Planetary defense

[Carlobrand]

... Power systems: banks of accumulators charged in peace time able to support the operation of the gun for months to years. ...

Minimum power requirement for a spinal meson is 500 EP, 125,000 megawatts - megawatt-seconds, under the most optimistic interpretation; that's the A-meson. Best value for power storage, if you ignore size, is a TL9 battery at the very generous level provided in MegaTraveller, 2.16 megawatt-seconds for Cr3.75, or 0.576 MwS/Cr. So, batteries for one blast from the smallest spinal mount cost MCr0.217. A decent-size meson can run to twice that. Operation for one meson for a day requires MCr15-30 worth of batteries.

It's a viable strategy once you factor in the losses a fleet will take in the course of trying to silence the installation, especially since it significantly reduces the cost of the installation if you don't have to supply all of the power during the battle; you can use a smaller number of plants to charge or recharge between battles and silence them during battle to protect them from attack. Trick becomes to find the right balance between power storage and recharge time. Optimal response becomes to charge troops in with many ND-equipped and armored boats of, say, 1000 dT or so, so that the meson batteries destroy only a few boats before the force lands and deploys, then let the troops locate and deal with the installation.

 

[Condottiere]

Unless the attacking fleet has overwhelming force, it's likely to lose a contest with an encrusted meson gun.

Assuming regenerative sensor systems, you'd have to constantly blind those as well.

If it isn't a dead world, lava based electrical generators can create enough energy to power the weapon system.

 

[Carlobrand]

I've been giving this some thought. Deep meson sites are nasty because they are very nearly unkillable. Can't be detected if they're beneath a certain depth, batteries could allow them to operate for several days without needing to turn on a fusion plant and giving the plant's position away, sensors might be a weakness but we're not entirely sure how to work that and they could be made absurdly redundant given an entire planet on which to conceal them. However, they're kind of like a big ol' cannon: big boom, but they can only shoot one target at a time, aren't guaranteed to hit that, and the infantry or cavalry can overwhelm them by sheer numbers - in this case, the infantry and cavalry being landers and fighters.

Trying to duel a deep meson is a suicide mission, and a capital ship spinal mount, for all it's power, is not as decisive in ground combat as it is in space combat - there's that same one-big-boom vs. many targets problem. An attacking fleet would do better to stand outside of range of the meson site and rush in fighters and landers.

Gunboats build around a single meson bay would be nastier than capital ships in that they'd provide many booms instead of the one, and the loss of one would have much less impact than the loss of a cruiser-sized or larger warship - and dampers won't protect you. Meson screens would, but those things eat power like hungry hippos, and their power consumption scales with the volume protected, so only critical targets are likely to have a meson screen.

Small fighters are more vulnerable but potentially much more numerous. From orbit, they could coordinate their missile bombardment the same way several artillery pieces would, so their small missile battery is less of a handicap in the bombardment roll than it is in the space combat roll. They are functionally similar to grav tanks - and they could be armed with ground combat weapons like a grav tank. A wing of a hundred small fighters could have firepower equal to a couple of armored battalions.

Landers would be small enough that a loss wouldn't be crippling but agile enough and armored enough that preventing them delivering their troops to ground would be difficult.

So, the deep meson holds the big ships at bay, but it can't keep them from bombarding the planet or landing troops. That becomes a duel between the fighters and boats of the hostile fleet and the local COACC.