The really heavy cans

[maitrejeanth]

I'm looking for a real big warship design. And when I write "big", I mean REALLY BIG. I mean something that makes a Tigress (notice how these are really getting back into fashion with the coming of GT Starships ?) look like a Gazelle. And must be a starship, not a monitor or a battle station.

And while you're at it, what is the biggest ship design (any category) you've ever attempted ?

Thierry,
feeling somewhat megalomaniac this morning

 

[The Oz]

The biggest ships I've ever designed (using HG) have been battle tenders at 1,000,000 dtons. The biggest fighting ships I've ever designed have been in the 300,000 dton to 500,000 dton range.

In HG there just isn't any real reason to make bigger warships than that, since you can only have one spinal mount per ship anyway. Once the ship is big enough to carry the big weapon, and the armor you want, and the drives you want, making it bigger only makes it cost more and a more valuable target for the enemy.

I've heard of designs in the 10,000,000 dton range, but they were all mobile starports or such things.

 

[marginaleye]

Where's there rules for a spinal-mount particle accelerator that fired an antimatter beam in one of the old issues of the Journal? As I recall, if it hit a ship-sized target, it automatically destroyed it, and it could even be used to reduce planets to airless, barren, radioactive rocks, through prolonged bombardment. Huge, voraciously hungry for energy, and available only at Tech Level 15 or better. Sounds perfect as the primary weapon for a multi-million dton super-dreadnaught.

This is all from memory, so I may have some of the details wrong.

 

[shield]

yes, the JTAs did have an article on anti-matter spinal mounts. The TL15 version massed 200kdtns if I remember.

I did a sample design. You could fit one in a 400ktn hull, with J2, 2G, a couple of missile bays and just enough room for a fresher.

It could not stand up to a decent cruiser let alone a battleship. At best it would be a planet destroyer, and have to be heavily screened. Basicaly your navy would have to wipe out the enemy ships before you dared bring it into battle.

Cheers
Richard

 

[mike wightman]

Where's there rules for a spinal-mount particle accelerator that fired an antimatter beam

Journal No 20

 

[maitrejeanth]

Isn't TL15 a bit early for (large) antimatter weapons ?


Savage's site features some house rules for multiple spinal mounts :

http://www.angelfire.com/empire2/savage/1WorldOrder/Multi-Spinal_Mount_HR.html

 

[marginaleye]

I did a sample design. You could fit one in a 400ktn hull, with J2, 2G, a couple of missile bays and just enough room for a fresher.

It could not stand up to a decent cruiser let alone a battleship. At best it would be a planet destroyer, and have to be heavily screened. Basicaly your navy would have to wipe out the enemy ships before you dared bring it into battle.

Uh... is this really a fair test of the combat potential of the spinal-mount antimatter particle accelerator? I would say the answer is definitely not.

If you're going to build a battleship around such a weapon, then build one that's actually worthy to carry it -- a (multi?)million-dton monster, a really obscene spacegoing monument to some war-mongering lunatic's hubris. Now that I would like to see!

I no longer have a copy of the JTAS No. 20.
Could somebody give me the price and energy consumption of the antimatter particle accelerator? I'd like to dust off "High Guard" and give it try.

 

[spank]

I personally like Leviatian, for large scale ship combat. I think it would be neat to unify Levianthan with Traveller, I never really cared for their campaign.

 

[spank]

btw I worked up some house rules for leviathan stateing that a ship could be built with either standard spinals or broadside spinals of 1/3 size.{facing only one side} This added alot to the strategy of a}building ships and b} fighting with ships.

 

[mike wightman]

Could somebody give me the price and energy consumption of the antimatter particle accelerator?

In the article by Jim Cumber the cost of the TL 15 version is 300000MCr with an EP requirement of 3000. They get lighter/cheaper/more efficient at TLs 16-18.
It doesn't state this explicitly in the article but I think it rolls to hit as a factor T PA and the only defense (which is mentioned) is a black globe which is penetrated by rolling higher than the black globe number (on 2d6) if it is flickering, if the black globe is fully on then the full EPs are absorbed as per the black globe rules.
Hope this helps.

 

[TheDS]

You mentioned that HG only lets you use a single spinal mount, and anything built bigger than that is a waste. That's one of the reasons I prefer TNE's design system. No matter how big or small my ship is, I can mate a spinal mount to it. A 10MT ship is going to have a spinal mount that is equivalent in size. You can make one that takes up the whole ship, and it's mostly a target. You can make a small one, and the ship is mostly a large missile or laser battery. Or you can make it the "right" size and have a well-rounded design.

In any case, the performance of the weapon is mostly going to depend on the size of the gun, and the size of the gun is limited only by the size of your ship (and how much power you can generate).

An APAWS would be designed the same way a PAWS is designed, although I suspect there is going to need to be an antimatter factory on board to generate what you want to shoot. I suspect that the factory will have a given output rate and capacity, and that this boils down to how long you can use your gun in combat. Once you've used up the antimatter, you simply switch to being a regular PAWS until your factory makes you some more antimatter. (Maybe a couple turns?)

The real question is what the range performance would be. I would guess it would be absolutely attrocious, being jealous of spit-guns.

Just because you fire antimatter at something doesn't mean the target automatically blows up. You do an amount of damage to it based on the energy of your shot. A 1Gj PAWS and a 1 Gj APAWS will do about the same amount of damage, but the APAWS will probably get a better armor penetration value, in exchange for a worse attentuation value (or a worse ideal range, however you want to call it).

Using it on a planet would be fairly useless. You'd probably generate a lot of radiation, and since you need to be close, you'd probably do more damage to yourself than to the planet. There would be NO giant craters or earth-shattering kabooms. Your ship, on the other hand, might get irradiated, and maybe there'd be fallout on the world too. Probably cost YOU more than it cost them.

IIRC, antimatter was usable for warheads under MT TL16, so making AM available at TL15 as spinal weapons is hardly unrealistic.

Side-mounting a fixed mount (such as the side-spinal mount suggested) is probably not a workable design. Your ship is going to be twisting and turning, trying to avoid being shot. Even pointing your nose at your target for a few seconds every combat round is dangerous. It's hard enough to align the nose on a target, but to coordinate with non-nose (or tail) mounted weapons is probably a tactical nightmare! The gun is usable only in an anti-boarder situation, and by that time, you have no power for it.

 

[mike wightman]

Just a couple of thoughts after that last post by TheDS.

An APAWS would be designed the same way a PAWS is designed, although I suspect there is going to need to be an antimatter factory on board to generate what you want to shoot.

Nice idea, and what a wonderful internal explosion result that would be

. An alternative would be to produce the antimatter elsewhere and store it in the ship in a "magazine". Still makes a nice target for a meson gun though .

The real question is what the range performance would be. I would guess it would be absolutely attrocious, being jealous of spit-guns.

It should have a similar range and targetting profile as any other particle weapon, as you say an APAWS is basically the same design as a PAWS and doesn't need all of those time dilation to target problems solved like a meson gun.

You do an amount of damage to it based on the energy of your shot. A 1Gj PAWS and a 1 Gj APAWS will do about the same amount of damage

True for kinetic energy and electromagnetic energy transfer, but what about the actual mass of antimatter fired and Einstein's equation? If only one ten thousandth of a gram is fired and converts an equivalent amount of mass in the target vessel to energy then that's an extra 18GJ of energy. Now if you are throwing kilograms of the stuff at each other...

One final thought, how big does an asteroid have to be before you can start building deep sited meson guns in it and what's its hull tonnage equivalent?

 

[Rupert Boleyn]

Originally posted by marginaleye:
Where's there rules for a spinal-mount particle accelerator that fired an antimatter beam in one of the old issues of the Journal? As I recall, if it hit a ship-sized target, it automatically destroyed it, and it could even be used to reduce planets to airless, barren, radioactive rocks, through prolonged bombardment. Huge, voraciously hungry for energy, and available only at Tech Level 15 or better. Sounds perfect as the primary weapon for a multi-million dton super-dreadnaught.

Actually such a weapon would the perfect reason not to build such a ship - it's just as vulnerable as any other ship, and being bigger it's harder to replace after it's been wasted. The opimal ship for such a weapon is the smallest that can carry it.

 

[savage]

When we start getting beyond the Tigress we have ships that need to serve multi-purpose. Per Tigress in Fighting Ships larger vessels use to exist as warships of the fleet. Perhaps because of lower tech. Either way having just a single spinal mount in something the size of a moon is a waste of potential. There is a point at which these things begin having their own micro-gravities and acting as small planetary bodies.

For another thread I put together a portable starport with self-repair functionality. It could use another revision... I regret some weapons and stores choices...but if you want it its at my site. I was trying to determine what was needed for the core route if you wanted to establish bases along the way.

Savage

 

[savage]

When we start getting beyond the Tigress we have ships that need to serve multi-purpose. Per Tigress in Fighting Ships larger vessels use to exist as warships of the fleet. Perhaps because of lower tech. Either way having just a single spinal mount in something the size of a moon is a waste of potential. There is a point at which these things begin having their own micro-gravities and acting as small planetary bodies.

For another thread I put together a portable starport with self-repair functionality. It could use another revision... I regret some weapons and stores choices...but if you want it its at my site. I was trying to determine what was needed for the core route if you wanted to establish bases along the way.

Savage

 

[The Oz]

Originally posted by Rupert:
Actually such a weapon would the perfect reason not to build such a ship - it's just as vulnerable as any other ship, and being bigger it's harder to replace after it's been wasted. The opimal ship for such a weapon is the smallest that can carry it.

This is the argument against any ship being bigger than it needs to be, when there are weapons capable of a "one-shot-zot" kill. If the enemy can kill your ships with one effective hit from his weapons (whether those weapons are nukes or meson guns or antimatter PAWs) you don't build big ships, you build lots of ships just big enough to carry the "one-shot-zot" weapon.

 

[mike wightman]

I have to agree with Rupert and The Oz. Using HG/MT then any meson gun with a factor of E or greater is a ship killer since if it hits it is likely to get enough crew-1 results, or even better fuel tanks shattered, to mission kill an enemy.
At TL 15 (using HG) it is possible to construct a j3 m6 agility6 light cruiser with a factor J meson gun in a 19700t hull at a cost of 13,446MCr. Put another way you could get 26 of them for the cost of one Tigress. I know which fleet I would prefer
(Just in case you are worried about PAW spinal mounts then try the 40000t armoured cruiser, again TL15 j3 m6 ag6 armour#A meson N, even factor T PAWs will get only one hit and no criticals)
Big ships = big targets, keep yours as small (and cheap) as you can manage.
I still like the APAW as a possible meson gun alternative.

 

[flykiller]

This is the argument against any ship being bigger than it needs to be, when there are weapons capable of a "one-shot-zot" kill. If the enemy can kill your ships with one effective hit from his weapons (whether those weapons are nukes or meson guns or antimatter PAWs) you don't build big ships, you build lots of ships just big enough to carry the "one-shot-zot" weapon.

well, the problem with this principle is that it carries over beyond the step change. if you design the spinal-mount ships to carry their weapons and little else then they become ineffective against and vulnerable to herds of 1k and 2k corvettes. finding a balance is difficult. (depending on your ruleset) the battle is likely decided when the opposing fleets are built and not when they engage. "world war two was won on the playing fields of eaton" and all that.

 

[The Oz]

Originally posted by flykiller:
well, the problem with this principle is that it carries over beyond the step change. if you design the spinal-mount ships to carry their weapons and little else then they become ineffective against and vulnerable to herds of 1k and 2k corvettes. finding a balance is difficult. (depending on your ruleset) the battle is likely decided when the opposing fleets are built and not when they engage. "world war two was won on the playing fields of eaton" and all that.

This is true to a certain extent, especially if you take the "big gun in as small a ship as possible" idea too far. But I'm not really suggesting that, just that you don't make the ship any bigger than it has to be to get all you want into the ship (spinal mount, heavy armor, high agility, good computer). And fitting all of that into a hull will give you a ship big enough to carry lots of secondary weapons, too.

Since I can get all of that into a 200,000 jump-capable hull, and into a 50,000 ton non-jump-capable hull, there's no real reason to build warships much bigger. Non-warships are another story entirely. I can imagine very large non-warships in the TRAVELLER universe.

 

[Rupert Boleyn]

Originally posted by flykiller:
well, the problem with this principle is that it carries over beyond the step change. if you design the spinal-mount ships to carry their weapons and little else then they become ineffective against and vulnerable to herds of 1k and 2k corvettes. finding a balance is difficult. (depending on your ruleset) the battle is likely decided when the opposing fleets are built and not when they engage. "world war two was won on the playing fields of eaton" and all that.

That's the paper-rock-scissors part of HG. The 'easy' answer is to mix some spinal PAW systems into your mainly meson armed fleet - the PAWs will mop up missile boats pretty well.