External ordance

[phavoc]

No need to cover a ship in weapons at all. In-fact, too many people (especially those building 3D models of spaceships) put way too many weapons on a ship to the point that they are getting in each others way.

As calibres became standardized, accuracy improved, rate of fire increased and damage inflicted improved, less was better. You could have just a couple of guns with more ammo in ready storage but these weapons had a much better "to hit" capability and would do greater damage to an opponent.

There was less equipment that could go wrong and it was harder to actually hit them whereas if you had a ton of weapons on deck, you had a very good chance of losing a bunch every time you got hit and you would also lose the crews manning them.

Crew sizes could be reduced as well. Now you could have a short (guns), medium, (ship to ship/air missile), long (over the horizon missile) weapons mix and be a much more effective fighting force.

During WW2 warships sprouted AA machine guns and cannons wherever they could mount them - in some instances AA emplacements were placed atop gun turrets and forward/aft of them. Emplacement which would have been impossible to man if the main guns were to engage the enemy (even the smaller 8in turrets could suffer the same fate). Older sail ships also sometimes ended up with multiple decks of the main cannon while the upper deck and the forward/aft sections had smaller anti-personnel cannons mounted to them.

Players, of course, typically look to cram as much firepower onto their ships as is possible, and then look for a few more ways to squeeze in some more. Why? Because the evil GM, err, universe is trying so hard to kill them.

You are right in that most modern warships are pretty efficient designs these days. But that's not always for the best. As the US Navy has painfully learned, having weapon stations where you can mount LMG's, HMG's or auto-cannon is not a bad thing. A destroyer is a powerful warship, but most of it's main armament is useless against crazy bearded guys driving speed boats packed with explosives. It's a lesson the US Navy learned, and then promptly forgot.

Another lesson navies have forgotten is that centralizing your weapons stations may be more efficient, but it's also a single-point of failure as far as damage is concerned. An Aegis class cruiser and destroyer has two missile stations (fore and aft), but some smaller ships have a single VLS or missile launch station which if hit removes the majority of the threat of the ship. For smaller ships you sometimes can't avoid it because of size. Much depends on your weapon systems though. Separating out magazines and launch stations makes it harder to move ammo between launchers, but provides more survivability in both the ship and retaining offensive capabilities after you start taking damage.

 

[wbnc]

At a certain point strapping gun pods o a starship would become redundant. the boost in firepower would never be as effective as actually building a warship with more effective guns.

but for some applications being able to put a missile or torpedo pod on a smaller fighter/starship allows you to give a design a bit more bite..and a bit more flexibility.

and the scale can be increased, a 100 ton drone pod, with only one weapon...a 50 ton missile bay. and a boat load of ammo

 

[Condottiere]

You could cram onboard as much guns as you want, but you find that they tend to interfere with each other's operation and accuracy.

The biggest threat to warships during the later stages of the Great Patriotic War tended to be airplanes. And the middle stages. Possibly the early stages as well.

 

[Epicenter]

saving them is a bad idea as the first point of damage you get destroys any external ordnance you may be carrying.

While this was reasonable in Starfire as a rules-balance mechanism, from a "realism" point of view, it's always seemed a bit questionable to me.

Are there weapons that can really do that much damage to the surface fixtures of a starship to wreck everything on the outside?

A lot of the damage that external fixtures suffer today are from surface explosions (as well as things like being exposed to elements). Particularly damaging are the effects overpressure (concussive wave) from the blast ... except in space there's not enough atmosphere to get overpressure going.

Fragment damage from a surface explosion is a concern and while large fragments are going to be a concern, smaller fragments could be fairly easily stopped using something like an array of whipple shields which would volume intensive but not mass intensive.

Thermal damage from hot gas likewise could be deflected using lightweight reflective physical shields.

A lot of this makes me think that unless these external mounts take a direct hit, they'd be pretty resilient to damage simply because their chances of getting hit directly would be pretty low. Because aerodynamics isn't really a huge concern in space, provided the merchant vessel is willing to have a some guys spend some time mounting these things in stand-off mounts, your bolt-on surface amounts could be spaced from the main hull of the vessel by like 10m. Maybe even 20 or 30 meters (obviously such mounts would need to be sturdy if the ship decides to maneuver about at 3Gs or whatever) which would make them even harder to hit.

 

[Snoman314]

With all this talk of external pods I wonder about a simple VLS-style fixed array of launch tubes. I'm aware that there's nothing in the rules for it, but seeing as we're talking about it, what about the possibility of replacing a weapon turret for an array of, say, 12 launch tubes.

They wouldn't be reloadable during combat, and they'd carry fewer missiles than a triple turret carrying missiles, but the advantage is that they can launch from 1 to 12 missiles at once. Firing 12 missiles at once is more likely to overwhelm the point defences of a target.

There's never been anything like in Traveller before, so maybe this could be one for that book in the future that will have different options to change the game. High Tech or something? Can't remember what it's called.

 

[AndrewW]

There's never been anything like in Traveller before, so maybe this could be one for that book in the future that will have different options to change the game. High Tech or something? Can't remember what it's called.

Traveller Companion is the book. High Tech is a chapter of alternative technology in the High Guard book.

Note there was a thread awhile back discussion this type of system.

 

[Condottiere]

Vertical launch tubes are a better solution, both for the occasional military and civilian users.

Avoids handling, either by machines or humans, and any possible damage resulting from that.

In fact, an interstellar regulatory agency should insist on that for civilian operators, so that each cell is sealed, and can't be hacked so that some young punk doesn't decide he'd like an early Fourth of July, and has the entire parked merchant fleet fire off their oversized roman candles in concert.

 

[locarno24]

Small craft do have XO rules - torpedoes are bolted straight onto a hardpoint without needing a barbette.

I don't think it's so relevant for other larger ships because traveller rules doesn't include the kind of 'significant-percentage-of-the-tonnage-of-the-ship' missiles for which external racks are a sensible idea.

If you want a missile pod concept made within the current rules, have a look here

 

[Anonymous]

Small craft do have XO rules - torpedoes are bolted straight onto a hardpoint without needing a barbette.

If you want a missile pod concept made within the current rules, have a look here

Oh wow. That thread is "interesting" (but I do not blame you for the link). Some people actually believe armored ships are "immune" to missiles.

Missile airbursts will remove the fancy radars. Without the fancy radars, the ship is useless beyond a few miles and is going to be sunk by aircraft or submarine. World War 2 planes managed it, carrying less than 1/10th the bomb load that modern aircraft do, and with terrible accuracy, and a much worse sortie rate, so I have no idea why people think modern planes can't do the job. Plus, we know how to build armor penetrating bombs and missiles, and have some in storage. If someone did start building a large armored ship, you can bet they might just start producing more of those weapons just in case.

 

[Condottiere]

There's no real obstacle to external ordnance, except game mechanics and balance.

 

[phavoc]

No need to cover a ship in weapons at all. In-fact, too many people (especially those building 3D models of spaceships) put way too many weapons on a ship to the point that they are getting in each others way.

As calibres became standardized, accuracy improved, rate of fire increased and damage inflicted improved, less was better. You could have just a couple of guns with more ammo in ready storage but these weapons had a much better "to hit" capability and would do greater damage to an opponent.

There was less equipment that could go wrong and it was harder to actually hit them whereas if you had a ton of weapons on deck, you had a very good chance of losing a bunch every time you got hit and you would also lose the crews manning them.

Crew sizes could be reduced as well. Now you could have a short (guns), medium, (ship to ship/air missile), long (over the horizon missile) weapons mix and be a much more effective fighting force.

The intent behind external ordnance for spacecraft is to increase your initial salvo against the enemy. Then, once your external racks are cleared you slug it out normally. Western navies don't practice the idea, but Russia does. Their intent was to try and overwhelm a USN carrier task forces missile defenses with air, sea and sub-launched cruise missiles. Had this happened when the F-14/Phoenix missile system were still active it would have been an interesting theoretical fight. Now there is AEGIS and rapid-launch VLS Standard missiles.

Technologically there's no limitation to it. It's one more of philosophy (or in this instance game philosophy)

 

[Anonymous]

I would say that the current VLS ships are a pretty good example of using your available surface area, which was the idea for Starfire XO (eXternal Ordnance) racks.

The older ships had a launcher on the deck, and magazines below and this limited sustained fire capability because of the need to load and fire through the launcher. Now they essentially open the top of each missile pod to the sky, and it's really no different in concept from external pods: they can shoot off the whole load pretty quick if they want to. The reason they don't hang extra pods on the side is that things fall off ships all the time, and some ships are already top heavy.

I've seen people talking theoretically about launching missiles from shipping containers on the deck of a cargo ship but that's one of the things that's forbidden in games. It would come with some hefty limits on how often you could do it in a wargame, but that wouldn't be practical in an RPG as the players would always do it. Plus you'd probably need to make some kind of reliability die roll each time you tried to launch.

If you have XO racks, you can have a towed barge full of missiles too, and where does it end? You could even just leave the missiles floating in space around Homeworld and just have them ignite from their canisters when the aliens arrive. I guess that's a variant of a captor mine though (it's a mine that launches a torpedo). It's probably sensible to avoid this sort of stuff in an RPG.

 

[Condottiere]

There's a Russian company selling them, so I suppose the CIA is keeping track of their inventory and sales.

From the promotional material, it seems workable.

 

[wbnc]

I would say that the current VLS ships are a pretty good example of using your available surface area, which was the idea for Starfire XO (eXternal Ordnance) racks.

The older ships had a launcher on the deck, and magazines below and this limited sustained fire capability because of the need to load and fire through the launcher. Now they essentially open the top of each missile pod to the sky, and it's really no different in concept from external pods: they can shoot off the whole load pretty quick if they want to. The reason they don't hang extra pods on the side is that things fall off ships all the time, and some ships are already top heavy.

I've seen people talking theoretically about launching missiles from shipping containers on the deck of a cargo ship but that's one of the things that's forbidden in games. It would come with some hefty limits on how often you could do it in a wargame, but that wouldn't be practical in an RPG as the players would always do it. Plus you'd probably need to make some kind of reliability die roll each time you tried to launch.

If you have XO racks, you can have a towed barge full of missiles too, and where does it end? You could even just leave the missiles floating in space around Homeworld and just have them ignite from their canisters when the aliens arrive. I guess that's a variant of a captor mine though (it's a mine that launches a torpedo). It's probably sensible to avoid this sort of stuff in an RPG.

Actually nothing in the current rules bar weapon containers....and if you treat them as separate craft/drone the rules don't need to be altered.

you build each container as a separate smallcraft it's not outside the rules...you simply give it a drone control rig, power plant, and firecontrol unit... then you can fit a launcher, or barbette, on the pod and it will engage and launch as directed....if you build a 100 ton pod you could fit a 50 ton bay into it, with many tons of ammo carried internally. of course the carrier vessel is going to suffer the loss of jump range, and thrust due to the extra tonnage of the pod.

And under the rules can carry a small craft on an external cargo clamp, or on a docking clamp... the weapon containers/drones are completely doable, they are just a bit more pricey than a simple box full of missiles.

 

[Anonymous]

Actually nothing in the current rules bar weapon containers....and if you treat them as separate craft/drone the rules don't need to be altered.

And under the rules can carry a small craft on an external cargo clamp, or on a docking clamp... the weapon containers/drones are completely doable, they are just a bit more pricey than a simple box full of missiles.

This is why I said it always works in an RPG.

In Wargame - imagine a competitive space ship battle game - this would get "fixed".

Either it will be limited or there will be a dice roll to see if the system works.

For why, see below.

There's a Russian company selling them, so I suppose the CIA is keeping track of their inventory and sales.

From the promotional material, it seems workable.

I am sure it will launch when you push the launch button.

However, if you're comparing a merchant ship with a box on deck to a warship, it's going to look a lot worse in bad weather, or against electronic jamming, or if it has to hide from submarines, or move quickly to reach a launch position, or anything like that. Missile-armed patrol boats, which are warships that that are ridiculously over-armed for their size and are effectively mobile missile racks with engines, also suffer from a form of this problem: They only really work close to shore, when not jammed, and in calm sea, and they have zero self-defense if they don't get to shoot first.

That's the thing I was alluding to when I say "It works in certain situations that are not really reflected in a RPG". In an RPG you're always going to be in the appropriate position because it's not a wargame with an actual opponent. Unless your GM is running 2 groups of players against each other, instead of making up the story himself...

I suspect secretly moving missile launchers around on land via containers is a separate issue to that of XO racks on a ship.

 

[phavoc]

I would say that the current VLS ships are a pretty good example of using your available surface area, which was the idea for Starfire XO (eXternal Ordnance) racks.

The older ships had a launcher on the deck, and magazines below and this limited sustained fire capability because of the need to load and fire through the launcher. Now they essentially open the top of each missile pod to the sky, and it's really no different in concept from external pods: they can shoot off the whole load pretty quick if they want to. The reason they don't hang extra pods on the side is that things fall off ships all the time, and some ships are already top heavy.

I've seen people talking theoretically about launching missiles from shipping containers on the deck of a cargo ship but that's one of the things that's forbidden in games. It would come with some hefty limits on how often you could do it in a wargame, but that wouldn't be practical in an RPG as the players would always do it. Plus you'd probably need to make some kind of reliability die roll each time you tried to launch.

If you have XO racks, you can have a towed barge full of missiles too, and where does it end? You could even just leave the missiles floating in space around Homeworld and just have them ignite from their canisters when the aliens arrive. I guess that's a variant of a captor mine though (it's a mine that launches a torpedo). It's probably sensible to avoid this sort of stuff in an RPG.

VLS has the advantage of extremely high rates of fire. On the downside once you exhaust your missile supply you have no reloads. I'm not sure if the Navy has the ability to do underway resupply of missiles or if they would have to return to port. Using boxed missiles you could do that, but you would lose some space too to accommodate the box. If they navalized the MLRS concept (where all rockets, the standard 6 pack or the single TACCMS in a pod) they could do that. Magazines do have their advantages. But their primary when compared to the VLS is rate of fire.

Russia has the Club-K cruise missile launcher in a standard shipping container. There is a newer video out for the system on YouTube (more animations than the first one I saw - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbUU_9bOcnM). It's an interesting system. But, like many other weapon systems it's got it's pro's and con's. One thing a lot of people don't realize is that military equipment is built to different standards. Civilian gear / ships has cost as a deciding factor. As anyone who's seen a military budget you realize that costs don't always factor into things. Plus if you use the video as an example, the side with the missiles in containers has a strong first-strike capability, but if they invest all their funds in that, they cannot follow-on with planes/tanks/helicopters. So militarily it isn't a good option.

There are the missile satellites already in v1 of MGT (orbital bays...ugh). But they are quite vulnerable to enemy fighter, so really they would be better off in 10-12 packs that would be deployed in numbers when tensions where high. But you would not want to deploy them all the time as its' far easier and cheaper to maintain them in storage on the ground than in space.

I agree that in an RPG there's not much issue to discuss it. But High Guard isn't RPG, it's kind of a scaled-up Traveller wargame. I was going through my old Renegade Legion stuff and that system for fighters and capital ships is simple and still gives you the feel for building and fighting ships or fighter squadrons.

 

[Condottiere]

There are a lot of opportunity costs involved in military spending, that at best, half get wrong.

There's more to the missile system than just the launcher, there's also the sensors, which one theory goes, lack of access to and requiring the onboard much less capable one, was why the Russian backed insurgents shot down a passenger plane, rather than a Ukrainian military one.

 

[Anonymous]

There are a lot of opportunity costs involved in military spending, that at best, half get wrong.

There's more to the missile system than just the launcher, there's also the sensors, which one theory goes, lack of access to and requiring the onboard much less capable one, was why the Russian backed insurgents shot down a passenger plane, rather than a Ukrainian military one.

I agree fully with your statement about the weapons being only part of the full package.

As usual the Americans are the best at shooting down everything: they also got an airliner but they used an Aegis cruiser because they can. It will be a while before any insurgents obtain one of those ships, so the record is likely to stand for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

 

[phavoc]

There are a lot of opportunity costs involved in military spending, that at best, half get wrong.

There's more to the missile system than just the launcher, there's also the sensors, which one theory goes, lack of access to and requiring the onboard much less capable one, was why the Russian backed insurgents shot down a passenger plane, rather than a Ukrainian military one.

I agree fully with your statement about the weapons being only part of the full package.

As usual the Americans are the best at shooting down everything: they also got an airliner but they used an Aegis cruiser because they can. It will be a while before any insurgents obtain one of those ships, so the record is likely to stand for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

Yeah, that was a black eye for the USN. It was human error in judgement, the same kind that would be present in the 21st century, or the 52nd century.

 

[wbnc]

There are a lot of opportunity costs involved in military spending, that at best, half get wrong.

There's more to the missile system than just the launcher, there's also the sensors, which one theory goes, lack of access to and requiring the onboard much less capable one, was why the Russian backed insurgents shot down a passenger plane, rather than a Ukrainian military one.

I agree fully with your statement about the weapons being only part of the full package.

As usual the Americans are the best at shooting down everything: they also got an airliner but they used an Aegis cruiser because they can. It will be a while before any insurgents obtain one of those ships, so the record is likely to stand for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

Yeah, that was a black eye for the USN. It was human error in judgement, the same kind that would be present in the 21st century, or the 52nd century.

anyone flying through combat zone runs the risk of being hit by a missile aimed at them by mistake ..... When elephants fight the grass gets trampled...

I can see why military forces would want to keep a tight grip on bolt on weapons pods, at least under our current situation. But if they allow ships to carry multi-megawatt lasers and missiles in turrets the issue becomes one of having the right paperwork in hand. logically anyone who can get permission t buy a standard weapon for a ship could get the permits to buy a bolt on pod. The issue today is that commercial vessels and aircraft are not allowed to be armed since the governments don't like the idea of a cargo ship shooting back during an inspection/seizure.

when properly maintained the pods could set on the dock, or strapped to a ship as reliably as an turret weapon, someone just has to go out and make sure the systems are functioning, check for faults and occasionally replace faulty hardware. the great thing about a VLS type pod is that if one missile fails, the control system just selects another missile, and fires it instead...the only side effect is that you have a dud missile you have to deal with later.( my suggestion for that instance was a prompt return to the manufacturing agency..with a harshly worded letter of complaint..and an offer to deliver it directly to the office by airdrop if they wish to inspect it...)

now if were a rack/rail type launcher you now have a dud missile on the rails, and cant use that rail until you remove the dud, or eject it...but that would only take a few moments with an automated system..so unless he missile was both a dud, and was somehow jammed on the rail, you would just lose a minute or two while the missile was dumped and a fresh one loaded. sine Combat turns are long enough to allow for that all yo would loose was ammo, not an attack opportunity...and someone yelling at the manufacturers agent next time they are in port.