Sand Casters

[Rigel Stardin]

Carloband comment: That's all. Missiles and sand/canisters are jointly defined as ordnance, but the indiscriminate way the word is used, it appears at times that the sand canister is impacting the ship that's shooting at you, which doesn't make sense. Sand might linger - "All ordnance which is launched has the launching ship's vector, which must be taken into account ... Ordnance (missiles and sand) which he has launched in previous game turns is moved at the same time" - but that 25mm bit really throws a kink in that view. We could argue about it till the cows come home and not come to agreement

The Sandcaster striking the target makes sense to me being ex-military. Its like lobbing a smoke round at a tank. It won't do much damage, but it blinds the crew from taking action against anyone in their line of sight. Perhaps the designer who thought up sandcasters was thinking in this way to explain their usage. I bet if someone has a GDW wargame from that period dealling with modern warfare and look up smoke there will be a similarity between the two.

 

[far-trader]

Interesting, never thought of sand as a directed attack against threats. That might work. Instead of a "cloud" of obscuring and ablative "sand" vaguely 25mm (scale) in diameter drifting aimlessly you have a "shot" of the same obscuring and ablative "sand" that is "aimed" and concentrated in a cylinder or tight cone 25mm (scale) long/deep that lasers may dissipate through and missiles may impact on their own reciprocal path aimed at the ship launching sand.

Yes, that might work very nicely. And it preserves the anti-personnel and anti-vehicle role in close combat/support, as a very devastating weapon.

Still doesn't address my long held concerns with both missiles and sand though, which is that at a mere 50kg they are both ridiculously small for the suggested performances... but that is a whole nother discussion

 

[Rigel Stardin]

if you are willing to accept that Sandcaster are used as "smoke', then you might entertain the possiblity of a turret losing a 'target lock' because the scanners are now having issue with there emissions begining defused or reflected by the sand. Which would then explain the improvements made at different tech level.

Throwing this out there just as a thought.

If I remember Far Trader explaination on what tech levels those improvements were made:

TL5: Degrades laser fire.
TL8: Degrades Laser and acts as anti-missile ordanance
TL12: Degrades Lasers, anti-missile ordanance and breaks target lock.

 

[tater]

So, no reference to the (per 25mm) aside from an entry on the DM table and nothing to say sand just arbitrarily stays with a ship (quite the opposite)? Or even a 'cloud'?

Saying it keeps the vector of the launching ship unambiguously means it stays with the ship. You place your marker, and it moves along next to the ship unless the SHIP moves away from it by using g-turns.

BOOK 2:

The launched item does not actually move until the following friendly movement phase. All ordnance which is launched has the launching ship's vector, which must be taken into account."

There is zero ambiguity there. The sand MOVES using the ship's vector.

'Stacking' works for me - if its 'ablating' energy to the point of making lasers less effective at hitting, then more of it means less effective to the point of not hitting. However, the rules state a requirement for targeting, so I don't see that as a general purpose cloud (like a force shield or armor), rather each canister addresses a particular attack.

Book 2 says nothing about specific attacks. The sand is placed, and moves. In fact, sand blobs stay on the map, as a kind of terrain.

 

[tater]

"Fool" sensors means to create a measure of uncertainty about location or vector, not by making the sensor think the ship disappeared. Much like trying to shoot a target through drifting smoke, or near a blinding light.

I explained why this cannot possibly work. If the sand is between you and the target (it is set an arbitrary size as whipsnade said for gameplay) to block what would usually be called a "facing", then the ship by definition is not evading. If it uses the drive, it accelerates and the sand is no longer blocking. So the sand is either blocking, but the target is exactly where you think it is, or the target is evading, in which case it is no longer blocked by sand---since sand cannot accelerate.

Then 'sand' becomes a big point defense shotgun which is not what the descriptions say it is.
And it would work against missiles, energy weapons and not much else.

No, not saying that is what the game says it is. I'm trying to imagine ANY rational description of sand. Some players are non-technical, and won't know enough to care. Anyone who does... needs a better rationale if they stay.

Best idea I posted above. Sand should be a DM on the DAMAGE roll, not a DM to-hit. Shots all hit, but maybe do lesser damage. Assuming you want to keep sand. then it "obscures" target enough to lower beam energy density, yada, yada, yada .

 

[tater]

That's all. Missiles and sand/canisters are jointly defined as ordnance, but the indiscriminate way the word is used, it appears at times that the sand canister is impacting the ship that's shooting at you, which doesn't make sense. Sand might linger - "All ordnance which is launched has the launching ship's vector, which must be taken into account ... Ordnance (missiles and sand) which he has launched in previous game turns is moved at the same time" - but that 25mm bit really throws a kink in that view. We could argue about it till the cows come home and not come to agreement

The 25mm (1 inch) blob is just to put a marker on the map that a player can draw a line through, nothing more. If played on a computer, it could be zoomed in, then the line of sight would be easy to scale. This was designed to play on a table or carpet.

The sand unambiguously moves with the ship's vector.

A few points: This predates everything else. At this point in the TU, a 50kg HE missile can explode in a blast that riddles the target ship with shrapnel. We don't know how thick the ship hull is. We don't know how much power the lasers draw - in fact, if I recall, you could mount two triple batteries of lasers on a Free Trader if you wanted and still have power for thrust. It was only later that High Guard set power limits, and that was in undefined "energy points". It was even later that Striker gave us ships with hulls like tank armor and lasers that pumped out 250 Mw of energy.

We know from book 2, that it is hard to hit a ship, and that SC can render ships invulnerable to beam fire. The DM is the single most important thing about sand in B2, along with stacking sand. A triple SC makes any ship 100% safe from beam attack. That is canon---each laser rolls on its own in B2, so 10,000 lasers fired at the player's trusty Free Trader will every one of them miss.

Whipsnade makes a good point, in his special fashion. We should probably consider these games individually, rather than using one to make inferences about another. As I said, the Striker sandcaster is not your grandfather's Book-2 sandcaster. Well, neither is the ship hull or the laser or the missile. High Guard missiles do not do damage like Book-2 missiles, and in fact Book 2 missiles can't do damage at all (at least by shrapnel) in the Striker universe. For all we know, the Book-2 laser is a 1 Mw job and the Book-2 hull a half-centimeter of steel over a metal skeleton. It was, after all, intended as a fairly simple game.

Agreed that they are entirely different. This also means that calling either "canon" as rules is sorta pointless. Trying to tease out what "canon" is based on rules---many of which are flat out badly conceived---is a bad idea. Better to treat story narrative as canon, exclusively. So an OTU adventure states that a certain historical event happened? Canon. Ships being invulnerable to lasers because Book 2 unambiguously makes this so, with an infinitely stacking -3DM to hit? Not canon, IMHO.

The rationale for SCs and stacking was almost certainly an escape route for the players. You can have defensive armament, and bide time til you can jump, or help arrives. The rule is just bad, and SCs being absurd makes it leap out to savvy players. Better to have called it a force screen that only absorbs certain damage. They tried for a "harder" feel, but it's broken. Some stuff is broken and worth ignoring (I like meson guns, but they have huge issues as well given the energies needed to make the required energy pions to decay at traveller ranges).

 

[BytePro]

Interesting, never thought of sand as a directed attack against threats. That might work. ...

Indeed

IMTU, things were based on Sci-Fi (i.e. not real Science) enough to be pass casual entertainment believability only (considering gravitics, Jump and Psionics were part of the game), with a tip of the hat to science. Maybe I read the same Sci-Fi as the authors, but I never had much of a problem with making starship combat 'work'.

Didn't have Mayday or Striker to confuse the mix... so the rules covering sandcasters were actually pretty meager.

Given the 1000s/20 min game turns... I 'explained' that:

• Energy weapons 'hit' by maintaining fire on a localized region of a vessel.
• Lasers do damage by shifting frequencies rapidly over a region.
• Sandcasters disrupt by being discharged into firing 'path' during that time.
• At one per turn - firing a canister actually dispersed 'sand' over that time.
• Canister stayed in turret while 'puffs' of sand were discharged at beam.
• Canister was basically a railgun winding tube that destroyed itself.

This lacked the idea that sand 'hung' around with the ship (as this was not in the Traveller rules that I had at the time), though, since it was discharging over the turn, I guess it would have the same net effect. Sandcasters worked like a machine gun firing 'ablating chaff'. The 'canister' was basically part of the firing mechanism - metal windings embedded in the upper part of a composite shell that were used like linear accelerator rings and burnt up in the process - over the span of a turn. It was not discharged all at once in order to disrupt a beam over time, and because the metal rings had to stay just cool enough not to melt apart. Yet, when allowed to cool, the rings would shrink and fail to function. Thus, a canister discharging 'packets' of 'sand', was useless past one turn - even if all the 'sand' didn't get used up. (And since the shell was very hot and deforming - the casing smoking while the rings melted and shrunk - it was ejected ala shotgun shell fashion, from a turret to avoid 'jamming' the slot in a turret barrel.)

IMTU, firing ordnance, required power - so even firing missiles couldn't be done if a power plant was disabled. (Missiles could only be fired one per turret barrel per turn - they have no propellent, needing to be 'charged' (ala a capacitor). As missiles discharge quickly, they can not be pre-charged.)​

Everything I did fit within an interpretation of the LBB2 rules - except I (later) house ruled sand against beams to apply in the same turn as that makes more sense from a point defense standpoint (which can even work with an interpretation of 'target' not applying to energy beams, I suppose).

My canister, as part of the firing mechanism, is simple enough to be manufactured at lower TLs. As to the believability re: 50 kg - at high velocity even a portion the mass of a marble could pack quite a punch, especially when combined with the velocity of an incoming missile.

Mayday and later material may have explicitly added the concept of a 'sand cloud', I don't know, but LBB2 didn't include such. The meaning and use of the '(per 25mm)' is not defined in LBB2. The intent of the authors - who knows? (I have a working system that has been suitable for 30 years, so that's no big deal to me anyway. )

 

[tater]

It's clear as day that the sand is a cloud, on map, moving with launching ship vector in LBB2.

Ordnance. Launched with ships vector. Placed on map.

The meaning of "per 25mm" could also not possibly be clearer. Per canister deployed since it says each makes this "cloud" marker on the map. The "25mm" is the size of a token on the miniatures game board to demonstrate that LOS from target to shooter passes through the cloud. That's it. On a hex system it would simply block a hex-side.

This is entirely unambiguous.

The end result is very, very clear. SC make ships invulnerable to beams as long as they either have sand, or don't maneuver.

Missiles are not affected by sand in LBB2. They have no to-hit, they hit by hitting (assuming they survive anti-missile fire).

 

[Ishmael]

I explained why this cannot possibly work. If the sand is between you and the target (it is set an arbitrary size as whipsnade said for gameplay) to block what would usually be called a "facing", then the ship by definition is not evading. If it uses the drive, it accelerates and the sand is no longer blocking. So the sand is either blocking, but the target is exactly where you think it is, or the target is evading, in which case it is no longer blocked by sand---since sand cannot accelerate.

hmmm..... you posted a cloud size of 2500km diameter ( from lbb2 I presume?).
Even if we shrink that down to 250km or even 25km in diameter, that's still a lot of space that a ship, measuring in the 10's to 100's of meters in length to jink around in.

 

[tater]

hmmm..... you posted a cloud size of 2500km diameter ( from lbb2 I presume?).
Even if we shrink that down to 250km or even 25km in diameter, that's still a lot of space that a ship, measuring in the 10's to 100's of meters in length to jink around in.

I was jokingly doing the math for the B2 sand "counter" on the map to get a MV for a SC (related to OP).

We know sand weighs in like a CT missile, tops, so anything bigger than a few 10s of METERS in diameter is going to be uselessly diffuse. Regardless, a ship can maneuver far more than that, even at 1 g.

Take the silly sand marker on the miniatures board, and the math I did. Over a 1000 second tun, that means the sand had an initial velocity given to it of 2km/s or so. That's a powerful cannon. None the less, a ship can accelerate to 5 times that velocity in the same 1000s. So even if you try to defend blocking with what is in reality a game counter, a ship at 1g moves 5 times the diameter of the cloud by using the lowest traveller drive rating.

That's besides the point of sand not really working to obscure the target vs passive sensors unless it is as hot as a ship making megawatts or more.

 

[mike wightman]

Missiles are not affected by sand in LBB2. They have no to-hit, they hit by hitting (assuming they survive anti-missile fire).

You need to get the Missiles special supplement. This gives LBB2 rules for missiles being destroyed if they pass through a sand cloud - I'll dig the rule out when I get the chance.

 

[BytePro]

LBB5 (High Guard) has sandcasters as anti-missile defense (see Missile Attack Table).

It also states sandcasters 'must be allocated against the hits of specific batteries'.

As with LBB2, no mention of 'clouds' of sand, and no mention of sand lasting indefinitely. As with LBB2, there are also no game mechanics to support these notions.

Sandcasters are treated in HG the way they are treated in LBB2 - as point defense weapons - except they are included as defense against missiles as well.

 

[tater]

You need to get the Missiles special supplement. This gives LBB2 rules for missiles being destroyed if they pass through a sand cloud - I'll dig the rule out when I get the chance.

Still, it's not B2. It's post-B2, as is HG, which also has sand vs missiles.

Missiles in the sup and very much nastier than even B2, which has missiles doing up to 6 hits.

So the earliest traveller canon is:

Beam weapons are not terribly effective at hitting (which is 100% at odds with reality), and can be 100% mitigated by what passes for shields in traveler, SAND.

Missiles have no to-hit roll, they intersect to hit. So if you can make it hit, it hits, only mitigated by anti-missile fire (which is nominally an 8+ for each laser shooting, so 3 rolls for a triple turret). Missiles then do 1d6 damage.

Missile supplement makes then even nastier.

Canon is a missile dominated combat system.

There are simply too many conflicting rules, and no overriding "vision" of what traveller combat in space really looks like. Clearly HG was meant to have the huge ships using spinal mounts. Cool. But what happened was with TCS, people started looking at what was best in the (entirely arbitrary) rules. The tables favor certain designs at certain TLs not because it is canon, not because it is realistic, but because they designed the tables a certain way.

Play a combat B2, play it with B2+missiles sup, play it in HG, play it in Mayday with HG on top. Play each 100 times for the same scenario. Within each system you will have a sense of what the typical outcome is. Between systems? No comparison whatsoever. One will have Player A usually winning, the other will have player B ALWAYS winning, etc. Not even close.

I have some ideas to fix things a little, but it needs a new thread, perhaps. Maybe we can all come up with something better that uses CT/HG USPs as they stand (and the HG design system), but produces better, and more consistent results.

 

[tater]

LBB5 (High Guard) has sandcasters as anti-missile defense (see Missile Attack Table).

It also states sandcasters 'must be allocated against the hits of specific batteries'.

As with LBB2, no mention of 'clouds' of sand, and no mention of sand lasting indefinitely. As with LBB2, there are also no game mechanics to support these notions.

Sandcasters are treated in HG the way they are treated in LBB2 - as point defense weapons - except they are included as defense against missiles as well.

LBB2 explicitly has "CLOUDS" of sand. It just doesn't use the word "clouds." it places a MARKER on the map. Call it what you like, blob, marker, counter. It is on the map, and moves like a non-accelrating ship.

Seriously, how can you possibly not see that.

It is launched, and a marker (which is the cloud) is placed on the map, and moves with the launching ship's vector.

That is 100% what it says.

Take a ~25mm diameter coin, place it on table to represent "sand" next to ship mini or marker, and it has a future position the same as launching ship.

Also, you can stack them, as per rules.

Your argument it is not in B2 is flat out wrong. It was clear when I played on my parent's carpet in the late 70s that this was the case.

HG is a radical change, and the very first mention that sand is vs a specific attack. There is NOTHING in B2 that says sand is against a specific attack. A marker is placed on the play surface, and moves with the launching vector.

and no mention of sand lasting indefinitely.

Wrong.

The rules say that ordnance (sand) is placed on the map, and moves the following friendly movement phase with launching ship's vector. That means it moves with the ship, starting the next turn (when the ship moves). It explicitly states it has the ship's vector. So it moves going forward in time, just like a ship, only with no maneuver ability (ie: it drifts).

 

[tater]

Again:

Ordnance must be specified as launched during the launch phase, and only
one missile or sand canister may be launched from a launch rack or sandcaster.
The launched item does not actually move until the following friendly movement
phase. All ordnance which is launched has the launching ship's vector, which must
be taken into account.

"The launched item." There are 2 types of item; missiles, and sand. Hence "item," not "missile." The "item does not actually move"... UNTIL THE FOLLOWING FRIENDLY MOVEMENT. Which means "the item" DOES move, but not until the movement phase of the turn. ALL ordnance (sand or missile) HAS THE LAUNCHING SHIP'S VECTOR.

"Taken into account" means that if the "item" passes through gravity wells, or has it's own acceleration, the future position is moved using vector addition. Sand has no acceleration ability short of gravity.

Period.

It could not possibly be more clear.

 

[Whipsnade]

The trouble with the space combat systems is they were designed without care about a few initial assumptions.

Seeing as GDW enjoyed a multi-decade career as award winning war game designers and seeing as you're just some guy on the internet, I'm pretty well satisfied the assumptions they did take.

The problem here is that you want different assumptions to be in play, not that GDW's assumptions were flawed.

Pick those well, and you can have a good, traveller system that is internally consistent, with the least amount of unrealism

Like Brilliant Lances? Why don't you post a poll and see how many people in the last year played that over-designed monster compared to LBB:2, Mayday, or HG2?

Here's the assumption you and people like you continually overlook: Games are meant to be played. Every design choice made during a game's development must keep that firmly in mind and, seeing as the games you're complaining about are still being played more than 30 years after their release, GDW was successful in designing games that will be played.

 

[mike wightman]

Still, it's not B2. It's post-B2, as is HG, which also has sand vs missiles.

Which version of LBB2?

Mayday, which predates HG and the revised version of CT (more on this later), has a DM for missiles attacking through sand, and the rules also state that sand casters affect missiles.

Here's the thing.

The ship combat rules in LBB2 1977 are incomplete.

Don't believe me - what are the rules regarding pulse lasers?

Look at the revised rules from 1981, TTB and SE - it takes all three to get the complete ship combat rules.

The missiles special supplement specifically states it is an add on for LBB2 ship combat, and has extra rules that help clarify the use of missiles in LBB2.

 

[Whipsnade]

Look at the revised rules from 1981, TTB and SE - it takes all three to get the complete ship combat rules. The missiles special supplement specifically states it is an add on for LBB2 ship combat, and has extra rules that help clarify the use of missiles in LBB2.

Very good points.

I'll add the JTAS article on the Gazelle-class CE to your list. It provides the rules for particle accelerators.

 

[tater]

Seeing as GDW enjoyed a multi-decade career as award winning war game designers and seeing as you're just some guy on the internet, I'm pretty well satisfied the assumptions they did take.

That's the counter argument? Really? The guys who wrote the games were simply "some guys NOT on the internet." You being "some guy on the internet" doesn't make your substantive points invalid, their content makes them valid, or not. Nothing else matters.

Base assumption of sand. They won game awards, so sand is realistic? if it is not realistic, that is a bad assumption. It's not even realistic with loads of techno-handwaving, and given SC TLs, we can't use technobabble hand waving. Explain how sand is a "good assumption."

So award-winning game designers (what kind of physics degrees do the award-givers have, again?) write B2 combat, where sand works 100% against beam attacks, and then write HG where it doesn't, and that is good enough? They wrote rules where lasers can very likely miss ships even at close range, when right now we can hit specific parts of targets with lasers that are crossing targets (note that at longer ranges, the angular motion is going to be less, and even easier for beam-pointes than missiles around Earth). Targets that are every bit as tiny (angular size) as traveller ships.

The problem here is that you want different assumptions to be in play, not that GDW's assumptions were flawed.

No, they have many flat out wrong or flawed assumptions. Not IMHO, but in the "opinion" of basic physics. Our award-winning designers made a system (HG) where a spinal mount---that has to point the entire ship (grossly, they can certainly bend the beam a little for fine pointing)---can hit a tiny, agile (in HG terms) crossing target at close range better than ANY turret mounted weapons in the entire game. Not even any SINGLE such weapon, but batteries of 10s of them, and arbitrarily as many such batteries as you like.

What brilliant assumption makes this true, or even remotely sensible?

What assumption makes this good GAMEPLAY?

Or that missiles have a better to hit against a small, agile target than weapons that propagate at c? Good assumption?

Relative computer as a DM? It seems reasonable before you do the math. Particularly in the 1970s. But right now... I'm not seeing it. Ships can be seen and tracked (even using "computer" to mean the totality of relative avionics). Having better sensors and fire control might well give you a better chance to hit a target. It will NOT be a relative thing. Your systems being half as good make you no more vulnerable. It is an anachronism to combat of the period when the game was written when ECM, etc, mattered a great deal. A bad assumption.

Like Brilliant Lances? Why don't you post a poll and see how many people in the last year played that over-designed monster compared to LBB:2, Mayday, or HG2?

BL was similarly riddled with problems and bad assumptions. It was too complicated to play, too. Pretty much worthless. For the TNE era, BattleRider is a far better game, though similarly FUBAR in details. Basically the best part of BR was the movement system (rescaled Mayday, more or less). The broader, simpler combat results, while flawed, were a good idea as a starting point.

Here's the assumption you and people like you continually overlook: Games are meant to be played. Every design choice made during a game's development must keep that firmly in mind and, seeing as the games you're complaining about are still being played more than 30 years after their release, GDW was successful in designing games that will be played.

So what?

That doesn't make the assumptions right. That doesn't make them internality consistent. Doesn't even make them good gameplay. Wargames are not fun when results are contrary to reality. If the players are not incompetent with basics physics concepts, some results in a bad game will immediately suspend disbelief.

You are arguing that their games are in fact flawless, I guess. Any change would harm them?

 

[tater]

Which version of LBB2?

Mayday, which predates HG and the revised version of CT (more on this later), has a DM for missiles attacking through sand, and the rules also state that sand casters affect missiles.

Here's the thing.

The ship combat rules in LBB2 1977 are incomplete.

Don't believe me - what are the rules regarding pulse lasers?

Look at the revised rules from 1981, TTB and SE - it takes all three to get the complete ship combat rules.

The missiles special supplement specifically states it is an add on for LBB2 ship combat, and has extra rules that help clarify the use of missiles in LBB2.

Agreed, but the totality of it is then still entirely disconnected from HG, even limiting HG solely to ships of the scale of LBB2+. I actually posted that I think sand is more realistic vs missiles than beams. You'll get no argument. I only bring up B2 because of the poster maintaining that sand is not a "cloud" that moves in B2, and it clearly is.

LBB2+ is better than HG, frankly, though the sand rules are unambiguous in making ships invulnerable to beam attack under the right sand deployment conditions.

I understand the point of HG abstraction completely, but it is broken. For huge units, it's outside from B2 enough that the results are OK. But it does't work for smaller units, which are used in HG situations (smaller ships, fighters, etc).