Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
While I doubt it's viable for smallcraft, a large enough telescope, especially with computer enhancement, should extend considerably visual range for spaceships.
Pondering visual range space combat
- Thread starter Carlobrand
- Start date
If you're using Striker as a model for your close-in work, then don't forget to consider the vacuum range multipliers for lasers in the environmental section that are often overlooked.
Striker is troublesome as a complete model if for no other reason then direct fire control systems are for planetary engagement ranges. At a minimum one has to assume starship computer model/weapon fire control subsumed.
And that the starship hull carving works both ways in that as pointed out Traveller warships have no obligation to be equipped like the SW Galactic Empire and would have sufficient point defenses firing at the same high rates as the fighters to make short work of threats.
Not to mention their own fighters and escorts to keep carvers away and dead.
The closing and relatively high accel would make matching course and vee highly problematic. One option that would be troublesome for a fast craft closing on a dreadnought would be mass drivers spewing a wall of steel ammo- could be like a cloud of sand for kinetic impact on vessels, and it would be streaming out so intercepting outside the 100- km.
In general the small doughty force closing to suicide range is the sort of thing that probably won't happen in 'high space'.
It will likely be special environments/situations- breaking through the High Guard to either get sheltering ships or the refuelers in the gravwell, disabled or heavily damaged M-drives, Pearl Harbor raids on ships at station/orbit or downports, or slow movement forced through asteroid fields/ice rings with ambush hiding spots.
THE heroic high space option would be making a high speed interception/pass with kinetic impacters. Other then the CT missile supplement, I'm not aware of rules that would model that, you might have to make your own.
Striker is troublesome as a complete model if for no other reason then direct fire control systems are for planetary engagement ranges. At a minimum one has to assume starship computer model/weapon fire control subsumed.
And that the starship hull carving works both ways in that as pointed out Traveller warships have no obligation to be equipped like the SW Galactic Empire and would have sufficient point defenses firing at the same high rates as the fighters to make short work of threats.
Not to mention their own fighters and escorts to keep carvers away and dead.
The closing and relatively high accel would make matching course and vee highly problematic. One option that would be troublesome for a fast craft closing on a dreadnought would be mass drivers spewing a wall of steel ammo- could be like a cloud of sand for kinetic impact on vessels, and it would be streaming out so intercepting outside the 100- km.
In general the small doughty force closing to suicide range is the sort of thing that probably won't happen in 'high space'.
It will likely be special environments/situations- breaking through the High Guard to either get sheltering ships or the refuelers in the gravwell, disabled or heavily damaged M-drives, Pearl Harbor raids on ships at station/orbit or downports, or slow movement forced through asteroid fields/ice rings with ambush hiding spots.
THE heroic high space option would be making a high speed interception/pass with kinetic impacters. Other then the CT missile supplement, I'm not aware of rules that would model that, you might have to make your own.
What I'm getting from some of the comments is that visual range needs to extend a chunk farther than I'm considering, which makes sense and adds another interesting bit. We end up with Visual Range - a zone extending tens or perhaps hundreds of kilometers in which computer ECM is less of an issue because gunners are using computer-augmented visual sighting, drawing on the way ships occlude stars to locate and fix on targets - and what I'll call Gun Range. That would be the region within about 5 km, using MegaTraveller to judge weapon power, in which autocannon, mass drivers, and even weapons like rail-launched tac missiles can become effective, and those collapsible rounds become dangerous ...
... although I'm not entirely sure a damper box will protect rounds from a ship's nuclear damper. With those short half-lives, even if the attacking damper does nothing but counteract the box, the rounds are going to hit temperatures in the vicinity of 1800 degrees F, which is likely to make the propellant in a CPR round very unhappy and can't be very healthy for a mass driver either. With the power that shipboard dampers are drawing, I expect they'll rather handily overwhelm a box and leave a molten mess of the ammunition storage. (I half expect the firing mechanism and barrel to need to be in the damper box to keep the rounds from damaging the weapon that fires them.)
Striker's vacuum rules are actually a bit of a problem since they extend the full power of lasers out to 125,000 km. Effective range is 2x output in km, beam laser output is 1/4 input, multiply by 1000 in vacuum. That would make for a neat HG variant in its own right, but MT went a different route by limiting full power to 5 range bands. The Atmospheric Penetration Table in MT Referee Manual's Universal World Profile table ups that 3 bands - I forgot to factor that in on my previous comment - but that still limits it to 5000 km, which means full power beam weapons aren't a problem at space combat ranges, though they probably should have been mentioned for those times when ships are in the same hex.
The problem of fighter versus dreadnought is one of numbers. A dreadnought is 200,000 dT and maybe MCr120,000-ish, 2000 hardpoints less space committed to spinal mount and bays, say 1000 just to keep it round. The ship can group those up in batteries to hit and kill fighters at long range, relying on criticals to get past armor, but then it's about a hundred batteries. Or, it could keep them at single turret batteries and kill lots of fighters when they get close - while they're spending the same turn carving it up.
MCr120,000-ish will buy around 1200 50 dT fighters, maybe twice that if you swarm with little 20 dTonners. You can bring escorts and fighters to screen, but he can bring more fighters, so your screen is outnumbered. You can stay out of visual range, they can't catch you if you don't let them - assuming you've got high-G drives to match them - but you yield initiative. You can't attack a planet until you've dealt with its fighters by either repeatedly baiting them out and killing a few at range before running off or by sending in fighters and taking losses yourself. Either time-consuming or costly, and time is not a friend of the attacker in a planetary siege, not when the defender is part of a larger empire that's busily marshaling forces for a counterattack.
It's not a radical problem if we hold beam weapons to about the power of a laser. Eliminate that +6 penalty and limit the bonus to, say, -4, which is a bit less than it's entitled to but keeps it from hitting the maneuver drive ('cause a lot of them will basically eat a Dn maneuver drive and then leave it vulnerable to boarding once they've scrubbed all the weapons), and it becomes an effective strategy without being dominating - the fighters take heavy losses, the DNs get their weapons scrubbed and are beaten back but can go get repaired and come back for round 2 within a few weeks, while replacing dead fighters will take months.
... although I'm not entirely sure a damper box will protect rounds from a ship's nuclear damper. With those short half-lives, even if the attacking damper does nothing but counteract the box, the rounds are going to hit temperatures in the vicinity of 1800 degrees F, which is likely to make the propellant in a CPR round very unhappy and can't be very healthy for a mass driver either. With the power that shipboard dampers are drawing, I expect they'll rather handily overwhelm a box and leave a molten mess of the ammunition storage. (I half expect the firing mechanism and barrel to need to be in the damper box to keep the rounds from damaging the weapon that fires them.)
Striker's vacuum rules are actually a bit of a problem since they extend the full power of lasers out to 125,000 km. Effective range is 2x output in km, beam laser output is 1/4 input, multiply by 1000 in vacuum. That would make for a neat HG variant in its own right, but MT went a different route by limiting full power to 5 range bands. The Atmospheric Penetration Table in MT Referee Manual's Universal World Profile table ups that 3 bands - I forgot to factor that in on my previous comment - but that still limits it to 5000 km, which means full power beam weapons aren't a problem at space combat ranges, though they probably should have been mentioned for those times when ships are in the same hex.
The problem of fighter versus dreadnought is one of numbers. A dreadnought is 200,000 dT and maybe MCr120,000-ish, 2000 hardpoints less space committed to spinal mount and bays, say 1000 just to keep it round. The ship can group those up in batteries to hit and kill fighters at long range, relying on criticals to get past armor, but then it's about a hundred batteries. Or, it could keep them at single turret batteries and kill lots of fighters when they get close - while they're spending the same turn carving it up.
MCr120,000-ish will buy around 1200 50 dT fighters, maybe twice that if you swarm with little 20 dTonners. You can bring escorts and fighters to screen, but he can bring more fighters, so your screen is outnumbered. You can stay out of visual range, they can't catch you if you don't let them - assuming you've got high-G drives to match them - but you yield initiative. You can't attack a planet until you've dealt with its fighters by either repeatedly baiting them out and killing a few at range before running off or by sending in fighters and taking losses yourself. Either time-consuming or costly, and time is not a friend of the attacker in a planetary siege, not when the defender is part of a larger empire that's busily marshaling forces for a counterattack.
It's not a radical problem if we hold beam weapons to about the power of a laser. Eliminate that +6 penalty and limit the bonus to, say, -4, which is a bit less than it's entitled to but keeps it from hitting the maneuver drive ('cause a lot of them will basically eat a Dn maneuver drive and then leave it vulnerable to boarding once they've scrubbed all the weapons), and it becomes an effective strategy without being dominating - the fighters take heavy losses, the DNs get their weapons scrubbed and are beaten back but can go get repaired and come back for round 2 within a few weeks, while replacing dead fighters will take months.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
When the fighters are at carve up range the capital ship weapons will be destroying them too.
Pulse lasers in point defence mode, RP-Y plus point defence, VRF gauss CAWS
You could even have firing ports for marines to shoot at the fighters with tac missiles.
Pulse lasers in point defence mode, RP-Y plus point defence, VRF gauss CAWS
You could even have firing ports for marines to shoot at the fighters with tac missiles.
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Again, it's a numbers thing. Assuming a situation in which the Dn has to let you get close for some reason, credit for credit you can overwhelm a capital ship, take grievous losses among your fighters, and still come away with a tactical victory if it means the behemoth that took 4+ years to build is not going to be able to go home and get repaired. That can be accomplished by putting in enough maneuver drive hits and scrubbing away weapons to allow boarding, which is the direction things seem to take if you give lasers their due at ranges under 5000 km. Dreadnoughts are handicapped by the need to marshal weapons in batteries of several turrets in order to generate the crits that assure a fighter kill at long and short range even against heavily armored fighters, not to mention to reduce the number of gunners needed (therefore the volume allocated to crew quarters).
The counter might be to permit batteries to be de-linked when the target is at visual range so turrets can be fired at individual targets; that does keep the battery business from becoming a handicap at visual range. We'd need to draft the marines and ship's troops as gunners at that point, but firing using image enhancers at visual range would be similar to using that tech in tanks and AFVs. I think that marine firing port idea is clever, if for no other reason than to keep potential boarders at bay. Or the cargo bay opens up and disgorges a battalion of Marine APCs that start shooting up the boats coming in with boarding parties.
I should probably mention that I calculated that last response off a presumption that the DN was carrying factor-F armor, which puts the TL14-and-lower ships at a disadvantage. Might need to restrain the laser even further to avoid having fighters be the pre-eminent defensive arm in planetary sieges. Maybe just hold it to eliminating the -6 penalty, though that really undervalues the laser.
Just a couple of questions. When firing ships weapons, will targeting actually be visual or would it be performed by sensors?
And while distances will be large, I assume velocities will also be large, so would the "tunnel effect" or something similar have an impact on visual targeting of unguided weapons?
And while distances will be large, I assume velocities will also be large, so would the "tunnel effect" or something similar have an impact on visual targeting of unguided weapons?
Not sure the OP was that 'focussed' on optical targeting as describing short ranges, and possibly less chance of EW having an effect.
I would expect every available spectrum would be in use to claw out an accurate firing solution.
The computers would be that much more powerful and thus adjust for any speed effects, visual spectrum or otherwise.
Yes? As I said, I'm trying to stick to the CT-MT rule structure to the extent possible, since that's what I'm most familiar with. The sensors you use for long range targeting haven't gone away - you still have radar and neutrino sensors and so on - but within a few kilometers CT/Striker tends to see you as having computer-augmented visual sensing available. So, something like a camera sending visible spectrum and IR spectrum images to a computer that processes it to make the contrast between objects and the background of space more apparent to a viewer using a monitor. The other guy can jam radar but he can't jam the fact that his spacecraft, however dark he paints it, is crossing in front of a field of stars. At a range of a few kilometers, with a really good camera and a computer processing the results before sending the image on to your monitor, that's going to be more apparent than it would be for a spacecraft standing out 50,000 kilometers away
I'm sorry, the "tunnel effect"? The reference I bring up speaks to some effect on drivers on long stretches of freeway. However, in space it's not really apparent how fast you are moving unless there is some nearby object in your field - and then it's not clear whether you're moving or the object is. Unless you happen to be reasonably close to a planet or similar body, your environment is stars light years away against a black backdrop. You could be doing a hundred KPS and, without sensors to tell you different or some nearby object for reference, it still looks like you're standing still.
There is of course the problem that, at sufficiently high closing speeds, you don't get a visual range that you can react effectively to. The target passes through your visual range in a second or so, and you're either challenged to react to it during the brief time it's visible on your monitors or you're relying on your other sensors to target so you can be sure of having the time to set up a shot for closest approach.
I was thinking more in terms of something like this.
http://vc.airvectors.net/tprel_2.html
It is variously referred to as tunnel effect or tunnel paradox because Einstein originally used the example of a train in a tunnel to illustrate it. It is an apparent effect of time dilation.
But your example only mentions 100kps and you would need to be going closer to 30,000 kps before relativistic effects even begin to be noticed, it would be negligible.
http://vc.airvectors.net/tprel_2.html
It is variously referred to as tunnel effect or tunnel paradox because Einstein originally used the example of a train in a tunnel to illustrate it. It is an apparent effect of time dilation.
But your example only mentions 100kps and you would need to be going closer to 30,000 kps before relativistic effects even begin to be noticed, it would be negligible.
Well if someone is making a frac-c time dilation run at visual range, I think a lot of people are going to be exploding.
The fast runner can't dodge anything and has slowed reaction times, if the fast runner can get that close he's already got a practical target solution and just has to spray nearby space with debris to destroy his target.
Yeah, it takes almost a week at 6G before you hit that kind of speed.
So, getting back to the problem of the little fighters: once they get in close, they can carve up big ships pretty badly because the big ships - being the size of a skyscraper - are almost impossible to miss for a laser at visual range and lasers are very powerful at that range. Fighters are cheap so you can get a lot of them: the price of a battleship buys something like 6000 20 dT fighters. Big ships don't seem to carry enough weapons to stop them - mostly because the big ships need to marshal their secondary weapons into large batteries to have a hope of stopping the secondary missile batteries of other big ships, or conversely to penetrate and hit them, but also because the little fighters can be pretty heavily armored and even nuclear missiles don't do much against heavy armor. A hundred or so batteries depending on criticals to kill fighters makes for a lot of running away for the dreadnought as it tries to keep out of visual range.
Except ... at these closing speeds, opposing sides are going to pass through and out the other side of any reasonable definition of visual range in seconds, unless one side has a significant acceleration disadvantage or both sides are eager to go in for a knife fight. The gunner has to go from sensors to augmented optics, train his weapon, and fire within a few seconds. This is like sitting in a little valley knowing from radar that a Mach 3 jet the size of an office building is approaching and then having 2 or 3 seconds to react to it when it appears over the one crest before it disappears behind the other crest. Visual range may not last long enough in most cases to free the gunner from reliance on his sensors; it may be a case of training weapons on the expectation that the sensors are right and that the target will be at a certain place at a certain time - and if the sensors were misled then you miss your opportunity. So, you can close and strafe, but you're still dealing with enemy ECM.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
If fighters are wanted in a game then invention of cinematic handwavium for them to exist is a necessity.
Base ship combat on any version of extrapolated real world physics and a swarm of fighters doesn't stand a chance of getting to close range, the capital ship can carry enough anti-fighter missiles, point defence railguns or lasers to kill the fighters beyond the effective range of the fighter's weaponry.
If the requirement is non-Newtonian movement for your fighters so they can swoop and dive, pull handbrake turns and ignore momentum then you can invent cinematic handwavium to allow them to maneuver like that.
Note i am not criticising this approach, I have run several games with ships like this.
Base ship combat on any version of extrapolated real world physics and a swarm of fighters doesn't stand a chance of getting to close range, the capital ship can carry enough anti-fighter missiles, point defence railguns or lasers to kill the fighters beyond the effective range of the fighter's weaponry.
If the requirement is non-Newtonian movement for your fighters so they can swoop and dive, pull handbrake turns and ignore momentum then you can invent cinematic handwavium to allow them to maneuver like that.
Note i am not criticising this approach, I have run several games with ships like this.
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None of that applies to a High Guard setting, where there is no swooping or diving or handbrake turns or anything cinematic, since it's abstract. I'm inclined toward band movement to address range questions, but there's no swooping and diving there either, and braking is newtonian. And, the fighter's weaponry is mostly the same as the larger ships - lasers and missiles. The key difference is the computer.
Frankly, not a whole lot of real world physics applies to a High Guard setting either without significantly altering the rules. High Guard as written makes it rather hard to kill a fighter except with criticals: fighters can be armored up to ignore anything short of nukes, and they're likely to fly away from a nuke hit unless you inflict a fuel hit. To implement something with some resemblance to the real-world effects you're citing, we need to restrict agility to resisting fire from spinal mounts only - already a popular idea, so no great controversy there - and then ramp up the nuke's damage by quite a bit, maybe give it a -10 bonus on the damage roll. That would get the attention of even well-armored fighters.
There are no rail-guns - they'd have to be added, and the fighter would already be close enough for their lasers to be a problem once they were in range of rail-guns, so that's a bit of closing the barn door after the horse got out. There are no anti-fighter missiles: a missile's a missile's a missile, same one that chases fighters is chasing dreadnoughts. So, we'd have to add those too - though, after curbing agility and powering up the nuke, that might not be necessary.
Again, I'm trying to stick to the CT-MT rule structure to the extent possible, since that's what I'm most familiar with. I'm not averse to adding some new twists - I'm already thinking up a few - but I'd prefer the foundation to be CT-MT. The point is not to make fighters possible. The point is to see what happens when we extend the rule set to its logical conclusion - which is to say, to see what happens when you get closer than the usual space combat ranges.
So far, the answer is that little fighters can be potentially very dangerous if they could get to and hold the right range, but they're not going to be able to hold that right range without the other guy either cooperating or being underpowered drive-wise. So, they'd be good at getting close in and chewing up civilian craft or mopping up warships that had already taken a maneuver hit, but they'd pretty well need to stay out of battle otherwise because they're horribly outmatched in electronics and it seems impossible to fight without depending on electronics - aside from attacks on the aforementioned civilian craft or wounded warships where they can't keep you from closing to visual range long enough to fire weapons under augmented optics.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
None of that applies to a High Guard setting, where there is no swooping or diving or handbrake turns or anything cinematic, since it's abstract. I'm inclined toward band movement to address range questions, but there's no swooping and diving there either, and braking is newtonian. And, the fighter's weaponry is mostly the same as the larger ships - lasers and missiles. The key difference is the computer.It is TL dependant. High Guard models ships from TL7 to TL15 and the efficacy of fighters changes as you advance through the TL scale.
I agree.
What HG requires is two fleets choosing to battle each other and maintaining distance beyond the autohit range of the ridiculously long ranged weapons of Traveller (there is not much real world physics or extrapolation thereof in Traveller apart from the adherence to Newtonian movement).
This is one of those TL dependant bits of HG - do not get fixated on TL15 vs TL15, the nature of fighters at lower TLs is very different.
In the original print runs of HG80 agility did only count towards spinals, and in my house rule options I split up turret/bay/spinal weapons so that bay weapons do not get the -6DM and thus nuclear bay missiles are effectively -12 on the damage table.
VRF gauss guns, mass drivers, rapid pulse plasma and fusion guns all exist elsewhere in the Traveller rules, but they at limited to a few tens of km range at best.
Using Striker you can build some interesting anti-fighter vehicle scale weapons...
Missile batteries are the best turret/bay weapon for hitting fighters at higher TLs. You'd have to make them nukes if the fighter is heavily armoured (unless using my optional rules)
Logic would suggest:
inside a certain range weapons can not miss and are more destructive
if ships can close to that range then weapons will be installed on capital ships to deal with the threat.
I agree with you here, taking into account the TL caveats and the logic of including dedicated anti-smallcraft weapon systems on capital ships if such tactics are possible.
A 1EP laser on a fighter fired at a capital ship from a range of only a few km should, if said laser is also capable of hitting and scoring minor damage at light second ranges, cause considerable damage to the capital ship at such close range.
Get enough fighters up close and pew pew, the trick is to get them that close in the first place.
