Fragmentation warheads as point defense???
- Thread starter wbnc
- Start date
It's a fair question, but two issues:
(1) Traveller materials are super-sciency! You can build a spacecraft that can accelerate continuously at mulitple G's for days, and not have to worry about any micro-meteor fragments. So if the materials are that strong, you'd be able to put a nose cone on your missile that could do the same (weight and mass aren't factored into the mechanics).
(2) No interceptor-style missile mechanics are present in the game system. You'd have to introduce anti-missile missiles to get your fragmentation warheads into the game. That's not a bad thing (And long overdue, IMO), but it currently doesn't exist.
Whether or not a fragmentation burst would work is quite problematic. It gets back to the idea of material strength and it's ability to ignore damage. Just a few hits with fragments may be insufficient to destroy a missile.
You might want to go with mini-nukes to destroy or at least punch holes in large missile salvo's. The offset, of course, to that would be to spread your missiles in a much wider pattern so that there is no single concentration to destroy. And the cost of defense in Credits might bankrupt a navy.
(1) Traveller materials are super-sciency! You can build a spacecraft that can accelerate continuously at mulitple G's for days, and not have to worry about any micro-meteor fragments. So if the materials are that strong, you'd be able to put a nose cone on your missile that could do the same (weight and mass aren't factored into the mechanics).
(2) No interceptor-style missile mechanics are present in the game system. You'd have to introduce anti-missile missiles to get your fragmentation warheads into the game. That's not a bad thing (And long overdue, IMO), but it currently doesn't exist.
Whether or not a fragmentation burst would work is quite problematic. It gets back to the idea of material strength and it's ability to ignore damage. Just a few hits with fragments may be insufficient to destroy a missile.
You might want to go with mini-nukes to destroy or at least punch holes in large missile salvo's. The offset, of course, to that would be to spread your missiles in a much wider pattern so that there is no single concentration to destroy. And the cost of defense in Credits might bankrupt a navy.
phavoc said:
Sounds like something that would fall under the ADVANCED COMBAT OPTIONS category.
as for the effectiveness of fragments against starship armor..maybe if the weapons were a cluster of something like depleted uranium/tungsten carbide/bonded superdense alloys formed into a nail/flechette. a small pieces of scrap metal is one thing..but if they were formed, hardened darts of those wicked superdense alloys your talking about turning something unlucky enough to fly into one into Swiss cheese...or at least causing one heck of a mess on the paint job,and exposed systems.
Note that Point Defence software allows you to protect other ships. It is only at short range, but given that space is, like, really big (!), I am not sure escorts should be far away and just 'happening' on salvoes...
