Sounds interesting, R_Chance. Please elaborate more, like what combat rules do you use, and can you provide a specific design summary?
Torpedo Boats in Traveller
- Thread starter BillDowns
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Sounds interesting, R_Chance. Please elaborate more, like what combat rules do you use, and can you provide a specific design summary?
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
I have a house-rule allowing craft to mount Striker's 250MW (1EP) battlefield Meson Accelerator in a barbette. If you can carry the thing close enough to the enemy, you might do some damage with it. Useless against a fast moving target, since your distance information isn't accurate enough, but against a ground target or capital ship...
Of course, such craft are effectively unarmed for combat beyond point-blank range.
In Starship of the Line, the rules set analogous to High Guard I'm developing for use with T5, I have a place for fighters, torpedo boats and frigates. Specifically, that is either at close range or in the screen formation.
(In Starship of the Line, task forced burn maneuver Gs for maneuvers and to enter formations. A weapon's ability to penetrate armour is represented by its penetration + damage; once it penetrates, damage is applied to individual systems.)
Close range is near-visual range for starships; in Brilliant Lances, it would be less than one hex (30,000 km.) At close range, a task force doesn't get any bonus for evading (+1 difficulty to hit for 2 maneuver Gs, i.e. a bargain) because the range is so short their velocity won't move them out of the way quickly enough. (Missiles launched at close range also ignore evasion, because they have plenty of fuel to burn to catch up.)
At close range, energy weapons are deadly. They'll easily puncture any but the most heavily-armoured hulls. Even a single basic plasma gun will have Pen +4 Dmg 2, being able to fully penetrate factor 5 armour.
The answer to this is the screen formation. A task force that assumes the screen formation must spend 2 maneuver Gs and designate at least half of its ships as escorts. The remaining vessels are escorted. Escorted vessels are never treated as being at close range to an enemy task force, even if the escorts are; use short range penetration and to hit tasks instead. Furthermore, escorts may fire lasers and energy weapons twice at missiles targeted on the escorted ships. If enough escorts are disabled (unable to move or unable to fire) that they can no longer screen the escorted vessels, the formation is broken and no longer applies.
In other words - letting plasma-armed gunboats or missile-carrying fighters near your battleships is a Bad Idea. Protect them with laser-armed frigates. Of course, other formations are equally tempting...like battle line, which allows spinal mounts to fire at reduced maneuver G cost, and echelon, which prevents a task force from being outflanked on one side.
--Devin
(In Starship of the Line, task forced burn maneuver Gs for maneuvers and to enter formations. A weapon's ability to penetrate armour is represented by its penetration + damage; once it penetrates, damage is applied to individual systems.)
Close range is near-visual range for starships; in Brilliant Lances, it would be less than one hex (30,000 km.) At close range, a task force doesn't get any bonus for evading (+1 difficulty to hit for 2 maneuver Gs, i.e. a bargain) because the range is so short their velocity won't move them out of the way quickly enough. (Missiles launched at close range also ignore evasion, because they have plenty of fuel to burn to catch up.)
At close range, energy weapons are deadly. They'll easily puncture any but the most heavily-armoured hulls. Even a single basic plasma gun will have Pen +4 Dmg 2, being able to fully penetrate factor 5 armour.
The answer to this is the screen formation. A task force that assumes the screen formation must spend 2 maneuver Gs and designate at least half of its ships as escorts. The remaining vessels are escorted. Escorted vessels are never treated as being at close range to an enemy task force, even if the escorts are; use short range penetration and to hit tasks instead. Furthermore, escorts may fire lasers and energy weapons twice at missiles targeted on the escorted ships. If enough escorts are disabled (unable to move or unable to fire) that they can no longer screen the escorted vessels, the formation is broken and no longer applies.
In other words - letting plasma-armed gunboats or missile-carrying fighters near your battleships is a Bad Idea. Protect them with laser-armed frigates. Of course, other formations are equally tempting...like battle line, which allows spinal mounts to fire at reduced maneuver G cost, and echelon, which prevents a task force from being outflanked on one side.
--Devin
Built under T20 as background for a campaign. As such the mechanism for loading/preping and firing are a separate space from the ordinance storage. The 50 dTon bay is the firing platform size, with the missiles/torpedos carried separately.
It came about after a discussion here about battleriders. If you don't have a spinal weapon on your battlerider it makes sense to minimise the size while retaining the best punch possible so you can maximise the number carried. At 200 dTon you can fit a 50 dTon missile bay or (at high enough TL) a 50 dTon fusion bay. Respectively designated as Torpedo boats and Gunboats.
Build 'em as strategic nuclear warheads (dozens of megatons; not the measly fractional-kiloton tactical jobs used in mere missiles) packed inside armored, buffered planetoid hulls with m-screens and 6G m-drives.
Add n-dampers with point-defense capabilities to counter enemy dampers that might try to suppress it.
Go whole hog and give 'em robot brains (just beware of Dark Star Syndrome -- make sure you're up on your phenomenology), and spit them out of Launch Tubes by the hundreds...
"Spinal Mounts? We don't need no stinking Spinal Mounts!"
Well you're right of course: if you're gonna do it, do it right.
G. Kashkanun Anderson
SOC-13
Sorry to be the pill here, but once you finish ricing out that rock-torpedo of yours, it's gonna mass something in the area of 400 dTons, minimum. Even assuming near-zero crew and fuel allotments, the EP and displacement requirements for all those n-dampers, m-screens, flashing LEDs, thumpin' subwoofers, chrome spinners, et. al that you're loading up on are going to insure that your SuperTorp is the fattest boy that ever waddled his way out of a launch tube.
Since you're basically hurling small office buildings at your opponents, I'd suggest just tipping it with the nuke and foregoing all the other doodads. Even if the nuke doesn't blow, the kinetic dose rolling off of that impact is one form of energy a damper can't kill.
Back of the envelope, I was thinking more in the neighborhood of 600 dtons, but you get the idea.
These are tender-killing torpedoes; they're going to be big and ugly and expensive...
Along the lines you suggest, a potentially more cost-effective alternative would be to build a fat robotic drone missile in perhaps the 50 dton range with just a small (Factor-0?) damper onboard. One often-overlooked use of damper tech is in enhancing nuke warhead yield by allowing the critical mass to be fully assembled before fission is permitted to begin; this would increase the efficiency of the blast by several orders of magnitude.
The engineering is left as an exercise for the reader...
The cost of deploying so many dampers in the face of enemy anti-fighter and anti-missile fire, however, precludes this smaller alternative as a viable option; you need all that armor to guarantee that the expensive package is delivered in functional condition...
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pendragonman
Absent Friends Margrave
Nice mental picture
Perhaps it's more of this kind of office building...
The Crimson Permanent Assurance
(I would much rather do a hostile take over with this, but ramming works too:smirk
all i can think of has already been mentioned harder to hit and way faster
then your normal ship...i would think....the torpedo would probably want
to be something of a one hit "monster" torpedo that at the very least
can totally disable any ship if it hits....
and they would only carry 2-4 torps...
probably(to make the theme) a smallish 100 ton or 200 ton vessel
and 1 gunner 1 pilot
then your normal ship...i would think....the torpedo would probably want
to be something of a one hit "monster" torpedo that at the very least
can totally disable any ship if it hits....
and they would only carry 2-4 torps...
probably(to make the theme) a smallish 100 ton or 200 ton vessel
and 1 gunner 1 pilot
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G. Fieendish
SOC-12
Nice mental picture
Perhaps it's more of this kind of office building...
The Crimson Permanent Assurance
(I would much rather do a hostile take over with this, but ramming works too:smirk
I counter your gambit of The Crimson Permanent Assurance, with The Spanish Inquisition (After all, nobody expects them...).
Gents,
The BIGGER the target, the easier it is to HIT.
Traveller has lasers with ranges measured in light-seconds. How many hits can these torpedos take before they are mission-killed themselves? One? Two? You needn't even force a critical hit, simply nibbling away at the m-drive would do the trick.
There's a hugely faulty assumption at work in all threads of this type. Someone decides that "Traveller Space Combat Resembles Historical Ship Combat From Era X" and then tries to shoehorn in every jot and tittle from the era in question. It's always "Traveller resembles the Age of Sail" or "Traveller resembles the Age of Dreadnoughts" or some other age of something and the whole thread goes right off the rails right away.
So, what does Traveller ship combat resemble? The answer is simple. Traveller ship combat resembles TRAVELLER SHIP COMBAT. Period.
You want a One Hit = One Kill weapon system? In TRAVELLER SHIP COMBAT that is the spinal mount. Period.
Quit trying to cram it into some vaguely analogous system and analyse it for what it actually is. The "deck" has already been designed, you don't need to add any more "cards".
YMMV,
Bill
The BIGGER the target, the easier it is to HIT.
Traveller has lasers with ranges measured in light-seconds. How many hits can these torpedos take before they are mission-killed themselves? One? Two? You needn't even force a critical hit, simply nibbling away at the m-drive would do the trick.
There's a hugely faulty assumption at work in all threads of this type. Someone decides that "Traveller Space Combat Resembles Historical Ship Combat From Era X" and then tries to shoehorn in every jot and tittle from the era in question. It's always "Traveller resembles the Age of Sail" or "Traveller resembles the Age of Dreadnoughts" or some other age of something and the whole thread goes right off the rails right away.
So, what does Traveller ship combat resemble? The answer is simple. Traveller ship combat resembles TRAVELLER SHIP COMBAT. Period.
You want a One Hit = One Kill weapon system? In TRAVELLER SHIP COMBAT that is the spinal mount. Period.
Quit trying to cram it into some vaguely analogous system and analyse it for what it actually is. The "deck" has already been designed, you don't need to add any more "cards".
YMMV,
Bill
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Missiles are far from useless; they simply don't take out capital ships in a single hit...
The reason that Trav doesn't use torpedos is because spinal mounts, despite the hull sizes required to field them, are more cost-effective ship killers...
I've designed 'torpedoes' using Fire, Fusion and Steel I. I made a 3/4 ton missile (a nice roomy 10.5 cubic meters), gave it only about 6 Gs worth of fuel, and then loaded on as many warheads as the thing could carry - set to detonate simultaneously at the same target, of course. (I didn't add EM masking or decoys, as I often do with missiles, because then I would be lynched.) It was, in other words, a very dangerous missile at short ranges, though without the true killing power of WWII torpedoes.
Another missile I designed - it came out very small - was the smallest nuclear warhead on 6Gs worth of fuel. You fire it into your own hex and detonate it - the whiteout provides a +1 diff mod for all sensor tasks into the hex. (IIRC, the fuel was necessary because of Brilliant Lance's combat phasing system; it shouldn't be at all.) Very, very gamey.
--Devin
I realize mong-Trav isn't the best respected version, but since the terminology fits: Torpedoes, from High Guard (mongoose, obviously), are 2.5 tons apiece and can be fired from 50 or 100 ton bays or from a 5 ton barbette mount.
There is a smallcraft (40 tons) 'torpedo boat' in High Guard that carries two torpedoes in that fashion.
Torpedoes are not gauranteed capital Ship killers, but they do hit harder than conventional missiles while essentially working in an identical fashion in every other regards.
In terms of math, it appears that Torpedoes hit four times as hard but bays only hold 1/4th as many missiles. So in exchange for fewer shots per ton (based on ammo size) and less tactical flexibility (fewer potential targets) you get a missile that has a better chance of punching through armor... making it a decent military choice and a crapshoot for anyone else.
There is a smallcraft (40 tons) 'torpedo boat' in High Guard that carries two torpedoes in that fashion.
Torpedoes are not gauranteed capital Ship killers, but they do hit harder than conventional missiles while essentially working in an identical fashion in every other regards.
In terms of math, it appears that Torpedoes hit four times as hard but bays only hold 1/4th as many missiles. So in exchange for fewer shots per ton (based on ammo size) and less tactical flexibility (fewer potential targets) you get a missile that has a better chance of punching through armor... making it a decent military choice and a crapshoot for anyone else.
ThunderChilde
SOC-13
As it so happens MgT AM3 Darrians has a bit on torpedo boat doctrine and development for the Darrians advanced tech take on SDB's.
Patron Zero
SOC-13
I've always had torpedoes present IMTU, not only in an offensive weapon application but such configurable to many different tasks.
My interpretation of a 'torpedo' is a an object fired from a dedicated fitted 'tube' in a vessel's hull, picture a 'mini-spinal mount' equipped with a rail gun-coil gun linear accelerator to launch said projectiles.
The 'housings' for such systems are-were 1.5 meters in 'diameter' and of varying length, the torpedoes themselves having 1 meter diameter on average, length also variable on payload-package configuration.
My thoughts were this sort of torpedo not a naval-defined ship-killer but more an option-alternative to the traditional turret mounted missile racks.
Perhaps best to view the torpedoes IMTU as civilian market commercially available ordnance, not military grade but adequate for merchant vessels and other privately owned-operated starships.
My interpretation of a 'torpedo' is a an object fired from a dedicated fitted 'tube' in a vessel's hull, picture a 'mini-spinal mount' equipped with a rail gun-coil gun linear accelerator to launch said projectiles.
The 'housings' for such systems are-were 1.5 meters in 'diameter' and of varying length, the torpedoes themselves having 1 meter diameter on average, length also variable on payload-package configuration.
My thoughts were this sort of torpedo not a naval-defined ship-killer but more an option-alternative to the traditional turret mounted missile racks.
Perhaps best to view the torpedoes IMTU as civilian market commercially available ordnance, not military grade but adequate for merchant vessels and other privately owned-operated starships.
Major B
SOC-14 1K
There is also an interesting house rule for torpedoes in Starships Starports and Vehicles Vol 1 No 07 (can be found on the HIWG CD in the fanzines folder).
The torpedoes are large and unstable due to their being early prototypes of antimatter missiles. The instability part comes from the problem of power - if the carrying ship loses power, the magnetic containment "bottles" fail and everything goes boom.
An interesting take on the subject written in February 1991 by Scott Olsen.
Subzero001
SOC-3
Looking through the new Darrians book from Mongoose they did write up a torpedo ship and apparently integrated a love of torpedoes and missiles in their fighting history style. You might give it a preview in a shop if you don't want to buy another book just to get an idea of how to integrate something of the like in your campaign.
Hopes this helps,
Hopes this helps,
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