Re: Ships in close airspace

Dan Corrin [email removed] writes:
> > From: [email removed]
> > > From: [email removed]
> > > Hi List,
> > >
> > > I'm currently writing a mercenary scenario, and I was thinking about the
> > > situation where fighter aircraft, jets and helicopters came against
> > > ships boats or even starships armed with lasers and missile racks.
> > > Are the spacecraft going to be like whales in sky, easily shot down or
> > > are they flying fortresses, impervious to the weapons of, say, earths
> > > current tech level.
> >
> >   Largely impervious, unless the weapons are exceptional.
>
> Most combat vessels have more than the standard armour, thus even more
> impervious and if its a starship with a nuclear damper...

Even a plain simple 100 ton scout/courier can seriously unbalance a battle.
It can outrun most things it can't destroy.  (Except other spaceships! :-)

> > > ie who would win, a group of tornados or the modula cutter?
> >
> >   If the tornados could carry mavericks, I'd put my money on them,
> >  otherwise they couldn't harm the cutter.
>
> Highly dependant on the armament (on both sides)

He said Mavericks, the USAF's standard anti-tank missile.  If they can destroy
modern heavy tanks, they should be able to damage an "unarmoured" spaceship.
Of course, even the cutter is big compared to tanks, which is why I said
"damage" rather than "destroy".  It also depends on what is in the cutter's
module.  I had one filled with every piece of ECM, ECCM and sensor gear I
could find in the Striker books, plus a laser turret, a computer, and an
extra power supply to drive all this.  In a mercenary scenario, it did what
an AWACS plane does nowadays, plus it could defend itself very well!

I did some calculations for ship's weapons once, based on the Striker rules
(which aren't that far off the MegaTraveller ones for this purpose).  It
said a ship's laser had a 250MW input; so did a ship's plasma gun; a ship's
fusion gun had a 500MW input.  Here are the results:

Weapon	Input	Effective range/pen.	Long range/pen.	Extreme range/pen.
Beam	250	125000 (73)		250000 (65)	1250000 (55)
Laser

Pulse	250	166667 (79)		333333 (71)	1666667 (63)
Laser

Plasma	250	7070 (83)		14140 (71)	28280 (44)
Gun

Fusion	500	17700 (99)		35500 (87)	70100 (64)
Gun

These are the figures for the introductory tech levels; I also have the
figures for the guns which got + DM's in High Guard due to higher tech
levels, and also the blast radius and penetration for the plasma and
fusion guns.  Put it like this; a near miss from a fusion gun will
wipe out a heavy tank!  For comparison, the Imperial Grav APC in the
Striker Book 3 has an armour factor of 73 at best.  The ranges above
are in metres, by the way.

Now to answer the question, what happens if a modern jet with Maverick
missiles tries to attack a cutter?  Answer; unless its missiles are longer
range than I think they are, or unless the jet can get close without being
detected, the jet gets fried the moment the cutter sees it.

> >   If you cought the ship on the ground, on the other hand, it would be a sitting
> > duck to any B52 or B1 equivalent with a bombbay full of laserguided 1000kg
> > iron bombs and with a forward observer on the ground to point a laser at the
> > ship.
>
> Don't forget there is also point defense weapons. I don't know if the lasers
> can act as point defense. Repulsors and possibly the lasers as they can fire
> at incoming missiles, the usual bombing height of a B52/B1 plus the nice
> lasers (assuming laser detectors) make the tracking of the bombs easy and/or
> destruction of the FO.

What do you mean by "the usual bombing height of a B52/B1"?  The B-52 goes
high, the B-1 goes low.

Lasers and fusion guns, as well as sandcasters, can be used against missiles.
So says High Guard, anyway.  Sandcasters can also be used as giant shotguns,
and would make a nice mess of aircraft.

Finally take note, the biggest penetration for explosives is around 60, and
that's with HEAP.  Against an armoured spaceship, those bombs would do
nothing - unless they're nukes.  Also, if the ship can use its lasers in
point defence, it can use them to zap the bombers long before they get to
drop their bombs.

- --
 "Keyboard?  How quaint!" - M. Scott

 Adrian Hurt			     |	JANET:  [email removed]
 UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian     |  ARPA:   [email removed]