[Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Following discussion on a few other threads, here's a pod-layer for critique.

(The ECM suites use my Quick Contest house rules. You can replace them with RAW ECM for 600k less cost)

BBG-1P “Honor” Class Pod-Layer

Description: An SM12 un-streamlined design, it hosts 100 Marines and their command as well as it’s crew.

Embarked smaller vessels: PD Drones and missile pods, 4 x100 ton cutters

Systems Table

Front Hull
[1] Hardened Nanocomposite Armor
[2] Tactical Array (Lvl 13 comm/sensor suite, active jam)
[3] Control Room (20 stations, C10 computer, Lvl 11 backup comm/sensor suite)
[4] Habitat (600 cabin equivalent: 40 single cabins (40), 50 double cabins (50), 20 bed automed bay (20), Briefing Room (1) Kitchen and dining room (2), Gym (1), Wardroom (1), Ship’s armory (1), Hangar and stores for four 100 ton modular cutters (100), cargo hold with 1,500 tons 50 x replacement PD drones (300), 420 tons steerage cargo)
[5] Defensive ECM (Lvl 13 hi-power ECM/ECCM suite)
[6] Defensive ECM (Lvl 13 hi-power ECM/ECCM suite)
[Core] -

Central Hull
[1] Hardened Nanocomposite Armor
[2] Fuel Tank (5,000 tons)
[3] Fuel Tank (5,000 tons)
[4] Hangar Bay (3000 tons, 500 ton/min launch, 100 PD drones)
[5] Cargo Hold (5,000 tons: 150 replacement missile pods, 500 tons cargo)
[6] Cargo Hold (5,000 tons: 150 replacement missile pods, 500 tons cargo
[Core] Fuel Tank (5,000 tons)

Rear Hull
[1] Hardened Nanocomposite Armor
[2] Hangar (3000 tons, 500 ton/min launch: 100 missile pods)
[3] Hangar (3000 tons, 500 ton/min launch: 100 missile pods)
[4] M-Drive Hot Reactionless Engine !
[5] M-Drive Hot Reactionless Engine !
[6] Jump-2 Super Stardrive !
[Core] Fusion Reactor (2pp)

Spacecraft Table

TL: 10^
dST/HP: 300 Hnd/SR: -2/5 HT:13 Move: 2G/c SM: +12
DDR: 100h / 100h / 100h LWt: 100,000 tons ( Dton displacement)
Occ: Crew: 20 Control + 12 workspaces, 100 marines + 8 officers/NCOs
Load: 1,420 tons cargo.
Air performance: 0
Annual Operating Costs: $ 5% cost plus fuel.

The class has artificial gravity, gravity compensation, stealth hull and a chameleon skin. It is highly automated.

Cost: $14,016 Million

Missile Pod: SM5, 30 ton. It has a tactical array, a single ECM system, total automation, a C6 computer, stealth and a chameleon skin for $3.64 million. There's no station keeping ability (and no high power requirement, it can operate off auxiliary power) but the rest of the spaces are 17 medium battery 3x16cm missile launchers with 5 missiles apiece for a total of 255 missiles per pod.

“Diomedes Protector” PD Drone: {Yes, that Diomedes, thanks D}

Forward Hull
[1] Medium Battery ! (3x VRF Improved Laser Turrets, 30KJ)
[2] Medium Battery ! (3x VRF Improved Laser Turrets, 30KJ)
[3] Medium Battery ! (3x VRF Improved Laser Turrets, 30KJ)
[4] Medium Battery ! (3x VRF Improved Laser Turrets, 30KJ)
[5] Medium Battery ! (3x VRF Improved Laser Turrets, 30KJ)
[6] Fusion Reactor (2pp)

Midships Hull
[1] Defensive ECM (lvl 6)
[2] Tactical Array (C/S 6)
[3] Medium Battery ! (3x VRF Improved Laser Turrets, 30KJ)
[4] Medium Battery ! (3x VRF Improved Laser Turrets, 30KJ)
[5] Medium Battery ! (3x VRF Improved Laser Turrets, 30KJ)
[6] Fusion Reactor (2pp)
[Core] Fusion Reactor (2pp)

Aft Hull
[1] Control Room (C6 computer, Lvl 4 Sensors, 1 Control Station)
[2] Medium Battery ! (3x VRF Improved Laser Turrets, 30KJ)
[3] M-Drive Hot Reactionless Thruster ! (1G)
[4] M-Drive Hot Reactionless Thruster ! (1G)
[5] Fusion Reactor (2pp)
[6] Fusion Reactor (2pp)
[Core] Fusion Reactor (2pp)

TL: 10^ SM+5
dST: 20 dHP: 20 HT: 12
Hnd: 0 SR: 4
Move: 2/c
Cost: $4.44 million

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

All punch, no staying power.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Yup. :-) The guys at Atomic Rocket say that's how space battles will be. "Ten men go in, half a man comes out sort of thing." Once battle is joined it's all about the ratio of forces at that point and over very quickly, despite any defenses. The loser's survivors run away if they can and the winner's survivors pick over the battlefield for what they can salvage.

I don't like it one bit - and I've a few house rules to make gaming space battles more interesting again. In any case, this beast goes in alongside the more conventional beam-armed battlewagons, carriers and arsenal ships as a force multiplier, then gets the hell out of Dodge behind a screen when it has unloaded its pods. If the pod-layer's side wins, they can recover pods and drones. If not, they have other problems.

Regards, C

So, Dave, what would you build to counter the pod-layer?

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

<shrug> That's the theory of massed missile barrages and if you do kill all your enemies with an overwhelming alpha strike you don't need "staying power".

Recent efforts with Spaceships at TL 10 make the concept of armored warships at TL10 look pretty dubious to me. It can be very hard to armor against a Major Battery beyond 1/2D range from a vessel of the same SM and you can forget about KK missiles and nukes.

It might not be just TL10 either. Back in the original playtest I had trouble making a dreadnought that couldn't be killed by a spinal mount from an attacker 2 SMs smaller.

"You kill them before they can kill you" might be the most practical advice you can receive.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Technology that puts a lot of destructive punch in a small package inevitably means that giant warship designs with an excess of defense are a waste of resources.

This matches real-world warship evolution. The main threat to battleships was at first other battleships. Then torpedo design evolved to the point where a small torpedo boat was the main threat to giant armored warships, which caused the development of the torpedo-boat-destroyer class, or "destroyer", to protect them.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Two of these to every Pod-Layer as escorts, although they're quite capable of independent action. I needed a quick name idea so Fred got a promotion :-)

DDE-34 Admiral Brackin Class Escort Destroyer

Description: An SM10, un-streamlined 10,000 ton vessel directly tasked to protect larger warships from missile salvos. It has the same J-2 to action, J-1 to safety fuel reserve as most warships.

Systems Table

Front Hull
[1] Hardened Nanocomposite Armor/ 30 cabin Habitat (1 workspace, 3 single cabins (3), 11 2-person cabins (11), Wardroom (1), Gym (1), 1 Ship’s armory (1), 5 bed automed bay (5), 40 tons steerage cargo.)
[2] Control Room (10 stations, 1 workspace, C9 computer, Lvl 9 comm/sensor suite)
[3] Defensive ECM (Lvl 11 hi-power ECM/ECCM suite, 1 workspace)
[4] Defensive ECM (Lvl 11 hi-power ECM/ECCM suite, 1 workspace)
[5] Fusion Reactor (2 pp, 1 workspace)
[6] Major battery! (3GJ UV Laser, fixed forwards, 1 workspace)
[Core] -

Central Hull
[1] Hardened Nanocomposite Armor/ 250 ton Fuel Tank
[2] 500 ton Fuel Tank
[3] 500 ton Fuel Tank
[4] Tertiary Battery ! (30x 1MJ improved VRF Lasers, turreted. 1 workspace)
[5] Tertiary Battery ! (30x 1MJ improved VRF Lasers, turreted. 1 workspace)
[6] Jump-2 Super Stardrive !! (1 workspace)
[Core] Fusion Reactor (2 pp, 1 workspace)

Rear Hull
[1] Hardened Nanocomposite Armor/ 250 ton Fuel Tank
[2] Hangar Bay (300 ton, launch100 ton/min: 10x 30 ton Diomedes Protector” PD Drones)
[3] Hangar Bay (300 ton, launch100 ton/min: 10x 30 ton Diomedes Protector” PD Drones)
[4] M-Drive Hot Reactionless Engine ! (1 workspace)
[5] M-Drive Hot Reactionless Engine ! (1 workspace)
[6] M-Drive Hot Reactionless Engine ! (1 workspace)
[Core] Fusion Reactor (2 pp, 1 workspace)

Spacecraft Table

TL: 10^
dST/HP: 150 Hnd/SR: -2/5 HT:13 Move: 3G/c SM: +10
DDR: 15h / 15h / 15h LWt: 10,000 tons ( 2,000 Dton displacement)
Occ: Crew: 10 Control + 15 workspaces
Load: 40 tons cargo.
Air performance: 0
Annual Operating Costs: $ 5% cost plus fuel.

The class has artificial gravity and gravity compensation, a stealth hull and chameleon skin.

Cost: $1,836 million

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

BTW, why fight in space anyway if an armada or the right type of rocket-bombers can simply destroy everything on the planetary surface?

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Jump gate defense?

Intercepting someone before they can get to the planet?

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

The pod-layer-style warships come from the Honor Harrington stories. And in the Honorverse, they have the Eridani Accords, which state that ANYONE who kills a planet gets killed by EVERYONE ELSE. So blowing up a planetary surface is a no-no. (And just blowing up the target is almost impossible, since a planetary surface can hold as many defensive batteries as you want.)

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Hi Molokh,

The same reason as always. You fight for the high ground because of what the one who holds it can do to his enemies on low ground.

Regards, C

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Well, weak, frightened interplanetary states will definitely want to use this tactic to discourage their bigger enemies from invading them anyway. I mean, it's sort of 'Anybody tries to invade one of my planets and I kill more of your planets than I ever had; I have nothing to lose!'.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Except that the tactic within the framework of the honor verse means it would mean not just fighting the already bigger enemy from attacking you but also the galaxies sole super power as well.

Outside of framework of the Honorverse it is quite possible a viable tactic but only if you have enough ships to both burn through the defense fleet and whatever orbital/planetary defenses that exists as well (although of course if you are in possession of enough firepower at that point to effectively incinerate the surface area of the planet you might be better off forcing its capitulation instead).

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

At the point of no longer having anything to lose in the first place, that doesn't sound like a credible threat.

It basically requires you to have enough ships/missiles/etc. to incinerate the total surface area of your own civilization + a bit + what you will lose on bypassing defenses (likely not very much compared to what gets through). At that point, you're just no longer worth it.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

How are you building these unstoppable rocket-bombers, exactly?

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Except in the first case it is the difference between loosing a war and loosing your entire civilization. A nation or a civ can recover from loosing a war the complete elimination of your entire civ is a bit more difficult to recover from ;).

It requires you not to have enough ships/missiles/etc. to incinerate the total surface are of your civ but the defense grid of the other sides civ, and to be able to repeat that enough times against whatever defense the other side enjoys to make it not worth their time. Which tends to move the discussion from the theoretical broad discussion to a more details oriented conversation.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

As I said, it's specifically for 'nothing to lose' cases. Something akin to WWII for Jews, only on an interplanetary scale, I think.

It's not meant for cases when complete occupation and mass deaths aren't a thread.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Fair enough and under those conditions I definitely agree to its potential as a deterrent though your earlier remarks below seemed to instead indicate it as more of a general strategic principle rather than as an act reserved for last stand scenarios.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Last stand is relative. But sincirely speaking, I did forget what I wanted in the first place. I'm mostly regurgiating stuff read on Atomicrocket.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Rules prod: Hangars can't go in the core hull. Your PD drone hangar needs to be relocated.

I'm a bit doubtful of the pod concept with this technical base.

The Honor can roll 10 or 11 pods in a 20 second round. That's a lot of missiles (561 in space per round). But a single Brackin boasts 600 PD mounts, with the drones out. That's probably not going to stop the volley alone (if using conventional proximity warheads), but it's respectable, and a pair of the destroyers actually have a good chance of coming through unscathed.

They can't actually win the exchange, since their weapon system has trouble penetrating the podlayer's skin and the second clutch of pods will overwhelm them if they don't break away from the first batch, but they get a shot at it.

At the same time, an Honor-sized battleship with two layers of armor would be quite resistant to 16cm missiles, which average 168 damage. A heavy 3-layer battleship would actually be able to ignore the missiles with impunity, unless they carried nuclear warheads (which are much harder to get through point defense).

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

The battle role of the pod-layer is not to fire once a round, it is to lay ALL their pods behind a defensive screen, then the screen clears and ALL the pods shoot. For the Honor-class pod-layer at the beginning of the thread, that's a total salvo of 127,500 missiles not including the replacement pods. That is guaranteed to put a hurt on whomever they're fired at, no matter how dense their point defense. Then regular battlewagons can engage while the pod-layer lays down it's smaller number of replacement pods for a second salvo (still numbering in the many thousands of missiles).

The inspiration of this, the ships of the Honorverse, utilize x-ray laser warheads (the nuke warhead detonates, energizing single-shot x-ray lasers which spray out in all directions). That would hurt armor, as would nuke warheads that got real close. Or just bunches of kinetic-kill missiles hitting the same ship over and over and over until something gave.

To paraphrase Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, "I get there fustest with the mostest." Concentrated firepower is the name of that game.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Fixed.

As to tactical doctrine for pod-layers, I agree with MDL. An Honor can flush all it's ready pods and the pods can attack either together or just "as and when, on command" while the Honor gets out of Dodge (and either lays a new pod barrage further out as a fallback for the fleet or comes back in at a later stage to do so. There's no reason at all why the Honor can't "hand off" control of its pods to more conventional battlewagons once it has flushed them.

Even if a 16cm misile has trouble with heavy battlewagons, such a massive swarm of missiles will still have a tactical use - clearing the opponents PD drones and escorts so your own sides heavier units can work unimpeded and swamping remaining PD so that heavier missiles have a chance of getting through to their targets.

I'm also thinking about a heavier 20cm SM6 pod for a "newer" generation of ship-of-the-line battlewagons. They'd be present in far smaller numbers but it seems to me they could still be more numerous than just using a system space for a tertiary missile battery (instead of a hangar for pods) on an SM12 battleship or dreadnought. For those, I think at least some pods loaded with nukes would be mandatory. maybe another few loaded with armored missiles and another few loaded with ECM/penetration aide missiles.

Another thought. At TL10 you're not going to get X-ray lasers by RAW. However, I don't think RAW deals with the bomb-pumped variety which was envisioned in Reagan era missile defense plans so should be available much earlier. Anyone want to have a bash at statting a nuke-pumped X-ray laser missile warhead?

Regards, C

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Bomb-pumped x-ray lasers exist now. They've been test-fired during nuclear tests in the 1960's (TL7). So late TL8 is the earliest we could expect to see a battlefield version.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

We'd need to up the scale a little. Ships in Honor-verse are Huge. SM12 is just a destroyer or light cruiser (100,000 tons). BB to SDN are SM16, 4.5 to 8 million tons. This would put their tertiary missile launchers at 80cm.

Weren't the pods deployed in the books one-shot devices? Spaceships missile launchers include a magazine. Perhaps pod-design as cargo units/ hangers would fit better with the book theme. Also, the launch system missiles are too small if BBs are lobbing 80cm+ missiles. The pods would be SM8, say 500 tons, with 15ton "hangers" as launch tubes. I'll need to dig deeper to find honor-verse missile stats.

The bigger ships appear to have secondary bridges. I wonder if this could be covered by Habitat space assigned as office space or would it really require 2 Control rooms.

I can't remember if they needed to upgrade their control systems to handle the extra missiles. Would this mean a second Tactical array or justify the second control room.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Hi Jacob,

All true, but I'm not running an Honorverse campaign. I'm running a very Traveller IW style of campaign but the pod-layer makes sense so it would get built - and I simply named it for the Honor books.

Regards, C

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

I'd take their advice with a grain of salt. No one "knows" what space combat will be like -- there are not even any current real-world military plans to build combat spaceships. The Atomic Rocket guys have their uses, but they remind me of Billy Mitchell's tormentors.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

The pods included the neccessary command and control systems for the missiles, as well as the powered missile launchers (if I remember right, they were basically shot out of gauss guns to give them an extra speed boost). Later on in the Honorverse, there was another type of missile that was basically a mobile command and control module that gave ECM and ECCM support to the launched missiles - this was helpful because missile barrages were regularly fired several light seconds to light minutes away from their targets.

I'd love to see a supplement to Spaceships that would allow us to stat missiles out, with 'warhead' packages, different drives and fuel capacities, sub-munitions, ECM, armor, etc. They could easily be built by the Spaceships system - it would just need to scale down correctly and add the required modules and a few rules. This would also fix the problem with missiles hitting in the same turn as they're fired when they usually should take a lot longer to reach X range, for example.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Somebody should write Spaceships 4: Big and Small, with attention to building fighters, missiles, sub-tertiary batteries, titans, doomstars, orbitals, sys-artemis networks, dyson spheres, fake moons etc. Not me: I'm mostly playing and GMing fantasy this year or so - I only have vague understanding of SS rules.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

In looking at the weights, ammunition, etc for missile launchers, it could be taken that only 1/3rd of the weight is the actual launcher. The other 2/3rds being the missile magazine, the missiles and machinery needed to move them into the launcher. Taking this viewpoint, you could build one-shot launchers that are one calibre larger than the standard integrated-magazine launchers, e.g. an SM5 pod that could launch a single salvo of 16 x 24cm missiles instead of 7 salvos of 20cm or an SM5 fighter with two fixed, forward hull, medium batteries of 3x20cm missiles that can be launched singly or en masse. If you expect the launching unit to be quickly destroyed, this boosts the power of the one shot it might get.

Re: [Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon
 

Good point, Jacob. Thanks. I'm very likely to use that idea myself.

Like Molokh, I'd like to see that Spaceships 4: Big and Small book too. Although I bet we could have a damn good try at it here on the forums.