Author Topic: Replacing PDCs  (Read 82121 times)

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Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #390 on: November 26, 2017, 11:36:49 AM »
On automated shipboard defenses:

Since we're still using the boarding pods abstraction, perhaps in addition to the internal security turrets module, we could have a module representing external security turrets.  These would be too tiny to use against ships or missiles, but would be for preventing boarders from breaching the hull.  Either by shooting down their pods, or by shooting them while they try to cut into the hull.  These would be like how modern warships have mounted M249 LMG's and M2 .50cals to defend against small craft and swimmers.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #391 on: November 26, 2017, 11:43:15 AM »
Droppods/boardingpods would effectively be .5 to 1 MSP missiles. CIWS and other missile intercepting guns would be fine.
 

Offline MagusXIX

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #392 on: November 26, 2017, 11:49:01 AM »
Suggestion

Marines in a transport module is the current golden standard for adding boarding defense to a ship.

An automated system, when compared to equivalent research/tech of marines, could be ...

PROS
Cheaper to produce, in terms of lives, materials, training time, build points, etc.
Uses less hull space than a single marine company + transport mod (so it works on small ships too.)
No additional life-support considerations.

CONS
Less versatile (cannot be unloaded like marines can, for instance.)
Uses energy (maybe a kinetic version does not, but is less effective in other ways to compensate?)
Less efficient hull-space-to-boarding-defense ratio. This reflects that Marines are more like antibodies in that they move around the ship to wherever they are needed, but these automated defenses are static (turrets, not robo-marines.)
 

Offline MagusXIX

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #393 on: November 26, 2017, 12:04:24 PM »
Droppods/boardingpods would effectively be .5 to 1 MSP missiles. CIWS and other missile intercepting guns would be fine.

Maybe I just need clarification on how big 1 MSP is in terms of volume, but I had assumed that a dropship of some kind, even if it's just a one-man pod (which if it's dropping an entire company of Marines, it ain't,) will still be at least three or four times as large as an anti-missile missile. (Room for 1 marine + combat gear + hull-cutting equipment + fuel + engines, etc.) If indeed it has to drop an entire Marine Company, it's likely notably larger than a 747 airplane. Bigger than a C130, which would handle roughly a platoon (sans boarding equipment) rather than a whole company, and certainly bigger than, say, a modern AAV (amphibious assault vehicle) which are roughly squad-sized (12 or so bodies.)

Still, you're almost certainly right about already existing AMM options working just fine for intercepting dropships/boarding-pods. Are armored boarding pods already a thing? If not, they ought to be.
 

Offline TheDeadlyShoe

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #394 on: November 26, 2017, 12:19:53 PM »
AMMs are kinda irrelevant. By the time you reach boarding range either theyre out of AMMs or you're dead.

 

Offline Hazard

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #395 on: November 26, 2017, 12:27:06 PM »
Maybe I just need clarification on how big 1 MSP is in terms of volume, but I had assumed that a dropship of some kind, even if it's just a one-man pod (which if it's dropping an entire company of Marines, it ain't,) will still be at least three or four times as large as an anti-missile missile. (Room for 1 marine + combat gear + hull-cutting equipment + fuel + engines, etc.) If indeed it has to drop an entire Marine Company, it's likely notably larger than a 747 airplane. Bigger than a C130, which would handle roughly a platoon (sans boarding equipment) rather than a whole company, and certainly bigger than, say, a modern AAV (amphibious assault vehicle) which are roughly squad-sized (12 or so bodies.)

Still, you're almost certainly right about already existing AMM options working just fine for intercepting dropships/boarding-pods. Are armored boarding pods already a thing? If not, they ought to be.

An MSP is 2.5 tons.

The thing about Drop Pods is that you can optimize them ludicrously towards short range boarding capacity, given the manner in which Aurora handles boarding. This means high power engines, practically no fuel storage, and high agility systems attached to a shell with an inertial compensation capacity of 'yes.' Infantry may have a Size of 5 tons in the game, but that's largely a result of their support and logistics trail. For a boarding action you don't need all that; either your troops are wearing void rated protective gear or they're dead anyway, so you might as well depend on their internal air supply until they manage to secure a foothold. Likewise with their munitions; you want them to have enough munitions for the battle, but at the same time it's foolish to weigh them down with more than they need.

Breaching systems are likely mounted on only part of the droppods, and/or supplemented by advanced cybernetic warfare systems that are meant to hack enemy computers, no matter how alien said computers may be. As that way you would be able to force open airlocks. Breaching systems either consist of multiple bricks of high explosives, cutting equipment, or both, if not done by clamping down the droppod on the ship and lighting off the last of the fuel in the engine to burn a hole down.

You can squeeze a lot of stuff into a relatively small and lightweight frame so long as the payload isn't that much. And a 200 kilogram at most infantryman? That still leaves you with a literal ton to play with for everything you need to take him from the ship he's in to the ship he's boarding.
 

Offline MagusXIX

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #396 on: November 26, 2017, 12:27:52 PM »
AMMs are kinda irrelevant. By the time you reach boarding range either theyre out of AMMs or you're dead.

Right, I remember now. This coupled with inability to reliably disable enemy engines is part of why I never bother with designing/using boarding vessels anymore. My kingdom for the ability to target specific modules.
 

Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #397 on: November 26, 2017, 12:44:04 PM »
You guys seem to be misunderstanding what I meant by boarding pods.  Currently in VB6 aurora, a combat drop module fires boarding pods at the boarding target.  These pods are NOT the fighter with the combat drop module in its design.  They are the combat drop module itself.  Currently, you lose some boarders in the increment the dropship executes the boarding assault depending on the speed of the target relative to the dropship, to simulate some pods missing and flinging people off into deep space.  The external turrets I mentioned are for shooting pods down, not the dropships.  To continue with the C130 and paratroopers comparison, it's less like shooting down the C130, and more like shooting the paratroopers while they float down in their chutes.  The turrets could also shoot at the boarders while they try to cut through the hull.
 

Offline Bremen

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #398 on: November 26, 2017, 01:50:23 PM »
My current thinking is to have three types of troop transports bays: standard, orbital insertion and ship-to-ship boarding, all of which have capacities in tons. Standard is similar to the current troop transport bays, where loading and unloading takes several hours or days. Orbital Insertion Bays have abstract drop-ships built into the transport bays (significantly more expensive and a little larger than standard bays). Orbital Insertion Bays can be used as normal troop transport bays, with normal load and unload times, or they can be used to instantly drop troops on to a planetary surface from orbit, in which case the bay is damaged and has to be repaired by a shipyard (replacing the abstract drop-ships). Ship-to-ship boarding bays can also function normally, but have a secondary function for launching infantry units (with boarding capability) against  other ships. This doesn't damage the bay. Standard Bays would be commercial, while the other two would be military systems.

Part of me likes the ability to have dropships as small FACs that can launch for the final million kilometers of the trip so the troop transports don't have to risk defense fire, but thinking about it your way is probably better. Less micromanagement that way, since you don't have to offload the troops from the transports to the dropships manually.

I had one thought, and it's kind of a biggy. As long as we're treating the troops and dropships as basically launching from hangars... would it be worth considering making space fighters and aerospace fighters the same craft? So that, say, carriers could use their fighters as part of the ground landing, and a planetary garrison could launch their fighters into space to help in the defense?

One way I could see doing it would be to just give planets an effectively infinite hangar capacity, but only for fighters (though unlike when in ship based hangars, you'd be paying maintenance on them like I assume you do for ground troops, so it's not as unbalanced as it sounds). Then fighters engaging in ground combat would still have their stats based off of their components, but maybe with an accuracy bonus compared to orbital bombardment for the weapons.

If I understand correctly, right now there's a divide between aircraft and space based fighters, which makes sense from a technical perspective. But fighters being able to enter the atmosphere is kind of a sci-fi staple, and it gives beam fighters an interesting role as hybrid space/ground units.
 

Offline Tavik Toth

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #399 on: November 26, 2017, 02:10:41 PM »
Steve, when it comes to planetary defence, have you thought of adding something like the SDI from the cold war? That is, armed laser, missile and/or kinetic sattelites meant for defending colonies and the like.
 

Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #400 on: November 26, 2017, 02:13:43 PM »
You can do that yourself already.  Just build very small ships that are basically just a single weapon, a reactor, and a fire control.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #401 on: November 26, 2017, 02:27:33 PM »
Part of me likes the ability to have dropships as small FACs that can launch for the final million kilometers of the trip so the troop transports don't have to risk defense fire, but thinking about it your way is probably better. Less micromanagement that way, since you don't have to offload the troops from the transports to the dropships manually.

I had one thought, and it's kind of a biggy. As long as we're treating the troops and dropships as basically launching from hangars... would it be worth considering making space fighters and aerospace fighters the same craft? So that, say, carriers could use their fighters as part of the ground landing, and a planetary garrison could launch their fighters into space to help in the defense?

One way I could see doing it would be to just give planets an effectively infinite hangar capacity, but only for fighters (though unlike when in ship based hangars, you'd be paying maintenance on them like I assume you do for ground troops, so it's not as unbalanced as it sounds). Then fighters engaging in ground combat would still have their stats based off of their components, but maybe with an accuracy bonus compared to orbital bombardment for the weapons.

If I understand correctly, right now there's a divide between aircraft and space based fighters, which makes sense from a technical perspective. But fighters being able to enter the atmosphere is kind of a sci-fi staple, and it gives beam fighters an interesting role as hybrid space/ground units.

Yes, the micromanagement of moving from transport bay to drop module is something I am trying to avoid.

One option is just to ignore the concept of 'ground unit aircraft' and just have normal ship-borne fighters interacting with ground combat using some form of close-range air-to-ground munitions (essentially in the same location as the planet). The anti-air units on the ground would have a capability against those fighters while they are attacking but not if they are simply in orbit. That avoids any complexities around having aircraft as ground units.

In fact, you could design smaller fighters intended for this type of combat. They would need smaller launchers (probably size 1) because they would be dropping 'bombs' (missiles without fuel or engines), rather than launching normal missiles. Assuming they are linked with a forward air controller on the ground, they wouldn't need a fire control. They also would need very little fuel. Engines would be smaller as well, so you are probably getting down to 100 tons or less. Probably hard to hit by any remaining planetary defences on the way in and out due to high speed. Given they are essentially dropping nukes at close-range against specific targets identified by a controller on the ground, that would probably be quite effective. Or they could be equipped with less effective non-nuclear munitions to avoid environmental damage.

In terms of aircraft based on planets, that in fine in C# Aurora as they can be maintained normally by maintenance facilities.

Just thinking out loud, but it would be fun to have carriers standing off out of energy range and sending in strikes to aid the ground war.
« Last Edit: November 26, 2017, 02:29:49 PM by Steve Walmsley »
 
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Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #402 on: November 26, 2017, 02:38:59 PM »
I really really like the idea of bombers dropping actual bombs instead of missiles with million-km ranges.  I know it's already possible in VB6 Aurora, but it just never comes up.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #403 on: November 26, 2017, 03:43:30 PM »
If possible it'd be superior to use a cruise missile variant instead with a tiny high efficiency engine and just enough fuel to be dropped from outside ground beam weapon ranges. Only thing you need is a fire control unit that can hit the planet and/or connect with a forward fire controller. Don't need fighters for that either, just shove the missiles into the AMM launchers. It'd be much cheaper despite increased cost of the missiles because you don't end up constantly having to replace the bombers.

Also, I don't know what range you are thinking those FCCs will guiding the bombs from, but generally speaking even for the smallest warhead designs, if you are close enough to paint the target you are close enough to be collateral damage. While the blast wave of the Davey Crocket (according to NukeMap) as a 20 ton TNT equivalent nuke won't reach much beyond a 100 meter radius, the acute radiation sickness death radius is about 500 meters, many FCCs will end up closer to their targets than that. And that's the smallest nuke known to be possible to make, small enough to be man portable, if not easily.
 

Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Replacing PDCs
« Reply #404 on: November 26, 2017, 04:31:16 PM »
Well, fire support coordinators could be quite a distance away.  They aren't necessarily painting targets by hand.  Maybe they use small UAVs?  A UAV at 2000m altitude can see much farther than someone at sea level.