War in the Future! -- Hammer Discussion

Burning Empires General Questions
21

Right.

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.

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

22

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 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?

23

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.

24

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.

25

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.

26

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?

27

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.

28

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.

29

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

p.

30

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.

31

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.

32

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.

33

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.

34

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.

35

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.

36

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 :slight_smile:

-Chris

37

"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?

38

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.

39

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).

40

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 – 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.