Rules check please - Starship combat damage

[rust]

Next, is there any rules or real (perhaps only real based on current TL. Future, currently unimagined, technology can do it by 'magic'.) reason that an energy weapon has to be tiny little narrow ray which is hard to hit a moving target and not a huge 'ball' of energy?

As for laser weapons, if one wants to get more than a nice searchlight,
one has to focus the laser's power into as small a ray diameter as pos-
sible. Traveller New Era has invented "gravitic focussing" to make long
range laser weapons possible at all, with real world physics and techno-
logy all you really could get over any space combat distance would be
the nice big searchlight mentioned.

Plasma and fusion weapons could probably fire "bolts" or "balls" of ener-
gy, their problem would be that these would move slower than the speed
of light, which would make it even more difficult to hit a small moving tar-
get at a space combat distance - it is slightly unimpressive if your plasma
bolt takes an hour or two to arrive where the target ship once has been.

 

[DFW]

it is slightly unimpressive if your plasma
bolt takes an hour or two to arrive where the target ship once has been.

Thanks a lot rust. Coffee, laptop keyboard. Not good. :lol:

 

[Captain Jonah]

it is slightly unimpressive if your plasma
bolt takes an hour or two to arrive where the target ship once has been.

Thanks a lot rust. Coffee, laptop keyboard. Not good. :lol:

Serves you right for using a laptop, get a decent keyboard which you can then clean up about once a week

Plasma and Fusion weapons fire a short stream of hi energy packets into the target area trying to bracket the enemy ship. I did add the double range and evade penalty I though because hitting a target at any kind of range with a slowish packet of plasma is going to be very hard.

Long range weapons involve both focused energy and/or sustained contact. A beam laser has the same overall power demand as a pulse laser. With the beam the power is constant and the beam is played across an area to cross the target at some point in its pattern of fire. A pulse laser fires a series of more powerfull pulses, it is less accurate because the pulses hit less of the possible target area than a continuous beam does but when they do hit each pulse delivers more energy to the target.

Of course if you just want to annoy the target you could use your beam laser as a very hot spotlight and mess up his paintjob

 

[locarno24]

First, where is this information coming from about sensors and the delays? Which mongoose book? High Guard? I've only briefly looked at a friends

Speed of light. 30,000 km is 1/10th of a light second.

Hence if I am looking at a passive sensor picture, the light/radar pulse/IR/whatever has to take 0.1s to reach me from you.

Assuming I then fire at where I think you are, a shot which is light speed or close enough to make no difference (lasers for the former and possibly the particle beam for the latter) will take 0.1s to reach you from me.

As a result, 0.2s have passed between where you were according to my screen when I fired, and where you are when my shots reach wherever I aimed them.

 

[DFW]

Assuming I then fire at where I think you are, a shot which is light speed or close enough to make no difference (lasers for the former and possibly the particle beam for the latter) will take 0.1s to reach you from me.

As a result, 0.2s have passed between where you were according to my screen when I fired, and where you are when my shots reach wherever I aimed them.

And, that's assuming ZERO lag between sensors receiving the data, a person deciding to fire, and actually firing. Add at LEAST a couple of seconds there.

 

[phavoc]

First, where is this information coming from about sensors and the delays? Which mongoose book? High Guard? I've only briefly looked at a friends

Speed of light. 30,000 km is 1/10th of a light second.

Hence if I am looking at a passive sensor picture, the light/radar pulse/IR/whatever has to take 0.1s to reach me from you.

Assuming I then fire at where I think you are, a shot which is light speed or close enough to make no difference (lasers for the former and possibly the particle beam for the latter) will take 0.1s to reach you from me.

As a result, 0.2s have passed between where you were according to my screen when I fired, and where you are when my shots reach wherever I aimed them.

Except where the range is short and travel time of the beam is virtually nil, you are always going to be firing at a starships expected location. So when you are looking at your sensors, your targeting computer is going to give you an "expected" location along with a cone of where you "could be" in the time frame that it last received sensor update. A ship under power is constantly going to be moving, so the reading you get is also constantly in flux.

The size of the predicted cone is going to be based on 1) existing speed, 2) expected agility of the ship and 3) size of the ship. The bigger it is, the more likely you are going to be able to hit it. Smaller ships with higher agility are going to be harder targets at long range. Some might say almost impossible to hit unless you get lucky or hit them with a barrage.

 

[rinku]

Conversely, if a ship is NOT maneuvering, any system that has any chance of hitting and damaging a target at these ranges should be able to guarantee a hit. Of course, you have to *know* or guess that the target isn't going to maneuver...

Properly speaking, there should be range based reduction in damage for everything except railguns and missiles, too, as the beam diffuses. Even a perfectly targetted laser beyond its maximum focal point is going to "flashlight" and can't help delivering less joules per square cm. Likewise, a plasma or fusion bolt (which may be travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light) is going to diffuse, and fairly rapidly I'd have thought.

Ironically, this diffusion might actually help increase the net chance of a hit, though probably not enough to overcome the range related difficulty.