Changes to Freighters, Colony Ships and Shipyards

[ShadoCat]

An excellent point! Given that construction ships are going to be very large, that could be a problem. Perhaps the instability caused by removing a jump gate will cause jump gates at both sides of a jump point to be destroyed

That would work.

One other thought.  Maybe a ship on either side of a double gate can send a command or an energy stream to cause the gate to disrupt.  This wouldn't close the gate but would make it so that anything going through would come out in pieces.  The change would be visible.  You wouldn't have to own the gate but you would have to have a ship within X km to continuously send the beam.  Thus, either side can embargo the gate.

There are two ways this can go.  Either a jump drive can temporary sort out the jump point to allow ships to jump through it (as if the gate wasn't present) or the disruption overrides all travel.  In which case, in order to get through an embargoed gate, you have to deconstruct the gate on your side; then you can jump through.

[sloanjh]

I was thinking in terms of having a HTK of e.g. 1000 (or even 10,000 or 100,000), and treating them as "all or nothing golden BB" the way SY are, i.e. any particular hit would have a chance of strength/HTK of completely destroying the gate.  With this destruction mechanism, you'd pretty much have to:

A) Rig a bunch of 100pt bombs (all-warhead missiles) to the gate in advance, and blow them all at once in the hope that one of them blows the gate.

B) Have bunch (or maybe just a single, if you've got enough time) beam-armed ships sitting next to the gate, ready to start blasting away if things get dicey.

C) Burn through the magazines of several (or more) missile ships shooting at the gate.

I really like B, because it gives another raison d'etre for beam-armed ships, with A as an alternate method for pure-missile races.

As for technobable, I like the idea that a jumpgate isn't actually a physical object - instead it's a stable wormhole which the weapons fire has a (small) chance of disrupting.  With this technobabble, only energy weapons and explosions would have a chance of destroying the gate - gauss cannon and railgun shouldn't (the slugs would go right through).

One of the things I like about requiring weapons fire from the far (enemy) side is that it gives the enemy an opportunity to interfere with blowing the gate, which gives more of an opportunity for "last stand" situations to show up.  Having civilian ships deconstruct them from the near side in a predictable amount of time seems a lot less exciting - although my ideas on this might change the first time the enemy launches an assault through the gate while the construction ship is trying to deconstruct it.  Hmmm - the far-side weapons-fire method also acts as a counter to the energy-combatant "duck through the wormhole when the missiles are due to arrive" strategy against missile ships - ducking through the gate means you can't be working on destroying it, so there's motivation to try and tough out the salvo rather than dodging it for longer than the missile loiter time.

I was going to say that I liked the idea of the disruption blowing the gate in both directions, and was almost ready to suggest "why do I need to build a jump gate on each side?", but then realized that this would allow deconstruction from the near/safe side which (as described above) I think is a lot less interesting.

John

[jfelten]

It is an interesting idea in principle, although I can see a couple of issues. Firstly is that beam armed ships wouldn't have much trouble destroying them with no downside whereas missile ships would have to use up a lot of their ordnance. Secondly, with that in mind I would damage every jump gate in the Empire to within a couple of points so I could destroy it whenever I needed to without any trouble. If I avoided that by preventing damaged jump gates from working, then I could still prevent an alien attack by damaging them slightly.

I do like the idea that they could be destroyed though so there must be an alternative that makes it possible but difficult. Assume that a jump gate somehow binds with the jump point, keeping it open at all times, and becomes more than just a physical structure you can shoot at. Perhaps jump gate construction ships could undo the jump gate or perhaps the gate needs to be taken out in one huge explosion (like putting out an oil well fire). Perhaps a 100 point warhead (or even more) You would have to design gate-buster missiles and would need a launcher big enough to launch them.

Steve

Throwing out more ideas:  

A thought is that a damaged gate can still receive but cannot send.  

Another is that a damaged gate has a percentage chance of malfunction.  That would dissuade people from intentionally damaging their gates.  Also, they could have a certain rate of self repair, so even if intentionally damaged, they would soon repair the damage.  I can't think of a real good excuse why someone could build a gate but then not have an off switch for the self repair mechanism though.  

I was also thinking that instead of being assembled by special ships, that gate construction ships are purely robotic and become the gate and therefore are one use machines.  Once on station they reconfigure and lock in place.  Say their engines are rebuilt in to the gate mechanism, or are consumed creating the wormhole, or whatever techno-babble sounds best for why they can't be moved once emplaced .  

Yet another wild idea is that all warp points already have ancient indestructible gates of mysterious origin.  Instead of a special ship being needed to build gates, a special ship is needed to reactivate a dormant gate (sort of a gate jump starter).  Although it is pretty hard to make anything believably "indestructible".  Perhaps they are massive, say the size of a medium size moon.  But then they would be obvious and easily found eliminating the need for surveying, unless the survey is still needed to determine a precise course that must be set to transit the gate.  I guess you could say they are cloaked by inscrutable alien technology and very hard to detect.  

All in all though it is a pretty big stretch to come up with a believable reason why a physical gate couldn't be rigged with a command detonated antimatter bomb.  Personally I would just make jump drives small enough to fit on warships so the military is not reliant on jump gates to carry on an offensive.  You could make them expensive enough that it would not be economical to put them on freighters.

[IanD]

Because of the above, some changes are needed to shipyards. A new Commercial Shipyard has been added and the existing Shipyard becomes a Military Shipyard.

A small point. Could we have the Military Shipyard known as a Naval Shipyard?  
Regards

[Steve Walmsley]

Because of the above, some changes are needed to shipyards. A new Commercial Shipyard has been added and the existing Shipyard becomes a Military Shipyard.

A small point. Could we have the Military Shipyard known as a Naval Shipyard?  

Yes, that does sound better. I'll make the change.

Steve