How would you describe a Starship Combat??

[zanwot]

And it's mathematically wrong. You simply need L/9.8 G's at 0.5LS to defeat laser aiming. (This assumes a non-predictable path.)

Well I believe we are essentially saying the same thing, minus 2 details:
* a factor 2 difference between my calculation (earlyer post: 20 meters 1 l.s. & 1G) and yours (works out to to 40 meters for you). I get it from the integration, but you could maybe expolain it by geometrical considerations.
* I have a slightly different optic: If you do not get that requirement in Gs, then I consider the situation to be an automatic hit. If you do get the required Gs, then the partial predictiability of the thrust directiobn means a more uncertain outcome than your definitive sounding "defeat laser aiming".

 

[AKAramis]

There are essentially four kinds of fire:

Direct-Aimed
direct-Sheaf
indirect-Aimed
indirect-sheaf

Once you get sufficient motion to be more than half your length from your original position, the shot can no longer be aimed at the center of the ship's predicted position. At that point, you have to saturate the area with a sheaf of fire; multiple shots spread out to maximize the chances of hit. Shots=((9.8*G*T)^2)/(L*S) where T is one leg time, L is longest axis, S is shortest axis, and Shots is minimum simultaneous shots to assure one hit.

Past 1 LS, most small ships requires at least 2 shots.

But that also discounts realistic beam diffraction in the lasing system, which, even with the gravitic focusing handwave, is pretty much useless for anything smaller than a 100Td bay past 1LS, even if one does hit. At 10 LS, even the strongest beams darned near spotlights, not weapons.

 

[barasawa]

As many people have pointed out, most weapons just won't be visible to the human eye except where they hit.

Some obvious exceptions are the fusion/plasma weapons and when an energy weapon is intercepted by a sandcaster.

The only sounds you'll hear is what comes over the radio, what hit's your ship, and maybe some pops or static when high energy weapons fire or nukes detonate.

That's reality in a vacuum. Not so exciting.

If you want it more exciting, and more useful for combatants and observers, use a Reality Plus system. You've got a computer and all those nice sensors. Have a piece of software that generates and overlays in real time (as far as humans are concerned) visual images of that stuff. It'll look like a star-wars movie. Take it a step further if you want, the data is also being fed into an audio processor to generate sounds. Hey, it's the full THX experience!
Now why would anyone in their right mind do something like that? (Other than entertainment value.) Very simple, to help the humans process the spacial environment into something they can quickly and instinctively understand. This simple act will increase the reactive and tactical capabilities of it's users. Even the real world military has experimented with it. (Our tech is too primitive to do it worth a snot yet. I'd say available at tech 9 and gets better with more sensors feeding it.)

So if you want to do a realistic 'silent battle', you can. On the other hand, if you want to do a flashy visual/aural experience, you can do that too, and not even sacrifice realism. Just remember, it's being done by a piece of software, so the guys in the ship have it, but the idiot in the spacesuit floating around outside probably doesn't.

 

[FallingPhoenix]

I know there's a fair probability my trigonometry is dodgy here, but can you explain what you mean? All I meant was if you're flying a straight course and apply some thrust other than forward/back such that it causes a 1 degree variation in your trajectory, that will result in a 280m difference in your final position.quote]

What do you mean by final position? Is that after 6 minutes? 10 seconds? I think I missed a crucial bit of time somewhere along the way.

Second, wouldn't speed make a significant difference in the calculations? How fast are we talking about here?

Third, the Traveller book does specifically mention that combat will only likely happen near points of interest like gas giants, main worlds, and such. For what it's worth.

Fourth, it does seem that probably vector differences would make piracy extremely difficult. Unless the pirates hid out near a gas giant or a world without some kind of population to warn incoming ships. It seems to me you'd have to be travelling pretty slowly to refuel at a gas giant or similar, and if the pirates hid themselves (landing on a moon, hanging in the upper atmosphere, or some such) with some kind of passive sensor system in place to watch for approaching ships, piracy should still be quite possible.

FP, who just got his mind going again.

 

[kristof65]

Been thinking - maybe the best way to answer this question is to say what I would say as a GM:

GM - "As you prepare to break orbit, your sensors and comm systems suddenly go wild - energy readings, communications traffic, IFF transponders, etc. Make me a sensor check"
Player A - "I got a 12"
GM - "Good. Ok, as you hunker down over the sensors and try and make sense of the mess, a picture begins to emerge. As you came over the horizon of the world, a large group of ships came into view. Your visual sensors show them as little more than specks of light right now - you'll need to fiddle with the tracking and magnification, but your comm sensors are somewhat telling. There is a ton of encrypted and scrambled communications traffic on a lot of bands, as well as some broadband jamming signals being broadcast. As an ex-Imperial Navy guy, you're thinking the chaos of that traffic indicates some sort of combat."
Player A - "Ok, I'll tell the captain what I'm seeing as try and get my visual sensors calibrated and tracking."
Player B (captain) - "Oh really? How close is our outbound trajectory going to take us to this clusterfudge? Put it on the main screen"
Player C - "I'll make a navigation check to see how close our current course is to them - I got a 10."
GM - "Your navigator informs you that you're apparently headed right into the chaos, captain. Back at the sensors, you've managed to get the optics to begin tacking and magnifiying some of the ships. Still too far away to get clear visuals on everything, you've identified a couple of Sword World's ships, and a couple of Imperial's. Overall, there appears to be a couple dozen ships involved, spread over a pretty big volume of space near the 100d limit. At least one of the Imps is an AZH class cruiser. You've also spotted a lot of fast moving objects too small and quick to positively identify - which really only means one thing - missiles. As you put the visuals up on screen, the computer begins interpreting some other data, and it begins to give you a better idea of what's going on out there. As the computer starts resolving the image of a Sloan class escort on screen, a bright spot appears amidship of it, and suddenly gas begins to vent from there. The pressure of the gas, and angle it's venting at looks like it's going to induce some roll on the ship."
Player B - "Oh crap, we're flying straight into a conflict between the Sword worlder's and the Imperials? Navigator, change our trajectory as best you can to take us to a jump point as far away from that mess as possible. "
Player C - "Aye Aye Captain."
GM - "Well, chances are good that the entire combat would be over, and or have moved well away from your original jump point before you got there, but caution being the better part of valor, your navigator replots your course to include another half orbit of the planet below to head off in the opposite direction. Fortunately, you didn't have too much speed to let the planet do some of the work for you.

As you flee the system, your sensors watch the conflict with interest. Like most space combats, it's pretty long, drawn out, boring and difficult to tell exactly what's going on, but from the sensor data you've picked up, the Sword Worlder's aren't fairing well. At least two of their ships have stopped transmitting and manuevering entirely, and are headed off on fixed trajetories into the outer system. Whether they are dead, dying , or just trying to use stealth to get away you can't tell, but given the fact that you've identified them with your civilian sensors means it's likely the Imperial's have tracked them too. And since they're leaving them alone, you'll guess dead or dying.

One of the other Sword World ships is broke in half and venting gas from the remaining two sections - from the way it split and the power spike on the sensors at the time, you'd guess it was an internal meson hit on the power plant from the spinal mount on the AZH. You've witnessed several missile and laser hits on the other Sword World ships as well.

But the Imperial's haven't gotten off all that easy, either. At one point you witnessed a barrage of fusion or plasma bolts from several of the Sword World ships batter the port side of the AZH - the surface isn't reflecting as much sunlight as it was before, and there is a haze of venting gas along it. Other Imperial ships are similarly damaged."


That's just kind of a basic idea, off the top of my head. If this was something I knew was coming down the pipeline for the players, I'd actually sit down before hand and "play" out the conflict, writing down the sequence of events and everything of interest so that I had a more dramatic script to work from.

In most cases, the players are probably going to be far enough away to simply be witnesses to the events, rather than participants. Even if they happen to run close enough to the combat to have an effect on it, in most cases I'd still keep to the script, and vary only where it affects the players or they affect the combat.