Starships Versus Tanks

[selunatic2397]

In my friday game of CT I have a lone player who got stuck on planet that is undergoing a pretty intense civil war. The other players are planning to rescue him, but have to shoot their way past the death heads hussars and a pack of prowling grav tanks. Just what effect does starship grade lasers and missiles have on a groundside battlefield? CT laser were about 250 megawatt I seem to remember, but TNE had some up to 360 megajoule...I'd kinda think that would lay waste to a ground target. A ship's missile that does 1-6 hit on a starship but a tacmissile probably shouldn't do more than cosmetic damage to even a scout ship. Would ship's lasers, in a city where the aforementioned hero is dug in, slice buildings in half or just start lots of fires and such?

Would the gearmongers and grognards lend me their vast experience and helpme out before I'm

 

[Piper]

A few ideas:
Large, hi-tech grav tanks are usually armored as well as a starship and carry weapons that are starship-grade.

Without going into a lot of detail, you could easily treat them as laser-armed small craft for combat purposes.

Armor is usually thickest on the front, thinning on the sides and rear and thinnest on the deck and belly. Large manpack tac missiles might be able to knock out a tank (or penetrate a starship) but most personal weapons are going to be very limited.

Improvised explosives (mines) may damage the belly and grav modules or you might even try dropping a building on one with explosives.

Something to keep in mind is that tanks are normally escorted by infantry in urban settings.
Grav tanks might actually hang back and pop up over buildings to engage targets, or lurk near long streets where they can block lines of movement and isolate buildings while the infantry clears them.

Large lasers at close range will probaby drill fist-sized holes in most buildings with some shattering as the material heats unevenly and releases trapped gasses. A series of rapid pulses might well slice a building like a knife.

Lots of fires, yes.

edit: Tanks normally carry secondary weapons. If you have Mercenary, consider an autocannon, a RAM autolauncher or even a VRF Gauss gun. Tanks should also have at least a limited ability to shoot at incoming missiles; something like the anti-missile ability of starships.

Good luck and good hunting!

 

[Pickles]

According to Striker (book 2, p.41-42), starship turret lasers are massively powerful in battlefield terms. At TL10, a ship's beam laser has a penetration of 625, which is almost 10 times more powerful than the laser grav tank example (book 3, p.29). High energy weapons are even nastier. Starship missiles seem to be quite unmanly by comparison, unless they're those naughty nuclear ones ...

I think the main problem might be in getting ship's weapons to bear on battlefield targets on non-vacuum worlds. Fighters would have trouble strafing at their speeds, and slower ships make very tempting targets within the atmosphere.

 

[Golan2072]

I never liked the Striker starship convention system. A small boat (say, a fighter) isn't much bigger than a tank, and is most likely less heavily armed and armored; only the big ships (1,000+ dtons) should really be beyond the battlefield scale. The rest would have to have weaker weapons and thinner armor than they have in Striker. By much.

 

[mike wightman]

I agree with Piper.

For quick and dirty grav tanks just adapt the CT small craft.

Treat as a fighter with a ship scale laser or energy weapon as a main gun, several tac missiles or drone missiles, a VRF gauss gun or point defence laser/energy weapon - use antimissile ship program rules - a couple of PGMP or FGMP weapons for use against infantry could round things off nicely.

 

[selunatic2397]

Thanks for all the help guys!!! The stranded hero is just hoping for a han solo style swoop in and scoop him up rescue, the rest of the group has set hopes in a few salvos of missiles to keep heads down with our hero hopefully getting up on a skyscraper top to cut down on infantry attacks. They do seem to have forgotten that grav tanks can reach orbit quite nicely

Hmmm...lots of small arms fire for effect and an ambush by the death's head hussars and the grav tanks to make them squirm...Mwaa Haaa Haaa

That should keep them on their toes.

Thanks again for all the help guys!

 

[Ran Targas]

^ I would contend that a Type S or A2 is no match for a grav tank; in fact, it shouldn't even be a contest. My thoughts:

ARMOR - Winner: Tank
Civilian starships are thin skinned and minimally armed by design, the added mass of armor or elaborate weapon systems only reduces crew space and cargo or fuel capacity and reduces drive efficiency. Tanks, by design, willingly sacrifice crew space, cargo capacity, and fuel stores in favor of more armor and weapon space. Just like aircraft today (even military aircraft), you shouldn't need a very sophisticated weapon (birds are still very effective) to knock a commercial spacecraft out of the sky; main battle tanks on the other hand do require significant effort to exact a kill, just ask an Iraqi soldier.

WEAPONS - Winner: Tank
A civilian shipboard laser is nominally only useful in a vacuum. Range and punch would be reduced significantly in an atmosphere; add smoke, chaff, and defensive aerosols and it gets even worse for the laser. Tank armor would be designed to repel or absorb the best an enemy could throw at it, whether high power direct energy weapons or explosive projectiles. Realistically, a ship would have to get well within a tank's effective weapon range for its dinky laser to do much damage, making this a suicide mission. An anti-starship missile would probably only be a little more effective, if 1) it could lock on the tank (ECM), 2) it could fly in an atmosphere (fins?), and 3) there was significant kinetic energy transfer. Still, it may not prevent the tank from firing back.

In a TU where rail guns and mass drivers are the norm, a civilian starship may have a better chance of damaging an armored vehicle, but then again, the tank designers would probably anticipate this and compensate accordingly.

TARGETTING - Winner: Tank
Tank targetting systems would be matched to track and engage high speed grav tanks and low flying, tank killing aircraft making a bulky commercial starship nothing more than a big fat target with little or no armor, ECM, or other defenses. Read: BOOM!

IMTU, your solo ground pounder would be going quickly from rescuee to rescuer, if the crew were lucky enough to survive the crash and subsequent explosion! Might make for a more interesting game, no?

 

[Piper]

Originally posted by Ran Targas:
^ I would contend that a Type S or A2 is no match for a grav tank; in fact, it shouldn't even be a contest.

Your thoughts are valid, but my suggestions were based on Striker which does specifically address this question.

ARMOR
Unarmored starships have a Striker armor value of 40(?). While a Trepida bow armor is higher (60-ish) the penetration rating of a ship laser makes this a moot point.

WEAPONS
Striker lasers are rated in standard atmosphere.
They derate the same as energy weapons.

TARGETTING
Starship fire control is the same as any system at a given tech level. Starships also have point-defense ability.

edit: I don't have the books handy. Could someone confirm armor ratings and weapon penetrations from either Striker or MT?
Thanks.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

The ship has better range and sensors, does more damage, and is big enough to absorb a few hits.

MT Type S has 40 armour, pulse laser has pen 80, damage 800. Trepida also has 40 armour, fusion gun has pen 67, damage 30.

 

[mike wightman]

Even in CT a starship hull/bulkhead requires 1000 points of damage from an explosive or energy weapon to make a man sized hole. Hardly an egg shell.

A ship's lasers can put a hole in another ship at light second range.
A few tens of kilometres, even in an atmosphere, aren't going to prevent it from vaporising the grav tank.

And as for tagetting, again the ship can hit a target evading at 6G out to 3 light seconds, not to mention being able to switch to a point defence role.

Instead of thinking of starships as aircraft, think of them as flying submarines, with thick hulls.

 

[Golan2072]

Originally posted by Ran Targas:
Civilian starships are thin skinned and minimally armed by design

Remember that all Traveller spacecraft (as opposed to vacc suits and even Battledresses) can stand a prolong exposure to an Insidius (sp?) Atmosphere. Take the example of Venus (Sol II), which is VERY Insidius, and the Soviet Venera probes, built with 1970's-era (early-mid TL7) tank-armor technology, could not survive there for more than a few hours or days. So a TL9+ (or even TL8+ ?) spacecraft is supposed to have more armor than an early-TL7 tank.

On the other hand, I *DO* think that Striker's ship armor values and weapon powers are off the scale. What we need is a middle-of-the-way solution of some kind.

 

[Golan2072]

I've just read the JTAS #17 article about airceaft/spacecraft integration with LBB1/LBB4 ground combat; it seems to horribly over-rate the standard starship beam lasers. Sure, it will probably be a high-accuracy, (relatively) high-output weapon, but why the 50m insta-kill radious? I don't think it should be much more powerful than a Plasma-A gun, maybe more accurate and with a longer range, but not a mega-death-beam!

 

[The Oz]

The power of basic CT starship weaponry is one reason I invented less powerful defensive weapons for my CT universe.

I would say that a civilian starship fighting against grav tanks (and enemy tac missiles) would have quite an edge in killing power, but the unarmored (quite sturdy, but unarmored in HG terms) hull of the starship would be vulnerable to the tank's main weapons (and larger tac missiles) and there would be a lot more tanks (and missile launchers) than the starship would have lasers. And the tanks can hide behind terrain, which the starship cannot so easily do.

When the ship hits something, it dies.

When the tanks hit the ship, some part of the ship gets hurt. Not hurt a lot, but it all adds up. This could make quite a tense scenario, especially when the person commanding the ground forces finally gets smart and orders all his gunners to concentrate on one area of the ship, perhaps the bridge or the engine room!!!

 

[Uncle Bob]

Remember that a starship hull is designed to survive a 10+ kps re-entry, even at wierd angles. This requires a highly refractory hull and an extremely strong one (6g+ in any direction!). This could easily be as strong as a contemporary tank.

We used gunships (armed ship's boats) to provide support for Marines, rather than grav tanks. They were more expensive, but very mass/volume efficient.

 

[sleech]

Mornin' All

I much prefer the quick and dirty approach. A tank = a small craft. This has worked well for me in the past.

Also, consider the tank's defensive weaponry such as smoke, etc, as a sandcaster and it becomes a faair match for any small craft and Type S scouts.

 

[Ran Targas]

^ Y'all seem to think that while starship technology advances, armored vehicle technology is going to stand still. How stupid do you think the tank designers/buyers are if the field tanks that even a single Far Trader could destroy without taking a hit? These things would be designed to be impervious to dinky civilian weapons.

And secondly, how could a civilian starship, designed for efficient space travel not war, possibly go toe-to-toe with a vehicle designed specifically to face off with other armored, heavily armed, vehicles. At the same tech level, a grav tank would rip a Type S to shreds!

 

[Badbru]

Ran, my answer to your questions/viewpoint would be to echo a previous post. The grav tank would indeed be explicitly, efficiently, well designed killing machine for battlefield engagements ranging from a few meters to maybe high orbit, or perhaps several thousand klicks, whereas your standard armament packaged trader ought to be able to atleast attempt to engage targets moving at up to 6g or more at ranges possibly beyond a light second. That's something your highly evolved and specialised Grav tank is never going to be expected to do and thus more than likely wont be equiped with a capability for it. By contrast it would almost be considered a basic opperational requirement for an armed trader.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

The problem is, "civilian" weapons are actually military quality.

 

[kafka47]

Tanks also have the advantage of being small & agile. The sensors on your standard civilian ship would not be so precise. Without effective sensors, there goes your targeting computer with a heavy DM. By that the Tilapia has sneaked by.

 

[mike wightman]

Starship sensors and weapons, even those on a free trader, can hit a missile in flight at a range of 3 light second - even more if you use the Mayday rules.

A grav tank's sensors aren't going to be capable of anywhere near the same resolution - unless you are building it to double as a space superiority fighter

A ship's laser can destroy a 5000t ship with one lucky hit, again at a range of 3 light seconds.

Ship weapons are vastly more powerful than anything carried by a grav tank - unless the grav tank's weapons are considered to be ship scale - the only way to change this in CT is to reduce the effectiveness/scale of ship weapons.

And a grav tank can't have an acceleration greater than (7G-local gravity) according to Striker.