The Physics of Space Battles

So, not too seriously then, the best design for a Traveller ship is a series of spherical hulls built around a spinal cannon like beads on a string, with the first one having most of the armour? 8)
 
Not really, because then the first hit between those spheres is going to cut the "string", break the spinal mount, and leave you with two half-ships instead of one full ship. :)

The length of the ship will be determined by its spinal mount. The volume will be determined by how much other stuff needs to be packed in there. That probably won't work out to a sphere, more like an ellipsoid. Or possibly a cone/wedge if you want maximum secondary firepower facing forwards, at the expense of having not much facing backwards. Then again, you can probably do a 180 degree turn more quickly than the enemy can fly round you (so long as you're using thrusters to turn the ship and not gyros :D), so weapons on the back may not be a major concern.

I was amused by a couple of things in the video. One was the suggestion that lasers in space won't be visible because they won't be at visible wavelengths. The reason lasers are visible at all is that some of the beam is reflected by particles in the atmosphere. There's not much of that in space, so even a laser in the visible spectrum won't be visible. Then there was the suggestion that a ship will only use short bursts of thrust - true if it wants to conserve fuel, not true if it wants to get where it's going ASAP, in which case it will accelerate half way there at full thrust and decelerate the other half. There was then a quick clip of the old game "Asteroids" - see how long you live in that if you're only doing short bursts of thrust when the little saucer with the good gunner shows up. :twisted:

And then there was the suggestion that space warfare won't happen because it's too difficult, which is probably what people thought about air warfare about 100 years ago. Or the suggestion that we'll all learn to get along and explore space in peace - I wonder if JFK would have thought that if it had been the Soviet flag on the Moon instead of the US flag. That peaceful exploration will last until someone finds something valuable and someone else doesn't want the first someone to have a monopoly of it...
 
phavoc said:
Offensively a wedge is the best, as you can bring the bulk of your weapons to bear if they are properly aligned. But Traveller doesn't use weapon arcs, so that's a non-issue.

I would also think that the wedge shape would give you a smaller forward cross-section, which would be somewhat advantageous. But Traveller also doesn't take into account the actual design and where the damage occurs, so again it's a not-issue.

By the rules the number of weapons you can bring to bear is limited as your tonnage goes up. A sphere would not potentially have as many weapons to bring to bear on a specific heading, but it would also be able to potentially slug it out with a ship that did because it could change it's facing to bring new undamaged armor and weapons to bear while other ship form factors could not.

Indeed.

There are several factors which affect hull geometry for a military starship (not necessarily in order of priority):

1 - The ability to bring weapons to bear. The higher the proportion of 'presented' hull surface the better, even if it's not fully square on. A wedge or dart is a good design (think star destroyer).

2 - The ability to provide armour. A sphere is the best for the same amount of armour for omni-directional protection, but the counter argument is that you will rarely have an enemy warship 'sneak up' on you - at least, not arriving in weapons range without you seeing it coming. There is therefore a counter-argument that you should design your ship with 'prow armour' you can point at the primary threat.

Cross-sectional area isn't really a big thing. If you can hit a 200dton patrol ship at a light-second's range, you're so far beyond 'shooting the wings off a fly' territory that reducing the projected surface area of a multi-kilodton capital ship by a few percent is probably not going to make much difference.

3 - Any requirements related to propulsion. There isn't a really detailled diatribe on M-Drive physics anywhere in Mongoose Traveller, but it's generally implied there aren't any - if anything, this reinforces the suggestion of a wedge with directional armour, as you can point your heavy armour belt at the primary threat without compromising your ability to accelerate "sideways".

This requirement also includes requirements for atmospheric operations - which most warships will do (because even if they don't land most warships are configured for independent gas giant refuelling and the 'dive' is an atmospheric run) and jump (whilst, again, jump physics aren't well established, it's not an unreasonable assumption that the more efficient a use of volume you make, the easier it is to produce the jump bubble. Field effects tend to form spheres naturally.
 
A couple of other issues that don't really matter because Traveller has extremely loose rules for starships (it is an RPG of course, not a starship combat simulator):

1) Docking a spherical starship at a station is a huge waste of space, especially if you are docking externally. But with all ships (and objects) reduced to amorphous displacement tons, it really doesn't matter. In reality though you'd want longer ships so you could have multiples of them docking head in (or side, but whatever direction you do, it needs to minimize the dimensions to maximize the number of docking points).

2) Once you have anti-grav and you can build a ship that can take sustained maneuvers at high-G, the shape is more or less irrelevant in order to land on a planet. While a sphere is going to be slightly more aerodynamic than say a cube, either could land on a planet with anti-grav. If a ship can accept g-forces, it's structure should be sufficient to accept it's own weight in a gravity field. There are a couple of exceptions to that, especially when you get into distributed hulls, but for the most part the rule of thumb works.

3) If you were to mount a spinal gun, then your ships radius is at least minimally required to exceed the length of the barrel by some percentage number. You'd have to have sufficient space on both sides of the sphere to account for armor and other secondary systems that had to be close to the surface. If you look at the Tigress cross-sections, you see the length of the barrel runs most of the length of the ship. I'm thinking that artistically they added in the "armored aperture" to make it look like the ship had an eye. I don't see the need to have such a large armored door to cover the emitter. But it does look cool. And then on the 'rear' of the sphere they tacked on the engines, so it's not a true sphere. In the GURPS writeup for the Tigress it says "A large armored port protects the gun during non-combat operations; the port itself contains focusing equipment for the weapon beam." So at least the designers did a CYA for putting the port there in the first place.

4) Jump bubbles - ah, this is another conundrum. When MGT decided to get away from jump grids and go with the jump "bubble", all of a sudden it gets interesting. It's not explained anywhere, which is kind of sad because jump technology is the key to humanti's expansion, as it is with all other races. Second, just how in the hell does it work? Are there micro-emitters spaced evenly around the hull to spray out the charged hydrogen to build your jump bubble? Is the jump bubble created instantaneously? Cause if you were under power when you tried to jump you would be moving faster than the particles you ejected from the ship, thus part of your ship could be outside the bubble (gets back to how fast it gets built). Just stopping your thrust would fix the problem.

5) Another issue is maintenance. A sphere is possibly the worst configuration for when it comes to having to do heavy maintenance on anything placed in the core. Needle/wedge configurations offer (potentially) quicker access to a similar component.

But, since it's a game that doesn't address these issues (and others), the configuration really shouldn't be an issue. But it does give us something to talk about! :)
 
phavoc said:
But, since it's a game that doesn't address these issues (and others), the configuration really shouldn't be an issue. But it does give us something to talk about! :)

I was talking theoretically. what shape it would become for purposes of surviving & wining battles. (logic being applied) Since THAT is a warship's primary purpose, all other considerations take a backseat. For weapon bearing (although having scads of small weapons turrets is not important) it might become a flattened sphere.
 
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