Right. Following on from some comments/ideas etc that have popped up in a few recent threads, I thought I'd see about putting together a S&P article on missiles.
Call me old-fashioned, but I'm a fan of ordnance. I like Honor Harrington, I like Andromeda, and I like Battlestar Galactica, and ultimately I like the idea of putting more bite and flexibility into Traveller's missile arsenal.
There have been a few ideas I've had floating around, and I thought I'd like a thread to (a) lay out the general concepts and (b) see if anyone else has any particular suggestions to throw in.
Current options (ignoring ortillery)
Missiles
Missile (10G, D6 damage)
Smart Missile (10G, D6 damage)
Nuclear Missile (10G, 2D6+Radiation damage)
Multi-Warhead Missile (8G, D6xD6 damage)
LRM (15G, D6-1 damage)
Shockwave Missile (10G, Sand clearance)
Heavy Missiles
Heavy Missile (10G, 4D6 damage)
Nuclear Heavy Missile (10G, 6D6+Radiation damage)
Bomb-Pumped Heavy Missile (10G, 6D6 damage)
In addition, higher TL systems allow for:
1) up to 40% reduction in size - I would argue that this is likely to apply to the missile instead of/as well as the launcher, which then gives a double advantage that TL9 missiles can be packed 20 per dTon of magazine space.
2) Accurate
3) High Yield or Very High Yield
And the following launchers
Missiles
Fixed (x1, x2, x3)
Turret (x1, x2, x3)
Bay (x12)
Large Bay (x24)
Heavy Missiles
Fixed (x1) - small craft only
Barbette (x1)
Bay (x3)
Large Bay (x6)
I can see a few obvious missing options straight off - there is no reason, for example, that a bomb-pumped variant of the standard nuclear missile is impossible, nor is a multi-warhead or high-G equivalent of the conventional heavy missile.
Equally, one would think that the relative size means it would be easier to fit quite a sophisticated computer package on a heavy missile, making a smart heavy missile either less technically challenging or significantly 'smarter'.
Other things that have been mentioned recently fall into the 'dirty tricks category':
Counter-missiles (kinetic kill)
Counter-missiles (nuclear flash)
Countermeasures missiles (decoy launchers)
Countermeasures missiles (IR laser strobe)
Low Signature missiles (low radar cross-section, directed IR radiation)
Other things I can think of in the missile types:
Volley Missiles
Analogous to using a multiple launcher for CR-70 or SNEB (in this case guided but not especially smart and with a short powered - i.e. effective - endurance) Small warhead means not great against armour but massive rate of fire means effective against weakly armoured targets and very good at overwhelming point defence. With relatively little design work you could probably throw them three-at-a-time through a conventional launcher.
Armour Piercing
Conventional warheads are supposedly fragmentation/kinetic kill. It should be possible to increase the ability of such a weapon to penetrate armour (e.g. including some crystaliron/bonded superdense penetrators in the fragment cloud), but doing so will reduce the total number of fragments and hence (potentially) the gross damage inflicted. What it will do, is increase the chance of those fragments punching through armour.
Alternatively, one can set off the fragmentation at closer proximity (think of it as a shotgun blast), but this will entail getting closer to the ship and hence potentially giving point defence an extra shot at it depending on recharge times (a PD laser would never not fire until it has an easier shot as you can't be certain that a proximity fuze is set for 'close' until too late).
Medium Missile
In addition, an intermediate weight weapon was mentioned - somewhere between a missile and heavy missile. The diminishing returns on power to mass/volume is going to be somewhere between square root and cube root (every blast/fragment velocity model is generally somewhere along those lines).
Using a highly unscientific guess, I'll split the difference. Using a 2.5th power root, it works quite nicely - the 12th of a dTon missile is almost dead on a quarter of the 2.5 dTon heavy missile.
A missile providing 3 dice, by the same back-of-fag-packet model, weighs in (volumes in?) at 1.25 dTons, so half that of the torpedo, whilst a non-nuclear 2D6 missile requires 0.5 dTons of space. By comparison, some putative 5D6 super-conventional-torpedo would require 5dTons by itself.
I'm worried that that is, game-wise, a 3D6 weapon with half the space requirements of a heavy missile might be a bit too good, though.
New launchers
Obviously if there is a change of missile weight, then launchers need to be re-scaled. the current launchers seem to scale in proportion to the damage roll, which is as good a rule as any to work with. That would, for example, make a 3D6 missile fire at 1 per barbette, 4 per small bay, or 8 per large bay, which compares well with existing weapons.
The other possible things which have been mentioned are:
VLS systems/Box launchers
I'm not sure about them as previously mentioned, but a non-reloadable system must gain an advantage for a short-term engagement. I have an idea resembling fast reload racks - get barrage 1 & 2 in the air during turn 1, but you can't reload the racks to do it again without ceasing fire for a couple of turns.
Pod launch
A similar idea, pinched from Honor Harrington - essentially missiles clustered around a bunch of passive sensors, a comms relay and some manouvring thrusters. Provided the package is small enough to be jettisoned through a cargo hatch, then you have a way of providing a significant first strike launch, or else adding some standoff bombardment capability to a fleet's logistics ships akin to the cargo bomber concept. The size of the pod (and hence the missiles contained) and the number which can be rolled simultaneously would be dependent on the number of cargo hatches, which according to the design rules is sufficient to dump 10% of your cargo space in one go. Provided the pods are 1-2 dTon affairs I can't see this being a problem - unless you want to get really nasty and have 3dTon containerized heavy missile pods.
High velocity launch
The missile barbette has been mentioned, but as mentioned, unless a missile leaves a ship at a relative velocity on the same order of magnitude as the relative velocity of the target it's irrelevant if the launcher can traverse. However, there's no reason why it can't - essentially incorporating railgun-like mechanisms into a barbette launcher, the rate of fire won't improve much over (say) a triple turret, but the initial velocity will be quite scary, especially if said launcher is kicking out 15g LRMs to boot. The default missile would almost certainly require some internal reinforcement and redesign, so you'd have to use a specially designed round, but the reduction in time-to-target might well be worth it.
Any other suggestions for missile concepts welcome - be they attack missiles, counter-missiles, countermeasures missiles, or launcers.
Call me old-fashioned, but I'm a fan of ordnance. I like Honor Harrington, I like Andromeda, and I like Battlestar Galactica, and ultimately I like the idea of putting more bite and flexibility into Traveller's missile arsenal.
There have been a few ideas I've had floating around, and I thought I'd like a thread to (a) lay out the general concepts and (b) see if anyone else has any particular suggestions to throw in.
Current options (ignoring ortillery)
Missiles
Missile (10G, D6 damage)
Smart Missile (10G, D6 damage)
Nuclear Missile (10G, 2D6+Radiation damage)
Multi-Warhead Missile (8G, D6xD6 damage)
LRM (15G, D6-1 damage)
Shockwave Missile (10G, Sand clearance)
Heavy Missiles
Heavy Missile (10G, 4D6 damage)
Nuclear Heavy Missile (10G, 6D6+Radiation damage)
Bomb-Pumped Heavy Missile (10G, 6D6 damage)
In addition, higher TL systems allow for:
1) up to 40% reduction in size - I would argue that this is likely to apply to the missile instead of/as well as the launcher, which then gives a double advantage that TL9 missiles can be packed 20 per dTon of magazine space.
2) Accurate
3) High Yield or Very High Yield
And the following launchers
Missiles
Fixed (x1, x2, x3)
Turret (x1, x2, x3)
Bay (x12)
Large Bay (x24)
Heavy Missiles
Fixed (x1) - small craft only
Barbette (x1)
Bay (x3)
Large Bay (x6)
I can see a few obvious missing options straight off - there is no reason, for example, that a bomb-pumped variant of the standard nuclear missile is impossible, nor is a multi-warhead or high-G equivalent of the conventional heavy missile.
Equally, one would think that the relative size means it would be easier to fit quite a sophisticated computer package on a heavy missile, making a smart heavy missile either less technically challenging or significantly 'smarter'.
Other things that have been mentioned recently fall into the 'dirty tricks category':
Counter-missiles (kinetic kill)
Counter-missiles (nuclear flash)
Countermeasures missiles (decoy launchers)
Countermeasures missiles (IR laser strobe)
Low Signature missiles (low radar cross-section, directed IR radiation)
Other things I can think of in the missile types:
Volley Missiles
Analogous to using a multiple launcher for CR-70 or SNEB (in this case guided but not especially smart and with a short powered - i.e. effective - endurance) Small warhead means not great against armour but massive rate of fire means effective against weakly armoured targets and very good at overwhelming point defence. With relatively little design work you could probably throw them three-at-a-time through a conventional launcher.
Armour Piercing
Conventional warheads are supposedly fragmentation/kinetic kill. It should be possible to increase the ability of such a weapon to penetrate armour (e.g. including some crystaliron/bonded superdense penetrators in the fragment cloud), but doing so will reduce the total number of fragments and hence (potentially) the gross damage inflicted. What it will do, is increase the chance of those fragments punching through armour.
Alternatively, one can set off the fragmentation at closer proximity (think of it as a shotgun blast), but this will entail getting closer to the ship and hence potentially giving point defence an extra shot at it depending on recharge times (a PD laser would never not fire until it has an easier shot as you can't be certain that a proximity fuze is set for 'close' until too late).
Medium Missile
In addition, an intermediate weight weapon was mentioned - somewhere between a missile and heavy missile. The diminishing returns on power to mass/volume is going to be somewhere between square root and cube root (every blast/fragment velocity model is generally somewhere along those lines).
Using a highly unscientific guess, I'll split the difference. Using a 2.5th power root, it works quite nicely - the 12th of a dTon missile is almost dead on a quarter of the 2.5 dTon heavy missile.
A missile providing 3 dice, by the same back-of-fag-packet model, weighs in (volumes in?) at 1.25 dTons, so half that of the torpedo, whilst a non-nuclear 2D6 missile requires 0.5 dTons of space. By comparison, some putative 5D6 super-conventional-torpedo would require 5dTons by itself.
I'm worried that that is, game-wise, a 3D6 weapon with half the space requirements of a heavy missile might be a bit too good, though.
New launchers
Obviously if there is a change of missile weight, then launchers need to be re-scaled. the current launchers seem to scale in proportion to the damage roll, which is as good a rule as any to work with. That would, for example, make a 3D6 missile fire at 1 per barbette, 4 per small bay, or 8 per large bay, which compares well with existing weapons.
The other possible things which have been mentioned are:
VLS systems/Box launchers
I'm not sure about them as previously mentioned, but a non-reloadable system must gain an advantage for a short-term engagement. I have an idea resembling fast reload racks - get barrage 1 & 2 in the air during turn 1, but you can't reload the racks to do it again without ceasing fire for a couple of turns.
Pod launch
A similar idea, pinched from Honor Harrington - essentially missiles clustered around a bunch of passive sensors, a comms relay and some manouvring thrusters. Provided the package is small enough to be jettisoned through a cargo hatch, then you have a way of providing a significant first strike launch, or else adding some standoff bombardment capability to a fleet's logistics ships akin to the cargo bomber concept. The size of the pod (and hence the missiles contained) and the number which can be rolled simultaneously would be dependent on the number of cargo hatches, which according to the design rules is sufficient to dump 10% of your cargo space in one go. Provided the pods are 1-2 dTon affairs I can't see this being a problem - unless you want to get really nasty and have 3dTon containerized heavy missile pods.
High velocity launch
The missile barbette has been mentioned, but as mentioned, unless a missile leaves a ship at a relative velocity on the same order of magnitude as the relative velocity of the target it's irrelevant if the launcher can traverse. However, there's no reason why it can't - essentially incorporating railgun-like mechanisms into a barbette launcher, the rate of fire won't improve much over (say) a triple turret, but the initial velocity will be quite scary, especially if said launcher is kicking out 15g LRMs to boot. The default missile would almost certainly require some internal reinforcement and redesign, so you'd have to use a specially designed round, but the reduction in time-to-target might well be worth it.
Any other suggestions for missile concepts welcome - be they attack missiles, counter-missiles, countermeasures missiles, or launcers.
