Hey guys,
Answers to your bombardment below:
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Countercheck
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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.
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.
(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.)
Yes, the Distortion Drive is down in all of its aspects.
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.
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