Nuclear weapons IN SPACE!

[Dangerious P. Cats]

Originally Posted by Apache

Nukes aren't really all that dangerous (to ships) in most space RPG's.......it's what you can do to a planet with one (or several) that makes them really nasty.

That's more my concern. It's hard to justify why the PCs have to fight door to door house to house when they could just nuke the place from orbit. Likewise players have a habbit of asking things like "why havn't they nuked us yet?" when the enemy is attacking them. I'd like to have a good answer.

[Trachmyr]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

That's more my concern. It's hard to justify why the PCs have to fight door to door house to house when they could just nuke the place from orbit. Likewise players have a habbit of asking things like "why havn't they nuked us yet?" when the enemy is attacking them. I'd like to have a good answer.

Point-Defense satellites.

Most combat the player's might see is espionage type to shut down orbital defenses.

Also, a nuked world has little to capture (& repay the war costs)... Nukes might even be more likely to be set off by the defenders just as the Russians burned their fields durring WWII.

Same holds true for pirates... no nukes or you don't get paid! A few well aimed laser shots then it's time to board with a shotgun.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

That's more my concern. It's hard to justify why the PCs have to fight door to door house to house when they could just nuke the place from orbit. Likewise players have a habbit of asking things like "why havn't they nuked us yet?" when the enemy is attacking them. I'd like to have a good answer.

If the enemy has shelled you, but hasn't nuked you, that's a problematic question.

If you've got good point defense, the enemy can't shell you, so they equally can't nuke you.

The modern reason is diplomatic issues with nuke usage. You could have everyone sufficiently antsy about nuclear weapons that they aren't used much. Be hard to justify though.

If you're fighting house to house, nukes aren't relevant. You don't need nukes to pretty well annihilate a city or installation. If you wanted to destroy the place, you could smash it with nukes, or with conventional bombs, heavy beam weapons, or hypervelocity kinetic strikes. If you're fighting house to house it should be because you have some objective not achievable by pure destruction. Similarly, so long as the enemy wants something from the place you've holed up other than a smoking crater, they're not going to go all out on any sort of bombardment. (But be careful that your death isn't worth more than everything in the blast radius...)

If you break with the hard science a bit, you can have nuclear dampers so they can shell you but can't nuke you.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

That's more my concern. It's hard to justify why the PCs have to fight door to door house to house when they could just nuke the place from orbit. Likewise players have a habbit of asking things like "why havn't they nuked us yet?" when the enemy is attacking them. I'd like to have a good answer.

Again...see Traveller. Nuclear dampener fields are very common in that setting. In any SFRPG, if you are handwaving the FTL stuff, you can come up with more handwaves why Nuking Stuff Is Bad.

To use Traveller for an example, if you are crazy enough to casually nuke a city (to force the planetary leaders to pay ransom..or just for giggles) you have just about guarenteed Big Imperial Fleets to show up and start hunting you down like a dog. Massive bounties, you name it. Even other pirates/terrorists will shoot at you, because now the heat is up to 11.

Even Imperial Navy officers don't usually nuke stuff from orbit. Looks bad in the papers and upsets civilians at their tea, don't you know.

[Befuddled]

Money, that's how.

Space ships aren’t cheap to maintain, especially during a prolonged war. Nuking every enemy ship means that they can’t capture info from their computers, ransom/interrogate the crew, or salvage much of use from the husk. Let your PCs nuke to their hearts content, but make sure they know that this will 1) anger their superiors, 2) deplete their reserves of cash and nukes, and 3) earn them a reputation as nuke-happy bastards with a massive “Wanted: Dead” bounty on their heads.

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

This.

Space ships will already have shielding against hard rads, and ways to dump heat. Nukes have to detonate really close to the vessel to do much.

Moreover, they're expensive and complex pieces of machinery. Why would anybody use them, when you can just fire a rail-gun round at a velocity of 10 km/s? At that velocity, a the kinetic energy of the mass of the ammunition does 10 times the damage of an equivalent mass of TNT.

Alternatively, fire a missile with a submunitions warhead (basically, a giant shotgun shell) and have it go off so the ball-bearings get in the flight-path of the enemy ship. That's probably a little more expensive than a rail-gun round, but still nowhere near the price and complexity of a nuke.

Sandcasters, in other words. With the advantage that accelerators are far more energy efficient as well as mass efficient than rockets.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

Sandcasters, in other words. With the advantage that accelerators are far more energy efficient as well as mass efficient than rockets.

Except that guns are extremely short ranged in space, but missiles are not. A missile with a sub-munition warhead has potentially unlimited range. A scattergun has an effective range of a few seconds times its muzzle velocity.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

How do you deal with a realitivly hard space setting where you want to make conflict or war to focus of the setting, but at the same time don't want all the person to person or ship to ship fighting that players love to be ruined but people just setting off nukes everywhere?

More to the point how can you make "I just nuke them" not a viable option for players?

"Hard science space war adventures" is an exceedingly difficult genre to be trying to adapt to rpgs.

This is particularly true is you actually _mean_ "hard science". This leads to Transhuman Space and the dual questions of why anyone is devoting this many resources to fighting in space and why there are any flesh and blood humans involved if they are?

Of course all the people who keep telling you to look at Traveller are assuming something else. Traveller is "hard" only in that there are no blaster pistols. Indeed, if the PCs have to shoot slugs at the bad guys in personal combat that seems to be exactly what some people have in mind when they say "hard science rpg".

At any rate, nuclear dampers are absolutely not hard science.

Reactionless thrusters aren't either but they make nukes largely redundant because kinetic energy weapons will be far superior.

So maybe you should tell us what you think is "relativley hard science' in your context. For answers of "really hard" you may not logically be able to have "no nukes". You might not be able to logically have many of the usual trappings of "space war" either.

[Crakkerjakk]

Honestly, nukes are just one example of the whole problem of space combat in general. You have so much energy at your fingertips you can turn damn near anything into a weapon if you have an engine that can get you from one planet to another.

My suggestions are 1) have the PCs be people who can't afford super fancy weapons. They can barely afford the payments on their beat up old ship. 2) Give them objectives that they want to capture intact. Sure they could drop some rocks on the pirate outpost on planet X from orbit, but they're here to rescue a kidnapped diplomat's daughter.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Dangerious P. Cats

That's more my concern. It's hard to justify why the PCs have to fight door to door house to house when they could just nuke the place from orbit. Likewise players have a habbit of asking things like "why havn't they nuked us yet?" when the enemy is attacking them. I'd like to have a good answer.

If they are in a military force, the answer is simple. Nuclear weapons haven't been provided or authorized by high command. Actually, it's easier with nukes. They're expensive and dirty, particularly when used groundside. Conventional orbital strikes are more likely to be used by an interstellar navy. They should be far preferable to nukes. Cheaper, cleaner, less taboo. The reason they wouldn't be used is because there are people down there your bosses don't want dead. It may be bad publicity to kill civilians en masse, or they may have a bunch of your people down there with yours. You may have an objective like a research installation, an enemy leader, a collection of valuable art or an industrial complex you'd like to capture intact and therefore bombardment is disallowed.

Then again, it could just be a matter as simple as your bosses not expecting any resistance. You go down there to garrison some place, you get jumped, and not only do you have to get out of there before you can call in a bombardment, you may not even have orbital elements in place.