So you can get resonably close to the TV performance with the dodgy nuke thrusters, hmmm I'm assuming drones are the equivalent of Star Cruiser missiles? do they come with conventional and nuke warheads? or just Bomb pumped laser?
Drones are called missiles in prime 2k3 canon, distinguishing them from sensor drones.
The write-up is that are relative rare and are not "units of ammunition" but units in their own right:
Missiles and Drones are, of course, miniature stutterwarp ships in their own right. As such they are extremely expensive pieces of equipment.
The two tend to be used in conjunction with one another in combat. A vessel will send out drones to detect the enemy at a distance so that it can send its missiles to attack without having to approach the enemy itself.
This means that drones are often targeted during combat. Sometimes this is because they are mistaken for missiles, but more often the enemy simply wants to deprive the missile ship of the information the drones transmit, forcing the ship to close distance itself.
When considering the fact that every time a detonation missile explodes or a regular missile or a drone is destroyed by fire, another small stutterwarp engine is lost, it becomes obvious that such battles are very expensive, even if the main military vessels themselves are never hit.
- Page 78, 2300AD Directors Guide, 2nd edition
However, in the Naval Architects Manual, the someone started knocking zeros off the missile prices. I suspect an editor thought they looked too high, with a high-end missile costing as much as mid-range fighter. However, they have real stutterwarp drives in them.
The designers notes for Star Cruiser are:
DESIGNER'S NOTES
As you play Star Cruiser, you will quickly find that it is considerably
different from any space combat game you have played before. Our approach to
designing Star Cruiser was first to try to pin down what space combat between
starships was likely to be like and then to design a game that reflected it.
The first step was to identify the science upon which starships were based.
THE SCIENCE OF STAR CRUISER
I've heard it said that a science-fiction author is allowed one major change
in the laws of physics. I'm not certain how true that is for authors, but it's
a good rule of thumb for game designers. The one major departure from current
physical laws in Star Cruiser (and in Traveller: 2300) is the Jerome Drive,
more commonly referred to as the stutterwarp. The Jerome Drive relies on the
principle of "tunneling" to move particles from one location to another
without passing through the intervening space. Each tunnel is relatively
short, but the drive cycles at a rate of millions of warps per second and thus
gives the illusion of considerable speed. The apparent speed of a starship is
affected by the sheer power of its drive, the warp frequency of the drive, the
mass of the ship, and the presence of a gravity well. The sheer power of the
drive, when compared to the mass of the ship, determines the average length of
the warp tunnel. Gravity severely truncates the length of the warp tunnel.
Warp frequency indicates how many times the ship will tunnel per second. All
of these combine to produce an apparent speed. The activity of the drive
itself at high cyclic rates produces a gyroscopic effect that is referred to
as pseudo-momentum. It is not true momentum in the Newtonian sense, but
limits the magnitude of immediate changes in direction and velocity.
Aside from the star drives themselves, the science of starships is a
relatively conservative linear projection of current technology. Power plants
are based on refinements of existing designs. Weapons are directed energy beam
weapons, either lasers or particle accelerators, Detonation lasers and
particle accelerators are currently under development for the U.S. Strategic
Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") program, and the game's submunition
dispensers are an economical and logical outgrowth of this. Detection in the
game is by means of neutrino detectors, infrared sensors, enhanced optics, or
reflection of radar or laser radiation. In all cases these are currently
available, at least in theoretical form, and require only better data
processing to produce the results suggested by the game.
THE NATURE OF TACTICAL COMBAT You can make an argument (and I am now doing so)
that developments in tactical combat can largely be viewed as attempts at
better solutions to the targeting problem. That is, the problem in tactical
combat is seldom one of developing a weapon that will deliver sufficient
damage in the event of a hit; the problem is, instead, finding a weapon that
can be relied upon to achieve a hit. For example, the smoothbore musket is a
perfectly acceptable mankiller, provided you can manage to hit someone with
it. To increase the chances of a hit, battalions in the 17th and 18th
centuries formed up in tightly packed lines and discharged their muskets in
simultaneous volleys all at the same target. That enabled them to achieve a
fair number of hits. To increase the individual infantryman's chance of a hit,
rifling was added to the musket's barrel, and this increased the accuracy
sufficiently so that a more dispersed formation could achieve the same number
of hits. Massed formations could then be shot to pieces in short order, and so
by the American Civil War, armies tended to fight in loose skirmish lines. The
development of the machinegun combined the rifle's accuracy with the massed
battalion's volley effect and did so without requiring large numbers of men to
expose themselves to enemy fire. The result was more dispersion of the
infantry and the need to put more firepower in the soldier's own hands-hence,
the automatic rifle, grenade launcher, etc.
Naval warfare has seen a similar evolution. The 17th century's ships of the
line, with twenty or thirty guns per broadside, quickly gave way to warships
with rifled shell guns. Each rifled shell gun had a much higher chance of
scoring a hit, and each shell did much more damage. As a result, a ship
carried fewer guns but could do much more damage and do so at greater range.
To counteract the effects of better guns, ships added armor. The answer to
armor was larger guns, but the greater weight of large guns meant ships could
carry fewer of them. To give them the same chance of scoring hits and more
numerous small guns, more work was done with ballistics. Larger ships were
built to provide more stable firing platforms. Rangefinders and fire directors
improved gunnery accuracy. By the 1980s, many warships carried only a single
gun or missile launcher.
Where is all this leading? The central problem in any tactical situation is
hitting the target, There are two possible ways to increase your chances of
hitting a target: Increase the per-shot chances of a hit (precision of fire)
or keep the same per-shot chance of a hit but increase the number of shots
fired at the target (volume of fire). Examples of both solutions can be found
throughout history, but, of the two, precision of fire is clearly preferable.
Why? Because the other fellow is firing at you as well, and a precision weapon
is usually a smaller target than a volume weapon, all other things being
equal. Consider the example of a handful of riflemen versus a massed battalion
of musketeers; or the large three-decker ship of the line versus the steam
frigate with a few rifled shell guns; I or the rapid-fire large caliber naval
guns of a light cruiser versus the missile launcher of a Soviet Osa-class
missile boat.
After thinking this through, I decided that the Star Cruiser system should
concentrate on the solution of the target problem. This entails efforts of the
attacker to achieve a good target solution and efforts of the target to
frustrate that solution.
THE TARGET SOLUTION IN STAR CRUISER
There are three main elements to the target solution: enemy position, weapon
performance, and weapon control. By enemy position we mean the location of the
enemy when your shot arrives. By weapon performance we mean the actual flight
path of your shot as affected by the physical characteristics of the weapon
itself and the environment through which the shot passes, By weapon control we
mean the degree to which you can precisely control the aiming of the weapon
(quite well in a spacecraft, for example, but much less so with a rifle). As
data processing improves, our ability to measure and control for each of these
variables has improved, and that enables engagement of targets at successively
greater ranges.
While the attacker attempts to increase his chance of a hit, the target can
take measures to decrease it. Just as the two means of increasing the
likelihood of a successful shot are increases in precision of fire and in
volume of fire, the target's two defensive options involve decreasing the
precision of fire and decreasing its effective volume. To decrease the
precision of fire, the target must interfere in one of the three variables
above. The easiest to control for the target is target position, and most
defensive measures based on reduction of precision concern themselves with
disguising target position. Simple examples of this are camouflage paint and
electronic jamming of radar. In Star Cruiser the main component in this type
of defense is basic ship design. Most ships are designed to minimize their
"signature," the extent to which enemy sensors can detect them. Contemporary
stealth technology is a good example of this. Stealth is hardly super-science;
its basic principles were outlined before World War II. In the future,
considerations of radar cross section and reflectivity of materials will be
basic to any military ship design.
Reducing a ship's normal emission level is important as well, as passive
sensors will become much more important. Active sensors, once illuminated, are
like beacons for enemy missiles and fire control equipment, and thus will
often be mounted on remote sensor drones.
The second means of frustrating a target solution is to reduce the effective
volume of enemy fire. Volume is reduced if rounds are rendered harmless even
if they hit, and this is usually accomplished by means of armor. In Star
Cruiser armor is used, but so are screens. Screens are not mysterious force
fields that prevent enemy weapons from penetrating. Instead they are
electromagnetic fields which hold reflective particles in suspension. When a
laser hits the screen, the particles reflect a portion of the laser light and
then vaporize, absorbing the rest of the laser's energy. Although some energy
will penetrate the screen, often the screen absorbs or reflects enough energy
that the remainder is insufficient to damage the ship.
HIDE-AND-SEEK WITH BAZOOKAS
The result of all this is that Star Cruiser sometimes resembles a very lethal
game of hide-and-seek. This is certainly true of battles between smaller
ships. A good analogy is to compare this to modern antisubmarine warfare. One
good shot can end the battle, but that doesn't mean that the game comes down
to one die roll. The true strategy and drama lies in the efforts to pinpoint
the enemy and set up your shot without getting hit in return.
The most effective means of getting in your shot without being hit in return
is a missile, and that is why all modern warships in the game rely heavily on
missiles for their offensive ability. No matter how well a ship is
constructed, it is an inherently larger target than a missile. Thus, a missile
can be fired from a safe distance and has a better chance of penetrating to
effective range than does a ship. By the same token, use of a remote sensor
drone can enable you to detect your enemy while remaining at a safe distance.
A second solution is the use of a number of small fighters. Although a larger
target than a missile, a fighter is still harder to hit than most ships and is
capable of delivering a quick hard punch with either a conventional beam
weapon or submunitions dispensers.
In general, human fleets tend to rely more on stealth and its related
technologies to avoid destruction. The Kafers, on the other hand, tend to rely
more on armor and screens. This is so because the average level of
intelligence and initiative is much lower among Kafers than humans, with the
result that qualified pilots are much rarer. To compensate for this, Kafer
fleets tend to rely on fewer very large ships, each heavily armed and
protected, but virtually impossible to conceal. If human tactical battles can
be likened to hide-and-seek, Kafer tactics are closer to a barroom brawl.
Kafer ships close as rapidly with the enemy as possible, trusting their armor
and screens to minimize damage on the approach run, and then trade broadsides
until one or the other ship is crippled or destroyed, The limited number of
fire directors on a Kafer ship make it fairly easy to overload its antimissile
defenses and land hits, but the sheer amount of punishment a Kafer ship can
take can be very demoralizing.
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