Close Air Support, Airstrikes, & Orbital Bombardment

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

I want to see some rules for:

Close Air Support:
A craft flying over the combat zone, firing vehicle or ship weapons at the hostile forces

Airstrikes:
A craft flying over the combat zone, firing vehicle or ship weapons at stationary targets, possibly targeted by a target designation laser from an allied ground unit

Orbital Bombardment:
A craft in or near orbit, firing ortillery weapons at stationary targets, possibly targeted by a target designation laser from an allied ground unit

 

[allanimal]

I want to see some rules for:

Close Air Support:
A craft flying over the combat zone, firing vehicle or ship weapons at the hostile forces

Airstrikes:
A craft flying over the combat zone, firing vehicle or ship weapons at stationary targets, possibly targeted by a target designation laser from an allied ground unit

Orbital Bombardment:
A craft in or near orbit, firing ortillery weapons at stationary targets, possibly targeted by a target designation laser from an allied ground unit

I don't see how the current rules don't allow for this.
There may be some equipment to add (target designation laser, the weapon or ammo mod to lock on to the laser), but it all basically comes down to DMs on the to hit roll for each attack.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Certain required details are missing or wrong, and some abstractions are missing.

The time it takes an ortillery round to hit the ground from launch is missing.

Damage between starship rates of damage and ground combat rates of damage do not scale correctly.

An abstraction for specifying a target zone, and correctly identifying the specified target zone is missing.

 

[MongooseMatt]

I have been pondering this - I think this would be something for a new Mercenary book.

 

[Annatar Giftbringer]

Using ground-based target designators could be done with the rules for task chains, I'd guess. Perhaps even more detailed rules in mercenary III.

Somewhat kinda related to the above, and a question I'm sure I saw somewhere within the forums but I can't quite remember where: burst radius when using space weapons for ground combat. A suggestion: would it work to simply assume a blast value of, say, 10 m per damage die? Or is 10 insanely much? 1 m/D? 5? Dunno, just thought I'd mention it and see what people say.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Somewhat kinda related to the above, and a question I'm sure I saw somewhere within the forums but I can't quite remember where: burst radius when using space weapons for ground combat. A suggestion: would it work to simply assume a blast value of, say, 10 m per damage die? Or is 10 insanely much? 1 m/D? 5? Dunno, just thought I'd mention it and see what people say.

Beam weapons, both laser and particle, have no significant area of effect. Here's a worst-case analysis:

A turret is 1 dton; this means it has a cross-sectional area of 2*(1.5m)^2=4.5m^2.
Divide this by 3 "barrels" (realistically, the total of the cross-sections of the "barrels" would be smaller than the entire turret's area): (4.5m^2)/3=1.5m^2
Square root to get the edge of the square: Barely bigger than 1.2m on a side; smaller than a whole grid square space!

If you were thinking, "Wouldn't the beam get wider as it goes away from the ship?", you're forgetting that to retain power, a beam has to retain its energy density over its range of fire; which is crazy-long space distances. So the beam has to stay in that square over its entire range. Whether the power loss over distance of energy beams in space is due to divergence (widening) of the beam over that distance, and whether the starship's damage-scale of those weapons would still produce damage meaningful to ground-combat on the outer edge of the beam is an open question; but you would still have to be firing at ground combat from the crazy starship range at which the damage starts to decrease.

The ground exploding due to the starship weapon's sheer power is a separate unexplored issue.

 

[Annatar Giftbringer]

Sorry, should have been clearer. I did not mean that the beam should be wide enough to warrant a blast value, I meant explosions and secondary effects from the high-powered ship weapons.