescopes? Because it is really hard for us to put things in orbit. When engineers design for space they are concerned about weight savings of kilograms.

Not such a big issue in Traveller. Even if you only have crummy TL-8 instruments because you can't import them from somewhere else it is almost trivial to put them into space. It is so easy, in fact, that the structural advantages alone of having them in zero G would probably outweigh the effort of putting them into space.

So since you probably have very large aperture sensors that are put outside the atmosphere you probably don't have to take the long exposure pictures like we do on Earth.

 

[kilemall]

MilSim was a MAJOR part of early Traveller. It's what Marc, Frank, and Loren paid their bills with... The Europa line being the most visible of Marc's wargames outside Traveller; Frank wrote minis rules and civil war sims. Loren made both of them more intelligible.

GDW was (and remained until the 90's) primarily a wargame company, that happened to also have a major RPG.

I'm well aware of the predecessor games to Traveller AND the wargaming company itself, being the owner of several of it's products including the armor games, Imperium, Triplanetary, House Divided, etc. etc. along of course with things like Snapshot, I:E, Striker and AHL.

A lot of the movement abstraction and design decisions baked into High Guard is clearly a semi-tactical design/detail rendering of Imperium, for instance. The original Traveller movement rules and the crunchier later fuel-based ship rules hearken back to Triplanetary.

This heritage and background does not change my point in the slightest.

The OP seems to be attempting to define the TU in the context of previous forms of warfare, and I am saying that the collection of materials never got to a definitive point where one could say 'it is like naval' or 'like aerial' warfare, beyond the value nodal points such as key production planets and refueling points already noted (which changes to an extent with increases in Jump tech).

Because, it is a GAME, with each version of the boardgames or RPG versions set to appeal to specific entertainments, not a rigid view of what future history/war will be.

Each version has 'an answer', or more accurately a POV, which is true of any wargame or RPG, you pare down a very complex topic and interactions to the ones that matter most (which is both art and opinion) in an entertaining format.

This is different from a professional milsim perspective, which I am gathering from the OP's resume and the nature of follow-on questions is where he is coming from, where crunchiness counts, including politics and logistics on a more detailed footing.

Not to mention economics, which is likely going to involve the same human animal doing what it does, but as radically different as 2015 Western life is to 1815 life.

Now if I were to boil it down to one thing, I would say it's like WWII Pacific theater fought in the pre-dreadnaught era, with basing/repair very key, bypassing possible, a significant raid component and strategic limits to army lift against large populations.

But that's a shot at it, not definitive, because IMTU can change things drastically, even a small OTU change alters strategic equations.

So settle on a version and tech/political/economic milieu, and then we can answer reasonably, keeping in mind always that version choices AND what has been done before is more an aesthetic then hardboiled reality.

 

[kilemall]

Actually Traveller is an RPG that can encompass dimensions political-military-economic simulations.. if one is playing at that level. This is why it was far more attractive than SF gaming systems like Space Opera or TRSs SF-RPG system....

It certainly can, and many of us do that sort of thing, or at least have it in the background for flair/deep story purposes.

That doesn't mean we have a definitive answer for the OP, because ultimately the way the TU is supports a specific RPG milieu, not necessarily 'how it works' consistently across all versions.

We can see that in the other multigenerational scifi entertainment franchises Star Trek and Star Wars, each has multiple takes between original and later core material and 'EU', different beasts with a different feel and appeal to each generational version even though they are clearly in the same 'general universe'.

To take the most recent example, the hijinx with the Millenium Falcon's hyperspace precision has rather HUGE strategic implications, both in the film and afterwards. You can DO that? Big alteration in the power equation, and definitely a rules rewrite.

 

[warwizard]

No. Sensors and the detection of objects is about being able to discriminate a signal. It might be a large volume of space, it might not be. When we turn the Hubble telescope on an area of space that is deemed 'interesting' it isn't scanning a large area of space. It is very focused on a small area in order to discriminate minute differences from the background of space. When we are scanning for gamma ray bursters we are scanning a large area of space but we have no trouble at all spotting them because they are so powerful. This makes them very easy to discriminate against the background of space.

Ships, when they arrive, give off a really big signature. It's called Jump Flash (they also make it when they depart). From everything I've read you can forget about people not seeing them. They light up the sky like a GRB (nowhere near as powerful, of course, but much, much closer). Now that your presence has been announced you can expect to have other sensors able to discriminate minute differences turned on that tiny area of space you happen to be in.
.

Actually for the intruder jumping into the system they do NOT get the advantage of the defenders announcing themselves with a jump flash, and it evolves into exactly the situation I was putting forth, there can be defending ships ANYWHERE, and you have to do a fast scan immediately upon breakout to try to detect objects that are close enough to be an immediate threat. Fleets have to practice this, and do it every time they jump into a star system, the speed of communications means that they may enter the system only to find an enemy fleet is there. Even if they are at peace, it's part of the OTU background.

Imagine if you will what would happen to a light cruiser raider squadron that jumps into a system on top of a battle squadron. so first choose if the OTU has all the ships that jump together arrive together with the normal scatter in arrival times applied to the squadron as a whole or if each ship is treated as a separate scatter.

If ship by ship, you get a jump flash and the intruder has about 1 second to detect and target lock a battleship 10 hexes away before the battleship sqdn gets the jump flash. In such a situation you really need 6 antennas to try to get 360 X 360 degree coverage, if you only have the one antenna you have a 1 in 6 chance that the battleship is in the FOV of your sensor. (this informs the design of intruder vessels, they NEED multiple antennas.) As in canon the designs only have the one antenna I would say that the squadron that jumps together stays together and they arrive together with a ship covering each it's own sector of sky with it's sensors.

So by this logic the battleship squadron 10 hexes away have a sphere of escorts, fighters, and drones providing 360 degree by 360 degree sensor coverage around the squadron many of which may be a lot closer than 10 hexes from the intruder. Coverage for the intruder may be a few scouts, but no deployed fighters or drones in the initial few seconds of the engagement. So we have a couple of hundred sensor systems on the battle squadron and escorts getting target locks on the 6 Lt Cr and 3 scouts and in turn the intruders are overwhelmed with sensor returns beyond their ability to handle target locks on everything. I can imagine the terse communication from the battleship squadron commodore to the commerce raider commodore JG. "surrender or die!" or just the shorter communication to his own squadron "fire!"

 

[Ulsyus]

Space warfare in Traveller is defined by the rules set you use to model it.
...
TNE started as a small ship setting with Brilliant Lances but then introduced big ship battled with Battle Rider.

Battle Rider (BR) was arguably the most accurate real-space system the guys have come up with so far. It's only 2D but it was far more pliable then the Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (for the Honorverse)that was a 3D system.

Maneuvering in High Guard is practically meaningless when everything you field has spinal meson guns. (HG's maneuvering rules are pretty abstract). Lots of minimum tonnage expendable spinals don't really benefit from range mods, so you just concentrate on killing what's in optimal...

It's far more important when you add the mayday movement to it (later printings include how to do this), because of concentration of fire. (or denial of concentration.)

Yeah, and in BR too.

It's not Traveller, and has tech that Traveller does not have rules for, but David Weber's Honor Harrington series is mainly about the grand space battles every Space Opera Wonk has dreamt of. When I envision fleet operations in Traveller, my thoughts turn to that sort of thing. Also, the Lost Fleet series has some good descriptions that are closer to Traveller in their tech developments. In my campaigns, I discourage players from getting into that sort of thing. After all, they have all just been mustered out and would want to refrain from anything military, right? (CTU rules, obviously.)

While the technology is different, the Newtonian movement limitations are similar between the settings, making these a good read, or the early ones anyway.

Space warfare is definitely a kind of Naval warfare.

Our concept of how squadron and fleets actually duke it out are varied and sketchy. But there are some main concepts that have percolated up, starting with High Guard's dry combat tables.

I think these points to one of the conceptual problems that exists with Traveller. So much has been driven by the dry tables and abstract actions derived from High Guards system, but it's so abstract it can't simulate what it's trying to represent with any decent level of detail. That causes the tactical you wants is to simply not appear when using High Guard.

The original question was centered around this problem I had looking at the map of the setting my father has. How the heck do Empires hold territory, and can I get a map of Space Lines of Communication, or are we in a setting where Lines are everywhere? Are there planetary and system chokepoints, and if so, how often do Empires trade these chokepoints?

Check out the rules for weighting of trade routes in GURPS: Free Trader & you can get some excellent ideas for LOC throughout a sector.

On sieges, remind yourself that the French aided the Turks in sieging Vienna, while the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Spanish, and the HRE fought to stem the Turkish tide.

Sieges are one of the biggest diplomatic-military moments in a war. They usually are decisive and brutal, they cost both sides exhaustion to the war, the loser has morale issues, and finally, they begin with a parlay for mercy and surrender, implying neither side wants brutality if it can be stopped.

A good example of the cost to an attacker is the siege of Leningrad in WW2

There are some major misconceptions about Traveller - or rather OTU space warfare - creeping into this thread. To clear some up:

3. There is no FTL communication or sensor network - you don't get word about an enemy invasion until courier ships bring you the news - and the enemy fleet may be right behind them.

If a defender has better navigational data they jump closer to the main world and transmit a message & be well ahead of the attackers? Wouldn't all that be significantly reliant on the jump limits of each world & system primary?

 

[esampson]

Actually for the intruder jumping into the system they do NOT get the advantage of the defenders announcing themselves with a jump flash, and it evolves into exactly the situation I was putting forth, there can be defending ships ANYWHERE, and you have to do a fast scan immediately upon breakout to try to detect objects that are close enough to be an immediate threat. Fleets have to practice this, and do it every time they jump into a star system, the speed of communications means that they may enter the system only to find an enemy fleet is there. Even if they are at peace, it's part of the OTU background.

. . .

Ok. Now I've got a better idea what you are talking about, but again this seems to be a pretty specific set of events. We are no longer talking about raiders, smugglers or hijackers waiting to attack a merchant. We are talking about attacking forces trying to spot defenders after popping in.

The three biggest issues I would point out here are that 1) you aren't talking TL-8 or 9 sensors. For a manuever like you are talking about you can probably assume that the lead ships have top of the line sensors, for exactly the same reason you have laid out. 2) It is now much harder for people to be hiding with any sort of system that has a limited lifespan (such as a heat sinking system). The defenders simply have no clue when the attackers will be arriving. They don't even have the benefit of 'we know they will be arriving in 3 hours' because you can't broadcast a message when they jump out to warn that they are coming. 3) The defenders have a very limited idea where the attackers are coming from. The idea that they will position themselves so that star is hiding them is again impractical. I would think that if this is a real problem you would have some specialized ships with strong sensors jump in at a tangent who can then transmit data to other incoming ships.

This isn't saying there's no point in trying to defend this way. As I said earlier being able to get a target lock first is a big advantage. I'm just not sure this is what you would consider stealth. More like targeting advantage.

 

[aramis]

Ok. Now I've got a better idea what you are talking about, but again this seems to be a pretty specific set of events. We are no longer talking about raiders, smugglers or hijackers waiting to attack a merchant. We are talking about attacking forces trying to spot defenders after popping in.

Commerce raiders generally aren't local to the system they're raiding. It applies even more to them, because they have to worry about it in and out.

 

[Selandia]

A) commerce raider do not prey exclusively on Starship jumping in close to the main starport.
- The in system interplanetary trade may offers rich target. Those spaceships routes may be extending over light-hours or more and you may jump insystem away from a planet but near such a route (constantly changing according to orbits of course)
- Commerce raider is also known as piracy when not involving ship of state and may be native in system.
- Commerce raider may be linked to civil war , or in Balkanized world/systems to insystem war. Therefore indigenous to a system.
- Commerce raiding may be linked to "distant blockade": a fleet is in system, unable to assault the planetary defense but too strong or swift to be hunted down by local SDB and makes itself a general nuisance.

B) If a less confusing term than fighter is usefull (and I agree) FAC Fast Attack Craft are a better description of a traveller "fighter" than MTB, for the OTU have not a singleshot "ship killer" "torpedo" (that I know of). The "fighter" in OTU is more like a Zodiac with a 2-4 people crew armed with an RPG and an LMG.

The fact that FAC are usually* not single manned while OTU "fighters" are usually single pilot cockpit as are Real World fighters is not sufficient in my opinion to justify the potential confusion of genre. 39 x 10 tons fighters attacking a 35,000 cruiser may smak of Midway type battle while the tactical reality of 39 FAC attacking a Fleet is very much like the battle of the Surigao straight with 39 PT boat (quoting wikipedia): At 22:36,.. over more than three-and-a-half hours, the PT boats made repeated attacks on Nishimura's force as it streamed northward.

* Italian Motoscafo d'Assalto and Japanese Shinyo were single manned explosive boat

Have fun

Selandia

 

[esampson]

Commerce raiders generally aren't local to the system they're raiding. It applies even more to them, because they have to worry about it in and out.

This seems to be pretty much limited to defensive forces (or besieging forces who have crippled the systems ability to drive them off and destroyed the local communications/sensor network). Commerce raiders wouldn't be able to make much use of this because they are only hidden to people jumping in. They aren't hidden to people in the system who would both attack them and warn people arriving in system.

 

[robject]

Neat stuff from lots of angles here. These posts ought to give Michael a lot to think about.

The designers of Traveller certainly worked from military simulations. So deckplan combat, infantry organization and equipment, strategic warfare all smell like wargames, because they are.

But of course Traveller is not slavish about what kind of military warfare it's like. It's science fiction, so while space combat is, as Frank Chadwick wrote in the design notes of Battle Rider, quite plainly a form of naval combat, yet we can't apply everything about naval combat to Traveller space combat, nor slavishly extrapolate Traveller's future tech with today's tech.

The biggest dreadnoughts can be just as sprightly as the tiniest fighter. That's not like any modern naval combat I know of.

Sensors can 'track' ships only for a few light-seconds (distance varies by ruleset), after which they lose them (for some definition of 'track'). We don't know what sort of hulls can escape sensors, nor under what circumstances. Of course, what 'tracking' means and what the distances are, appear to be only locally defined by various rulesets. Mayday's ranges are not Battle Rider's ranges, and both of those might not be T5's ranges.


Presumably the circumstances of sensor tracking falls not under "science" but under "fun game" plus "science fiction".

 

[robject]

I will note that, even though Mayday and Battle Rider use different rules for detection and tracking, those rules are designed to fit the game, not the other way 'round.

 

[aramis]

Neat stuff from lots of angles here. These posts ought to give Michael a lot to think about.

The designers of Traveller certainly worked from military simulations. So deckplan combat, infantry organization and equipment, strategic warfare all smell like wargames, because they are.

But of course Traveller is not slavish about what kind of military warfare it's like. It's science fiction, so while space combat is, as Frank Chadwick wrote in the design notes of Battle Rider, quite plainly a form of naval combat, yet we can't apply everything about naval combat to Traveller space combat, nor slavishly extrapolate Traveller's future tech with today's tech.

The biggest dreadnoughts can be just as sprightly as the tiniest fighter. That's not like any modern naval combat I know of.

The irony is that, given the TNE design sequences, they really can't be, because you rapidly run out of surface area for radiators....

 

[Ulsyus]

I will note that, even though Mayday and Battle Rider use different rules for detection and tracking, those rules are designed to fit the game, not the other way 'round.

In BR at least, even if detection to ID the type of a vessel isn't possible it is still able to be seen on the map as a 'blip'. This is a great game mechanic & introduces a level of uncertainty & decision-making often not seen in other games.

 

[mike wightman]

And this is borrowed from GDW's best space warfare sim - Star Cruiser.