Warships vs. Merchants Designs

[Captain Jonah]

Yep.

The first thing I did when I got to MongTrav ship to ship combat was change all the weapon damages and redo them in the same way that other versions did with higher tech versions (every 4 tech levels above base) doing more damage. A contact nuke should ruin the day/week of any player level ship not bounce off the hull of a scout.

Nukes should be lethal and banned for civilian use for a reason. Otherwise you have nuke missiles on a ship that can scratch the paint on a scout or Free Trader hull but will wreck whole sections of a city or starport in a terrorist attack.

Re Rust. Hey the rules on handgrenades are to prevent accidents while juggling those live hand grenades. An average grenade will do 5D or 17.5 damage which is just enough to knock out a person with 7/7/7 as long as they have no armour. with a flak jacket you can (just) get up, dust yourself off and wander off looking for a medic after standing on a grenade :shock:

 

[apoc527]

You know...I think grenades don't get Effect, but maybe they should. Same reasoning!

 

[rust]

Re Rust. Hey the rules on handgrenades are to prevent accidents while juggling those live hand grenades. An average grenade will do 5D or 17.5 damage which is just enough to knock out a person with 7/7/7 as long as they have no armour. with a flak jacket you can (just) get up, dust yourself off and wander off looking for a medic after standing on a grenade :shock:

True, Traveller hand grenades are already quite "neutered".

But try to imagine what a bundle of 4 hand grenades (average damage
70) would do, and then look at a picture of a crater caused by the hit of
the HE projectile of a 28 cm railway gun (average damage 70), and it be-
comes really bizarre. :shock:

 

[locarno24]

So in my mind merchies should have hulls that would be easily penetrated with heavy ground weapons. And obviously ground weapons are scaled to do damage to ground targets, so a plasma discharge from a rifle might penetrate the starship hull, but do nowhere near as much damage as say a starship-based laser or plasma weapon.

On an unarmoured ship they do. I would personally expect that a reinforced armour belt would carry the same permit requirements as a military-grade weapon (as per carrying particle weapons); even 1 point of starship level armour (50 on personal scale, making it ARMP/FGMP damageable but not much else) raises the question "why?" unless the ship has a realistic reason to expect attack.

 

[TC]

Here's my take on it.

Space Craft are not aircraft. remember the cargo is counted by dTon, not mass. The hull needs quite a bit of strength not to collapse when its fully loaded, on the ground, and unpowered.

The Hull needs to be able to stand up to micro collisions at substantial volocities, heat and radirion extremes, and lets not even meantion the requirements for skimming fuel from GG.

So no, I don't see a Star Ship having a hull that you could walk up to and get it to flex just by pushing a finger against it.

 

[atpollard]

I agree 100% about the need for heavy Rad shielding of the hulls. That and surviving even one missile attack require starship hulls to be non-trivial in strength.

That's true. Since it IS possible for a small star ship to survive a direct hit with a nuke missile, the hulls would have to be unbelievable strong by todays metallurgical standards.

More like a nuke hand-grenade given how small Traveller missiles are. And I'm not at all sure about the "direct hit" bit either. No convincing argument for any "unbelievable strong" hulls yet imo.

Two points:
1. I was thinking about standard missiles. Think what any air-to-air or anti-tank missile would do to a car or a brick house or the ISS or even a Panamax Container Ship ... and compare that with the effect of a Standard Missile on an unarmored Free Trader in a typical Traveller Starship combat.

2. "unbelievable strong" is a pretty broad range. Compared to my car, a Humvee is strong, but compared to an Iowa Class Battleship, even a Bradley AFV is weak. Compared to the Apollo CSM (the only BEO manned spacecraft) and the Shuttle Orbiter (the largest LEO spacecraft) even Traveller Small Craft are very strong. Factoring HE Missiles vs Starships suggests that starships are a lot stronger than modern Main Battle Tanks or destroyers (the water Navy craft).

3. (a freebee) I agree that Traveller Nuclear Starship missiles are closer to a hand-held version of the Atomic Cannon shell than an ICBM. How large of an atom bomb would you want starship captains to be able to buy on the black market ... or would you loan to a Merchnat Marine Ship to defend itself from privateers during a time of war?

 

[Captain Jonah]

A standard missile in Traveller is 12 to the Dton. A Dton is 14cubic metres. Now allow some for the racks and loading gear and you are looking at each missile being at/under 1 cubic metre.

That isn't all that much bigger than something like an AIM-120 that you see slung under many western fighters. Thats not all that big affter you fit the drives, comms, power source, guidance and warhead.

Easily small enough to fit a couple on a ground vehicle for Aero/space defence or smashing the odd passing tank to bits.

I don't like Nukes in civilian hands period. I ramp up the damage of weapons with higher techs so they are not needed. Only the military should have them. Not so much for ships. How many cities have continuous N-Damper screens on them.

How about lower tech systems in the OTU. Hey you primitive types, give me all your gold/Silver/Lantanum or that mushroom cloud you see on the horizon will be joined by a few more on top of your city.

TNE and the colapse of the empire type games had nukes as common. An OTU game with law and order should execute people for carrying them. Its bad enough your lasers can destroy city blocks but you want to carry a dozen kiloton yeild nukes as well :shock:

Re structural strength. Part of that comes from the structure and supporting framework as well as the actual hull metal. A tank is a small metal box, it has not other structure or frame since the armoured box is strong enough to handle moving round the battlefield. Once you blast through tha armour you are inside the box and everything in there reacts badly to HE/DU etc.
On a ship you breach the actual hull and you still have the fuel tanks that sensible designers pad out the hul with, the bulkheads, cable runs and jeffries tubes, Structural bracing and the mass of other bits that fill the outer metre or more of the ship.
Just because you HMG can put little holes in the unarmoured hull doesn't mean you can destroy the ship though the crew may be a bit upset (or dead) the drives and main systems should survive. Also I see ships hulls as being layers of things such as armour, radiation blocking materials, air tight layers and at least one spall liner.
The self sealing ability of fuel tanks should be able to handle hundreds of bullet hits, bulkheads and frames laugh at bullet hits etc.
Ships should not be immune to infantry weapons, the system that makes it so is simplified for playability. Try one of the versions of FFS

 

[DFW]

even Traveller Small Craft are very strong. Factoring HE Missiles vs Starships suggests that starships are a lot stronger than modern Main Battle Tanks or destroyers (the water Navy craft).

Yes, if you look at the rules for let's say an MBT 120mm gun damaging a small craft (divide dmg by 50). The hull of a small craft is at least 25 X as strong as an M1A1 tank frontal armour. By the rules as written. Opinions of what should be, aside. I'm talking about what is, in the rules.

 

[Captain Jonah]

even Traveller Small Craft are very strong. Factoring HE Missiles vs Starships suggests that starships are a lot stronger than modern Main Battle Tanks or destroyers (the water Navy craft).

Yes, if you look at the rules for let's say an MBT 120mm gun damaging a small craft (divide dmg by 50). The hull of a small craft is at least 25 X as strong as an M1A1 tank frontal armour. By the rules as written. Opinions of what should be, aside. I'm talking about what is, in the rules.

As usual bits of the rules are not consistent.
Main rules says multiply ship damage by x50 for personal scale. Rules for small craft give them 10 times the hull and structure for personal scale combat. A 100Dton shuttle has 20 Hull and 20 Structure in personal scale, many of the heavy tanks in book 6 have twice that suggesting they should be able to stand up in a fight but in reality they are easy kills.

120mm tank gun is 10D6 Super AP from book 6. Tank has roughly 25 Hull/Structure.
An un-armoured launch at 20 Dtons is more than twice the size and has 4 Hull, 6 structure on personal scale. zero hull and one structure in starship scale.

Super AP reduces target armour by 20 but the launch has no armour so this has no effect. Against the launch it has a small chance (several %) to do 50+ damage and cause a single hit. All other hits doing less than 50 damage bounce off somehow. If damage is caused it will be at most a single hit. Now if using the starship rules since the launch has no hull it takes an structure hit on rolls of 6 and 8 which destroys it since it has one structure on starship scale. Combining the likelyhood of rolling 6 or 8 with the small chance of doing 50+ damage on 10 dice I would say the 120mm cannon has 1-2% change of one hit killing the launch.

The launch fires back with a laser. Laser doing 50D damage against the tank, 25 armour vs average damage of 175. 150 damage through inflicts two triple hits, 20 double hits and 40 single hits. That is a fairly dead tank, even if it has some structure left at the end every system on board and the crew will be finished.

A ship scale missile launcher is 14cubic metres, 12 missiles are 14Cubic metres. That’s 28 Cubic metres for 12 shots costing Kcr765, almost twice the 10D6 120mm cannon but doing 50D damage. Many of the military vehicles can fit 28cubic metres. Yes I know space missiles have a minimum range, that doesn't change the fact that a single missile of roughly 1 cubic metre costing Kcr1.25 can kill any tank on the battlefield. Why not swap the warheads out and stick them into the local TOW 3 vehicle mounted anti tank missiles.

Small craft creation rules has them being 10 x scale for hull and structure onto the personal scale. At 10 x scale the 120mm will do significantly more damage to the launch and with its very low hull and structure probably wreck it in a few shots.

The problem is that between people/vehicles/starships the scaling is simplified and therefore doesn't stand up to even light scrutiny.

 

[DFW]

Yes, small craft rule is weird. However, anyway you slice it, a 200dt star ship
is pretty much untouchable for a 120mm AT gun...

 

[Captain Jonah]

Yes, small craft rule is weird. However, anyway you slice it, a 200dt star ship
is pretty much untouchable for a 120mm AT gun...

3-5% ish change of doing one single hit. Not sure how armour factors in since armour 4 on a scout equates to 200 with the x 50. So the need to do 250 damage in order to inflict any damage at all makes a scout immune to everything on the ground. The biggest guns in book 6 fall well short of being able to hit 250 damage. Even the 18D ultimate AP hypervelocity cannon or the fusion Z can do no more than ruin the paint job.
A single 100Dton small craft with 4 armour mounting a P-Beam barbette and triple fixed misile launcher can kill anything you can field on the personal scale. The P-Beam does 150D, thats going to sinkwater battleships never mind tanks. Plus it is immune to all return fire except nukes.

I accept that the weapon/Armour balance is constantly shifting and higher tech weapons can punch holes through lower tech armour but those higher tech super weapons should not be useless.

 

[apoc527]

I agree with you that, by the rules, this is correct. Since I don't like that result, I had to change the rules! Granted, ONE tank won't be a huge threat, but 6 might be.

 

[apoc527]

Yes, small craft rule is weird. However, anyway you slice it, a 200dt star ship
is pretty much untouchable for a 120mm AT gun...

3-5% ish change of doing one single hit. Not sure how armour factors in since armour 4 on a scout equates to 200 with the x 50. So the need to do 250 damage in order to inflict any damage at all makes a scout immune to everything on the ground. The biggest guns in book 6 fall well short of being able to hit 250 damage. Even the 18D ultimate AP hypervelocity cannon or the fusion Z can do no more than ruin the paint job.

Depends how you scale the AP rules, which don't exist in the space combat rules. Ultimate AP is x5 the dice of damage I believe. 18x5 = 90, which I would call -2 points of starship armor. That's -100 effective armor. So now you need to do 150. With Mercenary rules for adding up damage, it actually doesn't get that hard to do with vehicle weapons under the basic rules IF you don't ignore the AP qualities from Vehicles.

 

[Captain Jonah]

True enough.

But a tech 12 scout parked on the pad of a starport that sees a tech 15 Imperial heavy grav tank come into sight with a fusion cannon that will punch holes in half a metre of bonded super dense should be afraid. Not worried he may have five friends with him :roll:

 

[apoc527]

Oh absolutely. And if it was GURPS Traveller, that scout captain would be terrified. This is why I'm house ruling MgT.

 

[DFW]

I agree with you that, by the rules, this is correct. Since I don't like that result, I had to change the rules! Granted, ONE tank won't be a huge threat, but 6 might be.

Right. I'm just thinking about & discussing because I am working on that little project of mine. (which I'm making compatible with MGT rules)

I know the Mj of a TL 6 120mm AT round (which isn't the TL 8 one from Supp 6). I'm comparing how it damages a star ship vs. how a Beam laser turret does so I can figure the lasers MWatt requirements.

 

[phavoc]

You need to invest in either Striker or Fire, Fusion and Steel.

Formulas to your hearts content...

 

[DFW]

You need to invest in either Striker or Fire, Fusion and Steel.

Formulas to your hearts content...

I now have both. They contain some good stuff but, not the base data to calculate energy requirements.

 

[phavoc]

Getting back to the topic of the thread.... I would think that the average merchies hulls would be built along the TL9 or TL10 level, and stay there regardless of the increasing TL of the rest of the ship. This would be for a number of reasons:

1) The requirements of a TL10 starship to enter/leave an atmosphere remain constant regardless of TL. Therefore there is no need to build using stronger, more expensive materials, let alone bonded-superdense materials.

2) Using a lower TL hull components it would be cheaper to build.

3) The "average" TL10 hull should be proof against small-arms fire from man-portable weapons, with the obvious exclusion of weapons designed to penetrate or destroy vehicles. So you could fire away all day long with your gauss rifles and laser rifles and not do more than scuff the armor. But when the tank trundles up a few kilometers away and aims its plasma weapon at you, panic should set in.

But the damage tables really don't take that into account. Should something like say a vehicle-mounted VRF Gauss gun be able to damage a starship hull? What about a hypervelocity anti-tank missile, or even a shoulder-launched ATGM? Hard to figure out where to draw the line.

4) The rules for viewports, locks, sensors and everything else really don't factor into the combat tables, which makes for a simpler and faster-moving game. I have no issue with that. However, a GM should allow players to be sneaky, take aimed shots, etc that take into account the inherent weakness that these sorts of breaks in the hull.