I’ve been thinking about something lately, and I believe that it is an “undefined” area that should probably be defined. This is sort of like how shipyards used to be, where we all referred to them as “orbital” but in reality the rules were treating them as if they were on the ground. As a result of that conversation, Steve changed the way shipyards are handled in Aurora, truly making them “orbital”.
My thinking in this area began with fighters. One of my races is considering fighters as an answer to its short-term defense problems, and so I’ve been looking at the various basing schemes, and I’ve been thinking about how I would describe those basing schemes in a story setting. The various possibilities are basing them on a ship or base in hangers, or at a remote base on a PDC, or at an inhabited planet. This last possibility got me to thinking about what was really happening when the fighters were based at a planet. Were they hanging in orbit all of the time? That seemed unlikely. Therefore they had to be on the ground, somewhere. Because they were being maintained by the colony’s maintenance facilities, it was reasonable to assume that the fighters were actually physically located at the maintenance facilities, which would logically include large landing fields or spaceports and maintenance bays for the units being maintained there. Of course, if the fighters are on the ground, then it is logical to assume that all of the ships that are being maintained at the planet are on the ground as well.
This final conclusion is clear from the way the orders are set up. If a ship is “At” the planet, then it can be maintained by the maintenance facilities, if it is in an orbit, even an orbit of five kilometers, then it cannot be maintained by the planet’s maintenance facilities, therefore “at” the planet means “on” the planet’s surface, and the maintenance facilities have no ability to affect anything that is not on the planet’s surface. Again, it is reasonable to assume that the maintenance facilities include landing fields and that this is where the ships are actually physically located.
Currently, this entire area is a big blindspot that is undefined. Ships are “at” a planet, but not really “on” a planet. I think that this needs to be defined. After all, if the ships are “on” a planet, then this has several significant implications:
1. If a ship is on a planet, then it is vulnerable to capture or damage/destruction by ground units. This is particularly important in relation to ships undergoing overhaul, as they cannot lift off and get away as ground units approach their space ports.
2. Ships on a planet should be treated like PDC’s, as they have to deal with atmospheric effects. They should not be able to use beam weapons if the atmosphere is thick enough, and could not be targeted by beam weapons. Equally, they should be subject to damage by orbital bombardment, perhaps if their sheltering maintenance facilities are damaged.
There are additional implications. Currently, ships merely zoom up to a planet and are there in essentially zero time. One second they aren’t there, the next they are. I have considered explaining this by postulating the existence of transporters, which would allow a ship to unload from orbit without having to land, but as I argued above it is clearly implied by the way things currently work that ships are landing. Now, it is certainly possible that you could hand-waive away problems of passing through the atmosphere at appreciable percentages of the speed of light without destroying the ship, as they are after all built out of semi-magical trans-newtonian materials, but anything even remotely near them on the surface would be utterly destroyed and, it seems to me, there would be massive atmospheric disturbances.
This could be resolved by requiring any ship or unit landing on a planet to first reduce its speed to 1 kps, which is still 3,600 kilometers per hour, which is very fast in the atmosphere. If a unit had to stop at say…one hundred kilometers up, then proceed at 1 kps for the rest of the way, it would take one hundred seconds to land, which is more reasonable than zero seconds. In normal operations this wouldn’t make much of a difference, but in combat where ships are on the ground or transports are trying to land troops, then it would be different. That time would matter, particularly if the ships became valid targets for enemy ground units during this time.
Hmmm….I’ve got to think about this more.
Kurt3