AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
Yes, of course, for an airplane-style ship. A tail-sitter does not have that particular problem.
Return of the Fighter
- Thread starter AnotherDilbert
- Start date
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
Yes, the best we can hope for is to force the enemy to carry particle turrets, which are dead weight against capital ships and missiles.
If we don't allow quite so ridiculous augmentation of the gunners, fighters will go back to being hard to hit at range and somewhat more viable.
As far as I can see superficially, meson bays are better than meson spinals, so the spinal battleship may be an historical relic too.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
I wouldn't want to be bracketed by the Yamato.
Yes, they clearly separate them. And the entire discussion of grav compensation/inertial dampers is in the sidebar on how M-Drives function. So unless you take the fact that the boxed text references how much Thrust the ship has instead of explicitly its M-Drive rating as meaningful intent, it seems clear that M-Drives have compensation and R Drives don't.
I could be mis-remembering, but all initial examples that I recall of vessels with stacking M-Drive and R-Drive for high burst speed were fighters. That's what I meant. Purely R Drive vessels are not a problem.
wintertraveller
Banded Mongoose
Why would particle turrets be preferred to particle barbettes for anti-fighter defense? Is this just a tonnage efficiency issue? Thank you
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AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
Yes.
1 Dt for the turret, ~2 Dt for the gunner, and ~1 Dt for power is already 4% of the ship, 4% more for barbettes isn't all that much better.
A J-4, 9 G, Armour 30 ship only has about 13% free for weapons.
NOLATrav
Cosmic Mongoose
It's this that made me house-rule inertial compensators as bolt-on, separate components IMTU, similar to AnotherDilbert's reference to TNE. Like anything, it's a trade-off in terms of cost and tonnage - better G-comp, lesser armor and payload.
Alqualonde
Cosmic Mongoose
The carrier will need to be at least 250kT, probably more like 300kT minimum. And I'm probably overlooking a few things. The fighters will need at least a few full hangars for maintenance, plus recovery area (to quickly recover the surviving fighters) and launch tubes (to get your birds flying as fast as possible).
I guess you'll need something a bit more scary so that the fighters won't be too high on the flak priority list. But with the amount of turrets on a dreadnought (400 PA turrets on a 200k Dt Plankwell), we need a large number of targets so that they keep the flak occupied for a long time.
I haven't found rules for ramming, but a very small robotic fighters designed to ram its target, maybe with a torpedo grapple for extra punch.
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
Hang the fighters on the outside to get a much smaller and cheaper carrier, e.g.:
140 kDt, J-4, 9 G, GCr 110 + fighters.
Carries 600 fighters in grapples and 50 in Full Hangars for maintenance.
Carry a few fighter tugs to collect the damaged fighters.
Missiles?
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Sure, lots of the "issues" with Traveller ship construction come from simplifications for ease of use. If more than a small minority of players were willing to mess with FF&S style construction, that would resolve a lot of issues. But instead we have volume standing in for mass and useable surface area, we have hull components like inertial compensators factored into the M-Drives, and computers that are dispersed throughout the whole ship.
Trying to make fighters act like aircraft and ships act like wet navy ships when they are both spacecraft with the same constraints leads to some other problems.
AndrewW
Emperor Mongoose
Pack them with solonite and ram the battlestar.
It has the same problem. You still can't move around under even 2G loads. Getting beyond 2G means crew are restricted to their G-couch for the duration of the burn. Plus crew stations can easily be gimbaled to match directional thrust. Tail sitters in an antigravity universe don't make a lot of sense as they are unnecessary. Tail sitters are only needed if you intend on landing on a planetary surface, and that's where they get to be silly ideas for any sized vessel.
AHL was a tail-sitter type/style design with its deck layout though it had no need to be so.
Operating under high G even sitting down is hard on the body and makes some actions near impossible. Fighter pilots go in and out of high G and have special equipment to help with circulation. Astronauts take continuous G forces longer, but they aren't as much and they don't have to much other than get through the burn period.
You can actually combine them under the rules. The rules for high-burn thrusters were introduced in MGT v1.
It's easily sidestepped with even just a little bit of thought simply by calling out inertial compensators as a separate device rated for the max G rating the ship can do - though there should be some sort of cost to making it more capable for higher G ratings (especially energy).
This is the annoying thing many of the publishers of Traveller has continually created for theirselves. Nifty new gadgets or concepts are introduced without thinking through them through (gravity detectors that can pick up objects light years distant, or even rocks floating in the Oort cloud - but no thinking about how that breaks other parts of the game, or reaction drives that can accelerate you to 25G and can be equipped on million dton ships mounting collapsed matter armor (that's some pretty energetic rocket juice) or coming up with a new M drive interpretation that says it only works in heliosphere and no bonus to it operating closer to the object (a star) that makes it possible to function in the first place).
One would hope that the many decades of prior publishing would help to drive down these kinds of things rather than apparently increasing them. Clarity is a great thing when paying for a gaming system.
Yes, I am well aware that the rules say you can combine them for thrust purposes and that this causes more problems than it solves. Yes, you can easily houserule solutions that suit your interests to all these problems. My houserule is that you don't get to use M-Drives and R-Drives at the same time. But you can, instead, go with de-coupling the gravitic compensation from the grav drives and calculate them separately. They are probably only coupled for simplicity in the first place.
This is a game. Lots of compromises between "realism" and playability even before you get to the space magic. The best you can do is find a set of compromises that work for your play group. But there is no chance you'll get the wider community to agree on a single set of made up space magic interpretations.
This is a game. Lots of compromises between "realism" and playability even before you get to the space magic. The best you can do is find a set of compromises that work for your play group. But there is no chance you'll get the wider community to agree on a single set of made up space magic interpretations.
I believe the Scoundrel module first introduced them to act like afterburners and give a brief burst of speed. The new HG keeps that idea - that the speeds of the two systems are combined.
I do understand the what of they are trying to do, and I agree that simplification is helpful for ease of game play. The latest HG doesn't even cover the concept at all (bundling it with or without a M drive). Reading between the lines you'd have to expect some sort of compensator operating on a ship - especially since HG now allows reaction thrusters up to 16G (though the amount of space required for engines and fuel makes the vessel pretty much useless except as a manned engine).
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
Tail-sitters doesn't have the particular problem of the gravity field turning as we overpower the compensators. The grav field will still be straight down, just stronger.
Tail-sitters will even get a free 1 G "compensation" simply by turning artificial gravity off.
Yeah, I know what they are after also. But I'm not interested in replicating airplane activity with my spacecraft. Anything that works on my Viper or X-Wing in space also works on my Space Battleship Yamato and I don't feel like having afterburners on the Yamato. I accept the space magic drives because the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation makes reaction drives not great gameplay, as much as I love the idea of orbital operations being extra cool.
IMHO, the correct analogy for "space fighters" is the PT boat, not the airplane. Because the conditions of operation for space fighters and full ships are essentially the same. But I also know that's not the fantasy a lot of people want to play. So I'm cool with them being in the rules. I just don't feel obliged to use them
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
Why not just let space fighters be space fighters, without dragging WWII prejudice into the discussion?
If folks stopped trying to model space fighters on airplanes, as if they operated different from other spaceships, I would. That's actually my point.
They are all spaceships. Space fighters are small, lightly armored craft that fundamentally operate the same way as larger spacecraft, but with more constraints because of size limits.
"Dogfighting" at interplanetary speeds, special rules to allow little single man ships actually carry weapons without using up space and power they don't have or needing a gunner to use them, and all there rest.
They are all spaceships. Space fighters are small, lightly armored craft that fundamentally operate the same way as larger spacecraft, but with more constraints because of size limits.
"Dogfighting" at interplanetary speeds, special rules to allow little single man ships actually carry weapons without using up space and power they don't have or needing a gunner to use them, and all there rest.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
Aircraft have completely different maneuver capabilities to ships.
In Traveller smallcraft->battleships have the same maneuver capabilities, even introducing reaction engines and removing acceleration limit didn't really make all that difference because of the other reasons. The highest acceleration smallcraft fighter I recall is a TL12 17g fighter in T4.
In Traveller smallcraft->battleships have the same maneuver capabilities, even introducing reaction engines and removing acceleration limit didn't really make all that difference because of the other reasons. The highest acceleration smallcraft fighter I recall is a TL12 17g fighter in T4.
