Spaceship vs. Starship

[AnotherDilbert]

A simple Attack +1 for each additional turret in the battery would have a large effect, at least against heavy armour:

Single Triple laser:

Ten turret battery (attack +3 +9 [additional turrets] = +12):

Note that both average damage and crit chance is more than ten times as large, in this particular case, so a ten-turret battery would do more damage than ten individual turrets. Reasonably we would also need fewer gunners, saving a lot of space (or BW).

The difference would be smaller for higher to hit chance and less armoured ships.



Note that such a battery would be better than a bay (here small particle bay):

 

[Anonymous]

At some point your laser emitters may become a phased array and then concept of individual turrets is meaningless.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array

One thing that needs to be defined regarding conventional Traveller turrets is whether a laser shoots a small burst almost all of which hits, or whether they spray everywhere and the damage is just from the small % of the beam that hit.

I wondered if this explains the dogfight rules. In dogfight they pewpew for a few seconds and it hits. In regular they pewpew for 20 minutes and only 1 burst hits.

Anyway this matters for combining turrets. If it can actually fire once and hit, there is no reason why you can hit at thousands of kilometres but can’t fire link weapons for simultaneous superimposed impact when the emitters are 50 meters apart.

If on the other hand they’re spraying randomly I can see why you can’t get the precision to put 2 lasers into the same hole.

 

[GamingGlen]

Gadzooks, give someone a micron and they make it into a kilometer.

Thanks for the analysis. I'm still not going to bother putting some disadvantage to quad turrets. Just because it wasn't in previous editions of Traveller makes it a bad idea now.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Quad turrets are now in T5 which means they exist in the OTU.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Quad turrets are now in T5 which means they exist in the OTU.

Quite, but just like in MgT they exist in some sort of limbo, since all the familiar example ships use triple turrets max, even the vaguely military ones.

 

[Anonymous]

Gatling laser when? That seems like a more efficient way to get more firepower.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Gatling laser when? That seems like a more efficient way to get more firepower.

Pulse laser is pulse laser?

 

[Condottiere]

Multi pulse, depending on the number of lenses.

 

[Linwood]

I’ve been assuming that Gatling lasers were created in part to resolve cooling issues, whereas pulse lasers have those issues resolved in other ways.

 

[Anonymous]

Maybe quad turrets aren’t enough anymore?

Anti-tank Missiles, 81mm smoke grenades, 7.62mm machinegun, 30mm machinegun, and 30mm grenade launcher. It’s like someone read a Battletech TRO and said “we should build that”.

Source: http://deftechph.blogspot.com/2014/06/katran-m-ciws-close-in-weapon-system.html

Edit: This isn’t an anti-missile point defence, it is for gunboat duels, speedboat swarm protection, and shore targets.

 

[Condottiere]

As I understand it, gatling lasers or equivalents were meant as point defense, or anti personnel.

Probably both.

 

[Linwood]

If they weren’t designed with that dual role in mind someone would eventually repurpose them.

 

[baithammer]

Maybe quad turrets aren’t enough anymore?

Anti-tank Missiles, 81mm smoke grenades, 7.62mm machinegun, 30mm machinegun, and 30mm grenade launcher. It’s like someone read a Battletech TRO and said “we should build that”.

Source: http://deftechph.blogspot.com/2014/06/katran-m-ciws-close-in-weapon-system.html

Edit: This isn’t an anti-missile point defence, it is for gunboat duels, speedboat swarm protection, and shore targets.

There are only 2 anti-vehicle weapons on that turret, the rest are anti-personnel, so still fitting in the triple mount frame.

 

[Condottiere]

I don't think tanks go fast enough for the velocity to rip out the external machine gun from the mounting.

Having said that, spaceship turrets and barbettes (or even bays) aren't actually restricted to their legacy volumes.

 

[Linwood]

To that point - when fitting vehicle-scale weaponry to spacecraft maybe we should increase required volume to allow the weapons to be retracted when entering atmosphere?

 

[Anonymous]

I don't think tanks go fast enough for the velocity to rip out the external machine gun from the mounting.

Having said that, spaceship turrets and barbettes (or even bays) aren't actually restricted to their legacy volumes.

Don't know about tanks (they probably get bounced around a lot and stuff gets scraped on trees) but that is a boat turret and a few hours of heavy sea will break a lot of things. Not uncommon to see 5cm (2") and thicker windows, and I've seen a trawler with 10cm (4") thick porthole glass.

 

[Condottiere]

Gravitational waves?

 

[phavoc]

There's no real reason why you should not be able to link turrets to fire as a group (I believe the barrage rules are a similar concept). But this idea of having hundreds of smaller weapons taking the place of one really big one, and the need to NOT do this as it negates reasons for larger weapons and bay weaponry, kind of points towards a need to correct the design system.

One of the reasons you build bigger ships is to mount bigger weapons and more armor/defenses. Modelling this along the lines of the big-gun era of ships at the beginning of the 20th century would fit well within Traveller. It would also toss out the very silly idea that you can armor a small fighter to be equivalent to the same level as a dreadnought. This should drive design concepts to be more balanced rather than min-maxed. Larger ships would be modeled more along the lines of wet navy capital ships - bigger guns to take on their similarly-sized opponents with smaller weapons to target the smaller ships and fighters that may attack them. Think of the Argo from Star Blazers. It had a spinal mount, main guns to engage larger targets, missile tubes, and smaller guns to engage smaller ships, and point-defense batteries for fighter and missile defense. Traveller posits a setting that is more equivalent to the era of big guns than today's era of missiles, with guns and armor as an afterthought.

Along the same lines, as your armor factor increased, so too would damage resistance. So the hordes of smaller weapons would be able to only do minimal, if any, damage to heavily armored ships, thus making the need to balance your weapons out. This would also help with mission design for a ship, though I would suspect that most navies would build balanced ships for maximum flexibility.

I don't see these ideas as changing within the rules, but since many play with a IMTU it's something to think about.

 

[Anonymous]

Weapon bays might be large mounts. This would give Traveller ships a spinal, large mounts, turret mounts, missiles, and (in Mongoose) a point defense system.

I get what you're saying about armor thickness on small craft, but hit points that ensure they are disabled faster. (Mongoose gives 1 hit point for every 2 or 2.5 dtons).

Note that heavy armor is no guarantee of protection from lighter weapons. On a space craft at space battle ranges, your sensors are very important. You won't hit jackshit manually aiming at space speeds and ranges. Those sensors are going to need to be exposed to do their job, and probably don't like it when their fancy antennas get hit by lasers.

From history, Leyte Gulf saw battleships taking heavy damage from cruiser gunfire and being sunk by destroyer torpedos. I won't count HMS Hood as that was an outdated design.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Modelling this along the lines of the big-gun era of ships at the beginning of the 20th century would fit well within Traveller. It would also toss out the very silly idea that you can armor a small fighter to be equivalent to the same level as a dreadnought. This should drive design concepts to be more balanced rather than min-maxed.

TNE FF&S did all of this. It didn't stop anyone from min-maxing, rather the opposite...