I have returned to my office after an eight day course on Project Planning
and Control. During the course, I had plenty of time to sit and think
about other things, primarily Traveller, and specifically Striker.
I wrote down about seven pages in my "go everywhere" notebook on a variety
of topics, which I will reproduce here in more or less the order they came
up. Trying to sort this would be a problem.
Last summer, I started a discussion of future ground warfare that went on
for several weeks, and the need for infantry in general warfare at TL15 was
vigorously debated. I decided to look at the question from the other side,
in terms of what TL15 infantry would have available to them under the
current rules (and the Striker rules) and whether it would be useful.
The TL15 Infantry Squad: Would potentially consist of men with battledress,
suit radio and perhaps maser communicators, an active EMS system of 5km or
better range, and armed with a mixture of PGMP-14s and FGMP-15s. Presuma-
bly gauss rifle, laser rifle, and grenade launcher units could be added as
necessary, if you were anticipating a situation in which flaming things
with a fusion gun was going to be inappropriate. The trouble is that a
fusion gun only has a penetration of 34 at effective range, and its effec-
tive range is only 450m. For comparison, a TL13 4cm RAM grenade has an
effective range of 370m with a HEAT penetration of 38 (and an extreme range
that is about the same as the fusion gun, with a HEAT penetration of 38,
where the fusion gun drops off to a penetration of 4). Since the fusion
gun and its power pack cost a total of Cr700,000, and a RAM grenade costs
Cr20, there may be a little problem in our usual TL15 infantry concept.
With TL15 battledress having an armor value of 18, and with the rules set
up so that a penetration advantage of +8 is almost a sure kill, lower tech
infantrymen with grenade launchers will give the TL15 battledress user a
bit of a rough time. The only advantages the fusion gun has is that it
won't run out of ammunition, and its shots can't be engaged by point de-
fense weapons as RAM grenades can be. The battledress user also has the
problem of not having a weapon which will damage a 'tank'. A little exper-
imentation shows that tanks with all-around armor values of 65-75 are not
difficult to design, and can have acceptably high performance values de-
spite their high cost. We've generally assumed that the infantry will
carry missiles to give them a chance against tanks, but the best possible
penetration value that can be achieved by any sort of projectile in the
Striker weapon design system is 59. This means that tanks that are com-
pletely invulnerable to man portable weapons are quite practical. The
situation doesn't look good for battledress--too many things can kill you,
and you can't kill enough of them to make it cost effective.
Drone missiles and vehicles: Infantry could control drone missiles and
drone vehicles, but a drone vehicle with a large energy weapon might as
well be manned, since the men are likely to be cheaper than the drone
brain, and the drone missile is limited to a maximum penetration value of
59, as mentioned above. Infantry that was using drones would presumably
require maser communicators and computer support to maintain contact with
the drones. Since maser is limited to line of sight, I suppose that heavi-
ly protected relay drones would also be part of the inventory.
Communications: I have this feeling at the back of my mind that jam-free
communications capability is going to have a noticeable effect on tactics
in the Traveller universe. After thinking about it for a while, I decided
that it might be possible to jam tight beam communications by blanketing
the receiving unit with 'white noise' across the appropriate spectrum, but
this would probably require a line of sight and a fairly precise targeting
system. If you've gotten that far, you might as well fire a weapon at the
thing and be done with it. (Hard kill beats soft kill in current U.S. Army
jargon any day of the week.)
Scenario Planning for Striker: This looks like a real problem. I was
thinking about it from the point of view of running something like a Vargr
or pirate raid on a low population planet from start (arrival insystem of
the raider spacecraft) through the raiding force jumping back out. Before
this game could be developed, some sort of 'air support' rules for ships in
orbit would be needed. After all, a planet could potentially launch a lot
of missiles at an intruding spacecraft, and tanks with energy weapons,
particularly lasers, could presumably engage in some sort of reasonably
effective fire against spacecraft. It seems to me like an 'armor value' or
'hit modification' or something would need to be worked out for handling
the effect of large layers of atmosphere on this sort of fire, and it would
be necessary to decide whether to resolve it on the Striker system or the
Mayday system tables. In any case, Striker envisions a table covering
about 1km by 3km, which can be a real problem when many vehicles are capa-
ble of speeds of 8-10km per 30 second combat turn.
Space Combat: As part of this thinking, I started considering how to run
the space combat section, which would come first, after all. For the
really picky, it should be noted that one can set either the hex size or
the turn length for space combat if you want to use a Mayday-like system,
but not both. 20 minutes works out to 14000km per hex, and the 25000km
hexes recommended by the Referee's Manual corresponds to about 26 minutes
per turn. At the 14000/20 scale, the moon would be about 30 hexes from the
earth, and would have an orbital speed of 1 hex per 12 turns. Safe jump
distance from earth would be 48 hexes. After space combat was resolved,
ground defenses would need to be considered.
Planetary Defense: We all know from our reading that huge meson guns are
the main planetary defense system when these are available. I wonder if it
is possible to triangulate the position of these things in some way with
meson screens? In any case, lower population/lower resource/ lower tech
level planets would have to make do with things like lasers and missiles.
Lasers would be fairly easy to handle in Mayday. The installations could
be treated as turrets, and only damaged if a turret was hit on the damage
distribution roll. Ground installations would automatically have an agili-
ty of 0, although I suppose they might benefit from a computer modifier
representing various sorts of electronic countermeasures. The power plants
could be attacked separately, and I imagine that most sites would have
back-up power available and/or be able to draw from the commercial electri-
cal grid. In some more backward locations, power plants for the defense
lasers would be a very valuable commercial and industrial resource, and
there would probably be a tendency for governments to divert their power
for other uses. In Striker terms, these laser sites could be almost arbi-
trarily heavily armored. Still, missiles would be even less vulnerable,
since they could be dispersed in one shot package launchers (silos). I'd
want to add missile design to the system, since it seems like planetary
defense missiles in silos would not necessarily be restricted to a 50kg
maximum mass. Large missiles could be designed with some combination of
the Special Supplement: Missiles, Robot, and Referee's Manual vehicle
rules, and the cost of launchers worked out from Striker. Control sites
for either type of defenses might be dispersed, automated or hardened.
Striker mentions ground based meson screens. I'll have a go at figuring
out what sort of power consumption these might have some time be using the
dimensions of a spherical ship as an approximation.
Atmosphere: Consider the following for Mayday scale. Shooting through an
atmosphere has a 'to hit' modifier of +0 for vacuum/trace, +1 for very
thin, +2 for thin, +3 for standard and +4 for dense. This would apply in
both directions to laser, plasma and fusion fire.
Ship Lasers: It's always bothered me that all ship lasers are of the same
energy consumption. Chuck Gannon mentions adding small laser to ships for
ground defense or whatever in the article on TL9 starships in Challenge 55,
which seems plausible as far as it goes. I'd like to see smaller lasers
usable as point defense systems in space too, and suggest that you allow
100MW lasers to be substituted for 250MW lasers in turrets as a quick fix.
Such weapons would be restricted to firing at close range (later) or at
missiles, using either the Ref's Manual/High Guard system or the Mayday
system.
Missiles: If you are using Ref's Manual influenced Mayday, which allows
missiles to be in flight for several turns, it would be reasonable to allow
(as in basic Mayday) missiles to be fired at before impact. I'd add a
'missile' sized category to the Ref's Manual DefDMs, of +3, for anything
less than 1 displacement ton. Missiles would not ordinarily be allowed a
computer based defensive DM, but might be allowed one if they were in
constant communication with their launching ship. This, in conjunction
with the communicator channels rules (or a modification that is more real-
istic) from the Referee's Companion would allow a natural limit to be
placed on missile fire to get around the "1 shot per 20 minutes" problem we
see now. Command control missiles guided by the launching ship would be
limited by comm channels, and self guided missiles not carrying their own
computers would be more vulnerable to enemy point defenses. I like systems
with some sort of built in tradeoffs...
Striker to MT Conversions: One of MTs problems with the way they converted
Striker is that energy weapons and fire control systems got better--too
much better. Striker also had a very generous optional rule for firing at
evading air targets. Since this could cover grav tanks, I had a look at it
with respect to the infamous "Phalanx" battlefield fire support vehicle.
The Phalanx would be eligible for an evasion modifier on the 'to hit' roll
of about -15. This would mean that at effective range (8+ to hit) a mini-
mum modifier of +11 would be needed to attack it. High rate of fire might
be worth +5 or so, and an elite gunner could add another +3. Without any
further rules, however, it is quite simple in Striker to come up with a
vehicle which _cannot_ be hit (making its armor level irrelevant, eh?).
Using the Ref's manual design system additions, I'd insert a rule here that
allowed a starship sized computer to add a plus to the 'to hit' roll. The
Phalanx's Model 7 would be useful here, since it would give two evading
Phalanxes some sort of chance to hit each other with rapid fire weapons and
good gunners.
I think I'll cut things off here for the day. Tomorrow's installment will
include some thoughts about reworking Mayday as the small scale ship combat
system.
Good Gaming,
Rob Dean