The naval base in the living room

[phavoc]

Much depends on the type of base, and how valuable it is. Major fleet installations are going to be very tough nuts to crack. If you are building a major nodal fleet station, why not tow a large 10-12km diameter asteroid into orbit and then use a few km of rock for armor, liberally apply point defense and other weapons, and you essentially have a giant battleship. Though a costly one. But you will be able to outfight a much greater tonnage, requiring the enemy to commit a lot of hulls and firepower to take it out.

If it's a teeny base designed to provide some fuel and basic supplies to passing patrol ships it may mount very little, if any defenses.

Stand-off missile attacks seem like a great way to decimate any fixed installation. But you know defenders are going to think about that and would/should prepare for that. If you want to get stuck on the rules and saying a 50,000,000 Dton asteroid can only mount the same point defense as say a 10,000 dton ship, fine. Liberally sprinkle 10,000dton rocks orbiting the base to provide additional point defense.

Mobile defenses will be helpful, especially when they can fall back to the protection of a massive fortress (or three). Smaller installations might get a patrol vessel, or say a flight of fighters.

Traveller isn't the best gaming system to really debate this sort of thing because the rules and descriptions of weapon systems really don't scale up well at all for fighting fleet combat. If you want some "realism" to model fictional things, then go back historically and look at fortresses and defenses against attacking naval ships - then project that into Traveller. Cannons easily become lasers. Walls become armor. Rockets are a little harder to deal with, but I guess if you went further back into castle warfare things like catapults and trebuchet's would equate to long-range missile bombardments.

Nothing short of the cow being launched at Arthur and his knights outside the fortress manned by the French is going to simulate nukes very well. So you may have to handwave that, you silly kniggits.

 

[Carlobrand]

... If you are building a major nodal fleet station, why not tow a large 10-12km diameter asteroid into orbit and then use a few km of rock for armor, liberally apply point defense and other weapons, and you essentially have a giant battleship. ...

It's a cool idea. Mind if I play with the numbers?

Let's shrink it a bit to, say, 3 km diameter, large enough to dig in and put installations beyond the reach of opposing sensors. We're still dealing with 14 billion cubic meters, very roughly 40 billion tons mass of rock. That's on the order of 10,000-20,000 times the mass of a dreadnought.

Let's say you need to move that body from about 150 million kilometers, 1 AU, away. That's pretty close, actually. Now let's say you have a million-dTon tug with a 6G drive, or the equivalent in smaller tugs. You've got a drive (or drives) producing thrust to push roughly 10 million metric tons to 60 meters per second squared, so it's getting about 1.5 cm/s². Maybe more, but we're not talking orders of magnitude. So, about 10 weeks in flight, accelerating and then decelerating, if I haven't made a simple mistake somewhere.

Distance is likely to be substantially greater because you want to take it from its current orbit and match the orbit of an inner body rather than just dropping in 150 million kilometers with the same orbital speed. Still, we're talking only months to get it from the belt to a habitable-zone planet. Even the 10-12 kilometer one is reasonably practical to move - well, as practical as anything gets when you're committing a million dTons of 6G ships to a task for several months, but certainly within the budget of the IN.

It's still got the same problem any planet has, which is to say they can land troops to force their way in and take it that way. However, it is pretty much invulnerable to attack from space. They could identify and collapse the entrance-ways, but you'd have equipment to dig yourselves out once they left.

You know, I really thought this one was going to fail on the numbers. I'm quite happily surprised.

... Traveller isn't the best gaming system to really debate this sort of thing because the rules and descriptions of weapon systems really don't scale up well at all for fighting fleet combat. If you want some "realism" to model fictional things, then go back historically and look at fortresses and defenses against attacking naval ships - then project that into Traveller. ...

I don't think historical examples are going to be of much use unless we ignore the meson weapon. Well, I take that back - maybe if you consider the fate of fortresses once effective artillery and air power showed up to bypass the walls and rain death on the interior. This big multi-kilometer one, it's more like the great fortresses before the advent of artillery and air power, when you had to mine your way in to get access to the fort.

 

[phavoc]

One thing about towing a big rock is that if it takes 12-18 months to get there that's not a big deal. While it's being towed it's easily in range of the planet to fly crews out to being tunneling and doing the work. Basically once you find the rock you want you can start the move operation and build-out simultaneously. Portable habitats attached to the asteroid will take care of living quarters. Plus if you want to take the existing rules for Traveller asteroid mining all the tunnels and cuts you make for your base can be recaptured by a mining ship tagging along, or just caught up and freightered back to a processing facility. Will save you a few MCr.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

A simple rock is extremely vulnerable to kinetic strikes from out of range enemies. To be at all survivable it has to be manoeuvrable, hence have an M-drive, making it rather expensive.

 

[phavoc]

Everything is vulnerable to kinetic strikes. Unless a ship is actively performing evasive maneuvers its course can be plotted and pre-determined.

A large orbital installation that is a fleet base, and it would need to be large to have such a designation, is also too large and too impractical to mount drives on. It is the nature of a base. Otherwise it would have a moniker of fleet ship.

Unless your naval infrastructure is entirely mobile it is vulnerable. But one cannot operate a navy if one is always paranoid about a natural vulnerability. Kinetic strikes can also be intercepted with your own kinetic rounds, through interceptors, or even low yield nukes. An asteroid base would have a lot more material to fire as well as surface area to absorb damage. You could even put all your base infrastructure facing the planet and give yourself kilometers of armor against ships that must attack from beyond orbit.

But at the end of the day navies still need orbital bases. If it's an important enough installation it's possible to armor it against a lucky hit taking it out, relatively cheaply, by using a rock.

 

[Carlobrand]

We're edging into the C-rock debate. That one's always fun.

So, if we assume we keep that giant tender in place, then we've got that 1.5 cm² thrust. The 3 km body can clear half its length from a standing start in about 7 1/2 minutes. If we can keep patrols out far enough to spot a body traveling at a likely speed, we can either move out of the way if there's time or put a nuke in its way. Getting the rock up to a speed and size where that's not possible starts getting into C-rocks, which usually ends with: if they do it to you, you do it to them, and you're in a low-tech re-enactment of the Ancients War.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

I don't think there is much point fortifying something that can easily be defeated by stand-off weapons.

It might be very convenient to place the naval base on, or in, a moon, but I would not consider that fortifying it.

Attacking an orbital naval base with near-c kinetic or nuclear attack is very different from attacking a world or other civilian target.


I have tried making orbital fortifications with the systems we have with little success, the closest I have managed is this:
http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?p=910520

Deep buried meson sites should work, of course.

 

[Condottiere]

If it's strategic enough, short of a naval depot, defence in depth.

 

[phavoc]

I don't think orbital bombardments are going to be as prevalent as everyone thinks they are. After all, if you do it to someone, you are going to have it done to you. If you are attacking a base and you miss you'll hit the planet. Hitting the planet means they will most likely hit yours in return.

Basically MAD in space.

 

[kilemall]

I don't think orbital bombardments are going to be as prevalent as everyone thinks they are. After all, if you do it to someone, you are going to have it done to you. If you are attacking a base and you miss you'll hit the planet. Hitting the planet means they will most likely hit yours in return.

Basically MAD in space.

There would have to be a culture of surrender that is given fairly readily to not tax the attacker, and a corresponding willingness to accept surrender.


Stylized warfare with cultural norms that limit damage to the productive people and facilities have certainly happened before in human history.



But the reverse is true- people have held out for pride, a miscalculation of the enemy's resources or commitment, or expectation of rescue. The price of such hubris is usually utter destruction.

 

[Condottiere]

In the Honorverse, once a planet has no more creditable defence and the enemy has the ability to ortillery you to the Stone Age, you're supposed to give up.

 

[mike wightman]

The Imperium calls it scrubbing. If AotI is anything to go by they are pretty good at it.

 

[Quint]

The latter part of this thread has me thinking of Henry V (and that era) where there was often a token to not-so-token defense of a city before surrender. Sieges were expensive and time-consuming, and risked the sacking of the city if the commanders could not (or would not) control the conquering troops.

D.

 

[Carlobrand]

Well, we're talking about the base, not the world. We can be pretty confident that a base which surrenders is going to be sacked, if for no other reasons than to deny that resource to the enemy and remove one incentive for the enemy to mount a counterattack.

So far, the best alternatives to prevent that involve mobility, dispersal, and some small defensive force independent of the local SDB command, dedicated secifically to preventing opportunistic attacks on the base by light raiding forces. Like it or not, base assets in space need to have some minimal ability to move, and need to routinely practice random movement over short distances, in order to prevent destruction by attacks that depend on their occupying a predictable position. Ideally, they're also located a safe distance from the mainworld, close enough to be practical while far enough that they can evade attack by doing a short jump and hiding in the outsystem. Assets that have to be close to the mainworld should be able to go to ground and hide (a la SDBs). The moonlet idea is a good one, provided it too has some small degree of mobility and sufficient picket to warn of attack, but one should avoid putting all of one's eggs in that basket since the enemy can defeat it by landing enough troops to burrow in and take it. So, assets dispersed as multiple elements in multiple locations using different survival strategies so destruction of one or two elements doesn't compromise function.