[Spaceships] Pod-Layer Battlewagon

[Cernig]

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

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

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Originally Posted by Cernig

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.

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.

[jacobmuller]

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.

[Cernig]

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

[safisher]

Originally Posted by Cernig

Yup. :-) The guys at Atomic Rocket say that's how space battles will be.

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.

[Langy]

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.

[vicky_molokh]

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.

[jacobmuller]

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.

[Cernig]

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.