Regina has only 10 SDB factors in FFW. The 15C are planetary defense battalions.
System Defense Fleets
- Thread starter Murph
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Regina has only 10 SDB factors in FFW. The 15C are planetary defense battalions.
lostscout5
SOC-12
While I do not have FFW, I think that most worlds in the "lost" areas of the Imperium would have had enough SDB and other system forces to fight off the ravening hordes of the Vargr, and after two or three of these, they forces would have been so whittled down by attrition, that they would have to have given up. Plus, as pointed out the deep Meson gun installations. I found my old MT books and the two Vargr warships listed are both TL 11. One a battlecruiser, and the other a cruiser. Plus the planetary defense battalions would make raiding a tough proposition. And while you can pick off the low hanging fruit of the low pop, low tech worlds, at some point you have to tangle with the big boys.
Although I think by the time you control the high orbitals, you can play "drop the rock" on any hold out defenders. Less messy radiation. Plus something that Traveller did not address (probably because no one thought about it) were KEW strikes. A big enough iron rod moving at a C fractional speed can do a lot of damage. I don't really see troops assaulting Omaha Beach, rather, I see them moving in as an occupation force after the planet surrenders before being bombed back into the Stone Age.
Although I think by the time you control the high orbitals, you can play "drop the rock" on any hold out defenders. Less messy radiation. Plus something that Traveller did not address (probably because no one thought about it) were KEW strikes. A big enough iron rod moving at a C fractional speed can do a lot of damage. I don't really see troops assaulting Omaha Beach, rather, I see them moving in as an occupation force after the planet surrenders before being bombed back into the Stone Age.
That will depend on the rules used. See that with HG (or MT) rules, once again due to most ships being mision killed but not really destroyed, unless the varg hordes are strong enough to overcome the SDB fleet at once, they will fight again the whole fleet (or nearly so) next time, as, if the system has any repair capacity, most of the SDBs will be repaired in a few weeks (and any ship left behind by the Vargr will be reparied and added to the planetary fleet also in a short time).
I guess you mean those in Rebellion sourcebook. See that the Aek-Naz Battlecruiser is fully ilegal according MT rules, as it has j4 at TL 11 (when TL 13 is needed to achieve it).
Also, in both cases, with Computer 5, agility 0 and armor 45-50 they will be soon dead in a battle against any Imperial ship.
To keep with the same book (and using MT rules), a single SEH light cruiser can make short of quite a number of them, with its 4 level computer advantage, lasers/sand enough to keep vargr missiles from hitting (even some lasers could be used offensively) and its J meson gun, that will take one ship per turn (without agility and with the computer advantage, they'll hit and penetrate config 35 out of 36 times, while the vargr factor 7 missiles will hit on a 9+ and need also 9+ to penetrate SEH's beams, and their D spinal PAs will hit only on a 8+)
Unless you have many more ships than they have meson sites, your ships will be dead after a single round or two of bombing, and, in any case, with those cruisers, your losses will be far beyond what is acceptable).
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Besides a casual reference to the "Deep Meson Site", has anyone ever seen any numbers on them? How many planets have them, how they're laid out, the integration of static planetary sites like these with both space and terrestrial sensors and tracking systems, and the characteristics of such systems?
FF&S1 has a blurb about making a meson site (essentially burying a sphere with the same diameter as the gun).
Because seems to me, you don't need to kill the meson sites, you just need to blind them.
And, obviously they're popular in folk lore. But what is there talking about their deployment. Who gets them, how many do they get, etc. The upsides and downsides of building them.
Always talk about "SDBs lurking in the upper clouds of a gas giant", but not of meson platforms doing the same thing -- save they don't rise above to engage, they stay hidden.
Does Rebellion or Hard Time talk of the toll that meson sites take on attackers, or how planets are hammered flat that house them? What is Imperial Doctrine for assaulting a planet with meson sites?
Simply, I keep hearing about them, so in theory they exist, but they have a bit of myth and mystery surrounding them. Just wondering if the concept has actually been explored and documented anywhere.
GURPs Starports goes a bit into naval bases on pages 66-67. For a class V Naval Base it listed 25+ Deep Meson sites. Class IV were listed as having 1-2 Deep Meson sites. IIRC one of the TNE books had one.
MegaTrav "COACC" on page 73 has a little bit about deep-site mesons in game terms. They may be fired out to Planetary range (50,000kms) and combat is conducted exactly as ship-to-ship combat with the important exception that only sensor hits have any effect on the deep site meson.
esampson
SOC-13
Controlling high orbitals is a very tough proposition, IMO. Ships coming into the system are at massive technical disadvantages. For one thing the SDBs always have the well known advantage of not requiring jump drives or jump fuel. They also possess the ability to surprise the enemy (by being parked in various locations that provide shielding and running at low power) while being virtually immune to surprise themselves. Enemies arriving announce themselves with jump flash and pretty much have to arrive at a good distance to the target in order to regroup after jump scatter (both temporally and spatially). Jumping in 'close' is probably a good way to get your fleet picked apart as the ships individually arrive.
Holding high orbit is probably an even harder proposition. SDBs have to fly around and defend the whole system, because not all of your enemies will take up orbital positions. In fact, I would guess that a lot of enemies will not want to take up orbital positions because you can put laser and missile equipped satellites into orbit for a fraction of the cost of an SDB. Sure, they won't all be in position to attack someone in orbit but if you put up 500 of them and just 10% are in position (and in all likelihood with the ranges in Traveller you would probably have a much higher percentage) then that's a barrage of 50 attackers; attackers who have to be dealt with individually. No firing a big gun and taking out a large number of attackers in one shot. And of course you are in range of the deep meson guns.
Accelerating a KEW to a substantial portion of light speed is probably almost impossible as an effective tactic. It would take a substantial amount of time and distance. Before that occurs you can probably count on the SDBs interfering enough to cause a problem (which is why you have SDBs and don't just rely on satellites).
Trying to take the high orbit would probably be an awful lot like trying to take a medieval castle. You can give up on surprise so your basic tactic will be to try and pick off 'archers' (defense satellites) so you can get closer and inflict damage on their 'walls'. You'll need to watch out for 'patrols' (SDBs) that they have employed outside the 'walls' before you arrive and you need to watch for 'sallies' from the 'castle' attacking your camp while you are trying to do this.
And you have to be fairly quick about all of this. You can't just stand way back in a tight mass while your own marauders hunt down the patrols, then start picking off the satellites and begin plans to accelerate a large chunk of iron as your ultimate threat. You have a window of 2 weeks to get in and either assume control or else get out before reinforcements are going to begin to arrive.
My guess is that warfare is going to be a lot more of a harassment variety. Warships pop in, blow the Hell out of things, make merchants nervous about going to/from the system, and then pop out again. In the case of Vargr they will probably go straight for any merchant ships recently arrived (since they will lack fuel to jump) and raid them before jumping back out. Occasionally land will change hands as a system gets so besieged that it eventually gets worn down to the point where the attackers possess a large enough advantage to make a full scale grab viable, but that is probably a pretty rare case.
So if a fleet remained at 100,000 kms, they could "drop the rock" with impunity. Also a point is the sensor net required for the deep Meson guns to successfully target ships almost should require some sort of orbital/deep space component?
Excellent points, but what if you stand off and send your missiles in on a pre-computed ballistic path to attrit the orbital based weapons? Also when you jump in, I have always assumed that you arrived with 0% acceleration, essentially dead stop in space till you got your M drive up and running.
esampson
SOC-13
First you have to identify the orbital based weaponry. There are probably a lot of other functional satellites in orbit as well and if you are putting defensive platforms in space it would make a lot of sense to set up dummy satellites, each of which should cost a small fraction of a weapon platform since launch facilities in Traveller are dirt cheap.
Once you do that and you send your missiles they still have to reach the satellites. Launching from long range so that you can remain safe because of the gravity well (something I'm not even sure actually works thanks to the hyper-efficient nature of drives in Traveller) gives defensive satellites a lot of time to shoot down the incoming missiles (and you probably can't use that to reliably identify weapon platforms since a defense platform could shoot down missiles targeting another satellite. You would identify the defending satellite but have no clue if the targeted satellite was a weapon platform or a dummy).
Could you eventually take out the defensive net? Sure, but that's where the two week limit becomes important.
In one of the episodes of MT adventure Arrival Vengeance they confront an autpomated Deep Meson Site, and some details are given too...
To do that you must know where those satellites are. See that a hiTech world is likely to have also many civilian satellites (power, weather, commo, etc.) taht you don't want to destroy if you are to use the planet afterwards (or if you have any political reason not to be a genocide, that is what I asume to be the most common case).
And, as esampson sais, those missiles comin from far away will be detected and be quite easy to target and destroy (unless you launch them in massive quatities, but they're not cheap, and you space to carry them is limited).
ANd, of course, you can expect to need some of them for the defending fleet...
That's not so clear. In a MT adventure I remember pirates accelering before jump to reach their fast moving base, hinting that you arrive with the same vector as you jumped (relative to what, is not clear).
I read a book once, I believe it was "Lost Fleet" where the fleet did just that, but using kinetic strikes. It seemed a bit improbable when I read it, but the rest of the book was pretty accurate, so maybe there's not that much hand waving going on.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
I've heard that maintaining your vee after jump is canon. I have no idea, I am no canonista after stopping reading everything religiously by 1983, just read several posts stating this.
I am leaning towards the 0 vee after jump value myself, in large part to avoid ugly frac-C scenes.
Re: missiles and SDBs or orbitals, a standard Traveller homing missile from SS3 is 5G6, meaning that by the time it reaches it's 6th turn of burn for the final run in, it is packing 25Gs. With one hit per 3G of collective vee on impact, that missile is packing 8 hits plus 2-4 hits in the warhead. Add in 25Gs from a launching platform headed towards the planet and you could easily be looking at a 20 hit missile.
Against moving ships a lot of those missiles will never reach target due to avoidance maneuver. But against a fixed target where missiles can have optimized G, a lot more are going to strike home and ruin any small target.
10 8000Cr missiles beat a MCr warsat every time in the cost efficiency department.
I am leaning towards the 0 vee after jump value myself, in large part to avoid ugly frac-C scenes.
Re: missiles and SDBs or orbitals, a standard Traveller homing missile from SS3 is 5G6, meaning that by the time it reaches it's 6th turn of burn for the final run in, it is packing 25Gs. With one hit per 3G of collective vee on impact, that missile is packing 8 hits plus 2-4 hits in the warhead. Add in 25Gs from a launching platform headed towards the planet and you could easily be looking at a 20 hit missile.
Against moving ships a lot of those missiles will never reach target due to avoidance maneuver. But against a fixed target where missiles can have optimized G, a lot more are going to strike home and ruin any small target.
10 8000Cr missiles beat a MCr warsat every time in the cost efficiency department.
I'm afraid you missunderstood SS3 numbers, as the number after the G is the total Gs it can accelerate, not the number of turns you can keep its maximum acceleration. A 5G6 missile will only accelerate 6 Gs before runing out of fuel, with a maximum of 5G in a turn. To reach the 25 Gs acceleration you'll need a XG25 missile.
So, those standard missiles will not reach the acceleration you say, and they will make their final approach out of fuel, so with no maneuvering capacity, and so easy targets for anti-missile fire (not to talk about ECMs that any such satellite might have, as you're using LBB2 rules)
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Don't believe I am, at all.
The CT errata makes it clearer if the original does not-
So that's 30 1 G burns in any combination (assuming not continuous) up to 5 Gs per any given turn.
Which just makes sense, otherwise missiles in CT would under your interpretation be strictly short range weapons (or MgT ranged, I suppose).
Those impact babies pack a punch.
In an earlier thread in the fleet subforum I went into some detail where the 1 hit per 3G combined vee/missile weight and casing translates into a specific joule number which we can use to evaluate per hit power.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Movement vector before jump is maintained after jump:
Taking out everything but the high port and/or beanstalk would be almost de rigeur...
You DO NOT want enemy imaging sats functional. Especially not if you might have to land; if not landing, they're not a major issue as casualties anyway, and can be turned to space imaging most of the time, which is something else you really don't want.
You do not want enemy def sats operating, whether aimed up or down, they need to die.
You don't want enemy comm-sats functioning - destroying them reduces local C³I². Even if you plan to take it over, you wnt to have maximum assurance of data integrity on them, and you simply cannot do that on captured hardware.
You DO NOT want enemy imaging sats functional. Especially not if you might have to land; if not landing, they're not a major issue as casualties anyway, and can be turned to space imaging most of the time, which is something else you really don't want.
You do not want enemy def sats operating, whether aimed up or down, they need to die.
You don't want enemy comm-sats functioning - destroying them reduces local C³I². Even if you plan to take it over, you wnt to have maximum assurance of data integrity on them, and you simply cannot do that on captured hardware.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
This is a classic example of errata being written by fans. The original version matched Mayday. The errata makes missiles even more unbelievable.
The errata should be ignored.
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