Devin,
The point I was trying to make was that multiple observers all sharing their "piece" of the sensor "puzzle" do and will greatly enhance the ability of all platforms to create hits.
Good point there.
My idea of the fire control solution goes something like this:
In sensor physics targets are referred to as either scintillating or non-scintillating. Scintillating targets give an all-or-nothing active sensor target, depending upon the orientating of the surface presented to the sensor, while non-scintillating targets always reflect at least a little of the energy back to the sensor. (This, of course, is why modern stealth aircraft have lots of flat or jagged surfaces.)
Building up a fire control solution takes time. Sometimes, though, you get lucky - several good sensor returns in a short space of time give you the information needed to calculate the target's range and velocity. That's when it's time to fire the spinal mount (or detonate the x-ray laser warhead.) Many shots
may be needed in a short space of time to fill the target area.
(My calculations seem to indicate that the space-filling model of fire control isn't as good as I'd assumed - a 10% increase in range means a 75% increase in number of weapons needed for a 1m2 target maneuvering at 1G -
and I'm generously assuming all shots are simultaneous. Someone, please check my math!)
This works for passive sensors too, except that passive sources are almost always non-scintillating, and thus easier to get a fix on.
Sensor physics is a fascinating field - it
is possible, contrary to popular belief, to detect a target with a emitting/reflecting a signal below the average root-mean-square noise. (It just takes a long time and a lot of processing power.)
Devin,
As for your other assumptions, I strongly believe that analogies between historical naval combat and Traveller's ship combat can be and been drawn too far. People pick an era they like or that they believe fits Traveller well and then "milk it" to a point of absurdity. This practice does nothing but harm.
No argument here. When I take historical analogies, I tend to pick and mix, and I try to match apples with other apples rather than oranges (though I'm not so scrupulous about matching a Granny Smith with a Red Delicious.) For example, the discussion about torpedo-boats struck me as misguided because historically torpedoes operated in a very different way that
Traveller missiles. (For one, even a few small torpedoes could seriously inconvenience a battleship; the ones that took down the
Prince of Wales and
Repulse were only 18" air-dropped jobbies; for another, with the exception of the 24" Japanese Long Lances, torpedoes were very short range.)
Traveller warships DO NOT line up like Nelson's 1st Raters, armor IS NOT confined to discrete slabs and belts like Jellicoe's dreadnoughts, and fighters DO NOT behave like Spruance's Wildcats.
I think ships would, of course, arrange themselves in some sort of formation, most likely a 3-d flying wedge or the like. Because the space restrictions on concentration of force are negligible, distances between fleets will likely dwarf the distance between friendly craft (except for pickets and anti-missile escorts.)
--Devin
While we know escorts are canonical, we can't find a workable canonical role for them in Traveller ship combat. In a fleet clash, they're little more than filler; i.e. hmmm... gotta spend a trillion credits and my battleline only cost 990 billion... guess I'll build something small to use up the money...
