"Viable ship vs ship weapons" Topic

So, every ship squares off and lights up the sky with beam weapons – but how viable would they be really? Would rockets or missiles be the weapon of choice? And how good would railgun solid slug projectile weapons be?
Just curious
What are your favourite weapons and why?

Go here:

link

Covers the subject better than I can.

Wow – what a great link. Thanks Hundvig, you're a gent!

Thank the guys who did the page, they did all the work. And a lot of work it was…

Since you mentioned it; has anyone been reading David Drake's series featuring the RCN officer Daniel Leary (starting with "With the Lightnings")? Classic space opera, some dubious technology; trying to make Aubrey and Maturin in space leads down some peculiar pathways.

But the ship-to-ship combat is interesting, although it would be horrible to game. Imagine literally setting and trimming sails in a space game.

Allen

Hmmmm. No thanks! Solar sails anyone?

What no elastic band slingshots?

trying to make Aubrey and Maturin in space leads down some peculiar pathways.

Especially the bit about falling out the open quarter gallery windows.

Yes Hundvig, a lot of work – particularly the number crunching and physics, which I suck at! And all these years, it seems, I've been lied to by my sci fi games! I was particularly surprised by the bit on nuclear weapons in space.
Anyhoo, I've googled this a lot and never found that site before – so you're still a gent. Off to the lounge with you for a drink on me!

Also in my next sci fi starship game I shall insist my crew stock up with tins of beans and launch them from the waste disposal chutes in a high speed drive by

No, no, you want M&Ms for the buckshot effect. "They melt in your mouth, and puncture your hull!"

aecurtis, I think youre making the Leary books sound worse than they really are. The "sails" are a part of the setting's FTL system, and you'll never have combat happening in FTL. They generally wouldn't be adjusting sails during realspace combat except to simply raise or lower them, depending on whether they need to degrade incoming plasma fire or preserve their "sailcloth" for later. Easy enough to game, I think.

Now the math on his missile accelerations, that deserves to be picked on a bit…but you could probably still game with his numbers intact if you don't mind some silliness. Or you could just divide by ten (or maybe even a hundred), and have something reasonable.

Another factiod (also from Nyrath's excellent Atomic Rockets site) is that the best weapon might be your thrusters- anything that can push a ship around at acceptable combat acceleration will do a number on anything behind and kinda near it.

-Will

As a footnote, a couple of the people cited on that page have been found guilty of repeated counts of "Preventing anyone else from having fun" on the Traveller Mailing List. I frankly don't care what they have to say on the matter.

From observing people trying to play it back in the '80s, I thought it was "Traveller" itself that was the worst culprit for "Preventing anyone else from having fun." Mind-numbing, it seemed to me at the time!

Actually, I believe there is FTL combat in the Leary series, Rich; I've only read a couple, but I thought there were references to it occurring previously. In any case, managing the sails while out on the hull in exo-suits is a recurring event in realspace combat.

Allen

Talk to the guys at Ad Astra Games, the 'Attack Vector' folks. They seem to have it pretty well down.

Traveller – play it with a more action oriented system, like BESM, D6, Savage Worlds. I love the setting, but I really don't want to worry about vectors. As long as G1 is slower than G6, and FGMPs vaporize people, it works just fine for me. I mean, c'mon, this is the game that had reactionless thrusters. Fuel consumption is only for FTL concerns, to make you slow down at each stop.

From observing people trying to play it back in the '80s, I thought it was "Traveller" itself that was the worst culprit for "Preventing anyone else from having fun." Mind-numbing, it seemed to me at the time!

Ah yes, the days before players figured out that most of the rules were meant to be used by the referee *between games*.

Traveller lives on, however, despite the efforts of several online "personalities" (a disclaimer here, as I'm not sure these people actually have any personality) who feel the need to shoot down any idea that might make the game easier to play, more fun to visualize, or allow the game to cater to a more action-oriented audience. Some of these folks will cheerlessly claim that "simple physics" disallows the neat idea, often while displaying a shocking lack of actual knowledge of physics or the engineering involved to make their assertions valid. That these people are continually reinforcing the tortuous impressions that Allen got many years ago has probably done more harm to the game than they will ever allow themselves to realize.

And no, I'm not talking about the primary writers for the game.

Interesting website. If my wife was a gamer, I might have been able to get her to read it, but she prefers her sci-fi to be "soft" as opposed to the hard stuff we're talking about. This is because she was working on some of the toys they're discussing during the "star wars" program.

Weapons derived from the "Shiva Star" program are notably missing from the discussion on that website.

I think I found a hole, however (quite possible that I've overlooked it in the text too)in the X-ray discussion. The writer says that there are "No X-ray Mirrors" however you can do just about the same thing with very strong magnetic fields. You just don't try to bend the beam at extreme angles, but you can make it curve. So, if your primary "ignition" of the x-laser (or even a maser) was a coil, you could pump up the energy while still taking up a rather small amount of physical space. Especially if you were to build a double coil where energy flows up one coil and down the second until enough energy is built up and then released.

Another option for powering a laser is that described for tri-barrels in "Hammer's Slammers". A plastic disk with copper ions is the ammunition. When energy is applied to the disk, the ions are converted to coherent light.

But, back to the original question. It all depends on physics and the method of spaceflight.

Larry Niven's "Known Space" universe uses Bussard Ramjets. A Kzin ship takes out a human ship by dropping gold dust ahead of the human ship, which the ram ingests causing catastrophic failure. At near-light speeds, your weaponry is limited to "shotgun" area attacks or missiles. Using a Traveller reference, the sandcaster becomes an offensive weapon under these conditions.

White Dwarf had a good discussion on space combat entitled "They're Peppering Us With Grapeshot" or something to that effect which discussed the use of solid shot (ie, kinetic weaponry) which, while not scholarly, did explain the viability at sublight speeds.

FTL combat, unless in "jumpsace" similar to Babylon 5, is going to be impossible. There was a rather good article on it in Asimov Magazine in the 1970's.

David Weber's "Honorverse" probably has the best real-world physics for starship combat. It shows that while a capital ship could have enough firepower to vaporize anything in space, it would also have vulnerabilities that would keep it from being indestructible.

All of that said, I would remind everyone (especially the wanna-be physicists that Gypsy Comet mentions) that we're generally talking 100 years in the future. 100 years ago, humanity was still trying to put together a decent flashlight, much less a laser. And the Curies were still making hand shadows on film while absorbing radiation from the unshielded radium on their lab bench.

Wyatt

That should've been "…100 years or more in the future.."

Wyatt

Brilliant website!! Amazingly, it's the first I've seen of it; I have already sent the site's author a request to link MX with them, as IMHO the content of the site should be *mandatory* reading for all science fiction gamers and fans alike!

Excellent stuff and great food for thought!

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

P.S. I wanna Colt-Vickers Atomic Rifle…NOW!!! Bwahahahaahaaaa!!!