Johannes replied to me: > Are there limits to the endurance of torpedos, especially on how long and > far they can travel through hypersapece?
Hello Johannes, distance depends on speed and endurance. The minimum speed with the 3E default rules is 240 times lightspeed. Fast missiles can do ten or more times that much, for a few minutes. > If there are little such limits, a hyperspace torpedo can follow a ship > that has dodged to hyperspace, into hyperspace, chase it through > hyperspace and exit at roughly the same place as the dodging ship does. > Unless the dodging ship has a better endurance then the torpedo, this > makes dodging moot. The ship will probably have better endurance, but lower speed. But unlike warp, hyperspace ships don't interact with the real universe or with each other. > With high endurance torpedos, there is an other configuration. Preparing > for battle, the missle boat launches all torpedos (or in fact an other > ship launches them) and they all go to hyperspace together, and in battle, > the missle boat orders individual torpedos to attack spezific enemy ships. Or the missiles lurk in real space, where they will have a much higher endurance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTOR_mine > Or there is no missle boar at all, and you just send torpedos to patrol > certain areas of space, and attack any ship that fits certain criteria. > (which might result in problems similiar to landmines) What if takes a coordinated attack by many missiles to saturate the defenses of a starship? > All but the last problem could possibly avoided, if you can scan FTL but > can't scan objects in hyperspace, so for instance dodging would work, > because the torpedo would have to wait for the dodging ship to enter > normal space, before giving chase. That's the default. > In either case (but more so if scaning into hyperspace is impossible), > what would viable defences for objects that can#t dodge into hyperspace, > such as planets be? Now that is a tough one. * Assume that hyperspace ships or torpedoes must leave hyperspace outside the atmosphere. How far out? Low orbit? High orbit? * Point defense systems will have an almost certain kill on one missile every other turn, within their Max range. For the small starfighters, I was thinking of beams in the 4 MJ range. Bigger strategic defense sats could be 400 MJ, with ten times the range. So important worlds could have orbiting networks of SDI sats. Can they defeat a concentrated attack? Who knows? > Even if there is a decent chance to shoot down a torpedo, once it entered > the athmosphere, you still can use warheads that are designed to explode > in the athmosphere and lead to one sort of fallout or an other. By the time the warheads enter the atmosphere, beam range will go down, so that's too late for intercepts, anyway. > So it seems like we are at a mutually assured destruction scenario here. How much of the budget do you invest in offense, how much in defense? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
