WHULorigan
Cosmic Mongoose
Well, unless you have a really bad bombardier . . .
What's the range of starship missiles?
- Thread starter coombes
- Start date
Well, unless you have a really bad bombardier . . .
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
The Mongoose range band system is the second worst ship combat maneuver system to see print in a Traveller game.
A much better way to do it while maintaining the simplicity is the pseudovector range band system from Starter Traveller which allows for a sort of momentum conservation.
A much better way to do it while maintaining the simplicity is the pseudovector range band system from Starter Traveller which allows for a sort of momentum conservation.
As a former artillery person I can say with a great deal of certainty that there really is a difference between artillery shells (even guided ones) and missiles. The former starts ballistically and the shell maneuvers only during it's terminal phase (and even then it's within a relatively limited cone). A missile will launch and has continual acceleration to it's target, during which it can maneuver and make potentially multiple course changes (within reason) to it's destination. Not a universal statement as missiles such as cruise missiles (a prime example is the Tomahawk using terrain-following maps or sensors to maneuver around and over mountains to reach it's target and to avoid specific areas). The AGM-136 Tacit Rainbow ARM missile was meant to loiter in an area, as needed, against enemy radars.If the engines can't turn on and off then missiles are no different from guided munitions for artillery. While this makes recordkeeping much easier, it nerfs missiles as Time On Target attacks are no longer possible using the same missiles. So, giving missiles an engine is useless.
I love how you think people are reasonable! jajajajaja!
The deadly legacy of landmines
More than two decades since the adoption of the landmark Mine Ban Treaty and the creation of the UN Mine Action Service, millions of landmines have been destroyed, but land in nearly 70 countries globally is still contaminated and innocent people continue to be killed or maimed.news.un.org
The US MLRS AT-2 anti-tank mine has the capability of being launch and deployed and has the ability to have a self-destruct timer set so that you can deploy the minefield as a temporary barrier to the enemy and then it self-destructs so that your forces can go through the area without demining it.
Landmines are meant to be very cheap area denial munitions, and they are relatively simple and 'dumb'. The 1907 Hague Convention required signatories to only deploy mines or torpedoes that would become harmless if they missed their targets or after hostilities ended. If you are really interested this paper will give you historical context on the discussion(s) that have continually occurred off and on for over a century (https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2918&context=ils).
Technology has continued to improve to make it possible for such things to be built into the systems, and nations have talked about treaty mechanisms so that when the wars are over there is less risk (never NO risk though) to have left problems behind. Obviously there will be exceptions and tech failures where systems and/or governments fail and a mess remains behind for the future to clean up. Doesn't mean the assumption isn't a fair one to make though.
Now that Traveller uses energy points (and the game really doesn't incorporate newtonian movement rules with the concept of range bands) Star Fleet battles has a useful starship combat system that could be easily incorporated / duplicated for Traveller. Energy is allocated for movement, weapons, ECM, ECCM, etc. The major difference is shields - but since no energy is required and most Traveller ships do not have that much, if any, excess energy, that probably would equal out and not be much of an issue.
I suppose one issue that would need to be thought a little about is velocity - that part would need to be incorporated as you have to expend energy (or thrust points) to accelerate and slow down. Things like drones/torpedoes and point defense based on range can be easily mapped out. Not sure how one would handle turning radiuses though - things like velocity would affect radius as well as the need to decelerate to change directions more than in a cone-like direction.
Still, I think it's something that would be a great bonus to individual or small numbers of starships engaging in combat.
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
I was actually going to use the Tomahawk as an example until I realized that the volume of a Tomahawk missile is 14m3 or 1 dton. Traveller doesn't have an analog to missiles like this unless you build it yourself as a robot or vehicle.
As to the AGM-136? This can't happen in Traveller as the rules do not allow for it. They should, but they don't.
Eventually the whole world will probably build munitions this way, but look at Charted Space. Look at how many weapons manufacturers there are just in the 11,000 worlds of the Third Imperium. The Third Imperium leaves this up to the individual systems as to their laws on this. The Vargr? The Vargr can't agree on anything much less a common sense law such as this. Hivers? Who knows? lol. Aslan? Thousands of clans each with their own laws. Outside of their broad culture, they don't agree on much either.
Yeah, but how many landmines were produced after that without those "protections" built in?
See the paragraph on Charted Space above.
Arkathan
Emperor Mongoose
SFB is largely putting out material for A Call to Arms now. No energy allocation anymore.
But, available thrust is still a useful unit for table top.
Until you get into short range, the bands readily convert to inches/cm's
Arkathan
Emperor Mongoose
No. The closest it came was turn modes and tumbles on a failed high energy turn.
collins355
Cosmic Mongoose
The great irony being Mongoose had a pretty good space combat miniatures ruleset (ACTA - Noble Armada) that is very playable without full vector movement mania. But instead we get the abomination of rangeband space combat.
No, they didn't.
I haven't played in quite a while. I'm sure rule changes cropped up along with publisher changes (how else does one get people to buy new books?). My experience with the game system goes back to the 80s/90s.
If you peel back Traveller missiles a lot of things start to fall apart. Warhead size in the missiles is woefully undersized to defeat starship hull strengths (let alone anything with say collapsed matter protection). And the more questions you ask, the more the system falls apart. A standard missile is just too small.
Traveller is not a wargame, and it's hodgepodge of rules / versions (Striker would be an exception) are a challenge for applicability for things that were not considered. As to the ability to shoehorn such things, I don't see it as a large challenge. Loitering munitions have a launch phase, a seeking phase and a new phase, the loitering one. Arguably the rules don't prohibit it either.
We have nearly two hundred nations on our single planet (fewer when these treaties were signed - and not every one of them is a signatory). We still manage to get some things done and agreed to on an international basis. We also have a large number of weapons manufactures (from the back-alley guys who build assault rifles by hand from locally produced parts to the major assembly lines). I'd throw out from a comparison sake anything that utilizes bullets, as bullets are just pieces of metal. Other races have the same issues that humans would have, thus it's reasonable to make such assumptions since there is no data to say it would not. There will always be cheaters for any rule, however that shouldn't be used as a defacto standard.
Many mines have been produced without protections built into them historically. We should be careful about using such a broad comparison brush though. The original 1907 treaty was oriented towards mines and torpedoes that were navigational hazards to ships rather than individuals. Space-based weaponry such as missiles and torpedoes would be similar analogs rather than anti-personnel mines.
In the SFB universe, ships move as speeds next to which anything moving in a Newtonian sense is standing still. Anyways, warp is not Newtonian, since you warp the shape of space to move along, so there is no momentum from it unless they want to handwave some in for no particular scientifically valid reason (usually the reason is to throw the bridge crew around the bridge for dramatic effect; one day they will buy seat belts). Although the universe is not known for consistency - ships move with the speed of the plot - it is clear that anything NOT moving using warp is basically not moving, even if it is getting close to light speed. So the Newtonian momentum of SFB ships, which might or might not be significant on Traveller scales, wouldn't even be worth keeping track of in SFB scale.
Arkathan
Emperor Mongoose
Amarillo Design Bureau is still pumping it out, I just haven't seen anything beyond ACTA material lately.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss the four inch binders for rules, plastic sleeves and grease pencils. Nostalgia is often masochistic.
That is the current sketched out plan...
Ships fought at impulse speed, not warp. And there wasn't any drifting speed. But that's not the comparison being made. The comparison was the over-arching system of movement of weapons and ships along with the tracking of energy allocation per turn. Traveller has no shields, but no energy is required to be allocated, so that's a moot point. It would come down to the same basic concepts though - plot your energy expenditures each turn and, depending on your energy output and requirements, you may be energy starved or not. Player ships would, as always, be a min/max design and the book ships would be more randomized. Other things like turn radius' and weapon arcs are going to be like shields - present in one system but not a concept in the other.
Traveller the RPG game is not meant to be a tactical-style form of starship combat like SFB. Not that it couldn't, but it's just not currently there. Adapting SFB-like concepts doesn't seem to be a big stretch if you wanted to go down that route - though a straight lift-and-shift would have some big holes in it.
The only time I had a 4 inch binder of rules was when I combined all the rule books. The SSD collection needed a larger binder.
Grease pencils and plastic sleeves were for the age of expensive copying ($.10ea or more per page). These days it would be just as easy to call up the SSD, print it out for the battle and dispose of it after the game was over (or just erase your pencil marks).
