Space Combat in the Human Sphere

That's not an inconsistency in Infinity, it's an inconsistency in how people are using language outside of the context of the setting.

And, I'll note again, the CB usage is totally in line with my experience of that language (and concept) elsewhere.

 

I guess what's frustrating to me is that most of the objections are coming across as:

1: I don't want the setting to be like this, so this is wrong.

2: This isn't how I use this language, so this is wrong.

3: These don't work this way in the real world, so they are wrong.

Which aren't really things we can discuss.

As far as the outdated and outclassed Yu Jing fleet vs the technologically superior and modern PanOceanian fleet, we don't know much yet. All the ship types are generic. I'm hoping there'll be more in the factional books (of which PanO will be out first, and very soon).

 

Consider that "outdated" is kinda... messy when it comes to big "naval" stuff, with the "effective active time" of a HULL (not the ship itself) is measured in decades for actual naval ships, and at least 100-150 years for spaceships for the sci-fi titles that bother speaking of such (aside from the Lost Fleet or something like that collection, those two factions had been at war for so long, their ships were built ASAP, with an active shelf life of 5 years or so). Also, "outdated" tends to mean "the medium age of the active ships is old", which can mean a lot of old models with a few new ones.

In other words, the time a ship is expected to be on active duty depends on several factors, wich boild down to "how long does it take to build a ship", leaving aside sudden developments (like new hull types, be it because of size or materials). This is so because, leaving aside how long can you make the ship work with comparative efficiency to other ships active in the 'verse, there comes a time when it is simpler to make a new ship than refit the old one for the Nth-time...

I think @Section9 can give us a good post about naval rotation of hulls depending of age and capabilities. Personally, I think Yu Jing would have an older average age of hulls than PanO, but this can be simply because most of the YJ ships were not renewed, just placed on picket duty, with the new hulls being used for the "important" operations and the old parked as both defense and training boats. PanO, on the other hand, would be following the "sell the old model as military surplus when you have a top of the line new hull" since it's based on corporations and private economy.
This would mean that YJ has more ships, but needs to pay for 100% of each new one (plus an ever increasing amount of maintenance for the old ones) even when selling the really older ones, while PanO has less hulls (possibly 40-50%) but can renew them faster (since it has to pay for about 40-50% of the new hull).

Also, PanO seems to go more for Defense Platforms than Yu Jing does, which can be a factor (YJ using old ships for defensive and support positions, while PanO uses defense platforms instead).

 

It wouldn't surprise me if at least part of YJ's focus on fewer but larger ships is in an attempt to keep an up to date fleet while having inferior manufacturing capabilities.

 

Or rely on many more smaller and cheaper ships. Of course, some big state of the art ships can put a lot of pressure on opponents, especialy politicaly. See the naval rush for dreadnoughts in the early XXe century, where even some emergent countries wanted to buy those monsters despite all economical common sense (the dreadnoughts were a special case in naval history in that they were obsoletes in a span of a few years, sometimes they were already obsoletes on their first launch). But smaller ships are not only cheaper, they also cut on research fees by splitting them on several models, fleet disponibilty is easier to handle, and they are more flexible on a strategical point of view.
In our history, that was what happened between the big capital battleships during WW2, which were too expensive to actually risk them in battle, and the more flexible and faster armored cruisers who, even if they could not withstand the big main guns of these battleships, were fast enough to dodge them, and had enough firepower to take care of other objectives like escorting carriers, fighting submarines, naval support for troops, patrolling ...

 

You can have that in smaller ships... Let's us remember 1981's Traveller Tournament (search here for Traveller, I will place it below)

Spoiler

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox parc, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.

Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.

“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.

Incidentally, that is one of the sources for my preference for drones in space combat ^^U

So the Korean Navy could be a distributed net of redundant small ships that work together to project a net of heavy countermeasures, for example, instead of something akin to the Death Star :p

 

Guys, guys.

I was just smack talking.

We literally don't know about the comparative strengths of the fleets really, except that, at one point of time during the NeoColonial Wars the Yu Jing navy was stronger.

That is a good point, but really all of the ships kinda fit into that model by default at the moment.

 

I'd laugh, but that's only so I don't start crying.

Smaller ships are actually easier and faster to build than larger ones. (PT boats versus carriers) However, that tends to mean you need more crew. Bigger ships don't necessarily need proportionally bigger crews, but every ship has a certain minimum crew required (roughly a dozen, 20 is easier on the crew).

I should point out that you need at least a dozen ships of the class to prevent random breakdowns from grounding the entire fleet. The UK Royal Navy found that out last year when every single attack sub was stuck at the pier, ~4 with random breakdowns, 4 in shipyard for scheduled maintenance, and the last 4 were not ready to go out to sea after their scheduled maintenance!

With wooden ships, they were basically rebuilt every 10 years or so as the crew replaced worn, damaged, or rotten timbers (it's why the Victory and the Constitution are still around, and why the Constitution is still seaworthy after 225+ years). Modern ships are typically built to last 25-50 years, but the early nuclear-powered ships needed to be refueled every 5 years or so. Now, nuclear powered ships tend to have life-of-hull fueling. The subs I served on were designed in the 1970s, and had 20-year power cores. With a mid-life refueling, that gives you 40 years of service out of the hull.

With fusion power, though, refueling is much simpler. It's as simple as adding more reaction mass to the tanks. Different tanks, and possibly different stuff in the tanks (proton-proton fusion, star style, is NOT easy to do, but hydrogen is one of the best reaction masses), but about as easy as pulling into a gas station.

For standard deployment, most navies need 3 ships to have one deployed at all times. One ship is out, one ship is just back from deployment and is getting refitted, and the third ship is getting ready to deploy. With two crews, a ship designed for it, and a whole lot of shipyard support, you can have any given hull at sea 3 months out of every 4. But if you don't have a ship designed for it, you will destroy the ship (or so the surface fleet found out when they tried multiple crews on some smaller ships as the ships were decommissioned).

The 1 in 3 availability is relatively easy to keep going. Why so "poor"? Let's compare your car. You need to change the oil every 3000 miles. If you drove your car constantly for an entire week (like how a ship at sea is running even at night), even if you never left the city, you'd need to change your oil weekly (168 hours per week times 20mph average speed is 3360 miles). You'd need to do your every-30,000-mile maintenance items every 3 months (which would have your car 'in the shipyard' for a week). Relatively speaking, our cars are used far less than a ship is, which makes it a lot easier to have them always ready for use.

 

One factor to possible consider in ship design, is projection of force. In a Cold War like setting, were the powers-that-be snarl and rattle their sabres at each other, but rarely come into direct open conflict, perception of force is almost as important as reality. A single large ship has much more psychological impact than a dozen small ships, even if technically the small ship fleet has more firepower. Especially in an information age, where every action is being closely watched by the population at large, the appearance of having more power might even be more effective than having more power. Unless the opposition is willing to call your bluff. You don't want to be all bark and no bite, but it might be beneficial to trade a little bit of efficiency for greater theatrical presence. Especially if the actual chance of exchanging fire is low. Not to mention the politicians who approve the funding, might be swayed by having the 'biggest'.

 

This kind of "Gunship Diplomacy" is an important and often overlooked factor.

But I'd add that with the current rules larger ships are basically immune to smaller ones due to the effectiveness of armour and the way it increases with the weight class of vessels.

 

Yes, that's a point I neglected to mention. Shame on me!

I remember reading that the China Station gunboats on the Yangtze River tended to have more and taller smokestacks than they 'needed', because it made the ships more impressive to the local warlords.

Is that in the RPG core book? How total is the immunity? Can a ship damage a target a size class bigger?

 

I love that kind of thing.

And it wouldn't surprise me at all.

So the ships have main guns (big railguns which are run the length of the hull), secondary batteries, missiles and Lasers.

The main guns can damage ships a class up, or maybe two if you have a good gunner. But the other weapons are only really good for shooting "down" onto ships of smaller classes. The Lasers are slightly closer to the main guns than the others, but still need a decent gunner if they are going to damage ships of the same class.

Obviously enough, this is Warships v Warships, civilian ships don't have the armour to stand up to anything beyond small point defense weapons.

This is all in the GM Guide, which is a wave 2 book available soon.

 

Kinda like in Mass Effect, it seems. As for the GM guide, I think it's already in PDF format.

Anyway, I wouldn't take Space Combat in *ANY* RPG as "how things really work in that 'verse", since the characters tend to have a great impact (needed, so player characters can do something in space combat). Heck, I remember a game called EXO (Ediciones Sombra, a Spanish one with a Gauss Bell-based probability curve, you would roll 3d10, one of them of different color, and that would tell you success, damage and location for example), that had a spin-off "minigame" called CEP ("Combate en Espacio Profundo" or Deep Space Combat, essentially a frictionless 2D space chess that came in plastic sleeve, it used a map and some cardboard tokens only), in which it was stated that it was strongly suggested to *not* use player characters in the game (the conversion rules would *take the PC's down*, and the game was much deadlier than the RPG space combat system).

After all, if spinal-mounted weapons were *the* thing, PanO's gun platforms wouldn't have looked so much like Tau drones in Wotan, but needles with tons of armor all around and support ships to protect them against smaller threats (so more "artillery stations" and less "plain defense stations").

 

Yes, I know they had everything inside. However, it would be much much more efficient to have just needles (less surface to shoot at!) with distributed systems among the "auxiliary" ships.

So you would have a lot of medium ships and small ships, a bunch of big ships, and the "needles" would act like semi-stationary defense systems, that would mound simply humongous guns and use small propulsors to reorient. All that controlled from the "ships on duty" at the time.
In other words, a weapons pod.

 

Well the ships need to look cool, of course

Can't make a shitty looking ship

 

cooler than a ship is a small fleet of cillindrical ships with some pyramid-based "needles" that are little else than giant guns you reorient easily as needed!

Furthermore, they can even have no internal energy system, using an umbilical instead and feed from assigned ships... kinda like giving sniper rifles (of the Barret kind) to soldiers...

 

OK, that helps.

So, riffing on this, the PanO ships would be a size class smaller than their YJ equivalents of the same role. A PanO Destroyer would be Size 3 (pulling numbers out of my ass) while a YJ DD would be Size 4. But they're both 'destroyers' and do the same job in each fleet.

The PanO version gives more command-level jobs, and bragging rights are something that is always scarce:

"What do you do?"
"Me? I'm the Commanding Officer of the POS Indus, a River-class Destroyer. Call me Captain!"
"You're a Lieutenant!"
"Yeah, isn't it great?"​

Thanks, will have to add that to the to-be-purchased list.

If there's no artificial gravity in the setting but thrust or spin, I assume that the saucer sections were enclosing the habitat wheels. Yes, plural. One wheel spins clockwise, the other spins CCW. Otherwise you have torque problems like a helicopter. Also lets you re-orient cheaply, at least in the plane of the centrifuges, as you can brake one to start you spinning and brake the other to stop (spinning them both back up won't cause trouble).