Ship Hulls For Tanks - Pocket Empire - Arguing W/The Foolish

[Solomani666]

If one wanted to create the ultimate grav tank, then why not start with a 10t starship hull, give it 12+ points of starship armour, then apply the rules from Supplement 6 to finish it?

It would be a big tank and would not even require a ships maneuver drive.

Any attacks by ground weapons would be [(#d6 / 50) - armor] making it nearly impregnable on the battlefield, except to meson weapons.

Assuming that cost is not a factor, any reason this would not be viable?


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[simonh]

The subject of grav tanks in Traveller, as against similarly armed and armoured gunships, is a long running issue.

Some people just really like tanks.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Beastttt]

your going to need a maneuver drive
otherwise your tank is not going anywhere(I suspect you meant it needed no jump drive)

what is the difference between your tank and a fighter
or to just have a regular tank that has ship borne weapons

If one wanted to create the ultimate grav tank, then why not start with a 10t starship hull, give it 12+ points of starship armour, then apply the rules from Supplement 6 to finish it?

It would be a big tank and would not even require a ships maneuver drive.

Any attacks by ground weapons would be [(#d6 / 50) - armor] making it nearly impregnable on the battlefield, except to meson weapons.

Assuming that cost is not a factor, any reason this would not be viable?


.

 

[AndrewW]

your going to need a maneuver drive
otherwise your tank is not going anywhere(I suspect you meant it needed no jump drive)

Probably meant using vehicle drives, can't have jump drives on small craft anyways.

 

[Beastttt]

thought I said that

your going to need a maneuver drive
otherwise your tank is not going anywhere(I suspect you meant it needed no jump drive)

Probably meant using vehicle drives, can't have jump drives on small craft anyways.

 

[Solomani666]

thought I said that

your going to need a maneuver drive
otherwise your tank is not going anywhere(I suspect you meant it needed no jump drive)

Probably meant using vehicle drives, can't have jump drives on small craft anyways.

I would be using Grav drives from the vehicle design rules, or maybe an M drive depending on size and performance.

 

[Solomani666]

I am looking to pack 4 weapons into this baby:

An enlarged triple sharship turret with a starship PAW and a Fusion Z in parallel.

An internally mounted meson turret inside of the front hull section.

Possibly a computer controlled gatling laser in a coupola turret for anti-personel and air defense.

TL16 with 16 points of BSD armor if I can fit it all in.

Crew of 2 or 3.

1 or 2 spotter drones in a rear compartment to make the meson gun super nasty!

Who needs bolos and ogres!


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[barnest2]

Fitting those weapons and armour in will be difficult, especially with the power-plant requirements for the guns...

 

[simonh]

what is the difference between your tank and a fighter
or to just have a regular tank that has ship borne weapons

There are a number of roles for heavily armed and armoured vehicles on a battlefield. Currently these are filled by tanks, gunships and fighters.

Tanks:
*Take and hold ground, on the ground often co-ordinating closely with infantry.
* Be heavily armoured, but this is just a technological issue. If gunships and fighters could have more armour, they probably would.
*Be cheaper than gunships. M1 Abrams ~$6mil

Gunships:
*Kill tanks and just about anything else on the ground.
*Be cheaper than fighters. Apache ~$18mil

Fighters:
*As per gunships, plus kill anything else that flies. Typhoon ~$90mil. F-22A $150mil.

I think with grav technology the distinction between gunship and fighter roles we have now will disappear. Instead you'll have a whole range of vehicles at different price points and capabilities but using the same basic propulsion technology instead of the tracks->rotors->jets technology ladder we have today. Still, the basic roles will still exist.

This ultimate grav tank design is really an ultimate grav vehicle design. With this amount of armour and cost of weaponry it's IMHO clearly in fighter territory as an air superiority vehicle. You wouldn't use it close on the ground to support troops at a tactical level. It's just too expensive for that. I'm not saying it's a bad design, it's a fine concept, but it's not really suitable for the role currently performed by tanks.

Simon Hibbs

 

[simonh]

Assuming that cost is not a factor, any reason this would not be viable?

The problem is that cost is a factor. If your troops need 100 vehicles to provide close support for their offensive against a city, and you spent all your budget on one vehicle, they are not going to be impressed when they start taking casualties left, right and centre and your one vehicle simply can't be everywhere at once.

Unless you can simply push a button at a factory and churn out a few hundred of these whenever you want, in which case sure. Max out the limits of the design rules as much as you like, but IMHO designs where you actually have to make tough decisions and trade off genuinely competing requirements are the most challenging and fun to attempt - and the most interesting.

Every military that can afford one will have something like this though. Or at least they'll want to have one.

Simon Hibbs

 

[steelbrok]

I'd started writing up some thoughts on ground warfare but this thread seems to be a good place to put in what I have so far:


Military technology
In MGT starships are massively armoured and have very destructive weapons compared to ground vehicles.

This is different to the TNE system in which high tech tanks were heavily armoured and carried main weapons quite capable of punching holes in starships. This led to situations where it made sense to leave the ship behind (or in orbit) and get characters feet dirty or make use of that air/raft instead of just jetting over in their ship.

I have no complaint over the change but it does change the way things work on the battlefield. I would see COACC forces (close orbit and air) being High Guard designs designed to take out enemy ships on approach or on the ground. Such ships will also be capable of delivering devastating attacks on ground forces and civilian targets.

This being so, ground forces are forced to either remain under their own air/space cover or essentially operate in a guerrilla role. One exception to this might be assault of heavily armed and armoured fortresses by Battle dress equipped troops, but even these would be vulnerable to any enemy who achieve even fleeting air/space parity.

Those ground vehicles that aren’t armoured to starship levels will have to rely on speed, manoeuvrability and stealth to survive.

 

[phavoc]

If one wanted to create the ultimate grav tank, then why not start with a 10t starship hull, give it 12+ points of starship armour, then apply the rules from Supplement 6 to finish it?

It would be a big tank and would not even require a ships maneuver drive.

Any attacks by ground weapons would be [(#d6 / 50) - armor] making it nearly impregnable on the battlefield, except to meson weapons.

Assuming that cost is not a factor, any reason this would not be viable?


.

If you use a starship/small craft hull, you need to use the rest of the design system that goes with it. So that means you'll need the appropriate power plant to power the anti-grav systems and drive train, and a maneuver drive to make it go from A to B. Remember that to get all that invulnerability you are packing on TONS of mass in the armor itself. It's (if I recall the rules correctly) essentially collapsed matter. That stuff is massive. Regular vehicle antigrav modules aren't designed for that sort of mass. That's why starships have such beefed-up systems.

Sure, you'd be able to resist standard ground weapons, but you'll still be vulnerable to ground-based anti-starship weapons, plus fighter strikes, orbit-to-ground missle and torpedoes, not to mention ground-based meson installations. Or maybe when you deploy your super-tanks the enemy will deploy their ocean-based 400ton SDB's as tank killers.

 

[SSWarlock]

Deleted.

 

[DFW]

Per the MGT rules, a small craft designed for the role can kill any tanks designed with vehicle rules. Those small craft could easily replace tanks.

The only consideration left is the cost...

 

[Solomani666]

Per the MGT rules, a small craft designed for the role can kill any tanks designed with vehicle rules. Those small craft could easily replace tanks.

The only consideration left is the cost...

Cost in MGT terms is not a factor.

This all came from an idea I had; what if you had a government without a monetary economy, but instead had a resource based economy. Then the only constraints for building anything would be time, physical resources, and the desire or need to do so. This would also eliminate the root cause of for the eventual demise of all republics... Fiscal irresponsibility.

At the highest level, they are governed by leaders from each major family group (simplified model).

Given the above, and that they have a culture where starships and ground forces are crewed/composed of family units, you get a situation where vehicles and equipment are driven by social forces to be the very best their society can make.

 

[rust]

This all came from an idea I had; what if you had a government without amonetary economy, but instead had a resource based economy.

Well, in the end it would turn out to be exactly the same, the conflicts
would only be about the allocation of rare resources instead of about
the allocation of money which symbolizes those resources. There is no
real difference whether you lack those 5 kg of unobtainium or the mo-
ney to buy those 5 kg of unobtainium. Cost would still be a factor, but
this factor would now be calculated in tons of raw materials and in man-
hours instead of sums of money - otherwise the economy would work
just like one of the planned economies we know from our history.

 

[Solomani666]

I'd started writing up some thoughts on ground warfare but this thread seems to be a good place to put in what I have so far:


Military technology
In MGT starships are massively armoured and have very destructive weapons compared to ground vehicles.

This is different to the TNE system in which high tech tanks were heavily armoured and carried main weapons quite capable of punching holes in starships. This led to situations where it made sense to leave the ship behind (or in orbit) and get characters feet dirty or make use of that air/raft instead of just jetting over in their ship.

I have no complaint over the change but it does change the way things work on the battlefield. I would see COACC forces (close orbit and air) being High Guard designs designed to take out enemy ships on approach or on the ground. Such ships will also be capable of delivering devastating attacks on ground forces and civilian targets.

This being so, ground forces are forced to either remain under their own air/space cover or essentially operate in a guerrilla role. One exception to this might be assault of heavily armed and armoured fortresses by Battle dress equipped troops, but even these would be vulnerable to any enemy who achieve even fleeting air/space parity.

Those ground vehicles that aren’t armoured to starship levels will have to rely on speed, manoeuvrability and stealth to survive.

IMTU:
Given the range of meson guns, pulse lasers, beam lasers, plasma guns, fusion guns, and tac missles, fighters tend to fly only at low altitudes, less they become a target for every planetary weapon within 1000 km and every ground weapon within 10 km. Tanks rarely hover more than a few meters for the same reasons not to mention that their underside armor tends to be weaker.

In any well equiped battlefield, altitudes between 100m and orbit is a death zone even for starships. Yes the pulse laser from a staship will destroy any one tank if it hits, but then to remaining say 10 battle tanks will open up on the starship with their 10 x Fusiox Z cannons (+4 to hit) doing (3d6 - armor) + (3d6 - armor) + (3d6 - armor) of damage to the starship before it can fire back.

A battlefield is not a safe place for starships to hang around.

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[rust]

Yes the pulse laser from a staship will destroy any one tank if it hits, but then to remaining say 10 battle tanks will open up on the starship with their 10 x Fusiox Z cannons (+4 to hit) doing (3d6 - armor) + (3d6 - armor) + (3d6 - armor) of damage to the starship before it can fire back.

A starship built for this kind of environment will have more than one pulse
laser. In fact, it will almost certainly have enough pulse lasers or other
efficient weapons to ensure that it will destroy so many enemy craft be-
fore it is destroyed itself that the enemy losses are more costly than the
loss of the starship. To use your example, if the starship has the equiva-
lent value of 20 tanks, it will have at least 30 pulse lasers to enable it to
destroy more than 20 tanks before it is destroyed itself.

However, I would expect the use of high numbers of fighter drones as the
standard method to eliminate tanks on this kind of battlefield. Such a dro-
ne is almost certainly less costly than one of the tanks you described, and
I think it would even work at a loss ratio of 2 drones to 1 tank.

 

[simonh]

Cost in MGT terms is not a factor.

This all came from an idea I had; what if you had a government without amonetary economy, but instead had a resource based economy. Then the only constraints for building anything would be time, physical resources, and the desire or need to do so. This would also eliminate the root cause of for the evential demise of all republics... Fiscal irresponsibility.

But by eliminating money you're not eliminating cost at all, you're only eliminating a standard way to compare the relative value of things. The costs in terms of resources, time and most importantly labour (the key component of any measure of value, which I think it's telling that you didn't mention) are still exactly the same. However what you have done is eliminate any way to compare the relative values of those resources, time and labour compared to each other.

In fact the costs in your economy are likely to be much higher, becasue by eliminating money you're taking away a vital tool the economic planners need to manage the relative priorities of work and goods. This is likely to create inefficiencies.

For example, your economy won't know if it's overproducing certain goods unless it has a top notch way to measure relative demand. You can estimate demand by asking people what they think their requirement might be, but what poeple think and what they do can be very different. For example there's a huge difference between asking people what they might pay for something, and actualy seeing what they do pay for it with real money. You need a reliable way to measure people's relative needs for different things, and a way to adjust that relative need dynamicaly in real time. Price is a realy excellent way to do that.

Simon Hibbs

 

[rust]

I am afraid the only way to get rid of costs as a decisive factor in strategy
is to design a society which has a significant surplus of everything it re-
quires, food, raw materials, energy, labour and so on, and which is figh-
ting a society which does not have such utopian conditions.