02-08-2019, 01:45 PM | #11 | |||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] How does large-scale space warfare play out (without superscience)?
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Unrelated: I wonder if those really big beam weapons AlexanderHowl likes could have a niche in providing MAD. Keep one trained on your enemy's spaceport, and even if it's theoretically vulnerable to missiles, you might be able to do a lot of damage to the spaceport in the time period when the missiles are flying. Of course, the other side might angrily demand you move the thing as soon as it enters range. The background treaties or "space law" can affect warfare a lot just by dictating where military space vehicles are when the fighting breaks out. |
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02-08-2019, 02:18 PM | #12 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] How does large-scale space warfare play out (without superscience)?
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Unless both sides are based on the same planet or we're talking about interplanetary-range beams, I'd generally expect hostilities to be clearly established before anybody is in beam weapon range of each other.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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02-08-2019, 02:29 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: [Spaceships] How does large-scale space warfare play out (without superscience)?
The largest scale battle(s) I ever ran were during the combined playtest of Spaceships 3 and 4.
I took some of the designs that were to be published and turned them into fleets. If you wonder, David liked that if you're ever in a similar position in the future. To get the largest number of similar ships i ended up at a hard science TL10. There were Victory-class cruisers, some destroyer 1 SM smaller and Nova-class Assault Carriers. These all used to be the colonial navy of the Greater League of United Earth but the Free Libertarians of the Outer Solar System captured the half of the ships not based at Earth in a sudden uprising. So the new FLOSSForce launched an attack on Earth with a TO&E that was a mirror image of GLUEFleet. Except for the SM+14 Gibraltar battlestations in Earth orbit. The Victory-classes had a pulse drive while the Novas had Fusion rockets so they did not maneuver in concert. The Victory led squadron launched first toward some target in Earth space with the Novas launchign separately and later. GLUEFleetIntel decided their target was the L4 habitats and the appropriate response was to launch a mirroring detachment to intercept while FlossForce was still out of range of L4. Before the first battle starts everybody knows something is up because the Novas have passed the turnover point and are still accelerating. The geniuses at GLUEFleetIntel desice the Nobas are going to run an update of the Doolittle Raid and have their fighters shoot up everthing they can in Earthspace for psychological effect and to force GLUE spending on defense and thereby postpone any GlueFleet ops to retake the outer system. It wouldn't have been a horrible plan. At any rate the GLUE cruider squadrons are committed at this point and an equally matched battle between them and their FLOSS opposite numbers can not be avoided. The GLUE guys can't even divert to attack the Novas instead withoit the FLOSS squadrons attacking them first. A battle between equal forces could have been predicted to create yhorible csualties but how bad and how quickly that happened was shocking (2 Turns). Eggshells with hammers indeed. Shoot first and hope your gunners get lucky. The whole "navy ships updated to space" paradigm is probably not valid (at least for fleet v, fleet). Deciding they might as well trust FleetIntel GLUE has dispersed it's own Novas and fighters widely to be seen as opposing FLOSS at every possible point. The Novas have continuosly accelerated towards Earth all the way from Mars and have used up half their fuel reaching 70 miles per second. That's when they opened their hangar bays to disgorge not fighters but 100 TL8 ASATS homemade in the outer system. They aren't targeted at a wide range of Earth targets either. They are concentrated on the Gibraltars with 100 kamikaze ASTA launch 3 submunitions each and at 70 mps only one needs to get through for not jsut akill but over-kill. The Gibraltar has nothing like the required amount of PD and what's left of GLUEFleet is probably very busy protecting the orbital infrastructure from the debris.
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Fred Brackin |
02-08-2019, 02:43 PM | #14 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: [Spaceships] How does large-scale space warfare play out (without superscience)?
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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02-08-2019, 03:06 PM | #15 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] How does large-scale space warfare play out (without superscience)?
"Both sides are based on the same planet" isn't a super-popular scenario in sci-fi, but if you have one garden world in your system and no FTL, it's the easiest way to justify having sides that are even roughly equally matched. Honestly more settings should be like Transhuman Space in that regard. Though garden world vs. a heavily populated asteroid belt could be interesting.
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02-08-2019, 03:17 PM | #16 | |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] How does large-scale space warfare play out (without superscience)?
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02-08-2019, 03:23 PM | #17 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: [Spaceships] How does large-scale space warfare play out (without superscience)?
I am thinking that a good design for realistic capital ships will have four fuel tanks, three armor (one per section), three hangers for drones, two major batteries for beam weapons, two habitats, one tertiary batteries for missiles, one tactical comm/sensor array, one control room, one fusion reactor, one fusion drive, and one hanger for shuttles. At TL10, that gives a delta-v of 240 mps, which should be sufficient for most capital ships. A SM+12 capital ship will have 900 SM+4 drones, 900 40cm missiles with 10 megaton antimatter warheads, and 30 SM+6 shuttles.
The beam weapons are probably improved 30 GJ lasers with a total RoF of 40 on a 3-minute turn, dealing 6d×10 (2) burning d-damage up to a range of 10,000 miles and 6d×5 (2) burning d-damage at a range of 30,000 miles, allowing for orbital bombardment from GSO of missiles and lasers. The soft targets get the lasers and hard targets get the antimatter missiles. A pure spaceship of terror will exchange the missiles for 2,700 40cm bombs with 10 megaton antimatter warheads, which ends up not even doubling the payload cost, which it would drop from GSO. |
02-08-2019, 03:56 PM | #18 | |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] How does large-scale space warfare play out (without superscience)?
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*sigh*. I wish Vehicles 4e were out. Seems unlikely to ever happen, though. |
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02-08-2019, 04:19 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Spaceships] How does large-scale space warfare play out (without superscience)?
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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02-08-2019, 04:20 PM | #20 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: [Spaceships] How does large-scale space warfare play out (without superscience)?
For what it's worth awhile back I started this thread to try to figure out how the heck having multiple point-defense gunners works (among other things). I did not get an answer. Based on this thread from ten years back, Ulzgoroth, it sounds like you favor "a point defense gunner gets to see if his buddy hit before deciding whether to take a shot", is that correct?
You'd think that even if this question didn't have an official answer for point-defense, it would have an official answer for Sacrificial Parry or especially Shield Wall Training. But AFAICT we don't have anything official. |
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