How would you describe a Starship Combat??

[dgmonteavaro]

My idea is that the Players get away from a Starport that it's being attacked, and they run into a huge Starships Combat, maybe fifty starships. So my question is:

How will they see the flashing lights of laser? How long does it take a beam laser? seconds, minutes?

How is the fire seen in space? I mean, I know that it´s not posible but there's Oxygen leaking from the ship....Bufff, i don't know, men, I need help...

I'm pretty sure that some of you has a great vision of all this.

Thanks guys, see you out there!!

 

[dayriff]

My idea is that the Players get away from a Starport that it's being attacked, and they run into a huge Starships Combat, maybe fifty starships. So my question is:

How will they see the flashing lights of laser? How long does it take a beam laser? seconds, minutes?

How is the fire seen in space? I mean, I know that it´s not posible but there's Oxygen leaking from the ship....Bufff, i don't know, men, I need help...

No, they wouldn't see the laser. There's nothing in the vacuum to disperse it. I would play the whole thing very cold. Instead trying to describe an awesome visual spectacle, describe it through the sound of ship radio transmissions. At first the channels are crowded with a lot of chapter back and forth. Then they start cutting off, one-by-one, sometimes with a whooshing booming or a scream in the last half-second.

Pinpoints of light wink brightly and then quickly fade as the ships die, but you have to be looking in the right direction to see them at all. Maybe there's the telltale radiation of a ship jumping out, but you're not sure who it was- and weren't they within the gravity radius limit?

 

[lastbesthope]

How will they see the flashing lights of laser? How long does it take a beam laser? seconds, minutes?

Depends how 'realistic' you want to be, it's really dependent on range. For instance, IIRC, from the Earth to the moon is about 1.25 seconds (rough sum) at the speed of light

LBH

 

[Jeff Hopper]

Ran across this YouTube video over the weekend, it is from the Anime Legend of the Galactic Heroes and does provide one possible view of a Traveller space combat.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upS-pi-sOAQ

 

[kristof65]

Unless they're running right through the combat, I'd say that most of what they see is via their long range sensors.

Lasers probably won't have a visible component to them, except possibly where they are actually hitting. Fusion/Plasma weapons likely give off a muzzle flash and/or streak of light. Missiles will be seen by their drive "flare."

At a safe distance from the combat, it will probably appear visually as no more than some twinkling lights. Closer up, there will be venting gases, debris spinning off, etc. Sensors will tell more of the story, with huge power and heat fluctuations, frequency interference, jamming, etc.

Something to consider - The motivations behind the space battle, and the attacking/defending fleets and what they are trying to accomplish. If the goal of one fleet is to interdict the planet, things could be very rough for the players.

If the players are running away from a starport that's on planet when the planet is attacked - attackers in orbit have a huge advantage over those still stuck in the gravity well. If this is the case, you'll need to have a reasonable idea (at least in your head) as to why the player's ship doesn't get knocked out of the sky when it attempts to flee.

 

[Beastttt]

I would say with realative speeds the battle would look something akin to a modern naval battle in 3D

IR off laser batteries will show shot being taken and of course reflections and damaged hull spalling off will show hits

missile by their speed can be seen plasma and fusion bolts should be seen as the radiation of particle weapons will also be seen

only meson decay explosions should be seen
small fast fighters cold be seen as missile till wither they fire or or show that they are manned as they do not home in on targets

 

[Alexander Cecil]

Interestingly, some of my players have brought up articles about what space combat might look like in comparison to popular movies. Specifically, it related to the sounds the TIE Fighters made in Star Wars and how computer generated sounds in 3D could help pilots and gunners make use of multiple senses and allow reaction based upon our innate reflexes.

Traveller space combat is about as far away from Star Wars as you get, but multisensory combat displays make for an interesting addition to any universe. Although you can't really see the laser beams shoot through the empty darkness of space with your eyes, your computer might illustrate them on your holographic display to help you understand what is going on. Your computer might use the bridge's speak system to provide a feeling how fast the different objects are moving around you.

It's not Star Wars, but it leads to really interesting descriptions of combat to give the players.

 

[alex_greene]

You have to take into account Newtonian physics in space battles.

Ships don't just sit there, drawn into battle lines, squaring off against one another like some 2D Naval battle with lasers and missiles flashing and flaring all around them. It's a hell of a lot more complicated than that.

Ships in motion have to accelerate to get to the required velocity. Once at their required velocity, if they cut their drives they will more or less continue along that line. Theoretically, they could continue along that line forever, wherever it leads them, unless something imparts a force upon it - either the drives coming on, or a gravity field such as that of a planet or a star.

To decelerate, the ship has to plot the vector of its new course, as well as its new speed, and engage the drives for a given period of time to effect the course change. It involves some pretty funky calculations and a lot of trigonometry. For that reason, kids who learn trig in school and show natural aptitude tend to get snatched up by the military for their Naval Astrogation courses, particularly those who can work out 3D trig in their heads.

Now knowing that a vessel is out there, and that it's hostile, the ship has two courses of action to take. Firstly, it must minimise its profile to the hostile vessel - which involves the attitude control thrusters. Just because a ship's heading along a vector doesn't mean that it needs to be actually facing that vector: if an enemy ship was spotted three light seconds away at an angle of -45 degrees (X axis) and +12 degrees (Y axis) from the course the vessel is taking, it won't change its own vector if ti just changes its orientation and rotates around its centre of gravity in order to present its smallest profile to the hostile ship.

Secondly, if the ship is firing upon the hostile, it must use predictive software. This is a combination of astrogation and trigonometry. Taking one's own vector into account, the ship takes multiple visual sightings of the distant enemy vessel. Based on observation of its movements over a given period of time (say, fifty observations in a second) the fire control program can work out the hostile's trajectory - and predict its likeliest future vectors. This is also used by the Evade program, incidentally - if it can predict the hostile's trajectory, it can plot the most efficient use of thrusters to maintain its orientation and best profile to the hostile.

The more detailed an observation of the hostile, the better - and that includes knowing what the hostile actually is. If the sensors detect that the hostile is an aggressive Type A Free Trader, it can work out, based on its maximum thrust capabilities, the maximum range it can attain in any given direction based on its present vector, assuming it will be running under maximum acceleration. If it makes a radical course alteration, a good fire control program can work out most likely where the ship is going to be, say, in one second's time - and aim and fire a spread of lasers or particle beams accordingly.

Now a vessel cannot accelerate more quickly than its maximum thrust allows. However, it can accelerate in an unpredictable vector, and at an acceleration lower than its maximum. If a predictive model showed a vessel accelerating at 4 thrust over the course of ten minutes, anything it threw at the ship would miss if the ship cut its acceleration suddenly to 2 thrust - then 3.5 thrust the next round, -2.04 thrust the following round and so on.

I'm not even getting into the calculus here. It is horrendous. But the point is, ships in battle will quickly find themselves flying all over the sky, regardless of how well organised the Navy behind it. All they can do is to try, as best they can, to work out what the other force is thinking and attempt to direct their own forces accordingly.

But if a vessel enters a battlefield between two or more Naval fleets, expect a couple of things to happen.

Firstly, there'll be a lot of chatter over all channels, followed by a barrage of warnings from various ships that they are entering a hot zone. A lot of people will be very concerned about the dog that just wandered onto the football pitch, as it were.

Second, assume a few very close encounters. A fighter speeds past at an unbelievable speed; a missile scans the vessel, determines its neutral status and diverts course accordingly; perhaps a light peppering of debris from an exploded ship brings about a Collision encounter.

Generally hair raising stuff; but that, I'm afraid, could be all the characters see. Unless they accidentally stray across some Capital ship's spinal mount meson beam and get turned into a cloud of vapour before they can so much as squeak in protest ... but, dear Referee, be prepared to be mugged (at least) if you do that to your players.

 

[GJD]

High energy lasers, whilst they won't emit a Star Wars style "bolt" will be visible as they ionize any stray gasses in their path. In an atmosphere, or the upper reaches of an atmosphere, this would be seen as a faint trail of sparks and sparkles, followed by a puff of smoke along the length of the beam in denser atmospheres. In a pitched battle there may well be plenty of stray gasses to ionise, from missile drive exhausts to venting atmospheres and stray sandcaster grains. Even a space isn't a perfect vacuum, there are still particles of dust, hydrogen atoms, plasma from the solar wind and so on, the density depending on where the battle takes place. Low Earth orbit, for instance, still has enough atmospheric density to produce a slow amount of atmospheric drag on satellites.

G.

 

[alex_greene]

Mostly, though, characters caught in the middle of a pitched ship battle would just seek to hold a steady course, with one hand on the tiller, hunched over every sensor screen they've got, dreading the moment the radar screen picks up a blip and a PING indicating at least one high - velocity metallic object heading their way ...

 

[Paladin]

Would tech exist to provide "tracer" shots for laser/beam weapons to give gunners visual confirmation of fire or would the vacuum still be the issue?

I can definitely see the need for computer enhanced feedback as mentioned by Alexander Cecil to maximize effectiveness of close combat and accuracy for targetting specific systems on an enemy vessel.

 

[alex_greene]

Vacuum would still be the issue. A light beam is only visible in the atmosphere because stray dust motes reflect and scatter photons along the path of the beam.

A beam laser can more easily be traced back to its source once it has impinged upon a target surface for any length of time, because ionisation and vapourising metal ions from the hull will illuminate the laser's track. Same goes for a beam laser that intersects a cloud of sand. Pulse alsers, on the other hand, don't last long enough to be traceable.

Similarly particle beams and meson beams become visible by their effects on the particles of sand, or clouds of ionised hull material, they intercept. This only gives one a lock for a very short period of time. But if the computer is sufficiently powerful and fast, it's sometimes more than enough time to provide an effective response.

Assuming the ship being struck hasn't just been blown out of the sky, that is.

 

[GypsyComet]

Lethal-power lasers actually ionize atmosphere quite visibly, and I'm not sure if tuning for the right wavelengths will change that until (maybe) the switch to X-ray wavelengths at TL12. In space lasers will be much harder to see.

PA beams will be invisible unless the accelerator imparts enough waste heat to cause the particles, and thus the beam, to glow. Same with Meson weapons.

Plasma and Fusion weapons will be VERY visible in space combat, though very short-ranged by comparison.

 

[GJD]

Vacuum would still be the issue. A light beam is only visible in the atmosphere because stray dust motes reflect and scatter photons along the path of the beam.

A beam laser can more easily be traced back to its source once it has impinged upon a target surface for any length of time, because ionisation and vapourising metal ions from the hull will illuminate the laser's track. Same goes for a beam laser that intersects a cloud of sand. Pulse alsers, on the other hand, don't last long enough to be traceable.

Similarly particle beams and meson beams become visible by their effects on the particles of sand, or clouds of ionised hull material, they intercept. This only gives one a lock for a very short period of time. But if the computer is sufficiently powerful and fast, it's sometimes more than enough time to provide an effective response.

Assuming the ship being struck hasn't just been blown out of the sky, that is.

High energy lasers won't be in the visible range anyway, X or Gamma ray lasers offer far better energy delivery, so whilst interacting with dust motes will scatter the photons, you wouldn't see them anyway. A laser with high enough energy to punch holes on a ship will, however, create a trail of ionised gas plasma along it's length, briefly. This is part of the problem with high energy lasers "blooming" in an atmosphere, they ionise the air, and the plasma quickly becomes opaque to the laser wavelengths and so absorbs more energy, blooming into a "splat" of plasma near to the emitter.

Particle accelerators work by using the kinetic energy of the accelerated particles to smash into the target and convert the relativistic speeds of the particles into heat and radiation as they smack into your ship. They won't create any plasma en route since the energy is bound up in the particles rather than a stream of photons. What you will see is that in an atmosphere a space "tuned" accelerator will be useless, since the subatomic particles keep smacking into the atmospheric atoms instead.

Meson guns are somewhat of an enigma, since they seem to be a kind of relativistic super-particle accelerator for launching a physics defying decaying quantum particle. My understanding of subatomic and quantum physics isn't comprehensive, but my understanding is that a meson won't actually do what the Meson gun is supposed to do, (and the cannon description would actually make it a Lepton accelerator anyway). I've always described them as having a brief lightning-like electrical discharge from the emitter plate with a simultaneous explosion at the target, just for yuks

G.

 

[StephenT]

a meson won't actually do what the Meson gun is supposed to do, (and the cannon description would actually make it a Lepton accelerator anyway).

The general consensus on the TML was that Meson guns are called that because they were invented by a man called Bob Meson.

I think that 'realistic' deep-space combat in Traveller will be a matter of watching faint moving specks of light 20,000 kilometres apart. Occasionally one will flare up as bright as a star for a brief instant and then disappear. On the radar screen, things will be a little clearer. You'll see icons, perhaps with labels saying the name and type of the ship, or just "unknown contact". There may be holographic lines showing the ship's past course, and a cone showing the range of positions it could move into next. Missile launches would be tracked as a forest of tiny moving dots. Communication chatter will be going out, but it'll be on tight-beam maser communicators between ships, not broadcast for all to hear.

A civilian ship blundering into the battle will probably get ignored, unless its IFF transponder isn't working or one side thinks it's an enemy ship trying to disguise itself, in which case its lifespan will be short. Also, best not to get directly between two opposing ships... :?

 

[GJD]

a meson won't actually do what the Meson gun is supposed to do, (and the cannon description would actually make it a Lepton accelerator anyway).

The general consensus on the TML was that Meson guns are called that because they were invented by a man called Bob Meson.

Really? Lol! That's a nice retcon in action.

Fire up the Bob Cannon!

G.

 

[alex_greene]

a meson won't actually do what the Meson gun is supposed to do, (and the cannon description would actually make it a Lepton accelerator anyway).

The general consensus on the TML was that Meson guns are called that because they were invented by a man called Bob Meson.

Really? Lol! That's a nice retcon in action.

Fire up the Bob Cannon!

G.

Is his cousin called Higgs Boson, by any chance?

 

[Ishmael]

maybe Bob Meson is Boson's mate?

 

[phild]

How would you describe a starship combat?

Am I allowed to jump in late and say "unlikely"?

I was thinking about real world physics the other day, and surely the reality is that speeds travelling a significant fraction of lightspeed across the vast trillions of miles of fully 3-dimensional space with sensors that can respond at no faster than 50% of light speed (there and back again) are extremely unlikely to encounter any other vessels, let alone shoot them. Put it this way - if a ship is just 300,000 km away (not that far) it takes 2 seconds for you to know that... by which time it will have moved at least another kilometre or two. Unless you're firing a laser array that is a kilometre or two in diameter, or it's flying dead towards you, you can forget it! (On second thoughts, you might detect it in just 1 second, as it could have active sensors itself which you would detect the presence, allowing you to also deduce the direction although not speed of the incoming vessel).

With planets orbiting stars, stars twirling around galactic arms and galaxies themselves rotating and hurtling across the universe, it will be impossible to predict jump entry points unless you know the precise minute that Ship X will be departing from Port Y... even a slight variation in timing will lead to a million mile discrepancy. Therefore the only place you'll ever fight is just outside planets, when everyone has slowed down to far more reasonable speeds.... but leaving aggressors easy pray for a matrix of orbital defence platforms.

I may be wrong, and I'm no astrophysicist, but it seems to me:
1. you'll never encounter another vessel
2. even if you do, by the time you detect it, it's gone
3. even if you do detect it, by the time you've locked on your laser, it's gone
4. even if you do lock on your laser, no human skill will ever be able to track its vector unless you meet the almost infinetesimally unlikely scenario of running on an exactly parallel vector.

As such, the only realistic weapon will be a missile that can fly very VERY fast to make up for the delay between target manoeuvring and receiving sensor information on that manoeuvre - or a remote gun drone that is programmed to seek out the enemy as per a missile and then lock a parallel course (or better yet, just sit behind it). But that's easy to defend against, unless you release a whole bunch of them.

God, real science would make sci-fi very boring indeed, wouldn't it?!

 

[zanwot]

@Phild:
Actually, space battles are more likely than you think. The reason is simple: In space, (relative) speed is just another parameter like (relative) position, no biggy. In practice, say an enemy ship is one light second away. Your laser beam will reach it with a two seconds delay from a known position. Ok.
But if you know it's position in the last couple of seconds, you also know it's last speed, so you can easily compensate and shoot where it should be given it's speed. Or a computer can easily compensate at least.
There is still an uncertainty though: thrust. Suppose the ennemy ship has a 1 g thrust, in two seconds of continuous thrust it could have changed it's position relative to the predicted position of maximum 20 meters, in any direction. If the ship is at least a hundred tons, basically you still hit it even without guessing it's thrust.
Now ships can have higher thrust than 1 G, but if you suppose that the main thrust is built to only go in one direction (this is debatable with gravitics, but then the exhaust of types S in every illustration would be pointless) that means the target can only reorientate so much in a second, therefor you can guess to a certain degree where this extra 2 seconds worth of thrust could take it if you are monitoring it.

All in all, space battles with laser beams can happen at distances of several light seconds, so long as thurst are not too high. Even if the directions of travel are very different space battle is possible (even though in that case the ships will only get a couple of seconds of combat and then end of the laser fight as distances reach tens of light seconds). But yes, most often space battles should happen in orbit, as that is where ships are the most likeley to be close in the [distance,speed] space, but the same rules apply there actually relative to thrust etc.