Asorted items and HIGHGUARD

Bruce writes:

>And you miss the sucker!  The missiles fly on until their fuel is exhausted
>and then drift (OR self destruct).  Your mesons have fallen short or long and
>are no more.  But hey, your lasers and energy beams and Particle beams travel
>on and on and on.  Does this mean that some poor bugger minding its own
>business accidentally gets toasted several years later in a neighbouring
>system?

Won't there be some dispersion of the nasty beam weapons over distance?
Space isn't really empty, it contains a little bit of junk that will
effect your mis-aimed weapons.  Also, your chance of hitting a nearby
system is pretty remote (space after all is pretty big).  One possible way
to avoid this problem is to apply an imperial order that all ship to ship
combat shall take place perpendicular to the plane of the 2-D universe :-)


>2. In a real fleet engagement are we going to see "line up and shoot" sort of
>combat from HIGHGUARD/TCS or is the whole thing going to degrade into
>"one (or many) on one" dogfight combat or is it going to be massive formations
>ala DOC SMITH or is it just an uncoordinated "free for all" as in STAR WARS?

The line up and shoot is a good way to commit suicide.  If you opponent
is busy lining up, you might as well start shooting now.  The high guard
idea was that you commit some of your ships to the front and hold the
rest back as a reserve (which is a pretty good idea).  It then abstracted
away the bulk of the combat stuff.

As for the dog fight idea, I might expect the smaller ships to go into
that mode while the larger ones attempted to stay out of range of the
enemy's big ships.

The DOC SMITH formations would be good for displays and so on but would
be much use in combat.  They may be of use when you fleet is travelling
around.  Some kind of formation would have to be used to save stress on
the commander(s) of the fleet.

The uncoordinated "free for all" would be an inefficient usage of your
ships, any kind of cooperation would improve you effectiveness thus
I wouldn't expect this mode to occur in any clash except possibly for
small ship dogfights or reguard actions.


I'd put my vote on fleet combats being very short and very bloody.

Given the lethality of MT ship combat (which is probably under-estimated
anyway), I cannot see ships enguaging head to head.  That would be a sure
fire mutual kill.  Which isn't often good for either side.  I'd expect
real combat to be more of the form, detect them on passive sensors and
blow them away as fast as possible hoping that they don't see you in
the process.  The only time you'd turn active sensors on would be when
you detected the enemy using them or when you needed them for point
defense purposes.

As for how the fleet formation would look, I'd put my vote on having
the large capital ships as the centre or maybe aft of the centre (with
respect to direction of travel of the fleet).  Then the smaller ships
further out (getting smaller as they get further away from the centre).
Finally, some sensor ships a long long long way out who's job it is to
detect the enemy before they detect you.  I'd also expect the entire
formation to be very spread out becuase (1) small navigation errors
will occur and they shouldn't cost ships; (2) it ought to mean that
your smaller (and thus more expendable) craft are around the perimeter
(actualy surface since things are in 3D) of the fleet; (3) it reduces
the chance that two ships will be hit by the same nuke and misses are
less likely to hit something alse.  Point (1) isn't all that important in
combat, but even in comabt you'll need some space to maneuver.  Point (2)
means that your small ships should have (passive) sensor suites equal
to anything else in the fleet.  It also means that when your fleet is
detected, your small ships are the ones that take the first hits which
preserves your capital ships.  Additionally, the small ships are able
to provide point defence against incoming missiles for the larger ones.
I'm not sure how important point (3) would be in space since your fleet
is going to have to be very dispersed anyway.

Given this formation was being used, what would the chances be of building
a huge meson screen and a huge nuke damper to protect the entire fleet?
We've seen references to screens for cities (which would be small compared
to a fleet), but with decent defences for your entire fleet you wouldn't
have to build the defences into each ship (or at least you wouldn't have
to build in as good defences).


>4. How do you take a planet from a determined enemy on the ground?  From
>experience and observation of various strategic campaigns I've seen massive
>armies obliterated, atmospheres stripped, viral plagues applied, radiated
>rock balls, cometary collisions and simple surrender.

Get a large rock, accelerate it some nice pleasant velocity and chuck
it into the planet.  Wrecks the planet very well but gets rid of the
defenders.  Oh, so you wanted the planet afterwards.  Well, that makes
life much harder.

Meson gun attacks against population centres until they surrender
might work as might destroying the industrial potential of the planet.
But as has been pointed out on this list before, it doesn't take that
much effort to make a high population planet a fortress in space -- put
a laser turret into every new building plus some basic passive sensors
on many building and in many places around the globe and have some of
the fabled deep meson gun sites.  Attackers can forget about trying to
overcome your defenses quickly.  They cannot send in the big capital
ships becuase a single sensor platform anywhere on the hemishpere facing
them is going to mean that that ship is dead.

        						Pauli

Paul Dale                       | [email removed]
Department of Computer Science  | [phone removed]
University of Queensland        |
Australia, 4072                 | Did you know that there are 41 two letter
                                |     words containing the letter 'a'?