Fleets in the Iron Empires

Burning Empires Tech Burner
7

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.

8

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. One of the odd facts about Iron Empires naval operations is that you can’t make your opponant fight if he has fuel to operate at HEx. If you close on an unwilling foe, zip, off he goes. So Fortresses aren’t designed to be a “wall”, stopping enemy Hammer forces cold, but strong points beyond which it becomes dangerous for the enemy to penetrate. Doing so exposes the long trains of logistical transports following the spearhead to harassing attacks.

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… Furthermore, HEx, which is more sensitive than subluminal expansions, generally requires that you get outside of the star-system’s particle disc in order to fire up the drive (trivia: the quickest way out of a system’s particle disk is “up or down”… so that’s where system defense forces station the bulk of their assets: the North and South Watches).

I could obviously go on at greater length, but I have to paint today :slight_smile:

Chris

9

Don’t let your paying job distract you from the forum, Chris. Lord knows I don’t! (Heh. Joke. Sorta). The more details you give us, the happier we are, and the better the ultimate tech burns will be.

From your description, I’m thinking that the great strategic advantage of a fortress world, on the interstellar scale, is to free up one’s own Hammer fleet for a counteroffensive. An unfortified world is horrifically vulnerable as soon as there are no friendly forces in orbit, so the temptation is to penny-packet yourself to death by leaving small squadrons around every world (not that you care about the population complaining, but those local barons have cousins, who have cousins, who have cousins…), which the invaders can wipe out easily one by one. The more fortified worlds you have, the more you can concentrate your Hammer forces and respond aggressively to the invaders, in the confidence that the planets you’re leaving uncovered can hold out long enough for the Grand Fleet to come to the rescue.

As far as I read the comics, there’s no no class of ships that has a significant interstellar speed advantage over any other. That implies that it would be damnably hard to bring an unwilling enemy to battle, not just tactically within a star system, but strategically across interstellar distances as well. The fortress world doesn’t stop the enemy fleet, but it does force it to slow down enough that the defending fleet has a chance of catching it.

And I do mean “catch,” because invader Hammer that’s close enough to the planet to be useful in the siege is presumably also close enough not to be able to go to HEx. If I’m right about that, then the invader has a serious dilemma: each ship assigned to bombardment and landing operations is potentially trapped when the counterattack arrives; each ship assigned to a “high guard” standing off far enough to have maximum maneuverability is one less for the siege, which makes the siege last longer, which increases the chance of being counterattacked in the first place.

Conversely, the defending Grand Fleet’s dilemma is to let the invasion fleet get sufficiently embroiled with a tough fortress world that it sends most of its ships into bombardment range, but not to wait so long that the fortress is unable to help when the Grand Fleet arrives. The ideal is to catch the invaders in-close and unable to jump, with the Grand Fleet on one side and the still-functional planetary fortress on the other.

Hammer and Anvil. I think I get it now.

10

The ideal is to catch the invaders in-close and unable to jump, with the Grand Fleet on one side and the still-functional planetary fortress on the other.

Yes. When a fleet is inside the system’s disk (plane of the eccliptic? is that the term?), it’s vulnerable. Refuelling, revictualling, or interacting with planets. That when you can force battle.

Ships do have different HEx potentials (from 1 to 9 drive units, with potentially double that using a high technology “BCD” compression drive). One drive at HEx = 1 “Distortion Week” of travel (appx. two light years) per week. A ship with nine drives travels 18 light years per week. A ship with nine BCD-capable drives travels 36 light years per week (but uses double the fuel doing it).

The map on page 28 shows a distance key, with light years on the top and distortion weeks (Distortis Vicis) on the bottom, to give a sense of scale.

-Chris

11

Interesting. I presume “BCD” is relatively rare, what would be considered “high index” technology in game terms?

It looks like there’s potentially a wide spread: A fleet entirely composed of BCD-9 ships travels at 36 ly/week, a fleet of non-BCD ships with only level one drives travels at 2 ly/week. Now, as practical matter, I’d suspect the really slow ships would be large trading vessels, carrying goods for which they were confident prices at the destination wouldn’t fluctuate, and the really fast, really expensive drives would be found only on a relatively small number of courier ships, scouts, and elite raiders, so the actual variation among combat fleets would be a lot narrow.

So, question: What’s the HEx potential for a typical “slow” Hammer warship, and what’s the HEx potential for a typical “fast” Hammer warship? I’m not so curious about what’s possible for a handful of extremely good or extremely bad ships as I am about what’s possible for something you’d actually have enough of to make a fleet with.

12

Combat Fleets average D5. Fast combat ships: Destroyers, Frigates, etc… range around 6-7, Slow ships: Dreadnauts, Monitors, Tankers, etc… 3-4. Corvettes and couriers go to 9. BCD’s (Burnhardt Compression Drives) aren’t so much super-high-tech as they are fuel/mass hogs which take too much space away from weapons, sensors, bombs, troops and other combat necessaries. They’d be very much limited to courier types.

One development this suggested to me was the idea of squadrons of combat “taxis”… basically BCD equipped hulls with giant fuel tanks. They would be fitted to warships to give them BCD capabilites in rear areas, but be detatched before the final move into battle.

-chris

13

So while couriers and scouts can move nearly twice as fast as combat fleets – nearly four times as fast, with BCD (right?) – there isn’t that huge a range among combat-capable fleets, in practice: A fast raider force moving at D7 is going to have only a 40% speed advantage over a heavy battlegroup moving at D5.

The “mother ship” concept is attractive, but it’s often done badly in science fiction. (See the websites in the BE 'ography for discussion). In this case, I’d be tempted to have the BSD-equipped mothership carry the fighting ships right into the target solar system, so you can offload all non-combat mass onto the mothership – not just the BSD drives but all interstellar HEx capability, living quarters, sick bay, repair shops, etc. – and have the highest possible tooth:tail ratio in the fighting ships themselves, which go into battle in the disk of the solar system while the mothership and a few escorts hang back far enough outside the dust clouds to make the interstellar jump if they have to. This gets you to an aircraft carrier/fighter combination in a pretty classic Battlestar Galactica kind of way, except the optimally sized “fighter” may well be a mile-long Hammer battlecruiser.

(Luke, a few posts back – as of my 11-29-2006 03:30 PM post, I’d say – this became a “starships and strategic interstellar warfare” discussion; could you split that off from the Fortress discussion for clarity’s sake? Thanks).

14

P.S. Again, Traveller provides a model – the “battlerider” concept, where instead of a hundred tiny fighters on a big carrier, you had one non-FTL capable pocket battleship (or at most a half-dozen of them) mated to a slightly larger FTL-capable support vessel.

Come to think of it, in general, Burning Empires/Iron Empires is “Traveller done right.” Instead of, “here’s a vast interstellar empire with these huge, sweeping conflicts and, uh, you’re a scout pilot who took early retirement and your patron wants you to kidnap his sister-in-law,” it throws you right in the center of the big, sweeping conflicts." And also has character, world, and technology generation where the elements actually inter-relate instead of being highly randomized, and where the complexity level (especially in tech burning) is much more manageable.

15

Yes, that would be more efficient…

-But-

There is no mass navy in the Iron Empires, and Forged Lords are very jealous of their prerogatives. Imagine the power the Lord with the carriers would have over his peers.

BCD transports would be operated by private guilds. They are non-combatants, so they don’t tread on the toes of the Lords. And, like the private artillery trains of the 18th century (before Napoleon brought them into the military proper), they aren’t going to risk their valuable ships in actual combat.

Here’s an excerpt from a set of wargame rules I wrote years back to try to get a handle on what Iron Empires campaigns would look like at the strategic level (in this case, regarding tankers vs. transports):

Human Tanker Squadrons would be operated by a private 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 Hammer squadrons 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 force, that they’ll be sure to get big $$ from… the human player should be able to eliminate 1 private Tanker squadron in order to capture 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

16

Ah, yes: Politics. Of which war is an extension by other means, so to say “stupid politics are interfering with military efficiency” is like Basil Fawlty saying “we could run this hotel so much more efficiently if it weren’t for all these guests!”

Still, a Lord-Pilot Hammer or Hammer Lord could do the one-to-one battlerider:tender system without compromising his independence, since he’s not making himself just one of many fighter pilots dependent on a superior noble with a carrier. You could have your wife command the base ship…

17

Sure, anything’s possible on the individual level. But as a matter of course, IE armadas are cobbled-together groups of Hammer Lords, so any one battle-tender-equipped lord is going to be dragged down by the capabilites of his compatriots (leave the wife at home, Baron). It’s possible that an uber-noble (a Duke, say), could field his own small armada of BCD equipped dreadnauts. He’s the exception to the rule, though.

On the other hand the Vaylen, as a more unified political entity, will mobilize clan-fleets that rival a human fleet in size, and they could very well use the battle-carrier model.

Chris

18

Wargame rules?!? Might we ever see an Iron Empires wargame? I’ve loved space combat wargames ever since GDW’s Triplanetary (still the best vector movement rules ever IMHO) and Imperium

19

Heh. I’d love “Burning Emperors” as well, but it wouldn’t be a space combat game, it’d be a game where each world’s Infection-Usurpation-Invasion phase is proceeding in a miniaturized Burning Empires game (probably maneuver rolls with no scenes inside) and the players, as people (or Vaylen) of interplanetary influence, have to decide which world they want to intervene on this “turn” – i.e. actually have scenes on and spend resources on, be it a battlefleet bombardment or a state visit – and which they’re willing to let go hang.

Aha. No standardization = lowest common denominator drags the whole fleet down.

Since we haven’t see fleet action yet in the comics, I’m going by the game here – obviously, this is your universe, so you’ll know definitely in places where I have to extrapolate. The rules on pg. 112 say that you have to be a Hammer Lord to own a warship, so by implication each Hammer Lord has a retinue of individual Lords-Pilot under his (or, rarely, her) command. You could use them all to crew one big ship, but that seems a waste, since each ship only needs one person with a Crucis and the Helm skill (plus a backup pilot or two for safety’s sake and for 24-hour shifts). So the Hammer Lord could command the mothership – or put his heir/second son/wife in command of it – and have each subordinate Lord-Pilot take a fighter/battlerider.

20

So the Hammer Lord could command the mothership – or put his heir/second son/wife in command of it – and have each subordinate Lord-Pilot take a fighter/battlerider.

Sure, and fighter-carriers are definitely part of the mix, I don’t care what any stuffy old rocket scientists tell me about their impracticality. The limiting factor isn’t manpower, but the cost of maintaining an autonomous little fleet of warships, with all of the support that would entail. Imagine Bill Gates with his own carrier battlegroup. It would stretch even his prodigious fortune to maintain, I’d guess.

Chris

21

“a battle group – typically, a carrier, six surface combatant ships, an attack submarine, a supply ship or two and a 70-aircraft fighter wing – costs more than $1 billion a year to maintain, Congressional analysts say.” - New York Times, May 20, 2001.

“retiring the [aircraft carrier USS] Kennedy would result in an estimated steady-state savings of roughly $300 million per year starting in FY2008, including roughly $200 million per year for crew pay and allowances, and roughly $100 million per year in ship operation and maintenance (O&M) costs” – “Navy Aircraft Carriers: Proposed Retirement of
USS John F. Kennedy: Issues and Options for Congress,” Updated August 29, 2006, Ron O’Rourke (a great guy, by the way), Congressional Research Service.

I can’t find a good figure for Bill Gates’ personal income, for some reason, but the Gates Foundation, the charity he founded, gave $1.36 billion in grants in 2005 and had $35 billion in assets (The Independent , June 27, 2006) before Warren Buffet gave it even more money this year, so it looks like Gates could easily maintain a single aircraft carrier with crew at $300 million per year, and, if he’d made the Gates Foundation about running a private navy instead of a charity, he’d comfortably and sustainably be able to operate a full CVBG (Fleet Carrier Battle Group) at over a $1 billion a year.

Buying the ships, aircraft, etc. adds a bit to the cost, obviously, but a carrier only costs $2.2 billion – that’s in my notes, I forget where I got it from – so he wouldn’t sweat about that, either.

And the United States, by the standards of historical empires, has a relatively poor group of super-rich individuals. I recall reading that in Roman times, there were several men who could have funded the entire imperial military for a year or so out of their personal fortunes. I presume the concentration of wealth in the Iron Empires, with its weak central governments and powerful feudal potentates, is much more on the Roman model than that of a modern democratic, capitalist society.

So a fairly unexceptional Forged Lord might be able to maintain quite an impressive force.

22

If he’s Forged, he’s gotta budget for an comperable anvil force in addition to his 1 billion dollar battle group.

So maybe double the figures?

Or not, I don’t really know how much the whole shebang would cost.

Although, I guess if this is a feudal model, then the subordinates pay for and maintain their own “horse, arms and armor” so speak, right? So maybe the costs aren’t as bad as all that.

23

Okay, mister math man :slight_smile:

Let’s try another tack. Look at Great Britain’s navy.

-Chris

24

Err – must I? 'Cause the economics of modern navies are only going to be a “this is probably in the same ballpark or at least somewhere in the bleachers but it gives us an idea at least” level of comparable.

The Brits have three weenie aircraft carriers – 22,000 metric tonnes displacement and 686 feet long for their Invincible class vs. 87,996.9 metric tons and 1,092 feet for our Nimitz class, of which we have eight in service and another – the USS George H.W. Bush, I kid you not – christened just this past October but not fleet-ready yet. So their whole fleet is probably not a lot bigger than one of our twelve carrier battle groups.

Checking… Lord, why isn’t this in Lexis-Nexis like everything else? Why didn’t you ask me when I was at my desk with all my reference books? Ah: official Ministry of Defense spending plan: Looks like “Totalpublicspending” is 35 to 40 billion pounds a year, of which about 4-5 billion pounds goes to naval operations, although procurement and personnel spending aren’t included. That’s $70-80 billion a year to fund the entire UK military, including pensions for veterans, and less than $10 billion a year to fund fleet operations (current ops, not including buying new ships).

So Gates could probably afford to operate the Royal Navy for at least a few years, though he’d probably have to spend capital rather than just fund it out of income.

25

Hee hee, look at me make Sydney jump through hoops. Sorry, my friend. This is a good example though. The actual expense of running the Hammer portion of a Forged Lord’s military (using Britain as an example of a mid-level noble), is around 15% of his total budget. So for every 15 Standards you spend on a battlerider, you’re spending 85 Standards on other crap (technicians, bureaucrats, starports, fuel, bagels, etc…).

So most forged nobles can field a little battlegroup, probably centered on one or two capital ships, with an assortment of smaller craft. They’ll be designed to be entirely self-sufficient, since only an idiot trusts his allies completely, and when the time comes when you have to turn on one yourself, you want to have the ability to do what you need to do on your own.

That’s the primary reason why the Iron Empires fleets will be thoroughly inefficient. TONS of wasted energy. If everyone could get together and field an Empire-wide fleet, organized in a rational way, for maximum defensive effect, you could have things like giant squadrons of battle-riders, and death stars and such. Instead you get armadas consisting of a hundred forged squadrons, all of them ready to turn on one another at the slightest provocation, each with its own logistical tail, its own anvil transports, etc… A flying circus.

-Chris

26

Heh. Actually that only took me ten minutes, max, but I was feeling whiny.

I absolutely hear you on the sheer screaming inefficiency of a galactic-scale civilization with effectively autonomous and heavily armed political entities on the single star-system scale. You’re not going to get huge squadrons of anything.

The as-yet-unanswered question is whether the battlerider model makes sense for that individual Forged Lord’s “one or two capital ships.” Unanswered, and unanswerable by anyone but Chris, since we don’t have any hard numbers or Tech Burning rules on this. We can mock up equations, but we can’t put any hard numbers in, so basically the answer is “whatever Chris Moeller thinks is more fun to write stories about.”

Holding all else equal – i.e. modeling different options for one Forged Lord’s fleet rather than trying to compare different industrial bases – the more tonnage a ship can devote to a particular system, the more powerful that system is going to be. In particular, the greater the percentage of a ship’s mass is devoted to its drive (sublight drive, specifically), the more maneuverable it’s going to be. Since there’s no air resistance in space, a huge ship with 50% of its mass devoted to drives is going to be faster than a tiny ship with 10% of its mass devoted to drives.

Therefore, if maneuverability is at a premium, you want your combat ships to have the absolute minimum percentage of their mass devoted to non-combat systems, such as crew accomodations, medical facilities, fuel storage, and interstellar drives. The way to do this is to separate as many of those systems as possible from the actual fighting platform.

Now, there are a myriad ways to do this. One extreme is the aircraft carrier model: One huge mothership on which dozens or hundreds of tiny fighters are totally dependent. The other extreme is to model it on a WWII fighter with drop tanks, or a Star Wars prequel Jedi fighter with a detachable hyperdrive ring: The fighting platform is basically self-sufficient, but it can boost its long-range travel capability with a system that it can then detach when it needs to maneuver in combat. The Traveller “battlerider” model, with one or two combat ships on a mothership of nearly equal mass, is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So is (God help us) the Enteprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its theoretically detachable saucer section that allows the non-combat parts of the ship to run away while the rest fights.

But in warfare, the most efficient option isn’t always the most effective. Carrying your interstellar drive, crew accomodations, supplies, and other long-range support systems into combat with you means you’re having to accelerate (and protect) a lot of extra mass, but it also means you don’t have to spend time launching before you engage or rendezvousing & reconnecting when you want to run for your life.

Since we don’t have any hard numbers for what percentage of its mass a self-sufficient Hammer warship would have to spend on non-combat systems, it’s impossible to calculate whether the efficiencies of a mothership-rider design would yield enough efficiencies to compensate for its inherent awkwardness. Given that Chris has said that Hammer crews are fairly small – implying that long-term crew accomodations take up relatively little mass – and that the interstellar HEx drive is simply a different version of the basic intrasystem HEx drive – implying that you don’t need two different sets of machinery – the efficiencies probably aren’t that dramatic.