War in the Future! -- Hammer Discussion [Archive]

Countercheck

02-24-2007, 01:08 PM

There is a long and honourable tradition of naval warfare in the Mediterranean... greco-roman naval battles could include hundreds of ships. Check out the Battle of Salamis. The army and navy were very much mutually supporting in ancient times... the army relied on the navy for supply, since overland transport was dreadfully slow and inconvenient, and the navy relied on the army for protection... most warships back then were tiny and very lightly built, and crammed as many oarsmen onboard as possible.... more oarsmen=more speed aand power. And lots of power+a light, small ship means great speed and maneuverability. And great discomfort... the ships were so small and carried so few supplies that they would generally beach themselves at night. A beached trireme is an excellent target for a cavalry patrol...

Outside of the baltic, naval warfare between ships didn't really take off until much, much later. The weather was too bad to use light galleys, and sailing technology wasn't up to the challenge of not only allowing ships to sail in the rough water but also allow ships to FIND each other, let alone move in concert to fighting range. Then there was the problem of actually hurting your opponent. What, really could you do? Ramming was only really viable in calmish seas with specialized, oared boats. Artillery was very short ranged, inaccurate, weak, and bulky. It also needed to be mounted on the main deck... very hard to fit a ballista below decks. Archery was possible, but not really terribly effective. The only way to decicively beat your enemy was to close and board them. This was exacerbated by the fact that most warships of the time were converted merchantmen that manouvered like cows. Ships are very valuable assets, and no lord was going to waste money on a ship that was only good for fighting.

It was only in the late 1400s and early 1500s that sailing technology improved to an extent where ocean-going vessels could effectively fight each other. Cannon were also a hugely significant development. Now you could pack a ship with artillery instead of mounting 2 or 3 ballistas or trebuchets on fighting platforms (interestingly, the modern terms Forecastle or fo'c's'le and aftercastle are derived from the practice of building towers on the forward and after portions of the ship to provide for a firing platform and to discourage boarders. Those developments also made it more difficult to simply refit merchantmen, and more dedicated warships began to appear.

Sydney, I'm sure I've gotten some of the dates wrong, but I think the basic evolution is correct.

Edit: THe chinese, as with most things, were far more advanced than europe at the time. They had massive fleets, and sturdy oceangoing ships. They nearly organized a circumnavigation of the world, but it fell prey to political intrigue... as I recall, the eunuchs controlled the navy, and they got purged, so their plans got scrapped.

Paul B

02-24-2007, 02:23 PM

(Cross-posted from our Pie Rats fight @ the Arena):

Played any EVE Online? Greatest PVP MMO ever conceived, unless you just want to putter around and check out the universe. Everyone's a pirate or in an escort protecting themselves from pirates. It's actually a fucking evil place to spend your free time in, and I can't tolerate the stress it produces in me just trying to get from system to system. Probably I sympathize too much with the victims to be a good victimizer.

The piracy gig in EVE is that you have a) honorable pirates who threaten to gut your ship unless you hand it over, and then allow you to escape in a life raft and b) cutthroat murderers who won't parlay and just blast the shit out of you by camping in high-value/low-security areas. The a) group can be negotiated with and are tolerated by the community, the b) group cannot be negotiated with and seems to get off on being stalked by bounty hunters.

I'm still trying to dial in how common spacecraft really are in this game. The restrictions on which PCs can have ships suggest they're expensive on par with, say, private jets. (That's one of my SF game gauges I use to explain macroeconomy to players: how common are starships? As common as cars? Commercial trucks? Private jets? Princess cruise ships? Aircraft carriers?)

If they're on par with private jets, or in medieval-speak, as common as privately owned merchant vessels, I'd imagine anything worse than a tiny bit of damage done to a ship could conceivably ruin the owner's finances. Alternately, the assumption is that if you own a ship, you're fabulously wealthy by default because of the very ship itself (i.e. you can leverage the ship's value for loans and such).

Or we're back to the South Pacific Modern Pirate model, in which a trawler is just the delivery system for an asymmetrically-priced attack element (i.e. a $500 RPG that can sink a $500k ship). Conceivably, space could be crawling with trawlers.

This is where the game's resources mechanics make everything fuzzy. It's not clear to me that the price difference between a trawler-type in-system shuttle is really that far apart from an armed patrol craft. Well...they're half price according to the rules (Ob8 for a shuttle, Ob16 for a patrol craft -- does that price include the Artillery(1) weaponry?).

p.

Countercheck

02-24-2007, 03:14 PM

Well, the RPG can't SINK the freighter... it can just put a big unpleasant hole in it that needs to be repaired. I also think you may be overpricing your RPG, there =)

In game terms... yes, I believe the Ob16 includes the artillery. The increase in price is non-linear. The patrol craft probably costs a couple of orders of magnitude more than the shuttle. Which is as it should be, given the patrol craft has military grade sensors and artillery, is a hell of a lot tougher and faster, and has a disruption drive.

And I've never played EVE. Do you need to pay?

Tasoth

02-24-2007, 05:04 PM

-I think range would only be limited based on fuel and the availability of supplies for a crew. A heavily automated vessel with a huge fuel reserve would probably be able to operate for a long time without need for much supplies.

-Space is vast. Compared to the sun, the earth is a grain of sand. So a starship would only be limited by the amount of resources and time used to build it. Truly monstrous vessels, multiple KM or so, are microscope in the grand scope of space.

-I would think marines or shipboard security would handle defense of the ship. Crew would probably have weapon stations near by so that they too would be able to help repel boarders.

-Unless you're running around with a pocket howitzer, I don't think you really have much to fear in punching a hole in a ship with an anti-infantry weapon. Considering there is no force restricting tonnage, hull armor tens of feet thick could be possible, although probably expensive and a weee bit over board.

Countercheck

02-24-2007, 09:52 PM

While this is true, it actually IS possible to carry a hand howitzer =P It is called a Fuzor =) and it will breach a Hammer Cruiser's hull 2/3 of the time.

There's another important thing to factor into Hammer deployment lengths. They have relatively small crews, are confined, and repeatedly subject themselves to a truly harrowing experience (jumping). I could see them suffering from a high rate of psychological casualties.

Sydney Freedberg

02-25-2007, 01:22 PM

My optional Hammer lifepaths Master-at-Arms (http://www.burningempires.com/wiki/index.php?title=Military_and_Security_lifepaths#Ma ster-at-Arms) and Saboteur (http://www.burningempires.com/wiki/index.php?title=Military_and_Security_lifepaths#Sa boteur) were very much designed with the paradigm of high-tech, small-crew ships and stations, where control of computerized systems (via the Security and Security Rigging skills) can be as decisive as hand-to-hand combat. If a ship's highly automated -- to save on crew -- and highly compartmentalized -- to withstand battle damage -- then a major tactic against mutineers or boarders might be to try to seal them off in one part of the hull, behind heavy blast doors, slowing them down while they bring up heavy equipment or drill through. (I'd imagine blazing away with a Fusor at a blast door three meters away is not a particularly safe breaching technique, especially in an enclosed compartment.) A boarding action against a military-grade ship might look like a war in an ever-changing labyrinth, with each size trying to take control of the blast doors, life support, and gravity to try to block its adversaries' movement. I suspect that the ship boarded in Faith Conquers was a relatively easy nut to crack because it was a merchant, not a warship, and probably lacked internal compartmentalization to slow the boarder down once they'd blown the outer hull.

Tasoth

02-25-2007, 06:12 PM

While this is true, it actually IS possible to carry a hand howitzer =P It is called a Fuzor =) and it will breach a Hammer Cruiser's hull 2/3 of the time.

That came to me after I posted last night. Although I do think if you're using a fuzor as an anti-personnel weapon, you're one scary person.

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 07:58 AM

It's hard to talk intelligently about Hammer because we've seen so little of it in the comics: the only "canonical" starship vs. starship engagement is Geil's privateer disabling the Vaylen smuggling ship in Faith Conquers, which is pretty brief and one-sided. We need more data, and there's only one source....

Paging Chris Moeller -- Chris Moeller, white courtesy phone, please.

cmoeller

02-26-2007, 08:41 AM

Hello. Yes this is he. Really? Okay, I'll take the call, just give me a moment to finish my champagne and caviar.

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Excellent thread. I'm going to post a little Hammer Warfare primer I put together for myself and my proof reader. I'm writing a new IE story that concentrates entirely on Hammer issues, so this is stuff I've been working on a lot lately. These are notes only, not final...

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Starship combat in a nutshell: there are three kinds of drives, Distortion drives (DD), Conventional drives (CTA: chemical thrust acceleration) and Grav/pressor drives (which only provide viable thrust in a gravity well). Distortion Drives are the prime movers in space combat. They operate in two modes Hyperexpansion (HEx), which is used for interstellar travel, and subluminal expansion (SEx!?), which is used for interplanetary travel. Hyperexpansion isn’t a “jump” but it might as well be in terms of space combat. A ship that engages its drives at HEx expansions will vanish from the conflict.

So D-drives operating at subluminal expansions dictate the characteristics of hammer batttles in the IE. Here are the salient points about D-drives:

DISTORTION DRIVES
- An active D-drive creates a dimensional bubble, the boundary of which displays the characteristics of the antiverse (matter is antimatter, time travels in reverse, gravitons are pressors). The extent of the antiverse’s influence on our universe can be exaggerated or diminished by the drive generating the effect (the technobabble for this is “emergence”).

- Result #1: Time (t) at the boundary of the distortion effect is influenced by the negative value of time in the anti-verse. In the positive universe, time has a value of 1 (t=1). In the antiverse t= -1. At the boundary of the distortion effect, the value of time changes, depending on the emergence of the effect. Let’s say time at the boundary equals 0.5 (t=0.5). If the drive creating the distortion effect is moving at 10 meters per second, the result will be a sphere of positive space, centered on the drive, moving along its original vector at 10 meters per half-second. Time “inside” the sphere and time outside the sphere continue at normal, real world values (1). But the sphere as a whole is slipping through space on a different (a distorted) clock.

- Result #2: the influence of Gravity at the boundary is lessened. This has no appreciable effect since distortion field opens only in regions of space that have very little gravitational influence (see below).

- Result #3: small particles of positive matter at the boundary may begin to act like anti-matter, depending on how high the emergence is. D-drives are sensitive to the presence of particles. If too much matter is present at the rim of the effect, the drive will not open or it will collapse. This is not instantaneous, and there are odd effects with quantum particles (photons). This effect is utilized by the Q-beam weapon, which dials up a brief, nearly 100% emergence over a very large area, almost always resulting in matter/antimatter events along its boundary before it collapses.

WEAPONS
These include Q-beams (primary weapons), lasers, missiles, energy weapons and artillery.

Missiles, equipped with CTA drives, utilizing either nuclear warheads, kinetic energy or some sort of submunition to deal damage to their target. Essentially useless against a ship with a functioning D-Drive.

Torpedoes, with Distortion drives of their own. These tend to be either sensors, “mines”, fire-platforms or Nails (torpedoes equipped with field suppressors designed to interfere with the target’s distortion drive, preventing it from engaging.

Lasers, Artillery and Energy Weapons (Fusors, Screws):
these are fairly limited weapons in deep space, where ships are darting around at high speed and at long range. Any time that DDU’s are unable to operate, however, they begin to come into play. They may also play a defensive role against incoming Torpedoes.

Q-beams
the true hammer weapon, relying on anti-matter annihilation for their “punch”. The biggest ships field up to 5 or 6 of these. Most Line ships carry 1-2. These are fired on vectors ahead of ships moving at distortion speed. Their range is very great, but their accuracy is limited. when they hit, they destroy.

DEFENSE

Armor:
conventional armor that has zero effect on Q-beam strikes, and varying effect on conventional weapons.

Power Grid:
Layers of energy dispersing armor combined with large heat dispersion components. These provide some defense against Q-beam near-misses.

Dark Ships:
SDA Sensor Dampening Arrays: A high tech “cloaking” technology. It's the opposite of the Star Trek version... it blinds sensors, not visuals. Not in use in blood and iron

Jump Ships
These small ships are “fired” interstellar distances by a precipitator, fight for a limited time before automatically “beaming” back to where they came from. also used for communication torpedoes. Also not in this story.

-----------

*sound of Chris hanging up*

Paul B

02-26-2007, 08:59 AM

sEX drive...thanks so much for making me snort Raisin Bran out my nose.

Awesome primer, lots to think about. More as soon as I get this flake extracted from my sinus cavity.

p.

Paul B

02-26-2007, 09:19 AM

Okay, I don't even want to get into weapon attacks moving at FTL ("distortion") speeds because that'll just end up in tears. Or is the point of the distortion field not to make things move FTL, but to reduce the energy needed to get them up to just-under-FTL speeds? I'm sure there are all kinds of relativistic consequences of that, too, but at least I can get my head wrapped around that easier than attacks that occur before the attacker pulls the trigger...

This kinda-more-realistic-than-I-was-envisioning vision of Hammer tech strongly suggests to me that piracy and small-scale engagements are probably impractical if not impossible. Under this scenario, sensors are probably effective out to a few light-seconds at least. SDA would have to be awesomely effective and the sneaker-upper would have to be very, very patient. And then you're probably talking about straight-up boarding actions rather than big lazy broadside attacks a la Battlefleet Gothic.

How expensive/rare/restricted/advanced are these anti-distortion distortion torps? Because I could totally see regions of space seeded with silent, nigh-invisible minefields armed with this stuff, just waiting to snag a ship so it can be engaged.

So, given there's not much "surprise" to speak of in Hammer warfare and it's really, really hard to achieve any kind of firing solution, I'm wondering if there's much meaningful Hammer warfare at all! Perhaps it's centered largely around immobile assets like space stations, moon bases, mining colonies, starports, etc. There aren't discrete entry/exit point for ships arriving via HEx, are there? IE "gateways" or places where attackers/defenders could camp.

Just thinkin' out loud. Thanks for the post, Chris!

p.

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 09:45 AM

A key question is how far out from a planet or a star you have to be before Distortion can work. If you could stay in HEx until you're so close to a target that you can open fire -- and then zap back into HEx -- it'd be possible to strafe a planet with nearly zero chance of being intercepted or hit; it'd also be nearly impossible to force another Hammer to fight you. But recalling this earlier discussion about some aspects of Hammer warfare (http://burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3466), HEx starts to give out fairly far from planets, so it is possible for a defender to intercept incoming ships before they close to planetary bombardment range and for an attacker to catch defending ships too close to a gravity well/planetary accretion disk for them to HEx out.

But still, bringing a Hammer fleet to battle against its will is going to be tremendously hard, because they just have to keep far enough away from a solar system. I suspect interstellar fleet operations (as opposed to planetary sieges) would look a lot like Age of Sail naval warfare, where it was nigh-impossible to find an enemy fleet in the open ocean, let alone bring it to battle, and 90% of decisive battles happened close to land because one side was trying to invade another's territory or blockade another's ports. Trafalgar happens just off the Straits of Gibraltar, the Battle of the Nile happens on a river, the Spanish Armada battle is in the narrows of the English Channel, etc.

Countercheck

02-26-2007, 09:47 AM

Given the extreme difficulty hitting targets with operational distortion drives, I see space combat occurring in two main paradigms

First is long range duels. Two ships, or fleets, with active SEx drives (heee) engage each other at long range, peppering each other with Q-beams. Such a battle will not be decisive, as either side can choose to break off at any time. A successful hit with Nails is one of the prime objectives in such a battle, because then the enemy is forced to remain in system until the damaged fleet can get its distortion drive online, else they must sacrifice it to withdraw.

(Question, does a successful Nails hit on the engines knock out both SEx and HEx? The Napoleonic equivalent of dismasting a target? In game terms, does it count as an Engines Destroyed hit? If so, they seem like pirate weapons, but what worries me is they are unable to achieve a Breach result against any kind of Mercantor which means they are unable to target a Mercantor's engines.)

Second is close range slugging. Perhaps a squadron of Dark Ships manages to envelope a hostile hammer squadron, cutting off their line of retreat. Perhaps both ships are exiting a gravity well. Perhaps there is an objective, like a planet, that cannot be abandoned. In this situation, the aggressor has the ability to control the range and intensity of the engagement, much like having the Weather Gage in the age of sail. In this case, engagement ranges can be shortened to the point where lasers and missiles can play a powerful role again, and retreat becomes difficult. Ship velocities will be lower, as the confining battlespace prevents high speed maneuvers, lest one be carried all the way out of the battle and away from the objective one was protecting.

Edit: crossposted with Paul AND Sydney

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 09:49 AM

Mike and I crossposted, but we're very much thinking along the same lines. Jinx, buy me an [unspecified soft drink]! (Resources roll against Obstacle of 1, +1D if you name the soft drink).

cmoeller

02-26-2007, 10:23 AM

Hey guys,

Answers to your bombardment below:

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Paul B
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Okay, I don't even want to get into weapon attacks moving at FTL ("distortion") speeds because that'll just end up in tears. Or is the point of the distortion field not to make things move FTL, but to reduce the energy needed to get them up to just-under-FTL speeds? I'm sure there are all kinds of relativistic consequences of that, too, but at least I can get my head wrapped around that easier than attacks that occur before the attacker pulls the trigger...

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You’re right on the second point, Paul: nobody actually goes ftl. Time stays the same for the moving ship and the observer “outside”. A ship generates a pre-determined thrust vector, then engages its hex drive to increase the apparent effect of that vector.

Time gets wonky at the distortion boundary. In hex, it gets REALLY REALLY wonky. The sickness that travellers feel is from the distortion bondary travelling through their bodies as it expands out to its operating diameter. The field is manipulated by the tails you see in the comics. The tail can manipulate the emergence of the effect as well as its diameter, so there’s a very small emergence as the effect initiates (so the traveller’s body isn’t completely screwed by the time shifts), and it increases once it’s clear of the ship’s hull).

---

This kinda-more-realistic-than-I-was-envisioning vision of Hammer tech strongly suggests to me that piracy and small-scale engagements are probably impractical if not impossible. Under this scenario, sensors are probably effective out to a few light-seconds at least. SDA would have to be awesomely effective and the sneaker-upper would have to be very, very patient. And then you're probably talking about straight-up boarding actions rather than big lazy broadside attacks a la Battlefleet Gothic.

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The big lazy broadsides are actually the only way that ships without Q-beams can fight. Secondary weapons can only operate effectively against ships whose drives are Shut Down (term of art), so getting in close, or nailing a ship, or ambushing a ship inside orbit, or an asteroid field, or whatever it takes to shut it down... is a key tactical objective.

Note that if you can shut down a ship, and another ship with a Q-beam can land a direct hit on it (no small feat, even against a stalled ship), you will kill it outright, regardless of size or defenses.

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How expensive/rare/restricted/advanced are these anti-distortion distortion torps? Because I could totally see regions of space seeded with silent, nigh-invisible minefields armed with this stuff, just waiting to snag a ship so it can be engaged.

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Distortion torpedoes are as expensive as a small ship. They have their purposes, I’d imagine, but all you’re saving on money is crew facilities. One idea I’ve thought about is, defensively, seeding your gas giants to “nail” intruders who are trying to poach fuel.

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So, given there's not much "surprise" to speak of in Hammer warfare and it's really, really hard to achieve any kind of firing solution, I'm wondering if there's much meaningful Hammer warfare at all! Perhaps it's centered largely around immobile assets like space stations, moon bases, mining colonies, starports, etc. There aren't discrete entry/exit point for ships arriving via HEx, are there? IE "gateways" or places where attackers/defenders could camp.

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There aren’t gateways, no. There are transit lanes that have been painstakingly mapped over the centuries (millenia) to allow travel between systems, avoiding dust clouds that shut down travel, but their entry and exit points are not exact. You can get an idea of which system a ship is going to based on its exit vector though.

The key to space warfare is particle (ie: gravity) fields. Star systems are essentially dust clouds spun out into a disk by the pull of their central star. North and South (relatively) of the disk, things are particle free, and HEx drives can micro jump around to their heart’s content. No space combat out there.

Inside the disk, most of the particles have been vaccuumed up by any planets in the system, but there’s enough there to prevent HEx expansions. SEx (ha ha) is fine, but that’s it.

Inside a planet’s orbit or in asteroid fields or dust clouds of any kind, no distortion at all (and that includes Q-beam hits, since they involve opening a distortion field).

Those are your strategic choke points. The moment a ship enters a system’s disk, it’s vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. It can’t just beam away on HEx. A faster ship can intercept it, shutting down its Distortion drives just by pulling alongside (its gravity field is strong enough to Shut Down the drive). Send in a nail and the ship is engaged until your guys can detatch it from the hull by going EVA.

Obviously, refuelling or entering orbit is the most vulnerable point for an attack.

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Sydney Freedberg
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A key question is how far out from a planet or a star you have to be before Distortion can work. If you could stay in HEx until you're so close to a target that you can open fire -- and then zap back into HEx -- it'd be possible to strafe a planet with nearly zero chance of being intercepted or hit; it'd also be nearly impossible to force another Hammer to fight you. But recalling this earlier discussion about some aspects of Hammer warfare, HEx starts to give out fairly far from planets, so it is possible for a defender to intercept incoming ships before they close to planetary bombardment range and for an attacker to catch defending ships too close to a gravity well/planetary accretion disk for them to HEx out.

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Right. There are two strategic points that govern travel into and out of a planet: North and South watch. Those are the closest points “over and under” a planet that HEx can be engaged. Patrol ships are often posted there to check papers and ID’s of ships entering the disk.

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But still, bringing a Hammer fleet to battle against its will is going to be tremendously hard, because they just have to keep far enough away from a solar system. I suspect interstellar fleet operations (as opposed to planetary sieges) would look a lot like Age of Sail naval warfare, where it was nigh-impossible to find an enemy fleet in the open ocean, let alone bring it to battle, and 90% of decisive battles happened close to land because one side was trying to invade another's territory or blockade another's ports. Trafalgar happens just off the Straits of Gibraltar, the Battle of the Nile happens on a river, the Spanish Armada battle is in the narrows of the English Channel, etc.

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Yes! A fleet is invulnerable until it enters a system disk to re-fuel or launch an invasion. Age-of-sail comparisons are good here.
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Countercheck
Master Burner
Tax Collector

Given the extreme difficulty hitting targets with operational distortion drives, I see space combat occurring in two main paradigms

First is long range duels. Two ships, or fleets, with active SEx drives (heee) engage each other at long range, peppering each other with Q-beams. Such a battle will not be decisive, as either side can choose to break off at any time. A successful hit with Nails is one of the prime objectives in such a battle, because then the enemy is forced to remain in system until the damaged fleet can get its distortion drive online, else they must sacrifice it to withdraw.

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Yes. Q-beams at long range is the basic paradigm. Once ships begin to be hit, they will lose their ability to operate distortion drives and become targets for boarding or annihilation.

A comment about Nails and Fighters. Nails are less about shutting down a ship with an operating D-Drive than they are about keeping a ship that’s shut down, shut down. Any sort of weapon hit (particularly from a Q-beam) is going to cause a shower of particles to shoot off of the target’s hull and out into its Distortion field, shutting it down. That’s a temporary shut-down though, since once the ship can drive clear of the debris, it can engage its D-drives again. A Nail or a boarding ship (or fighters staying in close), can prevent the drive from re-engaging.

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(Question, does a successful Nails hit on the engines knock out both SEx and HEx? The Napoleonic equivalent of dismasting a target? In game terms, does it count as an Engines Destroyed hit? If so, they seem like pirate weapons, but what worries me is they are unable to achieve a Breach result against any kind of Mercantor which means they are unable to target a Mercantor's engines.)
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Yes, the Distortion Drive is down in all of its aspects.

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Second is close range slugging. Perhaps a squadron of Dark Ships manages to envelope a hostile hammer squadron, cutting off their line of retreat. Perhaps both ships are exiting a gravity well. Perhaps there is an objective, like a planet, that cannot be abandoned. In this situation, the aggressor has the ability to control the range and intensity of the engagement, much like having the Weather Gage in the age of sail. In this case, engagement ranges can be shortened to the point where lasers and missiles can play a powerful role again, and retreat becomes difficult. Ship velocities will be lower, as the confining battlespace prevents high speed maneuvers, lest one be carried all the way out of the battle and away from the objective one was protecting.

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Exactly right. Ships can’t actually fire while their distortion boundary is up... the time-distortion fucks up their sensors. So ships “phase” in and out of distortion, dropping out long enough to get a fix with sensors and launch their attack, then driving ahead to a new position before dropping out again.

Sensor drones are very very big, because you can drop a drone early in the fight and have it develop firing solutions which it can feed to you the next time you drop out of distortion.

A note on Dark Ships: they use an unabashedly handwavium technology. They are just too cool not to exist, however. They are submarines, and a whole slew of detection technologies exist to counteract them. I’ll write more about them later.

Chris

Paul B

02-26-2007, 10:42 AM

Okay, so I'm starting to see some narrative truisms coming out of this:

* Most Hammer warfare occurs within the system's gravity/particle disc, mostly around immobile assets.

* Dark Ships are presumably more effective than the sensors they're dodging, but following the submarine analogy they're probably small, expensive and perhaps not as well armed as their prey. Presumably they're used to immobilize bigger enemy craft so they can be engaged on the attacker's terms?

* Given the limitations of HEx and Q-beams, I don't honestly see how this level of warfare ever takes place without something/someone shutting down the target's drive long enough to work out a fire solution. Both the attacker and the defender must be out in instant-jumpaway space, yes? Perhaps there are Q-beam/sensor installations set up north and south of the elliptic, kind of the equivalent of big cannons at the mouths of harbors?

* I'm digging the idea that the tech seems to support an Age of Sail style of warfare. Does that AoS vibe carry through culturally as well? We know there are trade ships, pirates, privateers, official navies...is there anything left to explore? Is there any sense that there's a New World type region of space? Or is humanity pretty much hemmed in on all sides?

p.

cmoeller

02-26-2007, 12:43 PM

* Dark Ships are presumably more effective than the sensors they're dodging, but following the submarine analogy they're probably small, expensive and perhaps not as well armed as their prey. Presumably they're used to immobilize bigger enemy craft so they can be engaged on the attacker's terms?

Right.

* Given the limitations of HEx and Q-beams, I don't honestly see how this level of warfare ever takes place without something/someone shutting down the target's drive long enough to work out a fire solution. Both the attacker and the defender must be out in instant-jumpaway space, yes? Perhaps there are Q-beam/sensor installations set up north and south of the elliptic, kind of the equivalent of big cannons at the mouths of harbors?

You can get a fix on a target moving at sublight speeds... the time distortion, to an outsider, isn't really obvious. It "catches" light as it comes in, and accelerates it out again in odd bursts, but to the naked eye, a distorting ship is just moving fast. You can get sensor readings off of it and track it, set up firing solutions, all of that. The only weapon systems with the range to really take advantage of that are torpedoes and Q-beams. Sure, I can see Q-beams at the North Watch in some sort of zero-speed monitor.

* I'm digging the idea that the tech seems to support an Age of Sail style of warfare. Does that AoS vibe carry through culturally as well? We know there are trade ships, pirates, privateers, official navies...is there anything left to explore? Is there any sense that there's a New World type region of space? Or is humanity pretty much hemmed in on all sides?

There is the Void! It stretches for thousands and thousands of light years in all directions. Here's a bit from the archives:

"The IRON EMPIRES consist of 8 tiny interstellar nations which cluster at the heart of the long-dead HUMAN FEDERATION. The Federation once controlled a vast volume of space, containing several millions of worlds. The Iron Empires, last vestiges of that mighty nation, control less than 10,000 worlds.

Beyond the 10,000 worlds, there is THE VOID. The Void consists of that huge area surrounding the Empires that was once ruled by the Federation. It is basically unknown. The further away from the Empires you travel, the less known it becomes. What strange stories wait to be discovered in those mist-shrouded reaches? The Void with its millions of "lost" worlds, is left open for exploration. "

-Chris

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 01:10 PM

It's interesting how critical it is to get the technology right before the discussion can move, when it comes to "naval" (Hammer) warfare. That's not the case for planetside (Anvil) operations. Terrain doesn't change, human nature doesn't change, and those are by far the two biggest forces in ground combat -- but combat in media where human beings aren't evolved to live (the air, the sea, space) depends on technology to happen at all, and is therefore massively shaped by the technology available.

I'm seeing space, from the point of view of Hammer operations, divided into at least three concentric spheres:

Deep Space
Gravitational influences and dust presence are negligible. HEx drive is unimpeded. Ships can disengage at will, so combat is impossible without either
(1) willingness on both sides,
(2) a very clever ambush -- probably involving Dark Ships or treachery by "friendly" ships lying alongside -- that Nails the enemy's distortion drives before they can react, or
(3) sabotage by agents with access to the enemy's distortion drives.
Maneuver in deep space is about posing threats -- real or feinted -- and is constrained only by logistics.
Note that since dust appears to be a bigger problem than gravity, Deep Space comes quite close to any given planet from the North and South, i.e. "above" and "below" the solar system's accretion disk.

Near Space
(possibly subdivided into "Open" and "Near")
Gravity is still slight, but dust is significant, to the level that HEx drives cannot engage -- but SEx and Q-Beams can. This is the area where fleet engagements can actually occur, because each side has to maneuver a significant distance before it can engage HEx to escape, and the weapons available have a long enough range to catch ships fleeing at such speeds and distances. A main objective of such battles is to limit the enemy's ability to maneuver, either by "dismasting" enemy ships with Nail hits or by blocking their escape route to Deep Space. Depending on how brutal Q-beams are, combat could be a matter of instant annihilation for the loser, or dismasted ships could drift serenely in the knowledge that the winning side's salvage crews will be along shortly and that skilled crewmen are always in short supply and worth saving, no matter whose side they started out on (viz. the Press Ganged (http://www.burningempires.com/wiki/index.php?title=Military_and_Security_lifepaths#Pr ess-Ganged) optional lifepath).
Near Space is entirely confined to the accretion disk of solar systems (or to rare interstellar phenomena such as dust clouds, viz the Beserker story "Stone Place"). Morever, if you're far from a planet but still within the accretion disk, the logical thing to do is go "up" (or "down") out of the disk, go into Deep Space, and zip along at HEx until you get close to your destination, then "drop down" (or "pop up") back into the dust again. So as a practical matter, Near Space only exists in the vicinity of a given planet that has strategic significance, as a point of resupply for Hammer (i.e. gas giants for fuel, staryards, space stations) or as an objective of the war (i.e. inhabited worlds).
How far out from these points Near Space actually extends is a critical question. If the range of Q-Beams is equal to or greater than the distance from the dust cloud at which HEx fails, then any fleet engagement will always occur in range of a planetary fotress (if one exists). If HEx fails, and ships must engage SEx (errr), far enough from a planet that Q-beams on that planet can't hit them, there is such a thing as "Open Space" where fleet engagements occur outside the range of "shore batteries," even in fortified systems.

Tight Space
(possibly subdivided into "Tight" and "Atmosphere")
Gravity and dust effects are so intense that distortion drives don't work at all; nor do weapons that rely on distortion effects, like Q-Beams or torpedoes. Ships must fight using relatively short-range weapons like fusor cannon. What's more, ships must maneuver using conventional thrust or -- assuming there's enough gravity to work with -- using grav/pressor technology, which radically limits their speed and agility. Maneuver is clumsy, weapons are short-ranged, and combat is a brutal close-quarters grapple in which the losers spiral down to burn up in atmosphere instead of drifting demurely awaiting rescue.
Again, the distance at which distortion fails is critical: Is "Tight Space" so tight that these conditions only apply in the upper atmosphere, or does it extend significantly beyond the atmosphere? Specifically, is there a radius from a planet at which distortion fails but Q-beams still work, because if there is, that's a zone of death for Hammer assets approaching a planetary fortress: They can't fire their Q-beams into atmosphere, they can't maneuver worth a damn without distortion, but Q-beams on the planet can hit them.

Three crucial questions we still need to answer:

How far out do the dust clouds go? Specifically, how far "above" and "below" a solar system's plane of rotation is the dust thick enough to impede HEx, and how far out from a planet is the dust (and gravity) thick enough to impede SEx and Q-beams? I'm not interested in figures in kilometers so much as figures in terms of travel time at the speeds possible in such environments.

How long and far can a Hammer starship go before it needs resupply? And what is the different threshold before needing resupply of what level: gas giant to skim for fuel vs. friendly planet to get spare parts vs. spacedock.

Can you see a ship coming at HEx (i.e. at effectively faster-than-light speeds)? If so, how, and from how far away, and what degree of effective warning does that provide?

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 01:17 PM

P.S. The number of different concentric spheres matters a lot for the flavor of combat. We're basically looking at three options (where "radius" means "minimum distance from a planet at which this kind of distortion drive can be engaged):

1) HEx radius > SEx radius > Q-Beam range
Maneuver dominates firepower in any fleet engagement, and planetary bombardment/defense is a separate kind of operation.

2) HEx radius > Q-Beam range > SEx radius
Maneuver dominates at longer ranges, firepower at shorter ranges.

3) Q-Beam range > HEx radius > SEx radius
Firepower dominates maneuver, and any fleet engagement near a planetary fortress is effectively a siege of that planet.

cmoeller

02-26-2007, 02:23 PM

Hi Sydney,

Okay, this is where the physics give way to "good storytelling". Option 3 is out. You can't fire out of the disk.

Essentially Sublight Expansion (I'm sorry I ever came up with SEx!!!), and Q-beams shut down in exactly the same conditions. HEx is much more sensitive.

The exact density of the disk is something I don't know about. It's going to be "thicker" closer to the sun, much thinner the farther out you go (this too has ramifications for Hammer fighting, since on outer planets you can HEx right in to your goal). My intention is to have inner planets pretty deep into the disk. You would have hours of travel at normal distortion to get out of it. Outer system Gas Giants would be easier to get to (roughly half the travel time required for an inner planet?). High Orbit (and further out than that, by a bit) is off-limits to DD of any flavor. This would vary by planet, by system even, some being more "densely dusted" than others.

Good discussion.

Chris

Oh, a PS - No, you can't see a ship coming towards you until it leaves HEx and releases its buttload of "captured" photons in one spectacular flash. You can see ships which are passing you. Ships carry photons along with them and release them randomly as they go. You can pick up those random bursts. You can identify a target's approximate tonnage and DD rating from information contained in the release burst. And the range of fleets varies. Fuel capacity is a big design feature in warships, since fuel is such a critical strategic asset. Tankers are used, especially by the Vaylen who aren't afraid of centralized organization. Fuel Guilds are contracted by human fleets on an ad hoc basis to provide them with strategic refuelling.

Hope that helps, gotta run.

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 03:04 PM

Okay, this is where the physics give way to "good storytelling". Option 3 is out. You can't fire out of the disk...

I'm glad, precisely for storytelling reasons. As long as we can reverse-engineer our fictional physics to create the proper situations, let's not reverse-engineer them to create World War I!

So we've got our three zones (renaming slightly for resonance):

Open Space - In the Clear
In brief: HEx works. Q-Beams work. Maneuver dominates firepower.
Since ships can HEx away at will, bringing your Q-Beams to bear (let alone shorter-ranged weapons) depends on treachery or very special conditions. Ship-to-ship combat is very rare; Hammer operations in Open Space are all about getting to, or threatening to get to, positions in the Disc that have operational significance.

Boundary between "Open Space" and "Near Space"
A few hours subliminal travel from a small inner planet (deep in the Disc) or a large outer planet (out in the shallow rim of the disc but with plenty of gravity of its own to raise dust concentrations -- I don't see why these would necessarily be that much easier to approach); possibly just minutes from a small outer planet.
Maneuver along this boundary is tactically tricky: If you stay just outside, you present a very credible threat to the planet(s) inside and yet remain capable of HExing away at will. If the enemy tricks or forces you to cross the boundary, your mobility drops dramatically.

Near Space - In the Dust:
In brief: HEx doesn't work. SEx and Q-Beams work. Maneuver and firepower are balanced.
Ships can still maneuver at high sublight speeds in the Disc, but they're slow enough that they can't just flit out of Q-Beam range at will. The key tactical question is how fast sensors can achieve a fix good enough to fire Q-Beams (weapons with a vast area of effect, but space is even vaster). Most ship-to-ship combat occurs in this zone. Fleet actions are decided by clever maneuver and use of sensors to lock-on to part of the enemy's fleet and mass Q-Beam fire against it before the enemy can do the same to you. Battle line squadrons, scout ships, and picket ships wheel and dive and dash in spectacular three-dimensional dogfights. A skilled winner is going to come away unharmed; the loser is going to be annihilated by Q-Beams or, more elegantly, "dismasted" with Nail weapons and captured. Stationary Q-Beams on planets or space stations can cover critical areas, but many battles take place beyond their reach.

Boundary betwen "Near Space" and "Tight Space"
Typically, somewhere significantly but not dramatically beyond the High Orbit for a given world, i.e. beyond the range at which its gravity well will significantly affects any kind of maneuvering vehicle but within the range at which slow-drifting particles will be captured and concentrated.
Two fleets fighting across this boundary are in a paradoxical situation: The fleet in the Dust can maneuver much more easily, but the fleet -- or fortress -- in the Well is the only side that can fire its Q-Beams (since the location of the target matters, because that's where the distortion effect has to occur, and not the location of the firer: That's why planetary fortresses can shoot Q-Beams at all). The preliminary feelers of a planetary siege or invasion occur as the attacking fleet probes this boundary. A decisive fleet action may involve the losing fleet being trapped inside the Well unable to maneuver. Trying to move out of the Well into the Dust under an enemy's guns is horrifically dangerous and probably suicidal: You'll emerge into the dust at a predictable point, with little velocity at first, and probably be locked-on and killed by Q-Beams before you can get your SEx up to speed.

Tight Space - In the Well
In brief: All distortion effects -- HEx, SEx, and Q-Beams -- do not work. Firepower dominates maneuver.
Ships in the Well have radically limited maneuverability, limited to low sublight speeds and constantly having to consider the planet's gravity, even if they're not yet close enough to be significantly affected. This restriction and the short ranges make sensor lock-ons scarily easy to achieve: Both winners and losers in the Well are going to take damage, probably a lot of it. Mercifully, Q-Beams don't work in the Well, and the weapons that remain useful -- fusion cannons, missiles, etc. -- generally do not take out a military-grade ship with a single shot.
Relatively few fleet actions take place in the Well: No fleet wants to move into such a maneuver-crippling environment until it is sure that no enemy ships remain in the Dust to trap it. The Well is where the brutal slogging matches of planetary bombardments and landings occur.

Countercheck

02-26-2007, 03:22 PM

Question. How far into 'Tight Space' can Q-beams penetrate? Because I'm looking at the tactical situation, and I'm damned if I can think of a reason why a defensive fleet would bother engaging the enemy in a Q-Beam duel, unless there are vitally important objectives outside of the gravity well. Let the enemy come to you, and when they're maneuvering slowly in low orbit, that's when you maul them and force them out. I can see an entire class of harbour defense ships... call them monitors... slow, ugly, without any distortion drive of any kind, only grav/pressor, without any Q-beams, but a hideous array of lasers and missiles, and covered with gigantic slabs of armour, that would wait in orbit on the far side of the planet, or possibly even on the ground, until the besieging fleet attempted to close into tight space, whereupon they would engage the enemy. Since they don't need to spend mass and volume on distortion drives or massive fuel tanks, or, for that matter, crew amenities they can be all weapon and armour, much like medieval galleys. Their range is limited, but they don't really need to go very far, after all. These ships, I'm thinking, would come under the command of an Anvil Lord (since they are BARELY interplanetary) and could provide the basis for the large, heavy, anvil carriers we discussed in the anvil thread.

Edit: Other new thought

In the Near Space Q-Beam engagements, I can see an entire fleet co-ordinating to create a beam grid that would entrap and destroy a single target, since Q-beams are so inaccurate. Would fleets engage in 'volley fire' against single targets, or would 'smoke' from the Q-beams intersecting create too much interference for sensors to maintain contact with the target?

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 03:26 PM

That's a very neat ship class.

As I understand it -- and I clarified my post above to try to make this explicit -- Q-Beams can fire out of a planetary atmosphere and surrounding dust cloud, but not into one (hence, planetary fortresses with Q-Beams are possible). So you can do some ugly damage to invaders coming out of Near Space/"the Dust" into Tight Space/"the Well." But as soon as they're close enough for their distortion drives go offline, they're also invulnerable to your Q-Beams.

Countercheck

02-26-2007, 03:32 PM

In that case, what is to stop defenders from placing fortresses or Q-beam armed monitors right on that boundary? Far enough in the dust cloud that they are protected from Q-Beams, but far enough out that any ship attempting to close to missile or laser range will be exposed to the monitor/fortress's Q-beams.

Edit: I can actually see the difference between the monitor/fortress/anvil sleds and the true Hammercraft as being similar to blue water/brown water.

Paul B

02-26-2007, 03:47 PM

Syd, I don't think q-beams can fire out of a planetside installation. From a few posts down:

Inside a planet’s orbit or in asteroid fields or dust clouds of any kind, no distortion at all (and that includes Q-beam hits, since they involve opening a distortion field).

p.

cmoeller

02-26-2007, 03:54 PM

Cool! This is great stuff, you guys are amazing.

The idea of orbital monitors is excellent, Mike. I want to consider them more. I can see them being an important part of a Fortress World's defensive tool kit. Why would they be better than a ground-based fire-base that doesn't have to spend ANY money on ANY drives? I like the idea of their mobility giving them some defensive advantages, but they could just be your grav-mobile forts from the earlier discussion.

As for how would you take those things out? Fighters. Fast little Frigates and Corvettes. Swarms of little targets, accompanied by decoys on the approach across the dangerous Q-beam-sweep zone into The Well. Once inside the Well, they would bring their conventional weapons into play, and, most importantly, begin picking off all of the orbital sensors that are relaying targeting information to ground-based Q-beams. Same deal with any Moons or (god forbid) Rings. They could also contain sensor stations. All of those have to go before the big ships can even think about approaching.

PS - Paul, Q-beams can fire out of, but not into, gravity wells.

Countercheck

02-26-2007, 03:55 PM

In faith conquers, there is mention of planetary Q-beam batteries. I believe what chris meant is that the Q-Beams can't manifest in those areas. They can be created anywhere, but then they travel through... a different dimension? a space-time rift? until they approach the target, where they manifest in the sidereal universe again... this is why they are so difficult to aim =) However, they can't manifest in any place where distortion drives can't work.

Edit: Crossposted with chris. Answering his questions a little further down.

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 04:01 PM

what is to stop defenders from placing fortresses or Q-beam armed monitors right on that boundary? Far enough in the dust cloud that they are protected from Q-Beams, but far enough out that any ship attempting to close to missile or laser range will be exposed to the monitor/fortress's Q-beams.

I think that position is absolutely the sweet spot for monitors (Chris, did Mike just invent a new class of ship?). And the tradeoff with a monitor is that it's considerably more vulnerable than a hardened-and-buried fortress -- no tons of rock to hide behind, no tons of water to dump your waste heat into -- but also vastly more maneuverable.

I suspect monitors would be a Hammer asset, just as landing forces would be an Anvil asset, but that's a whole tricky question unto itself. We should probably figure out how this stuff works before we worry too much about who owns it.

Paul B

02-26-2007, 04:02 PM

Ah! So you could shoot out of your gravity well but you can't/won't hit anything 'til the beam has a chance to reappear, which it won't 'til it hits adequately-clean space.

Which tells me that the VERY FIRST THING any attacking ship would do, coming out of HEx and into potentially bad q-beam firing arcs, would be to chaff the shit out of their position with cheap, light particles (accumulated dust from their last refueling sweep or something). If q-beams really are that sensitive to disruption, I don't see how they'd really ever be a threat to anyone.

p.

Countercheck

02-26-2007, 04:06 PM

Chris, the orbital monitors could certainly be the grav mobile forts we discussed elsewhere. But by moving them further above the planet's surface, they gain several advantages. First, they can travel far faster, and could take 'hull down' positions behind the horizon to protect themselves from incoming fire. They can use the entire planet as a reverse slope to shield themselves from C-fractional kinetic strikes that, even I admit, are the bane of fixed fortifications (this is why, if you're fighting the vaylen, you put your fixed positions in the middle of population centers. Force the vaylen to incinerate millions of potential hosts >=) ) Also, the high altitude grav mobile forts deny the invaders the intrinsic advantages of the gravity well... your missiles don't need to accelerate up as far as they would if they were launched from surface silos. Thirdly, you remove the atmosphere from the equation. The atmosphere is two way armour... it prevents the use of neutral particle beams and attenuates laser fire. If you move further up, you can fire, then duck back down to receive the armouring effects, and pop back up to fire again. Thirdly, it allows you to engage transports before they have disgorged hundreds of anvil attack craft. It is far better to engage targets before they have separated into thousands of subtargets. And I don't see a forged lord deploying anvil sleds before the gravity well is reached... anvil sleds rely on grav tech for maneuvering, so they would be sitting ducks outside of high orbit.

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 04:38 PM

the VERY FIRST THING any attacking ship would do, coming out of HEx and into potentially bad q-beam firing arcs, would be to chaff the shit out of their position with cheap, light particles (accumulated dust from their last refueling sweep or something). If q-beams really are that sensitive to disruption, I don't see how they'd really ever be a threat to anyone.

I suspect that you need dust on a massive scale to make a difference -- probably more mass than that of a typical ship (albeit very thinly distributed). Otherwise the interference is just chipping a few percent off a massive explosion.

cmoeller

02-26-2007, 05:22 PM

I suspect that you need dust on a massive scale to make a difference -- probably more mass than that of a typical ship (albeit very thinly distributed). Otherwise the interference is just chipping a few percent off a massive explosion.

Syd's right. Plus, even assuming you can make one big enough, you can't move out of your debris field, so you'd better be happy staying inside it.

Mike, I like the idea of High Orbit monitor. The visuals alone are enough to sell it :)

-Chris

MechaMan

02-26-2007, 06:21 PM

"The big lazy broadsides are actually the only way that ships without Q-beams can fight. Secondary weapons can only operate effectively against ships whose drives are Shut Down (term of art), so getting in close, or nailing a ship, or ambushing a ship inside orbit, or an asteroid field, or whatever it takes to shut it down... is a key tactical objective.

Note that if you can shut down a ship, and another ship with a Q-beam can land a direct hit on it (no small feat, even against a stalled ship), you will kill it outright, regardless of size or defenses."

I take it this could be considered the equivalent to a Supressive Fire volley? launching Nails, drones and buckets of dust into their flightpath to disrupt your opponents' Distortion fields forming, and thus limiting their mobility?

Paul B

02-26-2007, 07:15 PM

Syd's right. Plus, even assuming you can make one big enough, you can't move out of your debris field, so you'd better be happy staying inside it.

Mike, I like the idea of High Orbit monitor. The visuals alone are enough to sell it :)

-Chris

Hm. But isn't the debris from a weapon hit enough to keep a distortion field from forming? If that's all it takes, it seems trivially easy to keep q-beams out of the equation (assuming, of course, you're okay with chemical thrusters once you show up).

p.

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 07:37 PM

That's a good question, Paul. "Debris from hits on a ship prevents that ship's distortion drive from engaging" and "dust deliberately ejected from a ship is not sufficient to prevent distortion weapons like Q-Beams from hitting" do seem contradictory.

Perhaps the nuance is that such debris is enough to prevent engaging at hyperexpansion (HEx), but not the less sensitive distortion effects of subliminal expansion (err, SEx) and Q-Beams.

It could also be that Q-Beams are essentially an area effect weapon, so you'd need to have a defensive dust cloud wide enough to keep any distortion effects from occuring anywhere near you, whereas distortion drives begin as point effects and only expand to the immediate vicinity of the ship, so a relatively small amount of interference close in would stop the space-time "bubble" from forming. It's like the difference between the number of trees required to hide your car behind (many, all around) and the number of trees required to cause your car to crash (one, in the right place).

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 08:03 PM

Based on Chris's comments about interstellar travel, a category, I also wanted to add a fourth category of space, one that presumably only exists outside a star system and whose significance is purely strategic:

Deep Space -- in the channel
In brief: routes between star systems where the density of interstellar dust is sufficiently low for HEx drives to engage at maximum expansion for a sustained full-speed run.
In Iron Empires usage, "Deep Space" refer not merely to the interstellar void in general, but to the most absolute voids, where concentrations of stray hydrogen atoms are lower than even average interstellar levels. A "run" or "channel" is a mapped region of such space that is long enough to allow even the fastest ships to accelerate to maximum HEx -- typically, several light-years long -- and wide enough to accomodate navigational errors, since even slight deviations from course at such staggering speeds lead to huge discrepancies quickly -- usually much wider than any single solar system measured from one side of its Oort Cloud to the other. Created by gravitational effects and the residues of ancient supernovae, these channels create terrain between the stars and make some systems strategic chokepoints.

Note that each category of space is the natural habitat of a different category of spacecraft, although in practice the operational envelopes of these types will overlap and some types might conflate into a single class:

Deep Space (channels)
Only HEx-capable ships can even get here. The ultra-high-speed but fuel-inefficient BCD ships mentioned by Chris in this thread (http://burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3466&page=2) -- typically couriers -- are in their element in these channels, able to boost loose at ridiculous velocities.

Open Space (clear)
There's just enough dust that BCD couriers probably can't reach full speed, but less refined HEx drives are still operating at their full potential. Militarily, this is the optimal place for ships with high-speed (but non-BCD) HEx drives and long-range Q-Beams -- but relatively little armor, since no amount of protection can save you if you're in a Q-Beam's wide blast zone. That basically means battlecruisers in the classic World War I sense: as fast and as heavily armed as any other ship type, but relatively fragile.
If the efficiencies-of-scale curves in sensors and HEx drives are right -- i.e. if Chris Moeller feels like it -- you might see nothing but battlecruisers, or battlecruisers with an array of escorts as well. If a high-quality sensor package can be fitted into a relatively small, relatively disposeable ship, the battlecruisers will send scouts (possibly manned, possibly robotic) ahead to try to fix enemy positions without exposing the battlecruisers as much. If smaller ships are generally more maneuverable than bigger ships -- which they need not be, given that maneuver in void space is a strict function of your thrust:mass ratio -- then you might get a class of picket ships, without the sensor packages of the scouts but with weapons, designed to intercept the scouts before they can get in range.

Near Space (dust)
All ships are stuck moving at subliminal speeds here, but Q-Beams still work, and it doesn't seem like the difference between a HEx-capable distortion drive and a SEx-only one is that tremendous. So subliminal-only system defense ships will have a slight cost-efficiency and mass-efficiency advantage over HEx-capable vessels, but basically you're still looking at battlecruisers of various types, plus scouts and pickets if those classes exist.
Since hits are significantly more likely at these ranges, that means marginally survivable Q-Beam hits where having armor actually matters might become likely enough that heavier armor is worth having. In that case, the optimum Near Space ship is not a HEx battlecruiser but a SEx system defense battleship: the two would have roughly the same mass and armament, but the battleship (a better name, anyone?) trades the drive and fuel capacity to travel at HEx for armor.

Tight Space (well)
Distortion drives and weapons don't work at all, except for Q-Beams firing out into Near Space. So you have two radically different ship types designed to fight in the Well and completely incapable of fighting outside it:
1) Orbital monitors. Slow, brutish ships with no expansion drives at all, and hardly any crew amenities or supply storage for the long haul, but with Q-Beams to hit incoming ships before they reach the Well themselves and with heavy armor to survive the close-quarters fighting in the Well.
2) Fighters. Again, no distortion drives, like the monitors, but their approach to survival in the Well is to be tiny and highly maneuverable (not at all fast, by the standards of expansion drives, but agile). Their job is to carry short-range weapons (by Hammer standards) and/or sensor packages (possibly distributed so the whole fighter squadron acts as a single sensor) into the well to pinpoint targets, or ideally destroy them, so the larger and more valuable distortion-capable ships don't have to risk themselves in the Well.

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 08:06 PM

P.S.: In practice, a sensible Hammer Lord will probably have a capital ship that is less nimble than a battlecruiser but also less fragile and probably more massive overall -- i.e. a battleship, again in the classic World War I sense. A battleship has fast enough distortion drives, and enough Q-Beams, to fight and win in Open Space and Near Space, but also enough armor and secondary weapons to fight in Tight Space if it has to. Whereas the battlecruiser is a specialized thoroughbred for space combat, the battleship is a robust workhorse able to fight other spaceships or take on planetary fortresses.

Sydney Freedberg

02-26-2007, 08:33 PM

P.P.S. (darnit): Conversely, a HEx-capable battleship is more expensive and less efficient than a subliminal-only system defense ship, but it's far more useful strategically.

Only a very wealthy and important system -- one that is constantly on guard against attack -- can justify building intrasystem, subliminal battleships that are only useful for defending that one system. Conversely, only a very wealthy, powerful, and aggressive Hammer Lord, or more likely a Forged Lord or Vaylen Clan Leader, can expect to see enough pure ship-to-ship battles, in the clean, clear space outside the Well, that it's worth investing in relatively fragile HEx battlecruisers.

Thus, a HEx battleship isn't optimized for any one domain of combat, but it's useful across all domains, making it overall a good investment.

Now I cede the floor and wait for everyone to point out gaping holes in my logic.

johnstone

02-26-2007, 10:39 PM

I'm 'a throw in my two cents now:

On acronyms and clever abbreviations:

Assuming the HEx drive was just the most successful of many Luminal (LEx), Supraluminal (SuplEx!), and/or Post-Luminal (PLEx) drives, the others having become obsolete, that would make Subluminal Expansion drives = SublEx.

Cause you can't use SEx when you have both Subluminal and Supraluminal (or Subliminal Expansion*, for those Dork Sh... eh, Dark Ships). You could have LEx and sLEx, though. Cause the "sub" doesn't deserve to be capitalized.

----------

On a different note:

The distribution of particulate matter (dust clouds) over the orbital disc area would be unique to each solar system. Here at home, we have the zodiacal cloud inside Jupiter's orbit, but each system is going to have radically different characteristics. Something to determine before the Firefight, just like positions and cover.

I seem to remember reading an article when astronomers were first beginning to see planets in other solar systems and were finding that systems were much more varied than they at first believed. Yes! Real science can give you excuses for anything!

---------

*Subliminal Expansion: HExpansion travel rendered invisible due to a backmasking effect created from the time difference of the antiverse (where time moves backwards) - the danger here is that the backmasking effect may cause crew members to commit suicide - an effect similar to listening to a Slayer album).

Countercheck

02-26-2007, 10:45 PM

Sydney,
I can just see the battleship/dreadnought debate raging. Is it better to have an all big gun (Q-Beam) design, or should ships waste space on secondary batteries.

Heee

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 06:20 AM

Mike: A-yup.

Johnstone: Now that is interesting. Can you offer links or other sources of detail on the real-life dust densities in our own system, and on the structures of the other systems discovered so far?

All: I actually had some terminology and classification ideas strike me last night as I was trying to sleep.

HEx-Capable Combatants

Battleship
Q-Beams: yes
Artillery-scale ordnance: heavy
Armor: heavy
Drive: HEx (interstellar)
Function: general-purpose capital ship for both ship-to-ship and ship-to-planet combat

Battlecruiser
Q-Beams: yes
Artillery-scale ordnance: light
Armor: light
Drive: HEx (interstellar)
Function: specialized capital ship for ship-to-ship combat only

Bombard
Q-Beams: no
Artillery-scale ordnance: heavy
Armor: heavy
Drive: HEx (interstellar)
Function: specialized capital ship for ship-to-planet bombardment only

Cruiser
Q-Beams: no
Artillery-scale ordnance: light
Armor: light
Drive: HEx (interstellar)
Function: general-purpose ship for interstellar patrols, supporting the battle line in ship-to-ship actions, and smaller-scale ship-to-planet bombardment

System Defense Ships

Cutter
Q-Beams: no
Artillery-scale ordnance: light
Armor: light
Drive: subliminal (system only)
Function: outer defense perimeter of a whole system

Monitor
Q-Beams: no
Artillery-scale ordnance: heavy
Armor: heavy
Drive: conventional (planetary gravity well only)
Function: inner defense perimeter of a specific planet

Battlecutter
Q-Beams: yes
Artillery-scale ordnance: light
Armor: light
Drive: subliminal (system only)
Function: heavily armed system defense, equivalent to a Battlecruiser

Battlemonitor
Q-Beams: yes
Artillery-scale ordnance: heavy
Armor: heavy
Drive: conventional (planetary gravity well only)
Function: heavily armed planetary defense, a "pocket battleship" able to strafe incoming ships with Q-Beams from the relative safety of the Well

Specialists

Carrier
Q-Beams: no
Artillery-scale ordnance: light
Armor: light
Drive: HEx (interstellar)
Function: transport large numbers of fighters, Assault Shuttles, and Hammer Hussars to within range of the Well and launch them

Courier
Q-Beams: no
Artillery-scale ordnance: none
Armor: none
Drive: HEx BCD (fast interstellar)
Function: very rapid interstellar communications

Note that I'm using the prefix "battle" in a particular and precise way, to designate "armed with Q-Beams."

cmoeller

02-27-2007, 06:43 AM

It could also be that Q-Beams are essentially an area effect weapon, so you'd need to have a defensive dust cloud wide enough to keep any distortion effects from occuring anywhere near you, whereas distortion drives begin as point effects and only expand to the immediate vicinity of the ship, so a relatively small amount of interference close in would stop the space-time "bubble" from forming. It's like the difference between the number of trees required to hide your car behind (many, all around) and the number of trees required to cause your car to crash (one, in the right place).

Bingo. Debris blowing off of a ship is right at the origin point of the distortion field. Q-beam points of origin can be anywhere, and the AOE of the antimatter explosion they throw off is far larger than any protective debris field a ship could make.

-Chris

johnstone

02-27-2007, 09:19 AM

Well, I couldn't find any stats on the actual distance from the invariable plane, but this site:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/Z/zodiacal_cloud.html

...mentions that the cloud is warped and that both comets affect it by passing through it or getting too close to the sun. Also, if there is an asteroid field, it will contribute greatly.

of course, wikipedia resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_dust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_dust_cloud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiacal_dust

There is a PDF download: "Charging Effects on Cosmic Dust" by Ingrid Mann here:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:MfTk3-q2rpIJ:dev.spis.org/projects/spine/home/tools/sctc/VIIth/79196da8c0a8001401e0426ac625cd62%3Faction%3Ddownlo ad+cosmic+dust+invariable+plane&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca
(has degrees of distance from the plane...)

Thats what a quick google search picked up for me.

Countercheck

02-27-2007, 09:37 AM

Musing on the similarities of assaulting a planet and breaking a line of battle. In both cases, the objective is to bear down on the target as quickly as possible and close to point blank range. Very few, if any, of your weapons can be brought to bear on the line, and the line is free to rake you as you approach. Once you get into a melee, of course, it's anyone one's game, and no captain can do very wrong...

Just thinking about planetary assault, the best way, other than subterfuge, stealth, or orbital bombardment, would be to go for complete envelopment and launch several probe attacks, trying to draw off the enemy from a sector where you can punch down into tight space. After that, the intruding hammers would do best to hug the ground and try to pick off battle-monitors from below. I am really digging the idea of submersible hammers.

Thinking in terms of subterfuge, I can see the use of Q-ships , which could be known as Petards, I suppose.... Large mercantors filled with missiles that would land on the target planet and flush their missiles during the planetary assault. There are also the requisite commando raids on planetary defense batteries that can open fire on monitors, and all kinds of other neat tricks.

Q-Beams are terribly inaccurate. HOW inaccurate are they? Would an evasively maneuvering cruiser be able to dodge fire and make it into tight space usually, or would it usually get pegged?

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 09:43 AM

Paul B

02-27-2007, 10:24 AM

Good questions, Mike. And Johnstone, thanks tremendously for those references. I've taken a quick look at them, and it's fascinating. My naive planetlubber's view of "well, it's pretty empty out there" is duly corrected, just as a sailor would correct me if I said "well, y'know, the ocean's got a lot of water in it, so it's all pretty much the same." It looks like Deep, Open, Near, and Tight space are less tidy concentric circles than a complex pattern of shoals and channels in the void.

Which is awesome, because this allows us to use a nearly perfect war-at-sea metaphor for the whole Hammer part of the game. There'd be big (3D) maps of course, charting these areas of high and low particulate density. You could lure enemies into sandbars where they get grounded 'til their chemical thrusters can shove them (sloooowly) back into the deep water. There are almost certainly Sargasso Sea type areas where it's real easy, for whatever reason, to drift into them straight out of HEx and then get stuck -- some combination of particles, gravity and exit vector shoves you into a spot that's really hard to extricate yourself from with whatever thrust mass you brought with you.

Oh! This is fantastic news!

p.

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 11:12 AM

The interaction between ship types becomes much more interesting. A battlecruiser with Q-Beams is going to be able to fight on equal terms with a larger, less specialized battleship -- right up to the point where the battleship maneuvers into a localized concentration of dust: The battlecruiser lacks the secondary armament and heavy armor to go in there after the battleship, and the battleship's Q-Beams can fire out. Monitors can lurk in all sorts of places, not just the immediate vicinity of a planet, forcing invaders to send fighters in after them.

cmoeller

02-27-2007, 01:12 PM

Sweet! Johnstone, thanks for those links, the one to the Encyclopedia is amazing. Look what I culled...

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/L/Local_Bubble.html

(There's a map there, showing intestellar gas surrounding our sun, with the following caption): ... White areas represent regions of extremely low gas density (which are probably filled with plasma); dark areas reveal where large condensations of cold, dense gas occur. Notice that the local cavity is surrounded by many of these condensations, but this "wall" is broken in several places by low density interstellar tunnels that link the local cavity with other nearby bubble cavities such as the Pleiades and GSH 238+00+09.

---

This is exactly how interstellar transit works.

Transit routes through those "low density tunnels" are surveyed by individual explorers (the future equivalent of Magellan, Drake, Columbus, &tc...), funded by powerful Hammer/Forged Lords. Those routes allow HEx from star to star. Often surveying is not a huge deal, but equally often there are regions of interstellar dust and gas that are dense enough to crash ships out of HEx if they hit them. Transit maps are priceless and of crucial strategic importance. Surveys from the ancient days exist, and are the Michelin maps of the age. Every merchant guild has them, copies and distributes them. They're ubiquitous and represent the highway network of the Iron Empires. Private transit routes are state secrets, passed down from one generation of Noble to the next. As with everything else in the Iron Empires, knowledge is the most valuable commodity. With private transit routes, you can get the jump on your adversary, showing up at times and in places he considers "impossible" for you to reach.

-Chris

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 01:21 PM

Along with the Age of Sail comparisons, there's a certain submarine vibe to all this. I'm remembering the scene in The Hunt for Red October (the excellent movie, not the tedious techporn book) in which Sean Connery, as the Latvian captain with a Scottish accent, takes his submarine blind down a deep-sea trench at high speed, deviating from pre-charted routes based on his vast experience and sheer gut instinct, while all the while a pursuing torpedo is pinging them with its sonar:

"Captain, turn in three, two, one, m..."

(ping....)

"Maintain course."

(...ping...)

"Captain, we need to make our turn."

(...ping... ping...ping)

"Maintain your current heading and speed, helm."

(...PING... PING... PING...)

"Captain! We're out of the channel!"

(....PING! PING! PING! PING!)

"Now -- TURN!"

(....PINGPINGPINGPING BOOOOOOM as the torpedo fails to make the turn and crashes into the side of the trench).

What kind of combat is possible at HEx, anyway? I know ships in distortion have to drop back into regular space-time to fire, but what about torpedoes, which are small distortion-equipped ships in themselves? I could see something nasty and automated hunting a ship through the interstellar lanes, trying to drop it out of HEx so it can be attacked.

luke

02-27-2007, 01:47 PM

Gentlemen,
This is the single best reference I've found for spacey combat:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html
It's reffed in the book, too, but I thought I'd post the link.

Truisms that I've accepted from Project Rocket:
• There is no stealth in space. If you're looking in the right direction, you can see your enemy coming from a LONG way off. Apparently, the tech required to mask your heat differential from lifesupport and ambient space is pretty complex. The phyiscs of it would either have the crew in EVA constantly -- ok for short missions, but of dubious effect -- or would create more heat than they conserve (and probably kill the crew).

• Crew is cool, but automation is cheaper and better. So you have crew served ships with a handleful of onboard specialists and a ton of automation, but no fighters -- 'cause the power consumption for keeping flyboy alive means your ship is slower than and more visible to a simple heat tracking missile loaded for bear. Anyway, no fighters. It's the Iron Empires, not the WW2-IN-SPACE Empires.

• Ranges are much farther than we typically conceive. Since we can see each other coming from millions of kilometers away (at least), then engagement ranges in the hundreds-of-thousands-of-kilometers are not outlandish.

• Space is COLD, so heat diffusion for weapons and engines is a cheap, cheap commodity. It's easy to make parts of your ship run hot.

•*Kinetic kill missiles are where it's at.
If your ship is quote "standing still" unquote, and if the enemy is tearing past you at seven kilometers per second, and if you leisurely toss an empty beer can into the path of the enemy, the relative velocity will be 7 km/s and the beer can will do severe damage to the enemy ship (if the beer can masses 0.1 kilogram, it will do 2,450,000 Joules of damage). So even though the beer can has practically zero velocity from your standpoint, from the standpoint of the soon-to-be-noseless ship the can has the velocity of a bat out of you-know-where.

• Q-Beams were in the original draft of BE, but I could never figure out how they'd work in the game. I'm actually in Paul's camp, I don't see how they'd be all that effective. However, they're fucking cool. If you guys can come up with a decent working model for them, I'd be happy to stat them up and put them in the game.

Lastly, before we develop Hearts of Oak, Men of Iron for Burning Empires, I'd like to encourage you all to focus on planetary/station/population concentration centers, their defenses and their vulnerabilities. As romantic as pirates and Age of Sail stuff is, Burning Empires focues on WORLDS. Albeit, there's a loose definition of "world"in the book, but I think worrying about deep space naval engagements is counterproductive.

I've spent way too much time on this today.
-L

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 01:57 PM

It's absolutely true that a lot of what we're discussing is too high-level to have much meaning in a Burning Empires game. A Q-Beam can't even fire on a target on a world, for crying out loud! But burning up capital ships for Firefight! isn't my primary objective here. I'm having fun elaborating the setting.

stormsweeper

02-27-2007, 02:47 PM

Gentlemen,
This is the single best reference I've found for spacey combat:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html
It's reffed in the book, too, but I thought I'd post the link.

That site gives me a chubby.

no fighters -- 'cause the power consumption for keeping flyboy alive means your ship is slower than and more visible to a simple heat tracking missile loaded for bear. Anyway, no fighters. It's the Iron Empires, not the WW2-IN-SPACE Empires.

I could see small fighters being on hand for the Hammer Lords, though. Not terribly practical in any real sense, but cherished heirlooms along the lines of iron. Plus you must have a ride before you can pimp it.

Paul B

02-27-2007, 02:59 PM

Actually I'm pulling a lot of good ideas for stories out of the net results of these conversations. I'm not sure I really give a shit about details like whether q-beams can or cannot plausibly engage ships exiting HEx or the various intersecting ranges of weapons and sensors and fuel ranges, oh my!, but the idea of an oceanic structure to space makes a space-based multi-location (planets, bases, facilities) story richer, in my mind.

For me, sci fi just isn't sci fi without the opportunity to fly about a bit. It doesn't even have to be exploration-themed; just the chance to go traveling, and have your travels interfered with...in spaaaace!

Re. fighters: I could see these being as personalized and maybe even as heirloomed as Iron, except for the Hammer. Why should Anvil thugs have all the fun? Make fighters durable enough to survive generations, attach all kinds of reverence and history and meaning to them, create mythology and symbology and superstition. It's all good!

p.

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 03:00 PM

Fighters aren't so obviously idiotic as that website presumes. The whole Iron Empires universe presumes no radical breakthrough in articial intelligence that allows a computer to outfight a human. Now, human beings are evolved to deal with threats on the ground, and even today unmanned air vehicles do a reasonable job in a wide range of missions, while unmanned groudn vehicles are terribly limited, and space is even easier for a robot, and even more counterintuitive than a human, than the air is. So you could justify human Lords-Pilot in Iron on the ground but drones in space.

But I think the whole "the future is the past" ethos of the setting implies that a human will always be able to outthink a computer in battle. So while a pilot imposes a severe performance penalty in terms of the added mass of his/her life support systems and the necessary power generation, he also gives a performance boost in terms of tactical insight. You have to balance the costs and benefits of a pilot, just as you would with adding any other subsystem. If Chris Moeller wants to say that pilots are worth it, by Ahmilahk, they're worth it!

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 03:03 PM

P.S.: I rather like the idea of fighters as spacegoing Iron -- the equivalent of magical heirloom and enchanted steed wrapped into one. I'd think the Hussars are a good model for the kind of animal-level Artificial Intelligence (and occasionally difficult "personality") that these things would have, and there is in fact a variant of the Hussar that's a space fighter in all but name (http://www.burningempires.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hussar_elite_recon#Hammer_Hussar).

luke

02-27-2007, 03:33 PM

I'm serious about the fighters. In addition to being impractical, they are lame. However, I'm certain that every other sci-fi RPG will accomodate you (now who's lame? Me, that's who.).

Also a missile doesn't have to be AI to be better than an expensive fighter -- can be easily be remotely piloted by the artillery crew or even be gifted with an automated skill or two (Helm, Sensors, Signals?).

-L

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 03:38 PM

Cool! We have a sharp, clear disagreement. Luke, stepping out of our pseudo-physics discussion, tell me why fighters are lame in terms of imagery and storytelling!

Paul B

02-27-2007, 03:42 PM

Given the IE "no AI ever for any reason!" freakiness of the culture, I'd assume Flying Iron would require a Crucis. It's all a bit potentially Robotech (10pt. tech trait: Iron that can fly! A fighter that becomes Iron!), which is my only look/feel concern.

p.

Countercheck

02-27-2007, 03:50 PM

It kinda depends on your definition of fighter, doesn't it? First of all, I love that website with all my heart, and reference it whenever I need to prove fighters are lame, but in the IE we're talking about a situation where you have reactionless drives (fuel becomes a comparative non-issue) and weapons that can obliterate the largest, heaviest armoured ship in a single hit. In THAT context, smaller corvette sized warships with a crew of two or three become viable. Further, given that SEx drives allow ships to nip about and change direction while thumbing their noses at Einstein and Newton, long range engagements become more problematic, as do kinetic kill missiles. If the no-escape envelope is too large, it's impossible to saturate it sufficiently to generate a hit with kinetics.

I'm also cool with Q-beams being colour generally. Any space engagement in BE is assumed to be in close proximity to a planet. If you want, you could make an unweildy weapon that obliterates any target in a single hit, but any cover negates it entirely. But I'd just as soon make Q-beams 'the right tool for the job'

cmoeller

02-27-2007, 03:52 PM

I'm serious about the fighters. In addition to being impractical, they are lame. However, I'm certain that every other sci-fi RPG will accomodate you (now who's lame? Me, that's who.).

Totally disagree. Fighters are the "irregular" troops in space. I agree that they've been imagined in a rather one-dimensional way (star wars/battlestar galactica, etc...). IE fighters serve a different function than "theirs". Nothing's new except in how it's re-imagined.

The site you quote is excellent, but brother they're hard core. It gives me hives after reading one page or two. Great for "2001: A Space Odyssey", not so great for "Dune".

Also a missile doesn't have to be AI to be better than an expensive fighter -- can be easily be remotely piloted by the artillery crew or even be gifted with an automated skill or two (Helm, Sensors, Signals?).

In which case it's a missile, not a fighter. We have both missiles and manned warcraft now. Why have both? Because a manned vehicle has advantages over an unmanned one.

-Chris

Paul B

02-27-2007, 04:06 PM

Given the nature of the Firefight rules, I don't even see any necessary modifications to any aspect of the game other than pure narrative: some equivalent of Iron that's intended for space/air battles, stentor-equivalents for fussing over your old flying Iron, etc.

p.

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 04:34 PM

Fighters are the "irregular" troops in space. I agree that they've been imagined in a rather one-dimensional way (star wars/battlestar galactica, etc...). IE fighters serve a different function than "theirs"....

I'm very keen on the idea of fighters as a specialized asset, e.g. for operations "in the Well" where the distortion drives and weapons that rule most of space are off line. I'd also agree that the standard WWII model of fighters has been done to death -- and combined incoherently with WWI-style battleships: Yes, there's a place for a wide variety of vehicles serving different operational needs, but why in heaven do you have TIE fighters and Star Destroyers in the exact same engagement, operating at the exact same ranges? If that's what Luke means by "lame," I'm agreeing.

Luke, can you define the parameters of lameness? Chris, can you elaborate on fighters as "irregulars" in the Iron Empires?

luke

02-27-2007, 04:38 PM

Sydney, I'm bored (to death) with sci-fi=refighting WW2, that's why. "Actual" space fighting is SO MUCH COOLER than Battlestar Galactica. So. Much. Cooler.

Anyway, to continue firing my AA at you pesky gnats:

Fighters have to be returned to base. That makes them short ranged. Missiles and AKVs are one way (which gives them a longer range).

This means I can engage you outside the range of your fighter swarm with KKMs, AKVs, probably even lasers, and definitely Q-Beams.

Which means I can lure your fighters out to their attack range and then just blink away. Leaving your pilots to die of hypothermia...

If they make it back to base, pilots need to be housed and fed. They take up valuable room that could be assigned to ordnance or engines.

Food and supply then limit the range of the carrier.

We've handwaved relativity away, do we have to handwave away oxygen, heat and food, too?

I'm not saying that there wouldn't be small craft out there. But the small craft that I'm envisioning is 3 crew and 40 meters bow to stern. Something that can support the crew on extended missions and carry serious (serious) ordnance.

-L

Countercheck

02-27-2007, 04:44 PM

We've handwaved relativity away, do we have to handwave away oxygen, heat and food, too?

I'm not saying that there wouldn't be small craft out there. But the small craft that I'm envisioning is 3 crew and 40 meters bow to stern. Something that can support the crew on extended missions and carry serious (serious) ordnance.

-L

That's actually pretty much exactly how I envision fighters. Not weency little ties and x-wings, but ships that, while they can't make it out of the system, are speedy and pack a punch. If you are incapable of using the word Fighter without wincing, how about 'gunboat'? That also takes us back to the age of sail... or we could use Sydney's 'cutters'

As for the iron equivelent in space, I kinda assumed those would be Hammer Hussars.

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 04:47 PM

In real life, even a relatively light "tactical fighter," the F-16 (http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=103) -- nicknamed "Viper" by its pilots in homage to Battlestar Galactica! -- is 15 meters long with a 10 meter wingspan, and weighs more than 16 metric tons. A bomber like the workhorse B-52 (http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=83) is 48 meters long with a 56 meter wingspan, weighing in fully loaded at almost 220 metric tons, with a standard crew of five. The B-1 bomber (http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=81), which is designed as a high-performance flier not unlike a fighter, is 44 meters long with a 42 meter wingspan (with wings swung out), with a full combat load of 216 metric tons and a crew of four. I think that's very close to your 40-meter small craft, right there.

So let's stop thinking in terms of Spitfires-in-Space and model our spacefighters on the much bigger and more complex combat aircraft of the real world.

[EDIT: Crossposted with Mike. Once again our thinking is eerily similar. Do I have a long-lost twin in Canada?]

Countercheck

02-27-2007, 04:55 PM

As much as I have come to loathe David Weber's writing, he did a damn fine job of designing effective 'fighter' style ships for the honorverse. The smallest of these fighters mass 10,000 tons. That's probably a bit hefty for IE, but is an example of how far from the x-wing paradigm fighters can range.

Edit: Cross posted with Sydney - Heh, I already have a twin who was born 2 years before me =) He's written a few children's military history books and is working on his masters. But I like to think that it's just that we're smart and right =) Would you believe I was specifically thinking of the B1-B?

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 05:00 PM

Really? I've stayed vehemently clear of the "Honorverse," based on everything I've heard about it, starting with the titles. So I'm ignorant. Describe an Honorverse fighter for us, Mike!

luke

02-27-2007, 05:02 PM

I'm fine with all of that. Gunboats it is! Or what about Hammerboats? Hammersleds? Gunsleds? Guncraft? Gunfu? Gongfu? Gongli?

I personally like Hammersleds. But I guess sleds are for grav vehicles.

Anything but "fighters." (Anything that ceases to conjure up images of single-man light attack craft).

Also, Mike, there is in-atmosphere reactionless drives, but, according to the game design (which counts for nothing, I know), all hammer craft require reaction drives and all the attendant awesomeness.

-L

PS: And it just goes to show you, there's no accounting for taste.

Sydney Freedberg

02-27-2007, 05:08 PM

How about "gunships"? That has a nice spread of associations, from shallow-draft coastal gunboats to attack helicopters and the AC-130. (http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=71)

Oh, and to toot my own horn more, I derived the Hammer Hussar (http://www.burningempires.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hussar_elite_recon#Hammer_Hussar) by apply the Husar standard traits (i.e. the +2D to Observation, the wonky AI, and the improved signals, sensors, and agility) to the Assault Shuttle, which is no small bird. The result is a two-seater craft with a frickin' Artillery-scale weapon that's presumably right in Luke's 40-meter size range.

Countercheck

02-27-2007, 05:12 PM

Eh. The first two or three are actually pretty decent space opera. After that he just starts tech and number-wanking, and it becomes impossibly clear that Honor is one of the worst mary sues ever (She's pretty! She's sad cause she thinks she's ugly. She has a special pet! She's tele-empathic! She's a crack shot! She's lethal in hand to hand combat! She can't do math unless it really matters and then she does it by instinct and gets it right! She's a terrific swordfighter! She's the best naval commander EVAR! Everyone loves her! Anyone who doesn't love her is EVIL or else discovers the error of their ways and loves her.)

Honorverse LACs... I'm going on memory here.
The Shrike class LAC, which is sort of the first LAC that plays a large roll in the books, is in the 10-60 thousand ton range. It boasts acceleration of about 600-700 gs. It is armed with a single spinal mounted capital ship grade graser, with an effective range of about 400 thousand km (which is, by the way, knife range in the honorverse), four rotory missile launcher each with about 6 small bomb-pumped xaser missiles, about 100 point defense missiles, and eight-ish point defense laser clusters.

Later on they introduce the Ferret, which is an all-missile varient that sacrifices the spinal graser to mount a hell of a lot of point defense. They were tasked with protecting the Shrikes on their approach.

The Katana is similar, except it is specifically designed for an anti-LAC role, with lots of small missiles and small laser batteries.

There's a fourth one, with a french name, that was soley designed to launche a wall of dirty nuclear missiles that would produce a collective radioactive cloud that would fry enemy LAC's sensors.

Edit: Bah, enough with the cross-posting! Luke, while you can only use the gravitic drives in a gravity well, I consider the SEx drive to screw physics enough that it doesn't count as a reaction drive. When you are getting more velocity than your reaction mass says you should be, that's reactionless, to me.

cmoeller

02-27-2007, 11:20 PM

Good discussion! Luke, you've trusted me to avoid lameness thus far. Trust me with the fighters (or gunboats, I agree "fighter" is a loaded term).

Syd, by Irregulars, I mean napoleonic cossacks. I know one of our BWHQ fellows is into Napoleonics... think of the role the cossacks played in the 1812 campaign. That's how I see fighters... as a swarm. Yes, you can 'swarm' missiles too, but they are, as stated, a one-way ticket, basically only good in combat. What gunboats (!) give you is the ability to saturate a system with armed ships, that can change their mission as the situation requires. If your opponant has a giant Q-beam armed cruiser and you have a carrier fielding a dozen speedy, well armed gunboats, you have the ability to swarm your opponent. His cruiser can guard one vulnerable point. What is he going to protect? Is he going to protect the mining facilities out in the asteroid field? Or maybe the listening post on the moon around the gas giant? How about the convoy that's due to arrive in two hours from out-system? Or the orbital factory? He has one hull, you have a dozen. You don't have to choose a target, you can go after all of them. You can make his life a living hell.

I love the idea of light, irregular-style forces. They fuck with your logistics. They screw your ability to protect everything everywhere. They're impossible to defend against unless you have something similar to fight them off with. And while the cruisers have their armor and fuel and big guns, the "cossacks" have the advantage of numbers, speed (distortion 9, the maximum factor possible), military-grade offensive weapons, and first-class sensors. And they're flexible, unlike remote-control drones.

As for fuel, it's not a huge deal in-system. As long as your gunboats aren't intending to use HEx, they can carry enough fuel to cruise for a long time. So small ships... whatever you want to call them... are going to be out there. Not every Hammer Lord will go that route, but a lot of them will, and there are reasons for doing it.

-Chris

PS - off topic, I just got back from seeing Ghost Rider... omg, the worst diologue and plot ever (although the burning skull looks cool).

Yagathai

02-27-2007, 11:57 PM

although the burning skull looks cool

I'm there.

This is probably somewhat off-topic, but what's the primary planetary defense mechanism against the ol' mass-driver attack? You know, grab a few dozen large asteroids, bolt an engine onto them and send them hurtling at a planet. Maybe blow up a couple at speed to create a big ol' dust cloud to spam Q-beam attacks...

I'm just spitballing here.

Sydney Freedberg

02-28-2007, 07:00 AM

Chris, thanks for elaborating. So you're envisioning gunboats (gunships, fighters, whatever) as having subliminal distortion drives, not merely conventional thrust?

cmoeller

02-28-2007, 07:50 AM

Chris, thanks for elaborating. So you're envisioning gunboats (gunships, fighters, whatever) as having subliminal distortion drives, not merely conventional thrust?

Absolutely. And remember that all Distortion Drives can either operate at subluminal expansions or "dial up" to HEx. There are control elements required to permit HEx... the "distortion tail" being the most visible, but the cost in Standards and Tonnage are negligible. The real limiting factor is fuel. A week's worth of fuel at HEx equals a month or more at Sublight.

Perhaps it really would be more useful to think of these ships as corvettes or gunships rather than "fighters". There's not much use for a CTA-only warship, unless you're on some sub-index world that can't build anything better. Once you're in "the well", grav/pressor drives are more economical. CTA would only really be useful in pushing you out of The Well to allow your DD to engage.

Oh, and per your earlier question about fuel ranges... the average load for a warship is 4 weeks of fuel. Major star systems will have fuelling facilities at North or South Watch to allow fleets to refuel without entering the disk. Refuelling at less advanced facilities (ie: gas giants or on planetary facilities) would take much longer, especially for a large fleet. Here are some design notes re: fuelling from my wargame Vaylen Wars:

Human Tanker Squadrons would be operated by a commercial guild. Some Leaders may have their own, personal Tanker squadrons, but 9 out of 10 human Tankers will be private, and pretty unreliable. Probably tending to park themselves on low-index worlds, along popular trade routes, charging fleets to refuel/revictual. They might almost be considered to be Neutral forces. It should be very hard to get them to move, unless it's with a really big stack, that they'll be sure to get big $$ from. Maybe they should move randomly (or if the player tries to move them, there's a 50% chance that the vaylen will do it for him). the human player should be able to eliminate 1 private Tanker squadron in order to "take over" another. This reflects siezure of private Tankers... but it should be a desperation measure only, and result, not only in the burning of one Tanker, but in the increasing reticence of private Tankers to stick with the fleets. (and future "burnings" should be more and more expensive: 2:1, 3:1....)

-Chris

johnstone

02-28-2007, 09:02 AM

I wanna put in a vote for "gunship".

That's gunSHIP, cause "boat" is kinda wussy, yeah?

Paul B

02-28-2007, 09:54 AM

My vote is for "corvette." It's more old-world.

What are the crews of these things? Are they functionally any different than the "Hammer Patrol" ships that are already in the book? ie faster, more specialized payloads, etc.?

p.

Thor

02-28-2007, 10:10 AM

The gunboats/corvettes you're talking about are called Hammer Assault Shuttles in the game.

cmoeller

02-28-2007, 10:21 AM

This isn't to do with game mechanics, but how I envision fighters (err... corvettes, cossacks, gunships):

Distortion: rated high 8-9, with fuel capacity sufficient for sublight cruising
CTA: also rated high
Hull Armor: very high
Power Armor: no
crew: 2-5 depending on mission
weapons: some hard-mounted weapons, but reliance on hardpoints for external stores: missiles, weapon pods, countermeasures, orbital mines, drones, nails, sensor packages, Drop tanks for HEx capability, etc...

I envision wings of these guys sporting an assortment of load-outs, one being an assault variant with enough troops to form prize crews. The emphasis is on flexibility, particularly on picking off vulnerable targets, pursuit (running down and immobilizing fleeing prizes), and rear area raids against lightly defended systems.

A secondary role would be as a "forlorn hope" in assaults on enemy capital ships that are hiding inside particle-rich zones, and dropping into the atmosphere to stage raids and drop special forces during invasions (this would be more in line with the Assault Shuttle's role, I guess).

Plus, of course, countering all of these roles when on defense.

Carriers would range from small HEx capable 5-ship "Wing Carriers" to larger fleet versions, fitted out with fuel, repair facilities and every external store known to man, as well as an oak-panelled command room for the Forged Lord.

-Chris

Sydney Freedberg

02-28-2007, 10:23 AM

Or rather, the Hammer Assault Shuttle is specific subtype of gunship/corvette designed to transport troops to a planetary surface and provide them supporting firepower. The Hammer Hussar (based on the Assault Shuttle) would then constitute a heavy firepower variant with no carrying capacity; we should probably Burn a non-Hussar version as well for forces without Hussar Trained pilots. Presumably there'd be a variant on the other end of the spectrum, with very little firepower but able to carry a lot of cargo and troops.

Sydney Freedberg

02-28-2007, 10:27 AM

Whoops! Crossposted with Chris -- but I think in line with him.

Let me see if I've got this straight: The major reason why corvettes/gunships (I'm still preferring "gunships") don't have full interstellar faster-than-light capability isn't the additional mass and cost of a HEx-capable drive compared to a subliminal-only distortion drive -- although there is some added mass and cost -- but rather the additional mass of the fuel (and, secondarily, life support stores) needed to support weeks-long interstellar trips. Correct?

cmoeller

02-28-2007, 12:09 PM

right on!

Sydney Freedberg

02-28-2007, 12:33 PM

Okay, so I see there's a definite mass-efficiency reason to choose subliminal-only and rely on HEx-capable carriers/motherships for interstellar.

Questions:

1) How do distortion-drive ships maneuver once they get close enough to a planet that even subliminal expansion shut down?

2) Specifically, are ships in "tight space"/"the well" close enough to a planet's gravitational field to switch over to grav/pressor systems (which presumably any ship capable of landing on a planet has to have anyway), or do they need to switch over to auxillary chemical reactant thrusters, or is there some entirely different category of propulsion? And how expensive are such drives?

3) Is it worth building a spacefaring vessel without distortion drives at all? Such a spacecraft would be hopelessly slow in any environment where distortion drives worked, but would be well suited to operating "in the well" around a planet where dust and gravity blocked distortion effects. The question is whether there's a significant mass/cost advantage to building a ship specifically for this environment.

Countercheck

02-28-2007, 01:12 PM

3) Is it worth building a spacefaring vessel without distortion drives at all? Such a spacecraft would be hopelessly slow in any environment where distortion drives worked, but would be well suited to operating "in the well" around a planet where dust and gravity blocked distortion effects. The question is whether there's a significant mass/cost advantage to building a ship specifically for this environment.

I'd say those are the monitors and anvil-craft, no? I'm getting the feeling that's the big distinction between hammer and anvil craft... distortion drive. Without it, you're tied to a planet unless you want to use chemical thrusters, which really, really suck (though interestingly, you can burn all the way to the target. no need to flip at the mid point, since you can use your vastly more powerful and efficient grav drives for braking.)

cmoeller

02-28-2007, 01:30 PM

1) How do distortion-drive ships maneuver once they get close enough to a planet that even subliminal expansion shut down?

CTA or Grav/Pressor. You can use G/P to get down, but it's really slow getting back out again. You can get into low orbit, but as the gravity tails off, so does the ability to gain "thrust" from it (in its pressor aspect).

2) Specifically, are ships in "tight space"/"the well" close enough to a planet's gravitational field to switch over to grav/pressor systems (which presumably any ship capable of landing on a planet has to have anyway), or do they need to switch over to auxillary chemical reactant thrusters, or is there some entirely different category of propulsion? And how expensive are such drives?

You need CTA's to take advantage of distortion drive, remember. Distortion just changes the value of time, it doesn't provide thrust in and of itself. So you need to have CTA's (even little dinky ones) to provide you with a vector that the distortion effect can amplify.

3) Is it worth building a spacefaring vessel without distortion drives at all? Such a spacecraft would be hopelessly slow in any environment where distortion drives worked, but would be well suited to operating "in the well" around a planet where dust and gravity blocked distortion effects. The question is whether there's a significant mass/cost advantage to building a ship specifically for this environment.

From low orbit to the planet's surface, Grav/Pressor all the way. From low orbit out to the DD boundary, CTA is the most efficient way to go. Beyond that, some form of thrust is required, but it doesn't have to be very profound. Distortion ships listed as having "no CTA" have small dedicated thrusters that serve simply to initiate vectors for the DD to amplify.

-Chris

PS- Mike I hadn't considered the idea of using G/P to brake from a long CTA burn... huh. What are the ramifications of that?

cmoeller

02-28-2007, 01:36 PM

Hey guys,

Any of you who are interested, email me privately (moellerc@verizon.net) and I'll send you a word file with the Vaylen Wars rules. Vaylen wars was a strategic wargame I developed back in the '90's as background for the comics. I wanted to know what form a Vaylen invasion would take: how the combatant's different organizations would affect things, and what ramifications the different technologies would have.

Chris

Sydney Freedberg

02-28-2007, 01:52 PM

Very helpful. So we have four categories of vehicles:

HEx (hyperexpansion distortion drive): Faster-than-light speeds for interstellar transit; requires very low dust densities (and thus very low gravity) to function, typically becoming ineffective by the time you reach the planetary disc of a solar system.

SEx (?) (subliminal expansion distortion drive): High sublight speeds for interplanetary, intra-system transit; requires low dust densities (and gravity) to function, typically becoming ineffective by the time you reach high orbit for a given planet.
A SEx drive can be converted to a HEx drive by adding a distortion tail and a large supply of fuel. Presumably it's fairly easy to add "drop tanks" and a bolt-on tail to an intrasystem ship to enable it to travel interstellar distances.

CTA (conventional thrust array?): Low sublight speeds for circumplanetary transit (planet to orbit, orbit to planet, shifting positions within orbits). Slow and inefficient without distortion drives to augment it.
Any distortion drive (HEx or SEx) already incorporates a CTA, and military craft are going to need fairly powerful CTAs to give their distortion drive strong vectors to magnify for sharp maneuvers, so distortion-capable military ships are going to be highly maneuverable even when they're close enough to a planet that they must rely on CTA alone.
However, a CTA-only ship is significantly cheaper, less massive, and easier to build, and the limitations of grav/pressor fields at orbital altitudes mean that grav sleds can't operate efficienctly even in circumplanetary space, so there is a commercial niche for surface-to-orbit CTA-only shuttles and for heavily armored CTA-only monitors.

Grav/pressor: Highly efficient, but requires gravity to push against, typically becoming ineffective by the time you reach orbit. Planetary surface and atmospheric travel only.
Any ship designed for planetary landings already incorporates grav/pressor systems -- unless you're planning on using really, really long landing strips.

BUT:

[B]Real Science Question: Is a planet's gravitational field actually that make weaker a few hundred miles out? Objects in orbit are in freefall, but I think they're still falling at (virtually) the same rate they'd fall at sea level -- they're just moving fast enough, and starting out high enough, that they "miss the ground" and keep sailing around the planet in circles.

Countercheck

02-28-2007, 02:25 PM

Wow sydney, you're asking me to dig up stuff I haven't used in YEARS. What you want to know is the difference in acceleration between two masses depending on distance? We'll call one mass pmass (planet) and the other smass (ship)

Force due to gravitation = gravitational constant x pmass x smass/distance^2

So the distance between the planet and the ship is inversely proportional to... the square root of the force. Note, that's from the center of the two masses, not the edge, so we're measuring from the core of the planet. So the force due to gravity 1 planetary radius above the surface will be about 1/4 the force due to gravity on the surface.

Radius of the earth, for comparison, is 6,378 km.

Therefore, geosynchrous orbit is about 5.6 earth radi, and will experience a force of gravity about 1/30th of that on the surface.

I THINK this is right.

And chris, I'll send you an e-mail shortly. I'm a space wargame buff =)

Countercheck

02-28-2007, 02:29 PM

Wow sydney, you're asking me to dig up stuff I haven't used in YEARS. What you want to know is the difference in acceleration between two masses depending on distance? We'll call one mass pmass (planet) and the other smass (ship)

Force due to gravitation = gravitational constant x pmass x smass/distance^2

So the distance between the planet and the ship is inversely proportional to... the square root of the force. Note, that's from the center of the two masses, not the edge, so we're measuring from the core of the planet. So the force due to gravity 1 planetary radius above the surface will be about 1/4 the force due to gravity on the surface.

Radius of the earth, for comparison, is 6,378 km.

Therefore, geosynchrous orbit is about 6.6 earth radi (from the center of the earth, not from the surface), and will experience a force of gravity about 1/40th of that on the surface.

Sydney Freedberg

02-28-2007, 02:45 PM

Mike, if I were not already happily married, and male, and non-Canadian, I would gladly bear your brainy children.

Countercheck

02-28-2007, 02:49 PM

=) Heh. None of those are insurmountable obstacles.

I'm Hoping that's right. It's been years since I've done that.

luke

02-28-2007, 06:36 PM

CTA -- fusion, fission or whatever is a must for all ships.

Grav pressors seems ubiquitous and efficient enough to be installed on any ship that's going to enter into a well. But deep spacers prolly wouldn't carry them. Then again, Geil's ship uses CTA to boost from the surface. So maybe they're not as common as I'd like to think.

Distortion drives -- what's the drawback? You can zip about effectively FTL. You need CTAs to make yourself go. You need fuel for the Distortion Drives. Is the fuel bulky? Is it expensive? Is it volatile? Is it rare?

-L

EDIT: Actually, space is full of gravity wells. As Paul has noted, it's an ocean of currents and depths. So maybe GPs would be universally useful.

Sydney Freedberg

02-28-2007, 08:19 PM

Actually, here's one way of framing it:

For a ship of a given mass (let m=1 in arbitrary units),

let h be the fraction of that mass required by drive components required only to achieve Hyper expansion of average speed (e.g. distortion tails) and fuel for one typical interstellar transit

let s be the fraction of that mass required by Subliminal expansion drives (not counting HEx-specific components, which are part of h above, and not counting CTA drives to provide a vector, which are counted under c below) of average speed and fuel for typical intra-system operations

let c be the fraction of that mass required by conventional thrusters of average acceleration

A ship capable of interstellar travel has HEx gear, subliminal distortion drives, and CTA, so its effective payload fraction (i.e. % of mass available for all non-propulsion systems combined) is whatever's left over after the mass of all three systems have been subtracted:

Payload (interstellar) = 1 - (h+s+c)

A ship capable only of intra-system travel has no HEx-specific gear, only subliminal and CTA, so it only has to set aside mass for two of the systems:

Payload (intrasystem) = 1 - (s+c)

A ship equipped only with CTA drives -- presumably a specialized short-hauler for operations "in the well" around a planet in the zone with gravity high enough that distortion drives cut out but low enough that grav/pressor doesn't work -- would have an even higher payload fraction:

Payload (circumplanetary) = 1 - c

Chris, in very rough terms, what are the values of h, s, and c?

Why does this matter? Because if h is relatively small -- i.e. if a subliminal-only drive can be converted into a HEx-capable drive with a relatively small addition of mass for distortion tail and fuel -- then there's no point in building intra-system only ships; if h is relatively large -- if the mass to support the distortion tail, or the bulk of fuel required for interstellar transit, or both, are considerable -- then there is a point to building intra-system ships. Likewise, if s is relatively large, there's a point to building CTA-only ships.

Sydney Freedberg

02-28-2007, 08:52 PM

P.S.: Since Chris confirmed a page ago (and in the Vaylen Wars rules) that the big mass burden of interstellar-capable shipis not the HEx drive proper but the fuel, that raises the possibility of a whole class of ships that are fully HEx-capable but which require "drop tanks" (again, as Chris mentioned) to go interstellar. It's still worth having HEx capability even if you have limited fuel, because if you're trying to travel to another planet, you can head due "north" or "south" until you're clear of the disk, engage HEx, and zip "above" or "below" the plane of the system until you're close to your destination, at which point you return to the disk and slow down to subliminal speeds for the final approach.

Sydney Freedberg

02-28-2007, 08:54 PM

P.P.S.: I get the impression that fuel is simply hydrogen, since Chris talks about ships refueling from gas giants if they need to. In that case, it's not expensive -- it's effectively free for the taking -- but the amounts needed to keep your fusion reactor going for light-years on end is still presumably damned bulky.

Paul B

02-28-2007, 11:45 PM

Thematically, it seems like the limitations on fuel for interstellar travel are very similar to the limitations on potable water on Age of Sail-era long ocean journeys. The water is "free" but you have to get to it and you have to haul it around.

Since the game already establishes that interstellar travel takes a maneuver to accomplish, everything that happens within that maneuver is pure color. I guess I'd be more interested in what sorts of things might come up during interplanetary travel, which in practical play is probably going to come up much more often. I'm hoping these narrative assumptions are correct:

* SubEx travel usually gets you from almost-here to almost-there without incident, unless you blow through an as-yet-uncharted debris field and get knocked out (ie you hit a sandbar or reef). The interesting stuff that happens, story-wise, during interplanetary travel is going to be unplanned stops, ship-board drama, and hijack/piracy attempts.

* There is no stealth flight in space, with the exception of very expensive and rare Dark Ship technology. For anything approaching an ambush-type scenario, you either have to be set up in a physically shielded place (radiation cloud, asteroid field, behind or inside an object), or have a Dark Ship (rare given the cost).

* In many/most other cases, setting up for a Conflict scene in space is going to involve plenty of foreknowledge. The only limitations you'd have on the fight would be what force you could bring to bear at a whim (i.e. Luke's logistics/strategy roll prior to a fight to establish "superior numbers" dispo bonus).

* Buying, maintaining, repairing and operating ships is pretty expensive: probably on par with owning a large yacht at the very smallest civilian level, up to owning a large private jet at the highest civilian level. High-index tech might even be irreplacable. Attackers have an avid interest in siezing ships without harming them in most cases. For the same reason we don't see mass drivers chucking asteroids at planets, the value of the spoils is such that total annihilation, or even extensive damage, is undesirable.

* Under what circumstances would total annihilation be acceptable? Shoot, I can even see an avid interest in capturing Vaylen craft and technology. Is there a cultural revulsion to even being near Vaylen stuff? It might all get vaporized on principle.

* Fortress worlds are possible, and even probable, because q-beam tech can so completely ruin the plans of many/most invasion attempts. Orbital pressor-lifted/maneuvered bases carry whatever firepower is needed to clean up anything that slips past the q-beams.

* Hammer has its own cultural parallel to Iron, and that is the gunship/corvette. It's unfortunate that these are viewed as multi-person vessels, because that means it's not a direct parallel. If these small, tough, super-flexible craft have an heirloom/artifact quality to them, how are crews chosen? Are these craft "owned" by their pilots like Iron-wearers own their Iron? Are gunships/corvettes fetishized the same way?

I think that's all the random thoughts that popped into my head for now. I guess I'm now more interested in dragging all this back to the realm of useful story/game material.

p.

Countercheck

03-01-2007, 03:13 PM

Analogy Brainwave: Q-Beams are roughly comparable to WWI torpedoes... admittedly, torpedoes are horrifically short ranged while Q-beams are horrifically long ranged, but the parallels still exist. Torpedoes, despite being terribly short legged and woefully innacurate, were deemed a legitimate threat to big battleships because a single hit could destroy the largest warship. Battleships and cruisers began mounting torpedo launchers simply against the day when they might be in a close quarters battle with an enemy capital ship... while ships could absorb hundreds of large caliber gun-hits, a single torpedo could crack a dreadnought's back. The largest threat came from motor torpedo boats, which were tiny little fast vessels that could carry a few torpedoes, but were too small and fast to easily be targeted (Historical note, the term Destroyer is actually a shortened version of the proper name for the ship type... torpedo boat destroyer. An entire class of light, fast, gun armed warships was designed in order to combat the torpedo boat threat... then people noticed that these torpedo boat destroyers were as fast as torpedo boats, more heavily armed, and more robust, and destroyers began launching torpedo attacks on battleships themselves. ironic)

How this relates to IE. Q-Beams can obliterate the largest vessel with a single hit, but require many shots to generate a hit. The logical solution to this problem is to have as many Q-Beam batteries as possible, and mount them on as many small ships as possible, thereby reducing the damage done by a single hostile Q-beam hit. I see small, effectively unarmoured vessels with high distortion SEx drives built around a single Q-beam battery. Five or six of them would be as dangerous at long range as a battleship, and would be far more robust, as any hit the battleship might score on them would only eliminate a single Q-beam, while any hit the squadron scores on the battleship would win the engagement.

Edit: Chris, I am more and more convinced that THESE are your skirmishers. There is no real defense against them other than deploying Q-beam boats of your own to engage them at long range and screen your heavily armoured Tight Space battleships and transports. A small group of thse things could easilly hang about at extreme Q-beam range and keep a battlegroup tied up in a cloud of particulates. In tight space, manouver is difficult and weapons are accurate... armour and firepower of heavy ships is what keeps you alive in tight space. In open space, speed and numbers is life.

While I'm thinking on analogies, here's another one. Smoke Screens. I could see a battlegroup deploying a mercanter in front of it to vent mist behind it, protecting the bulk of the battlegroup following it from Q-beam fire. Alternatively, an aggressor could divert a comet to make a close pass by the target planet, and the battlegroup could hide in its tail. A sufficiently coldblooded attacker could twitch the comet into the plate as it made it's final approach, forcing the defenders to split their attention between dismantling the comet and destroying the assault force.

cmoeller

03-01-2007, 03:40 PM

Cool analogy, Mike! Arguing the other side for a moment, Power armor does provide benefits: it can shrug off small weapons fire and provide protection against near-miss Q-beam hits. A big battleship with Factor-9 power armor can weather several Q-beam strikes before the armor is "saturated" and goes down. By strikes, I don't mean direct hits, but 99% of Q-beam hits are not direct hits.

Psychologically, if you're a Forged Lord and you've sunk a decade's worth of profits into a warship, there's going to be an urgent desire to protect that investment with all the armor you can buy. There will be daring lords who overcome that fear to develop aggressive designs like your Q-beam "Destroyers." The Kestrel Frigate (illustrating the Hammer Patrol Craft in the Brick), is basically what you're talking about. If you look at the sketch you'll see an arrow pointing to the bow with the note "1 high...", which, in the actual sketch reads "1 high-intensity Q-beam projector." The Kestrel is a fast (D7) warship with 1 Q-beam and no power armor. The field generators are passive sensors designed to detect and interpret distortion field signatures (the panels are stowed during combat...).

Chris

Countercheck

03-01-2007, 04:43 PM

Yes, this is assuming that you can make a Q-beam armed ship that is cheap enough to be more or less 'disposable' =)

Sydney Freedberg

03-02-2007, 10:57 AM

Mike, you and I are thinking convergently again, I think: I had been thinking in terms of a "battlecruiser" class with the Q-Beam armament of a battleship, greater speed, but much lesser armor and secondary armament. The idea of an even more fragile, escort-class ship built around a single Q-Beam is intriguing, but a little scary -- what if the enemy gets a shot anywhere near it?

Countercheck

03-02-2007, 11:31 AM

The same thing that happens if a MTB suffers a straddle from a battleship main gun salvo.... it dies. When light warships fight heavy warships, there's only one result when the light one gets hit. The thing is, if the heavy gets hit with a Q-beam, it's as dead as the light ships.

It's really more like the battleship trying to hit the MTB with torpedoes. Whomever suffers the first clean hit dies. The MTBs die if they suffer near misses too, but if you have enough of them, you'll generate the kill. They'd also have more of a psychological effect... Who really wants to risk a massive, expensive battlewagon against a piddling little patrol craft. Sure, the battlewagon will probably win, but all it takes is one clean hit. It might be unlikely, but these things happen... and no Hammer lord wants it to happen to HIM. If they were organized more like the vaylen, they might care less. The ships are clan property, not personal property. If one gets hit, well, it absorbed a shot that didn't hit a naiven transport. For the greater good! But if it's a hammer lord's personal battleship that he's spent a fortune refitting and repairing... is he really going to want to risk it on a game of pitch and toss? Against... escorts?!?!?!?!?!?!

Going for a medieval metaphor, it's like a knight fighting a crossbowman. There's no honour in killing men who are lower status, and you stand a good chance of getting shot yourself.

Sydney Freedberg

03-02-2007, 01:49 PM

The Q-Beam "apocalyptic near miss" is a real problem for lightly armed craft, though. To use game terms (loosely), we're talking about Structural Scale Megablast damage, so even an Incidental hit from a Q-Beam is going to wipe out an entire squadron of vessels whose "Destroyed" tolerance is in the "Vehicular" range.
Presumably an "Incidental" Q-Beam hit is quite a distant miss where you're still close enough to get the radiation burst, a "Mark" result means a near miss, and a "Severe" result means the distortion effect erupts right around the target, which nothing can survive.
So you get ships falling into roughly three categories of toughness (the names are notional and provisional):

Battleship (HEx) or Monitor (sublight)
Armor: Powered (destroyed tolerance = high superstructural)
Can survive Q-Beam hits of: Incidental or Mark

Cruiser (HEx) or Cutter (sublight)
Armor: unpowered heavy (destroyed tolerance = low superstructural)
Can survive Q-Beam hits of: Incidental only

Corvette (HEx), Assault Shuttle / Hammer Hussar / Gunship (sublight)
Armor: light (destroyed tolerance = high vehicular)
Can survive Q-Beam hits: never

Ships that can't survive even an Incidental Q-Beam hit will have to hide in dust clouds -- i.e. around planets, in asteroid belts, or in weird Sargasso zones of the system -- to survive. They'll be damned difficult to dislodge from such areas, but very limited in their capcity to maneuver across the system.

cmoeller

03-02-2007, 02:36 PM

Ships that can't survive even an Incidental Q-Beam hit will have to hide in dust clouds -- i.e. around planets, in asteroid belts, or in weird Sargasso zones of the system -- to survive. They'll be damned difficult to dislodge from such areas, but very limited in their capcity to maneuver across the system.

Another way of looking at this is using the Age of Sail idea of "Ships of the Line." Those big ships could stand in the Line of Battle, dishing out and taking tremendous punishment from the enemy. Frigates could participate around the fringes of such a battle, but would be pounded into splinters in moments if they participated directly. Frigates were more commonly employed as the eyes and ears of the fleet, and sent on independent missions all around the world. They were death to any merchant vessel, or anything smaller than themselves (schooners, galleys, etc...) that they could run down.

So there are two "worlds" of hammer conflict: the formal battle, in which Heavy, Q-beam armed, Power Armored warships duke it out in cataclysmic battle (a'la Trafalgar); and the much more common skirmishes between lighter warships, operating individually or in small groups. Those lighter ships (some with a Q-beam or two and a bit of Power Armor), will prey on similar targets, and rely on speed to get them out of harm's way when the giant Hammers show up.

Chris

Paul B

03-02-2007, 04:01 PM

I have the feeling that big, formal battles are in fact so big that you could play an entire phase within them.

p.

Sydney Freedberg

03-05-2007, 09:07 PM

Here's one more attempt on my part to nail down types of ship -- and, hey, to avoid the acronym "SEx" in the process!

Longhex ("Longship")
(interstellar-ranged hyperdistortion drive)
A fully self-sufficient craft with fully HEx-capable distortion drive, crew accomodations, and -- above all -- the fuel stores to travel faster-than-light for weeks at a time.
Most Hammer Lord and merchant princes prefer longhex ships, large or small, because of the attractions of (1) the strategic/commercial flexibility of being able to move interstellar and (2) the self-sufficiency of not needing tankers, carriers, drop tanks, or any other specialized support to do it. But that same flexibility and self-sufficiency means that longhex ships spend more of their mass on propulsion (drives plus fuel) and are therefore less efficient than specialist ships.

Shorthex
(intrasystem-ranged hyperdistortion drive)
A craft with a fully HEX-capable distortion drive but only enough fuel storage for a few days or even hours of faster-than-light travel: sufficient to zip around a system at faster-than-light speeds (once you've accelerated clear of the Disk) but only a tenth or a hundredth of what's required to make it to the next star system.
Shorthex ships are ideal for system defense outside the disk ("North Watch" and "South Watch") and for fast commercial transit (e.g. first class passengers) within systems that have more than one settled body. They can also be converted to longhex ships relatively simply, by adding (massive) drop tanks.

Sublight
(intrasystem-ranged subliminal distortion drive)
A craft with a subliminal-only distortion drive, capable only of sublight travel. They are adequate for short flights in the Disk of a system where HEx doesn't function anyway -- say two worlds so close together, or so deep in an unusually dense Disk, that taking the "shortcut" into HExable space is worthwhile -- or for slow hauls between planets for non-time-critical cargoes -- say bulk supplies or raw materials.
Militarily, sublight ships are of very limited use, able to defend a single planet and its satellites, but on a system-wise scale all too easily outmaneuvered by HEx ships taking "shortcuts" in and out of the Disk.
A sublight ship can be converted into a shorthex ship, or even a longship, by adding a HEx array and appropriate fuel tanks, but this is effectively bolting on a second drive and requires some technical sophistication to make it work.

Thruster
(conventional reaction-based thrusters only)
A craft without a distortion drive at all. (Distortion drive ships have CTA thrusters to give the vectors that the artificial and localized distortion of the space-time continuum then magnifies). Such craft are outmaneuvered by distortion-drive ships, HEx or sub, beyond the Well of a specific world, and they are outmanuevered by grav/pressor sleds within the atmosphere. So thruster craft are optimized for, and capable of dominating, only one narrow shell of space, whose upper boundary is the radius from the planet at which dust levels attenuate to allow subliminal distortion drives to engage, and whose lower boundary is the radius from the planet at which gravity is strong enough for grav/pressor systems to work efficiently.
Commercially, thruster-only ships are commonplace: They are a cheap and effective way of shuttling between a planet's surface, its orbiting satellites or space stations, and any deep-space ships parked in high orbit that cannot land or do not want to bother to. Militarily, they are very narrowly useful either as landing craft, launched by distortion drive-equipped motherships, or as close-in defense craft for a particular planet, often as a Q-Beam equipped mobile extension of fortresses on the ground.

A crucial question to Chris: Which of these types do you want to be common and which rare specialists? Because we can justify the underlying technology cost-benefit tradeoffs however we want once we know the desired effect.

From what you've posted so far, I'm thinking that most craft fall at one or the other of the the extreme ends of the spectrum: There are lots of fully HEx-capable interstellar ships, lots of local shuttles with no distortion drives at all, and precious little in between.
But you also mentioned "drop tanks" at one point, and if the mass required for fuel is a really significant factor (as the Vaylen Wars rules state), then the idea of a "shorthex" ship that has everything it needs to go interstellar but the fuel is very attractive: You only have to haul around the mass of all that fuel when you really need it, and the rest of the time you can strip down and have a much higher thrust:weight ratio. (Now, if "fuel" is mostly water, then it's a really good absorber of heat, making it potentially dual-use as a heat sink in combat when you can't expose your fragile radiator vanes, and even perhaps as shielding). If the efficiencies are attractive enough, you could even justify battleships with drop tanks!
Likewise, it's important what the cost/mass penalty difference is between having a HEx-capable drive with only enough fuel for intrasystem hops (shorthex) vs. a sublight-only drive vs. conventional thrusters only. If there's not much difference between the cost and mass of a HEx drive with enough fuel for intrasystem travel only and a subliminal distortion drive, then there's no point to building a sublight-only ship when a shorthex ship can just zip in and out of the Disk. And if there's not much difference between the cost and mass of a sublight-only drive and conventional thrusters, there's no point in building a thruster-only ship that's optimized only for a narrow zone around a planet. But the bigger the difference between drive types, and the more cost and mass increase each step of the way from CTA-only to subliminal distortion to hyperdistortion, the more it's attractive to build different specialized types of ship.

Sydney Freedberg

03-05-2007, 09:34 PM

P.S.: It's even easy to justify different answers for different sizes of ship, e.g. "small ships are usually sublight-only, but large vessels almost always mount HEx drive." You just have to handwave that the cost/mass of a distortion drive, or of a HEx drive specifically, doesn't increase linearly as a proportion of the mass being moved. If the cost/mass of a HEx drive increases exponentially with the mass affected, then it's much more efficient to make lots of small HEx-capable ships than one big HEx ship (which doesn't sound like the Iron Empires universe, though). If the cost/mass of HEx drive increases logarithmically with the mass affected (which is similar to the real world, where large ships require relatively smaller engines to move at the same speed because the key issue is drag, not mass), then it's much more efficient to make small ships without distortion drives and reserve HEx for big ships, like dreadnaughts, superfreighters, and carriers for all those little non-HEx ships.

cmoeller

03-06-2007, 03:29 PM

Hey Syd,

Most ships have DD's unless they're really just designed to operate near their planet of origin (Gepard's tug in Sheva's War for example). Nobody's going to argue that a car is more cost-efficient than a bicycle, but if you're planning on traveling more than a few miles, the car's going to win out over the bicycle (for all but the very athletic).

There are plenty of small transit-capable ships: escort vessels, scouts, couriers, mercators and private yachts, that sort of thing. The primary reason why a ship wouldn't have transit capability is based primarily on its purpose. Kitting out a gunship with several week's food, fuel, a sleeping compartment, etc... those are luxuries that could be given over to armor, sensors and other more immediate needs. Warship designers aren't known for going in for luxuries. And it's plenty easy to bolt a gunship to the hull of a larger ship that's built for cruising, and drag it along to its destination.

The reason I say a ship is "transit capable" rather than "HEx capable" is that it's important tactically for small combat craft to be HEx capable, even if they don't intend to travel outside of the local system. A ship with HEx capability is essentially invulnerable to attack as long as it has HEx and stays outside of a system's particle disk. If it can't "micro-jump", it's much easier to pin and kill.

-Chris

Sydney Freedberg

03-06-2007, 03:40 PM

Got it. So there are plenty of "shorthex" ships, to use the jargon I used above: capable of moving at HEx but without the fuel to transit between systems. And then there are a fair number of utility tug and shuttle-type vehicles that have thrusters only, for short-hauls around a particular planet in the Well where DD won't work anyway.

But the category that is very rare in practice is ships with sublight-only distortion drives. Even if you're not interested in anything more than interplanetary travel, it's just so darn attractive to be able to pop up out of the Disk and zip across the system: If you have distortion drives at all, HEx is too good to pass up.

cmoeller

03-06-2007, 09:28 PM

That's it in a nutshell, Sydney. I just started reading the first Honor Harrington book this afternoon, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Talk about design-for-effect naval warfare, Paul! Weber's spaceships are tough on the sides and vulnerable to raking fire at the bow and stern... hmmm...what does that remind me of?

Chris

Sydney Freedberg

03-07-2007, 08:48 AM

Coolness. Two final questions for you, Chris, and then I think we can come up with a solid scheme for ship classes:

1) How common are Q-Beams? Are they so bulky and costly that they are reserved for the largest capital ships (the battleship and battlecruiser classes), or do even escort-class starships usually have at least one Q-Beam (as your putting a Q-Beam on a "Kestrel-class Frigate" implies), or are even intra-system assault shuttle/Hammer Hussar/gunship class vessels capable of carrying a Q-beam?

2) How common is powered armor, and how does it work? Again, is this something so complex, costly, and massive that it is reserved for capital ships, or is it common on even escort-class starships, or is it feasible even for intra-system gunships?

cmoeller

03-07-2007, 10:12 AM

In both cases, we're talking about dedicated warships only, not small craft. A Q-beam occupies roughly 1000 cubic tons of volume (including space required for crew, power, etc...). The same volume, dispersed throughout the ship, will give you one power grid. A secondary weapon requires maybe 5-10% of that, depending on the mount (missiles and torpedoes that require magazines, obviously being on the high end).

As for ship classes, I'm not wedded to terminology yet (since Hammer stuff is in its unpublished infancy). Frigates (the lightest "true" warship: fast and unarmored) will have one Q-beam, maximum. Destroyers/Cruisers will have 2-3. Battleships 4-6. Soul-destroying Dreadnauts 8. The same goes for powered armor. Light warships will have maybe 1 grid. Cruisers 2-3. Battleships 4-6. Soul-destroying Dreadnauts up to 9.

That's the overall shape of things...

Chris

Sydney Freedberg

03-07-2007, 11:03 AM

Got it. I'd been thinking of Q-Beams vs. no Q-Beams as the dividing line between battleships and cruisers, but in fact it's the dividing line between frigates and small craft. So basically any warship (as opposed to a gunship/assault shuttle) will have at least one Q-Beam; and any but the lightest warship will have at least some powered armor.

cmoeller

03-07-2007, 11:23 AM

Yeah. If you don't have a Q-beam, you're basically out of the fight against power-armored targets. There can be orbital bombardment ships that could be heavily missile armed, and big troop ships won't have Q-beams or Powered Armor, staying out of the disk until the fighting arm clears out the major opposition.

Small ships will fight larger ships, but their goals isn't to "hit" their victim, but to shut it down and nail it. Once they get in close, the Q-beams are useless. Not a duty for the faint of heart, certainly...

Chris

Sydney Freedberg

03-07-2007, 11:27 AM

Do you have any thoughts on how shipboard powered armor works? Unlike a fortress, where you can just boil off the local aquifer, getting rid of the absorbed heat is a big problem in a vacuum.

cmoeller

03-07-2007, 05:45 PM

Hammer Lord Moeller sat quietly in his command chair, fingers steepled. A cigar smouldered in its clip on his desk. Outside his command cabin's viewport, the stars' color wavered from white to blue to red, wavelengths shifted by the intervening distortion boundary. He wondered, distractedly, where his tech was with the Power Armor specs he'd requested earlier. No matter. He had an hour cruising time to North Watch. Moeller sighed, running his fingers through his hair and realized that he was in desperate need of a shower.

Iskander

03-09-2007, 09:03 AM

Hair? WTF? That'd better be a wig, Moeller.

- Forged Lord Pedanticus Nitpickstickler.

Sydney Freedberg

03-09-2007, 09:24 AM

Hey, Philippe d'Artois gets to have hair, and he's wearing Iron at one point. Lucky bastard. Baron Sheva gets to have hair too, but I'm not sure that's Iron he's wearing.

Sydney Freedberg

03-09-2007, 10:05 PM

Enough hair talk! (Although: Really Nice Hair, +2D to Etiquette rolls, categorical limitation: cannot wear a helmet, Resources Obstacle: 4). Back to obsessive military geekery, specifically another try at ship categorization:

0. General Terms

A Hammer is any space vessel equipped with powered armor. Thus it is possible to have a "civilian Hammer," as with the two types listed in the book -- and note that they are as damage-resistant as much larger Mercators. (Specifically, they have equal Integrity, although lower Tolerances, when they have much lower Profiles).

1. Military Vessels

A Cruiser is any Hammer vessel capable of interstellar transit without any external augmentation or support: that is, it has fully HEx-capable drives and enough onboard fuel capacity to move at faster-than-light speeds for multiple weeks (as well as adequate crew accomodations and life support). Note that this use of "cruiser" depicts a whole category of ships, large and small -- it follows the Age of Sail use of the word rather than the 20th century definition (which was already obsolete by the 21st century, when "destroyers" became larger than most of the cruisers remaining in service).
All Cruisers are equipped with power armor (being Hammers) and most carry Q-Beams.

A Cutter is a military vessel capable of faster-than-light travel within a single star system: it has fully HEx-capable drives but only enough fuel for several days at full HEx. Cutters have adequate crew accomodations and life support for several weeks, however, as they are often used for long sublight patrols or to stand the North Watch and South Watch of a system. A Cutter's HEx drive is also designed to stress tolerances that allow it to operate continuously for weeks, and they are fitted to allow the addition of drop tanks.
With the drop tanks, a Cutter is capable of full interstellar transit, but usually larger and less maneuverable than a comparably powerful Cruiser with integral drop tanks; without the drop tanks, however, a Cutter is smaller and more agile than a comparable Cruiser. The greatest disadvantage of Cutters on the offensive is that, once they jettison their drop tanks for combat, they are dependent on support ships to retrieve the tanks and reattach them after the battle: A Cutter in a hostile system cannot easily retreat.
All Cutters have power armor and most have Q-Beams.

A Monitor is a military vessel without distortion drives at all, used solely for close-in defense in areas where distortion drives do not function -- either in the gravity well of a specific planet or in a high-dust "sargasso" area. A Monitor rarely has crew accomodations, life support, or fuel for more than a few days' operations and relies heavily on its base. Neither is a Monitor capable of accepting drop tanks or an externally mounted distortion drive -- although some Carriers (q.v.) are capable of transporting small or even mid-sized Monitors between systems. Most Monitors are designed with a specific planet's or sargasso's conditions in mind, however, and their very specialized thrust, anti-radiation, and navigation systems tend to translate poorly even to a similar world in another system.
All Monitors have power armor and Q-Beams to fire upon enemy ships outside the Well. Their relatively simple propulsion systems allow them to be much more heavily armed and armored than distortion-capable ships of equivalent mass.

A Gunship is a small military vessel for intra-system combat: It has subliminal distortion drives only, not HEx capability, and only enough fuel for about a day's operations. Crews are small -- sometimes just a pilot -- and accomodations consist at best of a reclining seat to catch a brief nap and room to stand and stretch. Hammer Hussars and Assault Shuttles are both examples of Gunships.
This class of vessel must be transported between star systems in Carriers (q.v.) and is too small to carry powered armor or Q-Beams: They are specialized for close-in operations around planets where Q-Beams and distortion drives do not function.
Unlike the larger and purely defensive Monitors, however, Gunships do have subliminal distortion capability. This allows an attacking fleet's Carriers to stand off from the Well of a besieged planet and launch Gunships from a (relatively) safe distance, and allows a defending fleet's Gunships to mount hit-and-run raids out of sargassos and planetary Wells against the invaders, especially against fuel tankers and troop transports.

2. Civilian Vessels

A Mercator is a civilian, non-Hammer vessel capable of independent interstellar transit: It has no power armor, but a fully HEx-capable drive and adequate onboard fuel for weeks at full distortion. A Mercator's thrusters are typically far less powerful than a Cruiser of comparable mass, however, making them much less maneuverable.

A Clipper is a civilian, non-Hammer vessel capable of faster-than-light travel within a system: i.e., no power armor, fully-HEx capable drives, but only limited fuel. "Clipping" is spacefarer slang for faster-than-light travel between planets in the same system: the ship moves at subliminal distortion out of the Disk, engages its HEx drive, crosses the system outside the high-dust zone at FTL speeds, and then reenters the Disk ("clips the Disk") at subliminal speeds for the final approach.

A Tug is a civilian small craft equipped with conventional thrusters only, used for local transit around a single world -- between the surface, orbit, and satellites -- or for slow hauls between planets in a given system. The name refers dismissively to "tugging" cargo and passengers around at low speeds, not to tugging larger craft.

3. Subtypes of vessel

The prefix Battle indicates a Hammer vessel which is equipped with the highest possible density of power armor and the greatest number of Q-Beams – typically four or more – and therefore able to do battle with the heaviest enemy ships.
Most such vessels are so expensive and rare that their owners cannot afford to confine them to a single star system, or to make them dependent on support ships, and therefore equip them with full HEx capabilities -- hence the term Battlecruiser applies to the Iron Empires' most powerful and strategically flexible vessels.
However, some Forged Lords, and many Vaylen Clans, prefer Battlecutters: These craft require clumsy external drop tanks and support ships to make an interstellar transit, but with the tanks gone they are considerably smaller and more agile than a Battlecruiser of comparable power. Battlemonitors also exist, but they are surpassingly rare, reserved for guarding the most valuable and bitterly contested worlds.

Heavy indicates a Hammer vessel with enough power armor and Q-Beams to defeat lesser vessels – typically two or three -- but not enough to stand in the "line of battle." Heavy cruisers are the largest ships in many Forged Lord's fleets. Heavy Cutters and Heavy Monitors are far more common than Battlecutters and Battlemonitors.

Light indicates a Hammer vessel with minimal power armor and only a single Q-Beam.
Light Cruisers are often called "Patrol Cruisers," because they are typically used to patrol multiple lightly defended systems, or to scout ahead of a fleet; "Frigate" is another common term.
Light Cutters are often called "Pickets," because they are usually scattered around a system outside the Disk watching for pirates or invaders; they are also often called "Corvettes."
Light Monitors are by far the most common type of planetary defense ship. The term "Monitor," in casual use, almost always refers to a Light Monitor.

A Destroyer is a Hammer vessel with the minimal power armor of a Light vessel but two (or even three) Q-Beams. These ships can give out much more punishment than they can take -- hence the name -- and are used, like early 20th century destroyers, to harass larger vessels and to screen the fleet.

A Raider is a Hammer Cruiser equipped with extra fuel and cargo capacity at the expense of its fighting power. These ships are capable of spending months at full HEx, bypassing defended border zones to raid unprotected worlds, and then retreating at HEx without stopping to refuel. Special dual-purpose design allows the fuel tanks emptied from the outward journey to be crammed with loot and even slaves in cryo-sleep.
A Raider typically has as much power armor as a standard Cruiser of the same mass -- to allow it to make its escape -- but far fewer Q-Beams -- since it is not intended to stand and fight.
Raiders vary widely in size: Thus there are Light Raiders and Heavy Raiders, although very few Battleraiders.

A Carrier is a Hammer Cruiser designed to carry Gunships and other non-HEx-capable craft (in rare cases, as large as a Heavy Monitor). Most of a Carrier's mass is given over to fuel, hangar bays, repair shops, and crew accomodations. They are essential adjuncts to an invasion fleet but perilously fragile. Carriers are of widely varying sizes -- hence "Light Carrier," "Heavy Carrier," and even "Raider Carrier" -- but usually carry significantly less power armor than a regular Cruiser of the same mass.
Most Carriers have no Q-Beams at all. A small number of so-called Battle Carriers exist, but most naval strategists consider putting such a weapon on a Carrier simply a temptation to put the valuable and specialized ship in harm's way unnecessarily.

A Bombard is a Hammer vessel with a high density of power armor -- as much as a Heavy Cruiser/Cutter/Monitor or even a Battlecruiser -- but with no Q-Beams. Instead, these ships carry a massive armament of short-ranged fusion cannon and missile launchers. They are specialized to fight in the Well around a planet, where Q-Beams do not work, trading blows with defending Monitors and planetary fortresses.
Bombards tend to be Cutters -- i.e. HEx-capable but only able to make interstellar transit with drop tanks and support ships -- because these specialized ships always operate as part of a larger invasion force and, lacking Q-Beams, are unsuited for fleet actions in open space anyway. Bombards hang back with the troop transports and other auxillaries until the Q-Beam-armed ships have defeated the enemy fleet, at which point they eject their drop tanks and, stripped for action, move nimbly into the Well of the targeted planet.
Bombards are a relatively rare type, but some of the most powerful and aggressive Forged Lords -- and, of course, many Vaylen Clans -- employ them to spare the even more expensive Battlecruisers and Heavy Cruisers from having to slug it out in the Well where their main armament of Q-Beams do not function.