How to make space combat more survivable?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Aside from large (but not huge) ships seeming to be missing serious anti-ship weapons so they have to slowly pummel each other's shields and then outer hulls to ruin before finishing each other off. It's like WWII battleships armed with cruiser guns.

Thinking about it, Star Wars is almost age-of-sail ships, but with WWII aircraft thrown into it. So ship vs ship just isn't very effective with big ships (because for some reason they refuse to use drones or fighter-grade torpedoes). This also explains why massive space stations work vs ships - they are shore fortresses.

Except that they don't use boarding in combat as a rule.

[SimonAce]

Realistic future combat is unimaginably deadly at nearly any level. Check out the short, eight minutes or so movie "Slaughterbots" for a pretty good idea of what drone swarms can do to civilian populations at late TL8/early TL9. Its gets nastier from there as sensors improve

These could also be used inside ships to kill the crew, get a hull breach, drop in kill swarm, kill crew though at least such ships are compartmentalized and offer some defense.

The best solution is either an ultratech one like force fields or just assume setting constraints keep spacecraft combat exceptionally rare or unknown

Firefly does this pretty well, civilian ships there just aren't armed since the government allows it

Do remember too that reactionless drives are doomsday weapons unless they have some kind of setting speed limits. Mount a cheap drive on some rocks, work it up top near C, cheap planet killer or ship killer

Reaction drives fast enough to be interesting are also weapons with lethal exhaust

[gmillerd]

One of the things that might be useful here is crazy distances between entities with the dramatic speeds, sensors (and counter sensor measures), and limited navigation data (or the sharing there of).

While the RAW might be useful if you get into range to use them, it might not really be that applicable as that situation isn't very likely or feasible in practice; because ranging isn't possible.

At extreme range, small drones may seem to be useful (and safe), but sensor countermeasures may blank ink the target away. And mines or similar may be incredibly hard to work out because of the 1) need to heavily engineer something that can live in space and 2) make something that cannot be detected and still detects.

Space may be a 'they cannot see us and we cannot see them' at default unless vast networks of sensor networks are in-place (home systems, etc) which will be grossly defended.

If you look at ST:Enterprise, Terran vs other Terrans would be pretty safe, as we see with the boomers (who only really had issues when they were out TL'ed). It's only the other TL people that are a problem.

Pulp 'Space Opera' story aside, it's hard to imagine ship to ship battles being a good thing really, politically and economically, the massive expenses and the ramifications. The chances of mutual destruction seem high and political fallout being huge. The opportunity for planet killing revenge is just too close at hand.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I wonder whether there is a suitable WWII naval combat game that could be re-skinned as Star Wars space combat and have a GURPS character interface screwed on. Star Fleet Battles, perhaps.

Even that wouldn't be a very accurate match between Star Wars battles and WWII battles. Aside from Yavin, most battles have "aerial" combat between and among fleets engaging in a gunnery duel, which as best I can recall never really happened. The closest match I can think of would be Samar, but there only one side had aircraft, and they engaged only out of desperation to try to disrupt the Japanese formation.

Under most circumstances, fleets only closed to gunnery range when aircraft were not a factor - Guadalcanal's night fights, Leyte Gulf after Halsey's carrier force ran off chasing a decoy, almost any battle involving the Royal Navy (who considered the Fairey Swordfish a practical weapon of modern warfare).

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Even that wouldn't be a very accurate match between Star Wars battles and WWII battles. Aside from Yavin, most battles have "aerial" combat between and among fleets engaging in a gunnery duel, which as best I can recall never really happened.

Yeah, but I think a WWII naval wargame would have to rules for it to happen if you set one up. They didn't happen in WWII because oceans are big, but in Star Wars space is only about sixty miles across.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Under most circumstances, fleets only closed to gunnery range when aircraft were not a factor - Guadalcanal's night fights, Leyte Gulf after Halsey's carrier force ran off chasing a decoy, almost any battle involving the Royal Navy (who considered the Fairey Swordfish a practical weapon of modern warfare).

Well, they were using what they (courtesy of the RAF) had. And, despite it's shortcomings, it was surprisingly effective. Also, aside from the Japanese Navy, everyone started the war with cruddy carrier-based torpedo bombers (if they had any carriers at all).

[Mike Wightman]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Except that they don't use boarding in combat as a rule.

What was the very first segment in Star Wars if it wasn't a boarding action?

I have tinkered with adapting Mongoose Games Victory at Sea to model space combat, one day I may get a playable game out of it.

WWII BB vs BB or other gunned ships - weapon range is a dozen or so miles
Aircraft extend your weapon range to hundreds of miles and your delivery system is an order of magnitude faster than your ships.
Now instead of thinking of manned bombers as aircraft think of them as piloted missiles (the life expectancy of carrier based bomber pilots was not very many missions.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Mike Wightman

What was the very first segment in Star Wars if it wasn't a boarding action?

I have tinkered with adapting Mongoose Games Victory at Sea to model space combat, one day I may get a playable game out of it.

WW1 BB vs BB or other gunned ships - weapon range is a dozen or so miles
Aircraft extend your weapon range to hundreds of miles and your delivery system is an order of magnitude faster than your ships.
Now instead of thinking of manned bombers as aircraft think of them as piloted missiles (the life expectancy of carrier based bomber pilots was not very many missions.

Funnily enough, early WWII carrier aircraft range wasn't terribly great, so 'hundreds' was barely true as an operational combat radius. Also, speeds weren't actual a full order of magnitude greater than the combat speeds of the ships. If AA fire control had been a few more years further advanced compared to carrier aviation, WWII's naval battles, and the conclusions arrived at in the aftermath of the war could have been quite different.

[Eukie]

I found this article on hypervelocity impacts, and several thing stand out with respect to how GURPS: Spaceships models damage to spacecraft:

1) "In ductile materials, like metals, crater diameters are typically 2-5 times larger than than diameter of the impactor." - This suggests that in the hypervelocity regime that GURPS: Spaceships typically assumes, the exact velocity is of little relevance. Instead, the damage multiplier should max out at some value. For instance, for instance, a 28 cm projectile should typically produce a crater at most 140 cm deep in metal armours, which corresponds to approximately 50 dDR of steel - irrespective of the closing velocity!

2) In GURPS:SS damage scales with the square root of impact energy and DR scales with the thickness of armour. However, the equation on page 535 suggests that penetration depth scales with the cube root of impact energy. Hence, instead of multiplying damage by velocity, it should be multiplied velocity to the ⅔rd power. (Yes, this is a different conclusion from #1 above.)

3) The use of spaced armour, wherein armour about a fifth as thick as the diameter of the impactor causes it to shatter and disperse as a cloud of many smaller impactors, which, owing to their individually smaller diameter, can more easily be stopped. This suggests that spaced layers of dDR 2 steel plates can significantly reduce the destruction caused by 28 cm hypervelocity projectiles.

Further considerations:

1) Water is incredibly effective, per unit weight, as armour. A fuel tank has about 1.1 the mass effectiveness of steel against high velocity long rod projectiles, and about 3.5 the mass effectiveness of steel against the hypervelocity jets of shaped charges. It seems reasonable that a Fuel Tank filled with water or other dense liquid propellants can be considered Steel Armor or Advanced Metallic Laminate Armor, depending on the situation and design. Most realistic spacecraft designs should probably be 50% Fuel Tanks or more, so this is a significant amount of extra armour!

2) In missile weapon design, missiles are typically required to have three times as much acceleration as their targets to have an appreciable chance of hitting a maneuvering target. This will impose sharp limits on the performance of a missile, probably forcing it to have a relatively low closing velocity and subsequently, damage multiplier.

3) GURPS:SS seems to assume that when a spacecraft is closing at great velocity with another spacecraft, projectile attacks will also close at great velocity. However, it's exceptionally difficult to land a hit on a moving or maneuvering target when the difference in velocity is great. As a rough example: If you're off by 1% in estimating the closing speed and you make course corrections every 0.1 seconds, at a closing velocity of 3000 mps you're going to be three miles off your target. If you're approaching the target at high velocities, you might actually want to slow the missile down, especially if you're not using proximity detonations!

4) Proximity detonations are essentially like giving the target free spaced armour, because it breaks the projectile into much smaller fragments that'll be unable to penetrate armour appreciably.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Eukie

I found this article on hypervelocity impacts, and several thing stand out with respect to how GURPS: Spaceships models damage to spacecraft:

1) "In ductile materials, like metals, crater diameters are typically 2-5 times larger than than diameter of the impactor." - This suggests that in the hypervelocity regime that GURPS: Spaceships typically assumes, the exact velocity is of little relevance. Instead, the damage multiplier should max out at some value. For instance, for instance, a 28 cm projectile should typically produce a crater at most 140 cm deep in metal armours, which corresponds to approximately 50 dDR of steel - irrespective of the closing velocity!

There's a penetration formula on the third page that gives penetration as being proportional to the 2/3rds power of velocity (and roughly 1/3rd power of mass). It gives a one pound object at one mile per second a penetration of ~55cm of aluminium. Assuming that's high-grade aerospace alloy, that's dDR76. A massier penetrator or a faster one would penetrate that much deeper. The article also points out that penetration to 50%+ of the skin depth results in spalling even if the hit doesn't penetrate deeper.

2) In GURPS:SS damage scales with the square root of impact energy and DR scales with the thickness of armour. However, the equation on page 535 suggests that penetration depth scales with the cube root of impact energy. Hence, instead of multiply damage by velocity, it should be multiplied velocity to the ⅔rd power. (Yes, this is a different conclusion from #1 above.)

Actually, the formula is 2/3rds power of velocity, 1/3rd power of mass, and thus you can't easily take simple kinetic energy and convert it to penetration using that formula.

4) Proximity detonations are essentially like giving the target free spaced armour, because it breaks the projectile into much smaller fragments that'll be unable to penetrate armour appreciably.

And thus they lose their (2) penetration modifier.