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.
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.
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).
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
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 combatBattlecruiser
Q-Beams: yes
Artillery-scale ordnance: light
Armor: light
Drive: HEx (interstellar)
Function: specialized capital ship for ship-to-ship combat onlyBombard
Q-Beams: no
Artillery-scale ordnance: heavy
Armor: heavy
Drive: HEx (interstellar)
Function: specialized capital ship for ship-to-planet bombardment onlyCruiser
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 systemMonitor
Q-Beams: no
Artillery-scale ordnance: heavy
Armor: heavy
Drive: conventional (planetary gravity well only)
Function: inner defense perimeter of a specific planetBattlecutter
Q-Beams: yes
Artillery-scale ordnance: light
Armor: light
Drive: subliminal (system only)
Function: heavily armed system defense, equivalent to a BattlecruiserBattlemonitor
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 themCourier
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.”
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
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%3Ddownload+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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
• 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
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.
That site gives me a chubby.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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