Newtonian Aurora

[jseah]

Come to think of it, how about this. 

Fuel is expensive.  Ships in NA guzzle fuel incessantly and massive amounts of it are needed.  Fuel fractions dominate designs. 
Engines also cost alot. 

A space station that doesn't use fuel will be incredibly cheap in comparison.  It will be half the size or smaller than the equivalent ship. 


So, to augment system defence fleets, colonies could build giant railguns in orbit.  Need it to be three km long to shoot missiles?  So be it.  Stationary objects are dead anyway, so target profile doesn't matter so much. 
The railguns will take time to die however, possibly even days.  During which time, they could chuck an obscene amount of guided ordnance at things.  A few of those guns could even be on interception duty, shooting sandcasters to interdict potential lines of fire.  After all, you are not moving, so enemy ships shooting at you have their stuff travelling in straight lines.  So chuck a ton of sand a million km out in the direction of a target and watch the fireworks. 

Plus, while enemy missiles and rounds are targeting your cheap railguns (after all, they don't use fuel), those ammunition aren't targeting your expensive ships and your shots are forcing them to burn delta-v to evade.  Evade all the way in-system until the railguns disappear in the flash of a TJ hit. 
All while you wonder if they still have enough delta-v to get home. 
Best of all, since target braketing will be very useful, this is a cheap option to providing another vector of attack. 

[procyon]

Come to think of it, how about this.  

I like it.
Only one thought.

We all know that the stationary station is a goner.  But a deadly goner.  Its weakness may be long range strikes from a ship that jumps in at great distance, releases a payload, and then jumps out before return fire can engage/destroy it.
Then the next ship shows up in a month and cleans up the rest/starts the mobile battle.

Instead of big orbital bases - how about a half dozen small one that might be built in a short timeframe.
More ability to put mulitple slugs on a target to overwhelm defenses/ bracket manuevers/ etc.  Or the ability to fire them at multiple ships that jumped in from widespread locations.

And if they jump out (having now burned a bunch of fuel...) and your stations bite the dust - you can rebuild the small/cheap platform in time for the follow on party (hopefully...).

But I like it.  I intend to ruthlessly steal this.
 

[procyon]

But as an idle question -

Are there many (any?) other posts here that have nearly a thousand replies...

[Erik L]

But as an idle question -

Are there many (any?) other posts here that have nearly a thousand replies...

The official 5.2 suggestion thread has about 50 less replies than this one.

[jseah]

We all know that the stationary station is a goner.  But a deadly goner.  Its weakness may be long range strikes from a ship that jumps in at great distance, releases a payload, and then jumps out before return fire can engage/destroy it.

Not too sure about that one. 

Non-guided projectiles must necessarily be on a "constant bearing, reducing range" course, as a certain someone mentioned multiple times upthread.  You know where the enemy ships were, so you know the axis along which any mass driver rounds must go through.  And you have days to do it in.  That's alot of interception shots. 
Interdict it with multiple layers of sandcasters (your huge railgun length is precisely so your payload survives the launch), and hope you can blow up the incoming shots.  They'll still be highly energetic plasma, but over a million km, it'll spread out enough. 
Well, 1 million km ought to be enough until you get into the high relativistic speeds, but then that's a whole different kettle of fish. 

Guided projectiles in the form of missiles can be shot at and intercepted with anti-missiles.  With days in flight time, hopefully you have enough railgun launched AMMs to kill his incoming fragmentation missiles before they reach separation range. 


For the record, I am not advocating humongous expensive railguns; I am saying we should build huge cheap railguns.  It should be a low power railgun for the size, just that the acceleration is deliberately kept down so you can shoot a missile out the barrel.  With much lower accels and power densities, you may not need much TN materials (after all, even a TN missile will be put through the wringer if they got fired out a hypothetical missile-launch railgun we could build today), bringing the cost way way down. 
Capacitors and heatsinks are likely to be TN, but the barrel might not need to be. 



Another nasty trick you can use is to hide the railguns on the surface of the planet, with short range planet-to-orbit tugs ready to move them out.  Your enemy jumps into the system, he can't find anything.  When he is well and truly committed to the mobile phase of the battle, bam!  The railguns go into space and begin spewing shots, hopefully they will do something useful in their brief but exciting life. 
Note that you can tell he is committed before the missiles start to fly, getting up to a good speed heading insystem or towards one of your system ship TGs is just as committed as being in the thick of it. 

[jseah]

Actually, NA combat is going to prove alot more interesting than TNA. 

Single hits are devastating.  Every incoming missile is a potential ship killer.  Every railgun shot, even sandcasters, can be used to bleed shields or even sandpaper away at armour.  (1g chunk won't kill your ship , but it sure can blow off a plate of armour)

This means that even single ships or PDCs can do disproportionately large amounts of damage for their cost. 

Furthermore, the difficulty of generating intercepts and possibility of evasion means that additional angles of attack increase your chance to hit and damage of every other angle. 


This means having the ability to strike from widely spaced areas with weak forces is going to be dominant over single concentrated fleets. 

Taking the railgun station further, it would be prudent to have missile and railgun PDCs hiding on some asteroids and outer moons.  Built to be small and hard to detect, with the intention of ambushing enemies en-masse.  Cloaking tech also became a lot more powerful, as you can sit TGs some distance outside the hyperlimit under cloak and engines off. 
Imagine your enemy's surprise when he heads in-system with his battleships against your feeble system defence destroyer squadron when the colony and an asteroid begin shooting missiles.  And a light cruiser TG from outside the hyperlimit lights up and begins shooting missiles down the path he is going to retreat across. 


For that matter, the way that NA warp drives split up warping fleets into individual squadrons across the system is an advantage.  It spreads out the attacking TGs, giving them an advantage in generating favourable geometry. 


EDIT: a way of storing the railgun stations on the planet would be a PDC hangar built for this purpose.  Can dual role as strike craft base as well. 

[UnLimiTeD]

Honestly, I'm still uncomfortable with the energy density that sorium seems to possess, just as the artificial hyper limit.
But embracing that mechanic, the mentioned tactics need not be suicidal.
A railgun station will require at least a small maneuvering drive, which would discourage an enemy from just jumping in, firing at them, and leaving; they'd need to bracket at least a few kilometers with fire to be sure;
If you tow them from the surface, once the enemy leaves, you can tow them back; Even a trace atmosphere will protect reliably against railgun rounds.
In a PDC, you could also store interception fighters, each equipped with a ship scale standard railgun and a small sandcaster, or alternatively a middleground of the two if such will ever be available.
Just start a few hundred of them, form a screen in front of the planet and fire in the general direction of an attacker, while your regular fleet keeps him endangered.
They'd be a great compliment to a railgun station, and their drives need to only contain enough fuel to break into orbit and get back, with acceleration to match. Should be cheap.

[jseah]

Suggestion RE the hyperlimit:
Instead of having a strict hyperlimit, have a scaling risk of failure based on distance from stars. 

At the traditional hyperlimit, the failure rate is 0%.  This increases linearly to 100% across 10% of the limit distance. 
The failure rate can be reduced by the crew grade (say, just a direct failure rate - crew grade = new failure chance, min 0%) so that more experienced crews can jump in/out closer and stay safe. 
Perhaps have the size of the hyperlimit vary based on the grav survey. 

Obviously, the failure rate for a particular command will need to appear somewhere, possibly in the Jump To Star command.  (slider scale of desired failure rate and distance.  Moving one causes the other to move appropriately)


As for what happens when it fails (whether the ship explodes or the jump just fails), that can be something suitably detrimental that it is a risk. 

[sublight]

Newtonian Aurora is going to need some form of vertical positioning. The 2-D abstraction worked pretty well with Standard Aurora. All the interesting stuff is on the orbital plane, and with 10,000 km considered point-blank weapons distance ignoring the implied vertical didn't hurt any. I sort of figured ship within a task-force were 10-100km apart justifingy both the single-ship CIWS protection and full squadron shared PD coverage. However, in Newtonian Aurora mere meters will matter with the introduction of area-of-effect nuclear explosions, debris shrapnel clouds, and more.

So, I'd like to propose Newtonian Aurora add a vertical dimension for task force stacking. For simplicity, the 3rd dimension could be ignored entirely for ship movement and only consulted as a final check for physical collisions and nuclear proximity.

As mentioned earlier, 10,000 km is/was point blank weapons range. Point blank range in Newtonian might be a lot shorter, perhaps 1,000 km. Going much smaller than that, and ships could easily have +/- 100 km wiggle room around the orbital plane and still have the vertical axis neglected. For task forces with less than 100 ships, the ships could easily all be 1km apart from their closest neighbor. When flying at speeds of over 1,000 km/s, a 1km separation would a rather tight formation, but would still save the fleet if one ship takes a nuclear missile.

So. Task force ships flying 1km apart. Room for 200 ships in a task force. The actual position doesn't matter much: we can assume any commander is going to fly at a random altitude to try to prevent an iron ball bearing from getting dropped in a predictable location. Anything non-targeted (like a rail gun fired at a passive contact) that happens to intersect the fleet could be assigned a random position between +100 km and -100km, and then check to see if it matches any unlucky ship hull. The chance of a random shot hitting a 20m wide object somewhere within a 200 km range isn't very good (0.01%). The odds of hitting one of 10 100m freighters is better (5%) but still requires a lot of spaying and praying. (Space is big.)

All objects fired at an active target might be assumed to have the same elevation as their target. So, a nuclear anti-missile missile could easily knock out all missiles fired from the same opposing taskforce against the same target, but might not take out missiles several km apart targeted at a different ships. This makes missile defense still much easier than Standard Aurora, but not so one-sided as it was currently looking.

Also, a 3rd dimension allows limited automatic dodging against active unguided projectiles. With 1-hit kills not getting hit is a priority. Adding a +/- 500m wiggle against actively targeted unguided projectiles would take a bit less than 500 m/s deltaV per day to dodge projectiles at least 10 minutes distant. The same protection against projectiles at least 30 minutes distant would cost a more affordable 53 m/s deltaV per day. The 95% dodge chance given a 50m wide craft isn't a substitute for proper 2-D zig-zags and won't apply against close range shots: yet such a feature might save a few lives among AI and inexperienced commander crews.

--------------------------------------------

On Speed: I'm with UnLimiTeD. I'm in the 'Sorium fuel consumption rate should be increased' camp. Probably won't happen since that would either slow the game down or require retaining an even more complicated hyperdrive. Oh well.

On the Hyper(Jump?)Limit. I'd suggest leaving it a hard line. Possibly adjust for commander survey bonus, but don't put a catastrophic failure chance in. Our ships will be fragile enough without them spontaneously detonating by mistake.

[procyon]

Not too sure about that one.

I didn't say it would be an easy kill.  But I am afraid the writing would be on the wall eventually.

I see the bases as powerful.  But I just don't anticipate them surviving if someone was serious about taking them out.

Cheap and fast to build would be my main goals.  If it could lay down a thick defense that would be great.  I think sand casters would be perfect, but haven't heard Steve say anything about them - so I haven't put a lot of thought into the old Traveller standby.

The problem will be one of percentages.

Even supposing Steve puts a limit on rail gun ammo, and I need to dedicate a ton to get my 1000 1kg slugs, I'm ok with that.
And my jump carrier has three parasites - each with a rail gun or two.  And I bring a couple carriers to make sure that I end up dispersed around the outer part of the system so that I can set up brackets.

Now the percentages come in.

If I can detect stationary targets, those will be a priority for a first jump in.  Say at least one parasite from each group would be tasked to engage.  And say that my rail gun needs 30 seconds between shots.  It will unload its 1000 shots over about 8 1/2 hours.  Then it will return to momma for the trip home.  The odds of a weapon reaching the outer system in that time frame would be small.  (Distant patrols will be vital I believe.  Those PDC on distant asteroids, etc could be lifesavers.)

Now, the base has a string of deadly 1 kg chunks coming at it.  Possibly from 2-3 directions.  For a base I probably won't worry about coordinating TOT, just looking for volume.

The base will need to be able to detect the slugs (which I have no idea of how successful it will be.  I have no idea how the NA sensors are going to work...), and then put up a defense that can stop them for a solid 8 hours plus.  It will need to be able to see a 1kg slug moving at 4000km/s from 4000km just to have one second to react.  That isn't much time for the sandcaster to deploy.  And you will have to be able to detect them at amazing ranges, otherwise you will have a terrible time predicting the exact time they will arive so your sandcaster isn't excessively dispersed. 

And it needs to be 100% effective.

Because at 99.9% - one of those slugs got through...

[jseah]

Depending on how thick the atmosphere of your colony is, it might not cost all that much to bring the station back down into a PDC hangar. 

Secondly, you do know where the slugs are coming from if you see the enemy ships (and if your colony can't see them, then why are you building these guns?).  Your planet and station aren't going to move, so necessarily their incoming rounds are going to be limited in firing arc.  Very limited. 

[procyon]

Depending on how thick the atmosphere of your colony is, it might not cost all that much to bring the station back down into a PDC hangar.

I am completely unfamiliar with any previous version, so taking an orbital station down into a PDC is new to me.  Could be very useful in this instance.  I don't know what this entails so I will be going on faith here.  It ought to take a healthy amount of fuel to keep moving between orbit and the surface though.  I don't know what the mechanics are for this at all.

Secondly, you do know where the slugs are coming from if you see the enemy ships (and if your colony can't see them, then why are you building these guns?).  Your planet and station aren't going to move, so necessarily their incoming rounds are going to be limited in firing arc.  Very limited. 

I didn't say you wouldn't have a pretty good idea where they would be coming from.  Again, I have no familiarity with Aurora and how good the sensors are.  I am assuming they are far enough away you can't detect the gun firing.  If you can detect the firing from interplanetary distances then you will have a very good fix on the origin - if not just which target.

The trick is unless you know the ship design that is firing at you - you will have no clue when they are going to show up.  You can take a guess, but when talking about the distances I envision an error of a hundred km/s could make the first slugs showing up anywhere in a couple of hour timeframe. 
And if you don't know exactly when they are going to show up, and can't see them very far out, it may be difficult to stop them effectively.  Again, my lack of any familiarity with aurora means I have absolutely no idea what is possible in this area.
The defense will have to be very effective though if you have strings of slugs coming at you over a span of eight or so hours.  Again, one screw up shooting them down and it could be over.

The game will be the best place to find out. 
And I expect to have a lot of fun finding out...   

[jseah]

The game will be the best place to find out. 
And I expect to have a lot of fun finding out...   

XD  Post a small projectile detection sensor along the expected angle.  You won't know the time they come, but if the enemy ships just leave, your system defence frigates near your colony (you have some there right?  right?)  can go hang around on the correct bearing a couple of million km out. 
Since we assume your DSTS can see enemy ships jumping in and out, you know the bearing the slugs are coming by to incredible accuracy.  Compared with interplanetary distances, a couple of million km gives you a comparatively large error tolerance (you can miss the angle by half a degree and it probably won't matter) thus you have alot of wiggle room to put your ships. 

You'll have a few minutes warning. 


As for landing your stations in PDC hangars, depending on how the game mechanics bear out, it could be instant deploy.  >.>  Which uh, would be hax. 
A TN Aurora version of this scheme (with long range drones) could land the railgun base instantly.  Obviously, in NA, you'll probably have tractor beams or tugs or some suitably cheap low-powered thing to move it on/off the planet. 

Lol, if we could land ships in PDCs instantly, energy weapon battles against enemy bases became pointless.  The bases could recharge on the surface where railguns and lasers can't reach them, then pop up to fire. 
<Needs fixing. 

Mini-fiction EDIT:
The battle destroys a few PDCs and the retreating enemy ships fired a barrage of rounds (or at least they appeared to).  A few bases cannot land due to lack of space and a desperate defence is mounted.  Round after round detonates on the thick cloud of dust placed in the way, escort ships spotting a seemingly endless shower. 
Ten grueling hours, desperate hours, later, one freakishly lucky metal pellet misses enough sand and a railgun base disappears in a brilliant flash of light, thousands of men and a fine officer didn't even know they were hit before the entire base vapourizes.  At the speeds the rounds travel, a hit explodes like a thermonuclear device, even though nothing in the target or round is explosive.  It is the only one to make it through, the huge clouds of sand are already dispersing, but for the next decade, ships approaching the colony are restricted to sub 1000 km/s speeds or require shields due to the orbiting dust. 

Alternatively:
The system commander (aka. you) could decide that defending the bases isn't worth risking the lives of crew and officers.  Abandon the bases to their fate and evacuate! 

[procyon]

Post a small projectile detection sensor along the expected angle....
Since we assume your DSTS can see enemy ships jumping in and out, you know the bearing the slugs are coming by to incredible accuracy....
You'll have a few minutes warning. 

Ok, this is where my familiarity of Aurora is going to crimp my ability in the first few games.  I just don't know how far out I will be able to see the slugs.  I expect to see the ships a long ways off.  It looks like you don't see missile (much smaller) until they are considerably closer.  I just don't know how far off you will be able to see the slugs.

If sensors designed to see missiles (something measured in meters) are a fair factor less efficient than those used to see ships (which is what it looks like) - how effecient are they going to be when used to spot a (assuming just a 1kg ball of copper) slug about 5-6 cm/2" across closing at what may be 10K km/s?  If you have minutes, you can spot that little pup a long ways out (over half a million km's?).

If that little ball of metal is even harder to see than the missiles - I am afraid your response time will be measured in seconds.

But I don't know how far out in standard Aurora you can see a rail gun slug (if there are any...).

Obviously, in NA, you'll probably have tractor beams or tugs or some suitably cheap low-powered thing to move it on/off the planet.

Sounds good.  And if it works for the stations - will it keep me from using fuel to take my ships off from a planet?

Mini-fiction EDIT:
The battle destroys a few PDCs and the retreating enemy ships fired a barrage of rounds (or at least they appeared to).  A few bases cannot land due to lack of space and a desperate defence is mounted.  Round after round detonates on the thick cloud of dust placed in the way, escort ships spotting a seemingly endless shower. 
Ten grueling hours, desperate hours, later, one freakishly lucky metal pellet misses enough sand and a railgun base disappears in a brilliant flash of light, thousands of men and a fine officer didn't even know they were hit before the entire base vapourizes.  At the speeds the rounds travel, a hit explodes like a thermonuclear device, even though nothing in the target or round is explosive.  It is the only one to make it through, the huge clouds of sand are already dispersing, but for the next decade, ships approaching the colony are restricted to sub 1000 km/s speeds or require shields due to the orbiting dust. 

Alternatively:
The system commander (aka. you) could decide that defending the bases isn't worth risking the lives of crew and officers.  Abandon the bases to their fate and evacuate! 

I like your story.  Very nice.
As long as I have ammo left or a population in danger - I would mount the defense.
If the base is empty, I may decided to devote my attention and effort elsewhere.
(My apologies to the fine crew.  'The needs of the many... and such.') 


 

[sublight]

Ok, this is where my familiarity of Aurora is going to crimp my ability in the first few games.  I just don't know how far out I will be able to see the slugs.  I expect to see the ships a long ways off.  It looks like you don't see missile (much smaller) until they are considerably closer.  I just don't know how far off you will be able to see the slugs.

If sensors designed to see missiles (something measured in meters) are a fair factor less efficient than those used to see ships (which is what it looks like) - how effecient are they going to be when used to spot a (assuming just a 1kg ball of copper) slug about 5-6 cm/2" across closing at what may be 10K km/s?  If you have minutes, you can spot that little pup a long ways out (over half a million km's?).

If that little ball of metal is even harder to see than the missiles - I am afraid your response time will be measured in seconds.

I think jseah is talking about passive thermal sensors. If you know where all the enemy ships are, you know any projectiles the fire will have to be roughly on the intercept line from their possition to your projected position at a speed no greater than the enemy vessel's closing speed + 100km/s.  If the thermal energy spike generated from firing is vissible (no clue if it would be) then you also know when they fire. For all of this actualy seeing the projectile isn't required.

For active detection no Standard Aurora knowledge is needed: the sensor system is being redone for Newtonian.
Using the new rules, the sample 150 ton resolution-1 missile detection sensor can spot a 4-ton missile 2.2m km out. If our 1kg projectile has the same density as a missile, then it has 1/4000th the mass and volume, 1/16th the radius, and 1/252 the cross sectional area. This gives a detection range of... 35km. Even at a standard firing velocity of 60 km/s, you have less than 1s reaction time. With 5s increments odds are the projectile would pass an advance scout without ever getting noticed. You may as well assume projectiles are undetectable and not waste processor time checking.

There is no indication that a resolution smaller than 1 is possible, but lets see what things would look like if there was a projectile sensor. Say, a 0.01 resolution sensor, sized to optimally detect 4 kg objects. This would have a maximum detection range of 220k km for a 150 ton sensor. A 1kg projectile would be seen at 35k km for a 1,000x improvement. Even a projectile accelerated to 3.5k km/s would still leave a 10s detection window.