Andrew Boulton
The Adminator
What do they look like?
How big is a missile? What shape is the launcher? What about a sandcaster, laser, etc?
How big is a missile? What shape is the launcher? What about a sandcaster, laser, etc?
Starship weapons
- Thread starter Andrew Boulton
- Start date
In CT, a turret is 1 dTon and a Barbette is 5 dTons, making a laser 0.33 dTons or less (up to 3 in a turret).
I figure they are sealed in canisters like disposable ATGM's are (Dragon, Milan, and the like) and loaded into the tube launcher. The missile is fired out, the canister is ejected and the next one drops into place. When all three are fired out of the magazine the loader has to open the hatch and slot in the next three canisters. In fact, I believe the missile JTAS supplement describes them as being in canisters? Anyway, IMTU they are.
So the launcher looks like a revolving cylinder that fires the missile that rotates to the launch tube. Bay missiles ("torpedoes" IMTU) are on either on big Katyusha looking racks (good for ortillery) or fire out of tubes.
Sandcasters work the same way except the canister is shot out far enough from the ship that it can safely explode to create the cloud of sand without harming the ship, getting sucked into scoops, whatever.
So the launcher looks like a revolving cylinder that fires the missile that rotates to the launch tube. Bay missiles ("torpedoes" IMTU) are on either on big Katyusha looking racks (good for ortillery) or fire out of tubes.
Sandcasters work the same way except the canister is shot out far enough from the ship that it can safely explode to create the cloud of sand without harming the ship, getting sucked into scoops, whatever.
Following Striker very loosely, the standard 50kg turret-launched missile is about 50cm in diameter by 1m long, IIRC. It should be a streamlined pointy thing, but it will not need fins to steer it. I think one of the Keith Bros. posted a drawing of some in combat in the early JTAS days: guidance and sensor(s) at the front, fusing and warhead in the middle, propulsion at the rear, the whole kit not really even streamlined.
Also as per Striker and its "giant shotguns", I figure a sand round is about the size of a "pony keg" -- which, at one-quarter barrel, is roughly 30l of volume and a unit that my players always seem very familiar with for some reason or other.
They both launch off of conventional-looking racks that do not take up that much space; the fire control mechanicals and electronics, however, take up the rest of the volume, up to one-sixth dton of a turret's allocated one dton.
The Gunner's couch takes up half a dton elsewhere (i.e., in a less-exposed place) in the ship, such as adjacent to the bridge, so a turret's total displacement may be halved between two locales on the deckplan.
A laser will be an electronic boxy thing with a lens on one end and a power plug on the other -- it eats a huge amount of electricity and therefore generates a huge amount of heat; most of its non-fire-control 1/6dton bulk is heat sinks (and capacitors in the case of pulse lasers). (This also explains their slow rate of fire.) Lasers do not necessarily have to be long; given the fact that they are most likely emitting in the X-Ray frequencies (for highest efficiency), they can have fairly stubby excitation chambers.
Each weapons installation -- launch rack including ammo or laser, both with fire control -- should be about the size of a refrigerator, with similar mass.
At least those are the rules of thumb I have always used in the rare instances when might be an issue...
Given that lasers can radiate waste heat into space, why the heat sinks? Just curious.
& IIRC TL 13 plus lasers are X-ray, prior to that they are... errr... something else - not x-ray! Assuming I'm correct, care to estimate barrel lengths for lasers ?
Like the beer keg analogy
Cheers
Because vacuum is actually a pretty good insulator (hence the Thermos™ bottle), so you have to dump the quickly-generated heat into something that can hold it while it is slowly radiated away.
I'd say about yay long for Tl12- (which are probably masers), and about half that for X-Ray, sometimes a/k/a/"xasers"...
It will be driven more by heat conductivity than wavelength -- it is just that the X-Rays will need more shielding for leakage, and you will want to minimize the opportunities for leakage, even if it means you have to really work on the cooling because your gain medium is more compact by design choice.
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Trent
Guest
Yes, missiles in traveller would likely not have fins and such as atmospheric steering would be useless. They'd likely steer via a gyroscope.
In starfleet battles, a game I was into before a run in with the designer, drones (Missiles) looked exactly like modern missiles with fins and such, despite the absurdity of it.
The designer rationalized that the fins were for heat dissipation and antennas to receive guidance from the launcher. *KOFF*bullshit*KOFF*
It was more likely that they looked like modern missiles with fins because the designer thought they looked cooler, and his opinion was the only thing that mattered.
GT has a nice "exploded" view of a missile, with deployable antenna for receiving guidance from the controlling ship.
In starfleet battles, a game I was into before a run in with the designer, drones (Missiles) looked exactly like modern missiles with fins and such, despite the absurdity of it.
The designer rationalized that the fins were for heat dissipation and antennas to receive guidance from the launcher. *KOFF*bullshit*KOFF*
It was more likely that they looked like modern missiles with fins because the designer thought they looked cooler, and his opinion was the only thing that mattered.
GT has a nice "exploded" view of a missile, with deployable antenna for receiving guidance from the controlling ship.
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BlackBat242
SOC-14 1K
I was under the impression that the launchers were more than just racks... they forcibly ejected the missile, so that the missile's propulsion didn't have to fire up in the turret.
Are missiles chemical-combustion propelled... or do they use some other form?
The canister might perform the same function as a modern VLS cell... contain & redirect exhaust blast/gravimetric field to allow the missile's propulsion to initiate in the turret... but that wouldn't allow quite the acceleration/range that applying an initial velocity via the launcher would.
Are missiles chemical-combustion propelled... or do they use some other form?
The canister might perform the same function as a modern VLS cell... contain & redirect exhaust blast/gravimetric field to allow the missile's propulsion to initiate in the turret... but that wouldn't allow quite the acceleration/range that applying an initial velocity via the launcher would.
IMTU they are gravitic -- cheap, disposable thruster units running off batteries and dumping the waste heat aft.
And Striker notwithstanding, my sand rounds are more like depth charges than giant shotgun rounds -- they are kicked overboard with a little spin for stability... and now that I think about it, I suppose if they were designed correctly and spun themselves fast enough they could simply use centrifugal force for chaff dispersal and omit pyrotechnics altogether... hmmm...
o:Which, upon reflection, seems awfully stubby... perhaps it is more like 25cm by 1m...
T
Trent
Guest
In GT it was said the missile launcher could add slightly from the missile's vector upon launch, so I assume they use either a gauss or gravitic impetus system to give the missile some initial velocity.
As to propulsion, how about a limited burn fusion drive? Huge acceleration, uses a little liquid hydrogen and only has to last a little while.
Not a good idea; the problem with all incarnations of HEPlaR is that the tens-of-thousands-of-kilometers-long, approximately-one-million-Kelvins exhaust plume poses too great a danger to the launching vessel. Better off to go with chemical propulsion (which does not have enough thrust because it burns out too soon) or clean, environmentally-friendly gravitics (which are ubiquitous in the OTU anyway)...
Although SS3 brings its own complicating issues to missiles of which I remain wary, that's a good metric to work from; it is pointy-enough and dense-enough.
Andrew Boulton
The Adminator
Is something that tiny plausible as an anti-ship weapon?
T
Trent
Guest
Hell yes. At an impact velocity of several miles per second making a warhead explosive would be almost redundant.
At high enough velocity even a small projectile, like, say, an ordinary bolt, could do grievous damage. There's a cool hard science anime called "Planetes" that centers around a group of people working in space to clean up orbital junk. They're actually called "vacuum cleaners" and they were mandates after a suborbital hypersonic passenger transport plane was destroyed by a bolt from an old spacecraft hitting it at several miles per second.
The motto for the series was "In space a bolt can screw you."
When you consider that the space shuttle can have an orbital velocity of something like 55 miles per second, you see anything coming off it will have that speed too. Modern day hypervelocity kinetic penetrator rounds don''t have a speed near that, so it's not hard to imagine how much damage something moving at that speed can do.
Indeed, but also bear in mind that in space, there is no atmo drag to decelerate shrapnel -- ejecta from an explosion will travel at a steady speed until they impact something or fall into a gravity well.
The only limiting factor will be shrapnel density; beyond a certain point -- say, 2500km to stick with the rules -- shrapnel will have dispersed enough for the target's m-drive-based micrometeroid shielding (á la Beltstrike) to handle it, but inside that radius it will be a Major Hazard.
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Trent
Guest
IMO one big impactor will beat a lot of little ones usually. I'm not familiar with beltsrike, so what is the mdrive based meteor shielding like?
