Burning Hotok and other Fortress Worlds

[Sydney_Freedberg]

Rescuing some relevant stuff that was split:

@cmoeller

Excellent discussion, guys. I’ve been away for the holiday, with no access to the site, so I missed the early part of this discussion. Overall, what you’re proposing is all well within canon. There are two factors that aren’t being addressed, mainly because the rpg doesn’t discuss them. I’ll be going into more detail in the future, and they may show up in an expansion, but I’ll touch on them here.

1. Q-Beams.
   These are the primary Hammer weapons… the big guns in the Iron Empires. They have the following properties:

-they annihilate matter on contact (via a matter/antimatter detonation), but don’t often contact their target directly, being inaccurate and slow. Most damage will be from near-misses.

-they outrange all other naval weapons by a significant margin.

-they can be fired out of atmospheres (or any other particle-rich environment, such as a dust cloud… even from far underground), but not into them.

-They’re massive, and require a lot of power to operate.

2. Powered Armor
   This isn’t a force-field (we don’t have those in the IE), but a form of powered plate (or ceramic, or layered, or whatever… Sydney, help!) armor. Energy transferred to the powered material (kinetic, heat, shockwave, etc…), is channeled away and vented, allowing the target to survive strikes from most conventional weapons (all the stuff in the Brick), Nuclear weapons and Antimatter weapons being the notable exceptions.

-Again, this technology is bulky and eats power.

The ramifications for fortresses: Fortresses can mount and power more Q-beams, more cheaply, than Hammer forces can. What’s more, ground-based Q-beams can attack anything outside of low orbit, while the attacker can’t respond. Finally, Q-beams can buried a mile underground, and still operate as long as their surface sensors and targetting elements are intact.

The Keep and other key facilities will be shielded with powered armor, rendering them virtually invulnerable to orbital attack except with nuclear weapons or really big asteroid bombs (which have their own problems, as you guys have discussed). So a “real” fortress will be proof against orbital attack, unless the attacker is determined to just burn the entire world. Outnumbered defending Hammer assets can shelter in low orbit, protected by the Q-beams of the fortress below, and preventing the attacking fleet from approaching without suffering horrible losses.

Ultimately, the only sure way to take a major fortress out is via ground assault, sabotage or treachery. Smaller fortresses are another story, and those sorts of fortifications will employ all of the sorts of strategems you’re talking about above.

-Chris

@Countercheck

Hmm, powered armour sounds like a very efficient heat exchange system. Something combining lots and lots of low mass/high bulk armour with superconductors that duct the energy down into subterranian water resevoirs.

@Sydney_Freedberg

Great! I was hoping for your input, Chris, since it’s obviously essential. Let’s contemplate how to depict them.

The armor sounds like a supersized version of Iron’s “hardened and shielded” trait: instead of reducing Vehicular-scale damage to Human-scale as Iron does, an armored fortress might be able to reduce Superstructural-scale damage to Vehicular-scale. [EDIT: I crossposted with Mike/Countercheck, but I think his description of the armor sounds reasonable].

The Q-beams might be portrayed as a highly modified Battery with an extra level of Long Range (“beyond artillery”), an accuracy penalty, the Megablast trait, and a Trait Limitation to reflect firing into/out of atmospheres.

@Countercheck

If that’s the way Q-beams work, then I could see most fortresses being placed under-water. The water itself would act as the bulky armour, and would give you a near inexhaustable heat-sink

@Sydney_Freedberg

That’s a cool idea. There are nasty engineering problems building underwater, so I’m not sure “most” fortresses would be submerged, but I’d think a lot of Forged Lords would consider the tradeoff (more construction cost for better defense) to be worth it.

And even with hardened-and-shielded fortresses, you’d want to conceal or at least obfuscate your exact location, because you don’t want to make it easier for the enemy to drop that asteroid or H-bomb on you – and they’re certainly going to try to.

As an invasion force commander, especially a Vaylen one, I’m going to do everything I can to smash the fortress itself before resorting to exterminating the populace and hoping the defenders relent. Besides the waste of valuable slave labor/hullable humans, the problem with such terror tactics is that they rarely work: The population tends to rally, not collapse (consider the Blitz in London), and even if they don’t, the defending military secure in their bunkers doesn’t really have to listen to them.

@Countercheck

I agree, strategic bombing has proved ineffective generally, but when you add WMD into the mix, things might change. Not saying they WOULD, but if fortifications are as tough as Chris has suggested, then planets will be virtually unassailable, and the Vaylen would eventually need to move onto depopulating a large enough area to begin staging their Hoth style assault.

Also, If I’m a Forged Lord, you KNOW I’m going to put my anti-invasion Q-beams in the middle of cities.

As for the engineering difficulties of submerged fortresses, how about truely massive submarines? They can manouver, fire into space easily, and have hundreds of meters of water between them and the surface.

@Sydney_Freedberg

Cripes, anti-Hammer submarines. Is scary thought. You can launch missiles off those things too, of course – that’s existing technology, in fact!

Also, I remember how the Traveller “meson guns” worked: Mesons are exotic particles that don’t interact with matter, but also have a very short lifespan before they decay into (deadly) radiation; by accelerating them to near-light-speed, and calculating precisely how much those relativistic velocities slow down time in the mesons’ frame of reference, you can determine exactly when and where they decay.

Now, trying to burn up the Q-beam is, wow, expensive:

Q-Beam
Resources Obstacle: 12 points

Enhanced Range: Artillery-plus (+10 pts)
(This is extrapolating from Vehicular range costing 8 points and Artillery costing 9)

Indirect (+8 pts)

Megablast (+6 pts)

Categorical Limitations x 3: cannot fire into atmosphere or dust clouds – restricts Direct Fire, Suppressive Fire, and shot opportunities (-3 pts)

Mounted (-3 pts)

Categorical Limitation: must be mounted on a fortress or a vehicle with Integrity of 8 or more (-1 point)
(Again, extrapolating from Vehicular weapons requiring Integrity 6 and Artillery weapons requiring Integrity 7)

Inaccurate: +1 Ob to Direct Fire, Suppressive Fire, and shot opportunities (-4 pts)

Categorical Limitation: may not be used in Close Combat at all (-1 pt)

And all that is after you’ve already bought an Artillery scale weapon (Ob 8) or a vehicle with artillery mountings (like a SPAG or Hammer warship) as the base to upgrade from.

@cmoeller

Blind spots will abound regardless… planets are huge, and you can’t build a fortress that points in every direction (at least not an affordable one). The strategic function of fortress worlds is to make “safe harbors” from which human hammer assets can strike and harass Vaylen penetrations.

…

As for nuking fortress worlds into glass, it’s expected that a desperate enemy will go full out against a fortress world when it comes to a siege, throwing everything possible at it. The populations will have some sort of underground shelters (if their lords are humane), or flee in civil spacecraft, or die horribly, which is still preferable to being hulled. As Faith says, “It’s a fortress world, it’s supposed to be ruined.”

As for the Q-beam, it is similar to traveller’s Meson Gun, in that it creates a “tear” in the positive universe at a distant point, without regard to intervening matter. The trick is that the point at which the tear opens has to be a virtual vacuum. The tear won’t occur if there’s too much positive matter in the vicinity. The same technology (on a much smaller, more controlled level), is used for distortion drives. So distortion drives can’t operate inside dense particle fields either… near planets, in gas clouds, nebulae, etc…