Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
I'd go for an anti smallcraft frigate, which would be as large as a destroyer.
Should maned small combat crafts be deleted from chartered space?
- Thread starter Perkanis83
- Start date
That wasn't really the point, just to show that you don't have to make close in attacks with fighters (and if you do they will probably die).
I have no doubt that you could design a custom ship that was optimised to deal with fighters, just as you could build an ever better fighter. Refitting a Destroyer is much more involved that swapping out the fixed mount weapon.
If it bothers you run the same scenario with the stock Heavy Fighter.
You would probably better served dealing with the weapon threat than the platform. Missile spamming can be effective via fighter but it is not the only method. If the missile fighter cannot effectively engage then the fighter becomes irrelevant.
I would have thought the best way of dealing with swarms of cheap fighters equipped with missiles is another swarm of cheap fighters equipped with missiles.
EDIT.
For reference in the Small Craft Catalogue, the Homeshield Mini Fighter is under MCr1.5 and is a missile platform and well within the technological capability of the majority of systems. It is hardly the last word in capability, but since over half the cost is the weapon, there is only so much you can do at that budget. It has plenty of unused space for extra fuel and the dual cockpit is probably unnecessary and could be dispensed with to allow a deeper magazine. I probably would have dispensed with the separate thruster and simply made the main drive Thrust 3. An M-Drive for such a small ship would not have added much to the cost. There is also no need to make it that ugly
It can be launched from any convenient planetary body, asteroid or from an ertsatz carrier, so the limited duration range is not really relevant.
I also designed a 3DTon Planetoid sleeper craft. At MCr1.2 it had 4 Advanced Missiles, a low berth and over a years fuel. The idea would be that it could be seeded in the hundreds in the asteroid belt with the pilots in stasis for up to a year. When required the pilot could be awakened, engage as necessary and then disengage and disperse returning to statis to await recovery and replenishment.
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Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Intercepting, with the sun against their backs.
MarcusIII
Emperor Mongoose
I don't even use fighters IMTU. The fighter concept is from terrestrial environment where they are 20X faster than the targets they are attacking (except dogfighting their opposite number). In Trav they are no faster than battlewagons AND have less armor. They really wouldn't exist for the most part.
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Most capital ships run M6 J4 thats about the best they can do and still have a decent amount of weapons and armor. Fighters run M9 and are hard to impossible to target with anything larger than a turret. So yes Fighter are generally faster than battle wagons. Any ship lacking a jump drive is going to generally be faster than a jump ship of the same tech level, that’s the basics of fighters. At TL 15 you can have a 10 dt two seat fighter with M9 and ECM and enough armor to have a good chance to survive a turret hit. But to be honest I never seen the need for a fighter larger than 35dt so that the size of my heavy fighters.
The equation changes a little if you use Hop drive but not entirely
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
There is no reason you can not put M-9 into a capital ship, the grandfathered designs are not an indication of what the rules allow. if you want to stick to the setting than the fighters are 6g and the capital ships are 6g.
If the fighters are going to be redesigned in light of the new rules then the capital ships should also be redesigned using the new rules.
If the fighters are going to be redesigned in light of the new rules then the capital ships should also be redesigned using the new rules.
StellarVenture
Mongoose
I do in general like fighters having access to r-drives to augment their available speed even if their primary thrust is still from M-drives. That short term boost can be all you need to gain the advantage.
It’s called space that’s the factor. Capital ships with J4 M6 are already under gunned and light on defense you want to make them even weaker? Yea you can make a capital ship with M9 but what are you sacrificing to get that? Defenses? Weapons? Jump? It has nothing to do with legacy and everything to do with space costs?
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
With smallcraft, it depends on what aspect you leverage for an advantage, however minuscule.
That was very much an artificial limit put in place for tournament purposes, and in another era.
CT ships ended up with a large amount of hull space that was unusable for weapons... aside from carried craft (although spinals mollified that a bit). Current Mongoose rules have modified things a lot in relation to bay allocation so that you can use all your spare tonnage on them.
I think another point needs to be made. There’s been a big push by some people to robotize everything in Traveller, robot crews that do everything, robot troops, robots stewards. Can you do this sure but it’s not Traveller it’s Robots in Space and if that’s the game you want to play have at it but my players actually like having to do things instead of sitting back and letting the Robots do it. There comes a point when you have to say this is a RPG and having things that are not quite optimized is a good thing because in Traveller it’s possible to optimize your PCs out of the game.
Sure, but that's not actually relevant. The point was that any scenario that does not have any constraints besides "theoretically possible in the rules" is a dead end for discussion. Because the "how it actually works in the setting" would have all sorts of constraints of access, of politics, of budget, and of culture. As well as other factors. You can easily imagine a scenario that proves whatever point you want when you are only limited by the rules theory.
And this is because the rules are designed to be flexible and to let you do a wide range of things. Because the constraints the Aslan are under are not the same as the ones the Third Imperium are under. And Charted Space is under different contraints than someone's homebrew campaign.
And this is because the rules are designed to be flexible and to let you do a wide range of things. Because the constraints the Aslan are under are not the same as the ones the Third Imperium are under. And Charted Space is under different contraints than someone's homebrew campaign.
Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
I feel seen.
I mean, this is at least a valid discussion point. The utility of small craft in combat itself can be justified... it's about the need for a breather to be carried along.
As I've already said, I tend to take the middle ground. If the distances are short enough that you don't have too much signal lag, crew (or machines) on the main ship can control the craft. If the craft are operating at any significant distance from the mothership, something needs to be making on-the-spot decisions (maybe with additional drone craft to fill out the squadron). That really isn't great under TL12 and costs a flat Cr500,000 just for the brain hardware. Can that do as good a job as either a highly trained organic pilot (who may or not be more expensive)? Or, turning that on its head, might a reasonably expendable base level pilot be able to direct the largely automatic craft?
Maybe we should redefine what a Far Future Pilot actually is? Elite knight of the skies, or just a spaceman in a can - more equivalent to an AFV commander?
As I've already said, I tend to take the middle ground. If the distances are short enough that you don't have too much signal lag, crew (or machines) on the main ship can control the craft. If the craft are operating at any significant distance from the mothership, something needs to be making on-the-spot decisions (maybe with additional drone craft to fill out the squadron). That really isn't great under TL12 and costs a flat Cr500,000 just for the brain hardware. Can that do as good a job as either a highly trained organic pilot (who may or not be more expensive)? Or, turning that on its head, might a reasonably expendable base level pilot be able to direct the largely automatic craft?
Maybe we should redefine what a Far Future Pilot actually is? Elite knight of the skies, or just a spaceman in a can - more equivalent to an AFV commander?
Well, ultimately, that's the problem. The level of abstraction used in Fleet Combat doesn't tell us enough about how EW works or what decisions need to be made. Likewise, the far future tech is generally pretty broad and ill defined, so again we don't know what the operational implications are.
People talk about hacking drones and disrupting their communications with controllers. But there's nothing in fleet combat that says that's a thing. There's no action you can take in the RAW that's "screw with the other guy's unmanned small craft." There's no clear definition of what it means that an brain can't make Very Hard task checks or what that looks like on the battle field.
We (meaning each player group) needs to define what they want to be true about space fighters 5700 years from now. And then they need to use the available rules to select those features that produce that outcome.
The ship design rules are broader and contain more stuff than any specific Navy's paradigm is likely to contain. We know the Fleet Combat Rules in High Guard do not produce the outcomes in the Charted Space setting materials, either in terms of ship designs or how battles are described. You aren't going to square that circle. You have to decide whether you like squares or you like circles. Because both squares and circles are valid depending on what assumptions you make about a technology and culture that vastly far away from ours in time and space and only described in broad strokes.
People talk about hacking drones and disrupting their communications with controllers. But there's nothing in fleet combat that says that's a thing. There's no action you can take in the RAW that's "screw with the other guy's unmanned small craft." There's no clear definition of what it means that an brain can't make Very Hard task checks or what that looks like on the battle field.
We (meaning each player group) needs to define what they want to be true about space fighters 5700 years from now. And then they need to use the available rules to select those features that produce that outcome.
The ship design rules are broader and contain more stuff than any specific Navy's paradigm is likely to contain. We know the Fleet Combat Rules in High Guard do not produce the outcomes in the Charted Space setting materials, either in terms of ship designs or how battles are described. You aren't going to square that circle. You have to decide whether you like squares or you like circles. Because both squares and circles are valid depending on what assumptions you make about a technology and culture that vastly far away from ours in time and space and only described in broad strokes.
I think there is a significant difference between hacking a non-protected drone, a drone pilot in a protected spaceship and non-drone in a protected spaceship.
A drone has an interface to allow control so subverting that is going to be easier than attacking a robot with no remote interface. The parallel with modern drones is limited as most use fairly simple RF, which can be jammed or fake signals can be sent. If the drone has any kind of encryption (the default if military) then fake signals become difficult to impossible and your options are reduced to jamming. If the drone has anti-jam technology (common in non-COTS drones) then you are going to have trouble with even that. EMP is your best recourse but hardening brains is also cheap.
We have rules for the security of bots and drones and hacking them in RH so the game can handle it. No-one sensible is sending a multi-MCr fighter out under the control of a Drone that can be easily hacked if they can spend a few KCr to eliminate that possibility.
Robots are best used as expendable or for skill substitution with players commanding their actions. It make no material difference to player agency whether they are using their expert systems Electronics skill or one that they picked up in their career. It makes a significant difference to player agency if they are faced with a challenge that they cannot address because of a random dice roll they made during character generation or character death is the only way to achieve a non-heroic outcome.
Knowing you could solve the issue with a tool rather than relying on your bare hands is what makes us human.
A drone has an interface to allow control so subverting that is going to be easier than attacking a robot with no remote interface. The parallel with modern drones is limited as most use fairly simple RF, which can be jammed or fake signals can be sent. If the drone has any kind of encryption (the default if military) then fake signals become difficult to impossible and your options are reduced to jamming. If the drone has anti-jam technology (common in non-COTS drones) then you are going to have trouble with even that. EMP is your best recourse but hardening brains is also cheap.
We have rules for the security of bots and drones and hacking them in RH so the game can handle it. No-one sensible is sending a multi-MCr fighter out under the control of a Drone that can be easily hacked if they can spend a few KCr to eliminate that possibility.
Robots are best used as expendable or for skill substitution with players commanding their actions. It make no material difference to player agency whether they are using their expert systems Electronics skill or one that they picked up in their career. It makes a significant difference to player agency if they are faced with a challenge that they cannot address because of a random dice roll they made during character generation or character death is the only way to achieve a non-heroic outcome.
Knowing you could solve the issue with a tool rather than relying on your bare hands is what makes us human.
I would think so, as well. But there's no such actions in the Fleet Combat or Ship Combat rules to reflect that. Does that mean that the designers didn't think about it? Does it mean it's a solved problem and doesn't work like our current distinctions? Either of those is possible.
