Land Battleships
Isaac Kuo
machines, I'm in the mood to design a board wargame about
really really big "land battleships".
Here are my basic assumptions:
1. A universe somewhat like Dune, with no computers and primitive
electronics. In particular, no missile technology exists and
all aiming and ballistic calculations are manual. Mathematics
is sophisticated enough for rooms of human calculators to
generate ballistic tables for long range gunfire.
2. Direct point-to-point "space folding" FTL travel, but no
"anti-gravity" technology. Gargantuan jumpships hop into
interplanetary space where gigantic carriers shuttle forces
to and from planetary surfaces.
3. All planets being fought over are rocky, but gravity and
atmospheric conditions vary. Armed forces are expected to be
flexible enough to fight in almost any combat environment.
So what do I need in order to sensibly promote the use of really
huge "land battleships" in favor of aircraft? I'm thinking
fission nuclear power plants will be useful since they don't
depend upon any particular atmospheric composition. They
don't scale down well, so large vehicles will be favored.
With such large vehicles, what vehicle designs will arrise?
An upscaled turreted "tank" with caterpillar tread propulsion
is an obvious possibility, but at scales of hundreds of meters
long, this traditional design will suffer greatly from ground
pressure vs maneuverability issues.
Another possible design is a huge armored pillbox on top of a
central circular turntable and a pair of large feet to the
sides which move in unison in a circular motion to "scoot"
the vehicle forward/backward. This mechanism exists in real
life although I don't know the official name for it. It's
cheap, simple, and robust, and can turn on a dime. It can
only move forward/back in comparison to the main gun, and
only pretty slowly due to the "lurching" effect of the circular
foot motion. Long feet combined with a less circular motion
can improve speed at the expense of added complexity, though.
Another possible design is a huge armored pillbox with a large
ring-shaped foot on the outside which uses hydraulic pistons
to move up/down. In the center is a cylindrical turntable
which houses a number of parallel "feet". These are supported
by crankshafts to move in circular motions out of phase with
each other. Normally, the outer ring foot is lifted up, so
the main body can rotate around the turntable for aiming and
the parallel feet can provide motion. Because of the large
number of feet, there is relatively little "lurching" and
decent speeds are possible. When the direction of motion
needs to be changed, the ring foot is lowered, which lifts
up the main body and the parallel feet off the ground. Now
the turntable can rotate the orientation of those parallel
feet. At this time, the main armament can't be aimed, so
it's best to do this during main gun reloading.
Comparing these two mechanisms, the former has lower ground
pressure and is less expensive/complex. The latter is faster
and can fire and move in different directions.
Any other good mechanisms?
Isaac Kuo
Karl M. Syring
<snip>
> So what do I need in order to sensibly promote the use of really
> huge "land battleships" in favor of aircraft? I'm thinking
> fission nuclear power plants will be useful since they don't
> depend upon any particular atmospheric composition. They
> don't scale down well, so large vehicles will be favored.
I think, the only sensible proposition would be the existence of orbital
weapon stations that can easily blow planes out of the air, but can only
scratch the ablative armor of the land behemoths. Bombing is out of question
as the behemoths have elaborate close-in missile shredders.
Why the weapon platforms themselves are not shot down by the land behemoths
could be explained by their very high orbit. The platforms send nuclear
driven laser bombs in large numbers down to a lower orbit. The orbiting
bombs have a significant attrition rates, as they are shot down by the
behemoths, but the platforms can easily replace them.
Karl M. Syring
Matthew Frederick
atmosphere.
Large land vehicles in favor of smaller, more manueverable ones: Your
fission plant idea is good. Also, maybe a highly-rubble-strewn surface, or
large cracks in the surface, or perhaps a highly vulcanized surface, with
lots of geysers, steam vents, semi-lava patches, etc. Things that would work
well with really large treads (or possibly wheels), but otherwise not well
at all.
Matthew
"Isaac Kuo" <mec...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:acc26c07.02060...@posting.google.com...
<snip>
> So what do I need in order to sensibly promote the use of really
> huge "land battleships" in favor of aircraft? I'm thinking
> fission nuclear power plants will be useful since they don't
> depend upon any particular atmospheric composition. They
> don't scale down well, so large vehicles will be favored.
<snip>
Steve Hilberg
>Land vehicles in favor of aircraft: No atmosphere or a highly turbulent
>atmosphere.
This is the case in the Heavy Gear setting from DP9; the two polar
alliances use giant landships because the planet has an extremely
turbulent atmosphere (especially over the giant desert between the
two temperate poles), making long distance air travel troublesome,
and because AA defenses have evolved to the point where any air
attack without a land offensive first usually ends up getting vaporized
by anti-aircraft lasers.
--
Steve Hilberg <Necromancer> CITES Workstation Support Group
<hil...@uiuc.edu> KB9TEV
Member, APAGear I don't even know what CITES stands
http://www.apagear.org for, so I don't speak for them.
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B-Chan
remember correctly, they were essentially gigantic treaded vehicles,
derived from the tanklike freight-hauling "cruisers" that took the place
of 18-wheelers in his Future History.
--
Bruce Lewis
**********
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that we don't have now?
We had the freedom to think big." -- George Dyson
**********
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Get it at http://www.amazon.com
Stephen FPilot Bierce
>RAH depicted land battleships in his novella "If This Goes On..." If I
>remember correctly, they were essentially gigantic treaded vehicles,
>derived from the tanklike freight-hauling "cruisers" that took the place
>of 18-wheelers in his Future History.
>
>--
>Bruce Lewis
And one of the reasons for that (in the context of the story) was the role of
large-scale assault transport vehicle: a machine that could carry an army into
an area under heavy bombardment (with the possibility of chemical weapons or
atomic contamination in the combat environment). In the story, such machines
were needed to breech vast fortifications around high value targets. With the
articulated track systems on them, what they couldn't break through, they could
climb over (as in the case of a huge concrete wall).
Stephen "FPilot" Bierce
IPMS #35922/Rosa Maeroris
"It has been my experience that the trouble has never blown over."--Tepid 7:19
Eternal Vigilance
A multitude of pivitable jacks (hydraulic) -- Sea Urchiin's of
Death (tm)
prob 2 stage jacks -- huge ones to make the bottom support structure
flexible
to fit some varying terrain , which then rest on many smaller jacks that
contatct the surface.
the pivots are used for locomotion (ever see how a startfish
walks....)
Another reason for Huge size -- thick layered armor to withstand
massive energy weapons
(volume - surface ratios -- efficiency of scale ) also you bring
your base with you (or you have to
have it underground to have enough protection...
Liam Slider
> After watching Five Star Stories and a TLC program about huge
> machines, I'm in the mood to design a board wargame about
> really really big "land battleships".
>
> Here are my basic assumptions:
>
> 1. A universe somewhat like Dune, with no computers and primitive
> electronics. In particular, no missile technology exists and
> all aiming and ballistic calculations are manual. Mathematics
> is sophisticated enough for rooms of human calculators to
> generate ballistic tables for long range gunfire.
>
> 2. Direct point-to-point "space folding" FTL travel, but no
> "anti-gravity" technology. Gargantuan jumpships hop into
> interplanetary space where gigantic carriers shuttle forces
> to and from planetary surfaces.
The problem here is with "no computers and primitive electronics" combined
with "Direct point-to-point "space folding" FTL travel." Do you plan on
making it a function of psionics or some other lame low-tech handwavium?
And another problem with massive "land battleships" is that they make nice
big fat targets.
--
The man, the music, the man pimping the music...
Brian Davis
> After watching Five Star Stories and a TLC program about huge
> machines, I'm in the mood to design a board wargame about
> really really big "land battleships".
Steve Jackson games did a nice one, called "Ogre", and patterend
very closely on the stories of Keith Lammer (sp?) about the Bolos,
mammoth self-aware tanks. The Bolo stories were fairly interesting,
and a hex-based board game that pits one supertank against an array of
convention forces was amazingly well balenced...
...at least the 2nd version was. One problem with single massive
units vs. many small cheap units is that the small cheap units can
often stop the big tank by massed assualt. the first version of this
game had this problem, in spades. A follow-up game ("G.E.V.") was also
very good.
--
Brian Davis
Erik Max Francis
> Steve Jackson games did a nice one, called "Ogre", ...
One of the rec.arts.sf.science regulars did the original Ogre artwork,
by the way.
> ... and patterend
> very closely on the stories of Keith Lammer (sp?) about the Bolos, ...
That's Laumer.
> ...at least the 2nd version was. One problem with single massive
> units vs. many small cheap units is that the small cheap units can
> often stop the big tank by massed assualt. the first version of this
> game had this problem, in spades.
Specifically, the problem was with the GEVs, which get an additional
movement phase. If a player timed things right, his GEVs
(lightly-armored hovercraft) could dip in, fire, and dip out, ending up
out of range of the Ogre. Due to this strangely unforseen tactic, the
GEVs could make short work of the Ogre and it could do nothing in
response except get whittled down.
> A follow-up game ("G.E.V.") was also
> very good.
There was also a third add-on pack, called Shockwave. The infantry
units inspired another game set in the same universe, Battlesuit.
--
Erik Max Francis / m...@alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
__ San Jose, CA, US / 37 20 N 121 53 W / ICQ16063900 / &tSftDotIotE
/ \ Who'd ever think it / Such a squalid little ending
\__/ The American and Florence, _Chess_
Church / http://www.alcyone.com/pyos/church/
A lambda calculus explorer in Python.
Serg
With "no computers and primitive electronics" sofisticated space
defence became a problem. From the gripping hand , without beam weapon
and with "no computers and primitive electronics" space-based
battleplatforms became useless. ( I think Tor-like medium size
projectile wouldn't hit without sofisticated guidance system). And
without space based weapon, avaition and electronics the only BVR
weapon are howitzers. They would have hard time to hit even something
very big, and handwaveium armor would protect from close nuke
explosion. About "Direct point-to-point "space folding" FTL travel"
I'd suggest easiest solution - alien/ancient/rare natural (strangelets
anyone?) artefacts used in the construction.
John Ludlow
>> combined with "Direct point-to-point "space folding" FTL travel." Do
>> you plan on making it a function of psionics or some other lame
>> low-tech handwavium?
> I'd suggest easiest solution - alien/ancient/rare natural (strangelets
> anyone?) artefacts used in the construction.
of Navigators had the ability to build and pilot spacecraft, and they
had no interest in land warfare.
>> And another problem with massive "land battleships" is that they make
>> nice big fat targets.
The idea of a 'land battleship' is a problem in itself. Battleships
were basically somewhere to put your guns when you wanted to fight at
sea. On land, you don't have this problem, as you can use mobile, fixed
or towed artillery. (these were used in WW2. I assume that's as
primitive as you want to make it). You also get tanks, etc...
A large military land craft would most likely be a mobile base, which
would have a garage (for servicing vehicles, and carrying them through
terrain that they cannot traverse on their own), mess, barracks, medical
facilities, and a command centre. Possibly also a way to deploy aircraft.
See if you can find something about an old book series I remember, called
AmTrak (possibly a book-based RPG, but there were certainly novels about
it). That featured a post-apocalyptic world. One faction had these 'land-
trains'. Massive mobile bases made up of cars connected like a train.
Hope this helps.
John
John Ludlow
> huge "land battleships" in favor of aircraft? I'm thinking
> fission nuclear power plants will be useful since they don't
> depend upon any particular atmospheric composition. They
> don't scale down well, so large vehicles will be favored.
>
> With such large vehicles, what vehicle designs will arrise?
on your ideas
> An upscaled turreted "tank" with caterpillar tread propulsion
> is an obvious possibility, but at scales of hundreds of meters
> long, this traditional design will suffer greatly from ground
> pressure vs maneuverability issues.
I agree. The biggest vehicle of this kind is the Crawler at Kennedy space
station, and that moves pretty slowly.
> Another possible design is a huge armored pillbox on top of a
> central circular turntable and a pair of large feet to the
> sides which move in unison in a circular motion to "scoot"
> the vehicle forward/backward.
I don't think this would work for such a large vehicle. Everyone inside
would be bounced around like peas in a pan! And so many bolts would come
loose you'd need to stop for repairs every hundred yards.
>
> Another possible design is a huge armored pillbox with a large
> ring-shaped foot on the outside which uses hydraulic pistons
> to move up/down. In the center is a cylindrical turntable
> which houses a number of parallel "feet". These are supported
> by crankshafts to move in circular motions out of phase with
> each other. Normally, the outer ring foot is lifted up, so
> the main body can rotate around the turntable for aiming and
> the parallel feet can provide motion. Because of the large
> number of feet, there is relatively little "lurching" and
> decent speeds are possible. When the direction of motion
> needs to be changed, the ring foot is lowered, which lifts
> up the main body and the parallel feet off the ground. Now
> the turntable can rotate the orientation of those parallel
> feet. At this time, the main armament can't be aimed, so
> it's best to do this during main gun reloading.
Too complex really.
> Comparing these two mechanisms, the former has lower ground
> pressure and is less expensive/complex. The latter is faster
> and can fire and move in different directions.
>
> Any other good mechanisms?
What about scaling it down? Instead of massive machines of battleship
size, what about multiple smaller machines? Perhaps each ten times the
size of a modern tank.
John Ludlow
> atmospheric conditions vary. Armed forces are expected to be
> flexible enough to fight in almost any combat environment.
themselves be the primary combatant?
If you want *no* aircraft at all I like the idea one poster put forward
about a turbulent atmosphere.
You could use tread for the traction system, but they would need to be on a
much larger scale. That is, while the underside of a modern tank might be
10 - 20%, these might need to be 50% or more.
What about a vehicle whose underside was almost all tread? In the gap
inside the treads, you have the vehicle's body. The weapons would
protrude from the sides on turrets. You might also have a top section,
above the treads, connected to the main body via support structures that
run in between the treads, and up the sides from the weapons bays.
I hope I explained that OK.
Cheers
John
John Ludlow
news:Xns922898060B212jo...@130.133.1.4:
> The idea of a 'land battleship' is a problem in itself. Battleships
> were basically somewhere to put your guns when you wanted to fight at
> sea. On land, you don't have this problem, as you can use mobile, fixed
> or towed artillery. (these were used in WW2. I assume that's as
> primitive as you want to make it). You also get tanks, etc...
OK, I didn't realise that we were not using smaller vehicles. Sorry.
Mark Thomas
news:acc26c07.02060...@posting.google.com:
> After watching Five Star Stories and a TLC program about huge
> machines, I'm in the mood to design a board wargame about
> really really big "land battleships".
[...]
> With such large vehicles, what vehicle designs will arrise?
> An upscaled turreted "tank" with caterpillar tread propulsion
> is an obvious possibility, but at scales of hundreds of meters
> long, this traditional design will suffer greatly from ground
> pressure vs maneuverability issues.
I think you have a larger problem. How does your 300 meter vehicle travel
down a city street, through a heavy forest, or down a narrow valley? I
don't think anything that large is really viable as a military vehicle,
which by definition has to perform in a variety of terrain. Naval vessels
don't often run into cliffs. :)
I also think that given your premise of no sophisticated computers you are
likely out of luck on any leg based movement system. Treads are probably
where you end up.
--
Mark
-----
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Remove SPAMGUARD from address when replying.
John Ludlow
news:Xns92287398A7702...@199.45.49.11:
> mec...@yahoo.com (Isaac Kuo) wrote in
> news:acc26c07.02060...@posting.google.com:
>
>> After watching Five Star Stories and a TLC program about huge
>> machines, I'm in the mood to design a board wargame about
>> really really big "land battleships".
>
> [...]
>
>> With such large vehicles, what vehicle designs will arrise?
>> An upscaled turreted "tank" with caterpillar tread propulsion
>> is an obvious possibility, but at scales of hundreds of meters
>> long, this traditional design will suffer greatly from ground
>> pressure vs maneuverability issues.
>
> I think you have a larger problem. How does your 300 meter vehicle
> travel down a city street, through a heavy forest, or down a narrow
> valley? I don't think anything that large is really viable as a
> military vehicle, which by definition has to perform in a variety of
> terrain. Naval vessels don't often run into cliffs. :)
He has a point. Unless the vehicle is only going to operate on flat
wilderness or rolling hillsides. Which is why I suggested that it be a
carrier for smaller vehicles, or just use multiple smaller vehicles.
A land-train could maybe fit down narrow valleys, or some of the wider city
roads, and it could just barge through a forest. Although some of this
might be a little hard to simulate on a board game.
>
> I also think that given your premise of no sophisticated computers you
> are likely out of luck on any leg based movement system. Treads are
> probably where you end up.
>
I agree. Wheels and treads are the simplest way to do it.
Mark Fergerson
>
> After watching Five Star Stories and a TLC program about huge
> machines, I'm in the mood to design a board wargame about
> really really big "land battleships".
Think I saw that TLC program. Great
Damn Big mining hardware, etc.? Big Fun!
> Here are my basic assumptions:
>
> 1. A universe somewhat like Dune, with no computers and primitive
> electronics. In particular, no missile technology exists and
> all aiming and ballistic calculations are manual. Mathematics
> is sophisticated enough for rooms of human calculators to
> generate ballistic tables for long range gunfire.
OK, but metallurgy, chemistry, optics,
radio? You have fission reactors below,
which suggests some pretty sophisticated
chem and metal tech.
> 2. Direct point-to-point "space folding" FTL travel, but no
> "anti-gravity" technology. Gargantuan jumpships hop into
> interplanetary space where gigantic carriers shuttle forces
> to and from planetary surfaces.
How does the FTL work, an EM side
effect we didn't notice, "alien magic",
or what?
> 3. All planets being fought over are rocky, but gravity and
> atmospheric conditions vary. Armed forces are expected to be
> flexible enough to fight in almost any combat environment.
Fighting over minerals, liebensraum,
area denial, what?
> So what do I need in order to sensibly promote the use of really
> huge "land battleships" in favor of aircraft? I'm thinking
> fission nuclear power plants will be useful since they don't
> depend upon any particular atmospheric composition. They
> don't scale down well, so large vehicles will be favored.
Turbulent atmospheres is good, but
that's just a way to eliminate air
power.
How about large chemical lasers as
weapons, but no suitable
armoring/polishing tech as counter?
> With such large vehicles, what vehicle designs will arrise?
Terrain is the issue. If it's all
flat, anything goes within the tech
allowed. But treads are about the best
compromise because you can use power
from rotating machinery pretty much
constantly. Legs are a bitch no matter
what you do because the hardware is
constantly trying to disassemble itself
as pointed out by others.
Come to think of it, also depends on
how often and how quickly you need to
move.
> An upscaled turreted "tank" with caterpillar tread propulsion
> is an obvious possibility, but at scales of hundreds of meters
> long, this traditional design will suffer greatly from ground
> pressure vs maneuverability issues.
Exactly backwards; treads give you
lowest ground pressure. Maneuverability
is also very good at the expense of
lateral scrubbing of the treads in
frinst neutral steer. Multiple tread
pairs a la Bolos mitigate that.
> Another possible design is a huge armored pillbox on top of a
> central circular turntable and a pair of large feet to the
> sides which move in unison in a circular motion to "scoot"
> the vehicle forward/backward. This mechanism exists in real
> life although I don't know the official name for it. It's
> cheap, simple, and robust, and can turn on a dime. It can
> only move forward/back in comparison to the main gun, and
> only pretty slowly due to the "lurching" effect of the circular
> foot motion. Long feet combined with a less circular motion
> can improve speed at the expense of added complexity, though.
Why have a "main gun" at all? Why not
many slightly smaller ones?
> Another possible design is a huge armored pillbox with a large
> ring-shaped foot on the outside which uses hydraulic pistons
> to move up/down. In the center is a cylindrical turntable
> which houses a number of parallel "feet". These are supported
> by crankshafts to move in circular motions out of phase with
> each other. Normally, the outer ring foot is lifted up, so
> the main body can rotate around the turntable for aiming and
> the parallel feet can provide motion. Because of the large
> number of feet, there is relatively little "lurching" and
> decent speeds are possible. When the direction of motion
> needs to be changed, the ring foot is lowered, which lifts
> up the main body and the parallel feet off the ground. Now
> the turntable can rotate the orientation of those parallel
> feet. At this time, the main armament can't be aimed, so
> it's best to do this during main gun reloading.
I like this one mainly for the
ringwall.
> Comparing these two mechanisms, the former has lower ground
> pressure and is less expensive/complex. The latter is faster
> and can fire and move in different directions.
>
> Any other good mechanisms?
Well, I suggest the basis be fighting
over minerals. Your "land battleships"
are actually self-contained mining
complexes (food, water, maybe even air)
hunting expensive ores (for the
jumpships, maybe?) and competing with
"enemy" complexes. Ballistic weapons
would be seen as wasteful, unless they
make the projectiles out of slag, which
means they can't use them until they've
been there a while. Also, what to use as
propulsion, steam cannon? Railguns?
They'd use fairly large chemical
lasers to do remote sampling, and maybe
drilling into likely deposits. Then,
they just maneuver to cover the deposit
and mine it out, put the dross back, and
move on. They'd not have to move often
or quickly, but multiple players will
eventually have to fight over the same
deposit.
Large lasers mean enemy aircraft are
kinda pointless, and no roof armor is
really needed fulltime. The ringwall can
be solid armor with no holes at all; the
lasers "pop up" for sampling/fighting,
and peritelespectroscopes do the data
taking. Since the ringwall is solid
armor, it will have to be able to rotate
in place without disturbing mining ops,
so a given section of armor doesn't melt
down right away. Also it can be replaced
on the side(s) not under attack,
assuming there are any.
Complexes on the move will be more
vulnerable, since laser light can be
bounced up under the rim, depending on
terrain composition.
So you'll have a typical factory
complex built as a hollow cylinder on a
feet/tread driven base, with a solid
armor ringwall that can be raised for
travel, and lowered into a purpose-dug
trench (big teeth on the bottom rim?)
where it can rotate for self-protection
without the bouncelight hazard.
It'll take a certain amount of
turns/time to find/mine a deposit, and
have adequate slag for ballistic
weapons.
They're gonna be big, slow, ugly,
noisy bastards. I like 'em already!
Mark L. Fergerson
John Ludlow
> radio? You have fission reactors below,
> which suggests some pretty sophisticated
> chem and metal tech.
> Well, I suggest the basis be fighting
> over minerals. Your "land battleships"
> are actually self-contained mining
> complexes (food, water, maybe even air)
> hunting expensive ores (for the
> jumpships, maybe?)
I like it. A reason for having them in the first place - once the
resources have been exhausted in one area, they move on.
>
> Large lasers mean enemy aircraft are
> kinda pointless,
Hmmm. I'm a little cagey about lasers. They sound a little hi-tech.
> and no roof armor is really needed fulltime
What about artillery lobbing shells over the ringwall?
> Complexes on the move will be more
> vulnerable, since laser light can be
> bounced up under the rim, depending on
> terrain composition.
But I still think a walker would shake itself apart.
> They're gonna be big, slow, ugly,
> noisy bastards. I like 'em already!
Yep.
Oh, and one other thing. Will you be able to build up the vehicles in a
modular fashion?
Mark Fergerson
>
> > OK, but metallurgy, chemistry, optics,
> > radio? You have fission reactors below,
> > which suggests some pretty sophisticated
> > chem and metal tech.
>
> Also, aren't nuclear reactors normally computer controlled?
First ones weren't IIRC. Just gauges
and nerves.
> > Well, I suggest the basis be fighting
> > over minerals. Your "land battleships"
> > are actually self-contained mining
> > complexes (food, water, maybe even air)
> > hunting expensive ores (for the
> > jumpships, maybe?)
>
> I like it. A reason for having them in the first place - once the
> resources have been exhausted in one area, they move on.
Exactly what I was thinking. The whole
culture (both/all sides) is/are nomadic;
no permanent installations anywhere.
> > Large lasers mean enemy aircraft are
> > kinda pointless,
>
> Hmmm. I'm a little cagey about lasers. They sound a little hi-tech.
Not really, especially chemical
(gas-dynamic) lasers. That's why I asked
Isaac about other tech levels. Some
fairly sophisticated chem & met is
essential to get fuel for fission
reactors, and I'll assume the optics
experience is there.
GDLs do expend materials in an
unrecyclable fashion though (AFAIK that
is; is a H-O laser feasible? You could
crack the water back with "free" fission
power). Perhaps more ordinary
electrically-stimulated CO2-type lasers
would be better. Besides, no sliderules
needed to get a firing solution. If you
can see it, you can hit it.
> > and no roof armor is really needed fulltime
>
> What about artillery lobbing shells over the ringwall?
That's why I said "fulltime". It could
be set up as soon as an enemy platform
was spotted, then stowed for travel. I
was also envisioning large angled
conveyors dumping overburden outside the
ringwall and a permanent roof would get
in the way.
Maybe sharp-eyed antiarty laser
gunners, too. Depends on manpower
available. This _is_ a working
self-propelled mine, after all. I
suspect the crewmembers will wear many
hats each depending on what's going on
at the moment, simplifying manpower
allocation.
> > Complexes on the move will be more
> > vulnerable, since laser light can be
> > bounced up under the rim, depending on
> > terrain composition.
>
> But I still think a walker would shake itself apart.
Maybe the "new and improved"
Harley-Davidson got the contract.
Seriously, lots of feet means less
stress per, so MTBF will be much longer.
Also more feet means you can jack a
broken one up for repairs without
stopping/slowing, then put it back into
service immediately.
This is for a game, remember? You
gotta have things that break so you can
spend "credits" on maintenance.
> > They're gonna be big, slow, ugly,
> > noisy bastards. I like 'em already!
>
> Yep.
Filthy, too! I forgot to mention the
smokestacks belching out gaseous
byproducts and the flares burning off
excess methane, etc. (Hey, it's not
_their_ planet!)
If Isaac likes the idea, it'll
out-steampunk Steampunk.
> Oh, and one other thing. Will you be able to build up the vehicles in a
> modular fashion?
The ringwall could be many flat plates
with angled joints between. Then it
could be built up as large as needed,
also making plate replacement easier in
the field. As for the innards, why not?
Likely no two planets will have quite
the same composition, so you'd want to
slap it together on the carrier so you
don't wind up carrying stuff you don't
need to handle dross etc. that isn't
there. (Either that or they're
general-purpose units that can afford to
carry excess stuff).
If they aren't GP, I was wondering
_how_ the carrier crews would know how
to set up the crawlers, maybe great big
sampling lasers used from orbit. But
then they could use those to eliminate
enemy crawlers. Hmm. A treaty, maybe? No
fighting allowed between ships in orbit
that have crews on the ground or in
transit? I'd really hate to be stranded.
That would get expensive, too. You'd
have to spend credit to put a crawler
down just for itself plus consumables,
manpower, and so on, and reap profit
only when you get the ore back to orbit.
The combat might look incidental, but
that ore's _precious_. Losing a crawler
would lose the whole investment.
Mark L. Fergerson
John Ludlow
>
> First ones weren't IIRC. Just gauges
> and nerves.
generally release all their energy in one big burst. Power plants release
it gradually, so you need a way to regulate the reaction (Boron rods,
maybe? can be inserted, retracted as needed?)
>> I like it. A reason for having them in the first place - once the
>> resources have been exhausted in one area, they move on.
>
> Exactly what I was thinking. The whole
> culture (both/all sides) is/are nomadic;
> no permanent installations anywhere.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. You find some resources, rig
your land ship for mining, and suck the good stuff out of the ground (we
can say that this is a time efficient process, so all the resources are
gone quickly), and then move on
>> Hmmm. I'm a little cagey about lasers. They sound a little hi-tech.
>
> Not really, especially chemical
> (gas-dynamic) lasers. That's why I asked
> Isaac about other tech levels. Some
> fairly sophisticated chem & met is
> essential to get fuel for fission
> reactors, and I'll assume the optics
> experience is there.
Maybe - not a chemist or physicist so I don't know much about lasers.
> GDLs do expend materials in an
> unrecyclable fashion though (AFAIK that
> is; is a H-O laser feasible?
Asking the wrong guy... :/
>> > and no roof armor is really needed fulltime
>>
>> What about artillery lobbing shells over the ringwall?
> That's why I said "fulltime". It could
> be set up as soon as an enemy platform
> was spotted, then stowed for travel. I
> was also envisioning large angled
> conveyors dumping overburden outside the
> ringwall and a permanent roof would get
> in the way.
Right. My tank variation would have a large hatch at the back where junk
is chucked out.
>> > Complexes on the move will be more
>> > vulnerable, since laser light can be
>> > bounced up under the rim, depending on
>> > terrain composition.
>>
>> But I still think a walker would shake itself apart.
>
> Maybe the "new and improved"
> Harley-Davidson got the contract.
> Seriously, lots of feet means less
> stress per, so MTBF will be much longer.
> Also more feet means you can jack a
> broken one up for repairs without
> stopping/slowing, then put it back into
> service immediately.
You have a point about the feet. But it's more things to go wrong as well.
A nomadic culture, with large vehicles that are self-sufficient, will go
for the simplist option, I think. Why would they go for legs instead of a
tracked system?
> This is for a game, remember? You
> gotta have things that break so you can
> spend "credits" on maintenance.
I suppose you could take some poetic license as well - doesn't have to be
completely realistic.
>> Oh, and one other thing. Will you be able to build up the vehicles
>> in a modular fashion?
>
> The ringwall could be many flat plates
> with angled joints between. Then it
> could be built up as large as needed,
> also making plate replacement easier in
> the field. As for the innards, why not?
> Likely no two planets will have quite
> the same composition, so you'd want to
> slap it together on the carrier so you
> don't wind up carrying stuff you don't
> need to handle dross etc. that isn't
> there. (Either that or they're
> general-purpose units that can afford to
> carry excess stuff).
I was thinking of people being able to build their own, personalised,
vehicle.
> If they aren't GP, I was wondering
> _how_ the carrier crews would know how
> to set up the crawlers, maybe great big
> sampling lasers used from orbit
Or prospecting scouts?
> . But then they could use those to eliminate
> enemy crawlers. Hmm. A treaty, maybe? No
> fighting allowed between ships in orbit
> that have crews on the ground or in
> transit? I'd really hate to be stranded.
Yes, you do have to address the issue of bombardment from orbit. Maybe the
atmosphere doesn't allow proper targeting, or maybe a treaty or law as you
suggest
Matthias Warkus
...and John Ludlow <johnl...@onetel.net.uk> wrote:
> > OK, but metallurgy, chemistry, optics,
> > radio? You have fission reactors below,
> > which suggests some pretty sophisticated
> > chem and metal tech.
> Also, aren't nuclear reactors normally computer controlled?
Usually. But I suppose mechanical analog 'computers' would already
suffice for the task.
> > Large lasers mean enemy aircraft are
> > kinda pointless,
> Hmmm. I'm a little cagey about lasers. They sound a little hi-tech.
And lasers waste energy. Big time.
mawa
--
BEGRIFFE AUS DEM DEUTSCHEN RECHT -- §22:
Schickschuld, die:
Verurteilung auf Grund eines modischen Vergehens
Serg
> >> Also, aren't nuclear reactors normally computer controlled?
> >
> atmosphere doesn't allow proper targeting, or maybe a treaty or law as you
> suggest
That's the problem with laser - you can not bombard from orbit without
proper guidance system, and condition was low-tech electronic. That
roule out projectile/missile. But laser could be aimed by telescope,
and coupled with weak armor that make battleships impossible. Even
with strong mainarmor such a construction should have a lot of
protruding external appendages (sensors, weapon, bays, etc.) which
could be fused by orbital laser.
Edward Brekelbaum
> machines, I'm in the mood to design a board wargame about
> really really big "land battleships".
> Isaac Kuo
Make sure you read "Hammer's Slammers" by David Drake. Not exactly the
same, but there are some reasons put forward for big ground machines with no
air power.
Sound cool!
Ned
eab...@bigfoot.com
Nyrath the nearly wise
> Brian Davis wrote:
>
>> Steve Jackson games did a nice one, called "Ogre", ...
>
> One of the rec.arts.sf.science regulars did the original Ogre artwork,
> by the way.
<timidly waves his hand>
John Ludlow
Cheers
john
John Ludlow
Mike Simone
> After watching Five Star Stories and a TLC program about huge
> machines, I'm in the mood to design a board wargame about
> really really big "land battleships".
>
>
> 1. A universe somewhat like Dune, with no computers and primitive
> electronics. In particular, no missile technology exists and
> all aiming and ballistic calculations are manual. Mathematics
> is sophisticated enough for rooms of human calculators to
> generate ballistic tables for long range gunfire.
Since huge size is not a problem, and is nearly a bonus, you could go
with the WWII style building-size computers. Making a land battleship
big enough to carry two for redundancy (and added accuracy via
error-checking?) could be the technological macguffin for some
scenario.
<snip>
> 3. All planets being fought over are rocky, but gravity and
> atmospheric conditions vary. Armed forces are expected to be
> flexible enough to fight in almost any combat environment.
Big can give you some additional flexibility. Want to transport some
commandoes? What's a company of Imperial Marines one way or the other
on a vehicle that size? They can probably carry a small lab and some
techs, so you can determine if there's oil/gold/spice in the area
you're fighting for. The big ones could act as carriers for scout
vehicles (which in this context would be M1 Abrams sized). Also, a
lot of terrain considerations fall away at the bigger end of the
scale. Forest - crushed underneath. Cities - crushed underneath.
Streams - didn't even notice 'em. Rivers - didn't even come halfway
up the hullsides. Cleaned the residue of the city off very nicely,
though. English Channel - Sealed up openings, turned control over to
the Navy, crawled across the bottm, only lost a few dozen men when a
hatch didn't tighten up properly.
> So what do I need in order to sensibly promote the use of really
> huge "land battleships" in favor of aircraft? I'm thinking
> fission nuclear power plants will be useful since they don't
> depend upon any particular atmospheric composition. They
> don't scale down well, so large vehicles will be favored.
>
Perfect "atompunk" feel - reactors with nervous engineers and analog
controls.
> With such large vehicles, what vehicle designs will arrise?
> An upscaled turreted "tank" with caterpillar tread propulsion
> is an obvious possibility, but at scales of hundreds of meters
> long, this traditional design will suffer greatly from ground
> pressure vs maneuverability issues.
A real engineer could probably find a million holes with this, but how
about a "Trackipede". Have many connected segments, each with their
own set of four tracks underneath. If the tracks were in one row
across the bottom, it would reduce the ground pressure more, but it
might hinder maneuvering. Between segments, the armored coupling
allows for some flexibility/maneuveribility, so the whole battleship
can be as flexible as a centipede/millipede. The design allows
additional segments to be added or swapped out, so you can switch some
of those 20" cannons for rockets or AA units, or additional engines
depending on the tactical circumstances. There was a game called,
originally enough, "Robots!" that let you customize what your units
were armed with (guns, missiles, or lasers). You could let each
segment be a separate counter, so players would be able to do
something similar.
Of course, different cultures in the setting could have different
ideas on how to do the land battleships, too. The Celestial Kingdom
could use trackipedes that look like dragons, while the Interstellar
Proletariat has big walkers. The RIAA would use the turntable plan
you describe below (Why does the RIAA need land battleships and
interstellar flight? To prevent CD pirating, of course). Okay, those
were a little goofy, but you get the idea.
ToohrVyk
Isaac Kuo <mec...@yahoo.com> a écrit dans le message :
acc26c07.02060...@posting.google.com...
> After watching Five Star Stories and a TLC program about huge
> machines, I'm in the mood to design a board wargame about
> really really big "land battleships".
-Interesting... now why huge battleships?
From a strategical point of view, many small-sized but fast vehicles
contained inside large carriers are better than big battleships.Which brings
us to the conclusion: huge vehicles are used because small ones do not work
-Why?
The only answer is: "because they don't have enough room".
-To contain what?
Difficult question. Cannot be personnel, coz' one manned vehicles are
manageable. Cannot be supply-storing or supply-producing facilities (oxygen,
food, ammunition...), because small vehicles could be loaded with supplies
and launched out for short missions. The only thing that cannot be loaded on
small vehicles is an energy plant. that's it: those huge battleships are in
fact gargantuan plants, with a few catwalks around it and little personnel
(remember the Nostromo? huge, not even 10 crew members). Looks like you were
right ;-)
> Here are my basic assumptions:
>
> 1. A universe somewhat like Dune, with no computers and primitive
> electronics. In particular, no missile technology exists and
> all aiming and ballistic calculations are manual. Mathematics
> is sophisticated enough for rooms of human calculators to
> generate ballistic tables for long range gunfire.
Interesting... but that's not the point with mathematics - it's just
calculus. The fact is, to generate a ballistics table, you only need two
operations: multiply and divide. Say, you need to multiply abc and def.
You'll do: abc*f + abc*e0 + abc*d00 = a00*f+a00*e0+a00*d00 +... which means
9 short multiplications. Take 9 mathematicians, give'em each a,b,c,d,e,f and
they'll dish out the 9 numbers in less than a second. Not that fast, you
say? Now take 8 more, to do the 8 additions required. They can work in
chains and get the numbers rolling out. Each result will come out after
around 1 minute, but they'll come at a 60/minute rate (when mathematician 1
is over with his calculus, he can go on to another one even if the others
aren't done yet - they'll be when he's done with the new one).
> 2. Direct point-to-point "space folding" FTL travel, but no
> "anti-gravity" technology. Gargantuan jumpships hop into
> interplanetary space where gigantic carriers shuttle forces
> to and from planetary surfaces.
No anti-gravity? What a shame :-P.
> 3. All planets being fought over are rocky, but gravity and
> atmospheric conditions vary. Armed forces are expected to be
> flexible enough to fight in almost any combat environment.
Gravity is the problem - calculuses must be made over and over again...
> So what do I need in order to sensibly promote the use of really
> huge "land battleships" in favor of aircraft? I'm thinking
> fission nuclear power plants will be useful since they don't
> depend upon any particular atmospheric composition. They
> don't scale down well, so large vehicles will be favored.
If I remember well, if the only availabe plants are metropolis-sized, no
plane's gonna take'em aboard. And without energy, a plane ain't gonna fly...
> With such large vehicles, what vehicle designs will arrise?
> An upscaled turreted "tank" with caterpillar tread propulsion
> is an obvious possibility, but at scales of hundreds of meters
> long, this traditional design will suffer greatly from ground
> pressure vs maneuverability issues.
Such a design will require an enormous tread in order not to sink into the
ground...
[snip]
> Any other good mechanisms?
Sure. What about spherical wheels? Ones that are under the battleship and
can be rolled in any direction? This allows for very fast turning and
aiming.
Another idea would be: mounting a shield below the ship (or anything that
can slide on the ground), and using two arms to pull itself in a direction
(may replace arms by strong chains that tie to the ground).
Last but not least, a small idea: the battleship is put on top of three
segments, each divided into a left and a right part. Each part is connected
to the battleship main body, 10-20 meters above them, through very strong
legs. The battleship then takes a segment off the ground, moves it, and puts
it on the ground again.
> Isaac Kuo
Todd Zircher
> "anti-gravity" technology. Gargantuan jumpships hop into
> interplanetary space where gigantic carriers shuttle forces
> to and from planetary surfaces.
With regards to problems with orbital weapons and lasers, simply
remove the spaceships. Removing the high ground also introduces
the fog of war back into the equation. Anyway without anti-grav,
shuttles would be limited to chemical boosters. That would be nearly
impossible to use as land ship carriers. You could use dimensional
portals of some kind, it would also help distance you from being
a Dune or Tatoonie clone. Since you're allowing this one handwave,
any FTL trick will do. Perhaps you have to walk ley lines from one
world to the next. Limited entry points, but still too many to
guard them all. [Maybe those armored hulks also protect the crew
from electrical effects by grounding the hulls. Philadelphi
experiment kind of stuff?]
> 3. All planets being fought over are rocky, but gravity and
> atmospheric conditions vary. Armed forces are expected to be
> flexible enough to fight in almost any combat environment.
That alone would preclude aircraft as a main combatant. Toss in
steam driven tech (after all, that's what nuclear propulsion really
is) and most aircraft are limited to steam catapult launched recon
gliders. Internal combustion being the road not taken due to oxygen
and fuel limitations (no combat vehicle would want to carry LOX or
something very volatile like hydrazine.)
--
TAZ
John Ludlow
> steam driven tech (after all, that's what nuclear propulsion really
> is) and most aircraft are limited to steam catapult launched recon
> gliders. Internal combustion being the road not taken due to oxygen
> and fuel limitations (no combat vehicle would want to carry LOX or
> something very volatile like hydrazine.)
Mark Fergerson
>
> >> Also, aren't nuclear reactors normally computer controlled?
> >
> > First ones weren't IIRC. Just gauges
> > and nerves.
>
> Maybe. The first A-Bombs probably weren't computer manufactured, but they
> generally release all their energy in one big burst. Power plants release
> it gradually, so you need a way to regulate the reaction (Boron rods,
> maybe? can be inserted, retracted as needed?)
Finding hard data on "ancient" tech
like this is difficult. From memory, it
was literally gauges and nerve.
SCRAMming a reactor involved shoving the
moderating rods all the way in by
_hand_.
ISTR some kind of analog servos to
regulate output under "normal"
operation, but little else.
> >> I like it. A reason for having them in the first place - once the
> >> resources have been exhausted in one area, they move on.
> >
> > Exactly what I was thinking. The whole
> > culture (both/all sides) is/are nomadic;
> > no permanent installations anywhere.
>
> Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. You find some resources, rig
> your land ship for mining, and suck the good stuff out of the ground (we
> can say that this is a time efficient process, so all the resources are
> gone quickly), and then move on
And, of course, try to stop/slow down
the other guys.
re:lasers; Isaac, do your homework!
> >> But I still think a walker would shake itself apart.
> >
> > Maybe the "new and improved"
> > Harley-Davidson got the contract.
> > Seriously, lots of feet means less
> > stress per, so MTBF will be much longer.
> > Also more feet means you can jack a
> > broken one up for repairs without
> > stopping/slowing, then put it back into
> > service immediately.
>
> You have a point about the feet. But it's more things to go wrong as well.
> A nomadic culture, with large vehicles that are self-sufficient, will go
> for the simplist option, I think. Why would they go for legs instead of a
> tracked system?
When a single track link fails, that
whole side of the vehicle is
immobilized. Contrast a millipede with
_one_ broken leg.
> > This is for a game, remember? You
> > gotta have things that break so you can
> > spend "credits" on maintenance.
>
> I suppose you could take some poetic license as well - doesn't have to be
> completely realistic.
Isaac's choice!
> I was thinking of people being able to build their own, personalised,
> vehicle.
Well, that's part of the game AISI.
You have to decide how much to risk
against what benefit you project. Gotta
spend money to get points.
> > If they aren't GP, I was wondering
> > _how_ the carrier crews would know how
> > to set up the crawlers, maybe great big
> > sampling lasers used from orbit
>
> Or prospecting scouts?
Ooh, scouts that the other guys won't
notice because they don't need a
humongous carrier etc. Yeah, that's
work. You come into a system, look over
the scout reports, and assemble your
crawlers to fit!
> > . But then they could use those to eliminate
> > enemy crawlers. Hmm. A treaty, maybe? No
> > fighting allowed between ships in orbit
> > that have crews on the ground or in
> > transit? I'd really hate to be stranded.
>
> Yes, you do have to address the issue of bombardment from orbit. Maybe the
> atmosphere doesn't allow proper targeting, or maybe a treaty or law as you
> suggest
Isaac? You still care?
Mark L. Fergerson
Chuck Stewart
>tzir...@yahoo.com (Todd Zircher)wrote:
>> ...Internal combustion being the road not taken due to oxygen
>> and fuel limitations (no combat vehicle would want to carry LOX or
>> something very volatile like hydrazine.)
> how about something volatile like uranium?
Uranium is not volatile :)
--
Chuck Stewart
"Anime-style catgirls: Threat? Menace? Or just studying algebra?"
R Dan Henry
ser...@yahoo.com (Serg) transmitted thus:
>John Ludlow <johnl...@onetel.net.uk> wrote in message news:<Xns9229127189FFjo...@130.133.1.4>...
>> >> Also, aren't nuclear reactors normally computer controlled?
>> >
>> Yes, you do have to address the issue of bombardment from orbit. Maybe the
>> atmosphere doesn't allow proper targeting, or maybe a treaty or law as you
>> suggest
>
>That's the problem with laser - you can not bombard from orbit without
>proper guidance system, and condition was low-tech electronic. That
>roule out projectile/missile. But laser could be aimed by telescope,
>and coupled with weak armor that make battleships impossible.
On the other hand, as long as they have sufficient heat-shielding to
survive reentry, bombs don't lose power traveling through the
atmosphere. Lasers do. And if you are shooting a laser at an area
where really huge vehicles are kicking up dust, you are going to need
a very powerful laser indeed. And if the atmosphere should be
turbulent enough to prevent aircraft from being practical, it's almost
certainly going to be refracting the hell out of your laser. In
addition to messing with your visual targeting.
>Even
>with strong mainarmor such a construction should have a lot of
>protruding external appendages (sensors, weapon, bays, etc.) which
>could be fused by orbital laser.
Bah. Huge vehicles can't turn on a dime and certainly aren't going to
do so in response to an orbital station they don't know is about to
fire on them. Mass drivers would be a much more practical approach.
--
Richard D. Henry
rdan...@earthlink.net
Serg
> > But laser could be aimed by telescope,
> Cloud cover blocking the LOS?
Yep. But wouldn't the same clouds prevent laser from being effective
AA weapon ?
We presume there is no good radars...And if there are good radars
there are should be guidance system for Tor-like projectiles wich make
battleship non sensible.
George William Herbert
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.science,rec.games.design
Subject: Re: Land Battleships
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Chuck Stewart <zapk...@gmx.co.uk> wrote:
>> how about something volatile like uranium?
>
>Uranium is not volatile :)
No, only pyrophoric...
While technically there is a distinction,
in that it only burns like mad and vaporizes
*after* being heated significantly and / or
dispersed as fine particles, the end result
is often practically the same.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
George William Herbert
>I think you have a larger problem. How does your 300 meter vehicle travel
>down a city street,
Over.
>through a heavy forest,
Over.
>or down a narrow valley?
Either in, or balanced on the sides of.
>I don't think anything that large is really viable as a military vehicle,
>which by definition has to perform in a variety of terrain. Naval vessels
>don't often run into cliffs. :)
ObSF: When the Devil Dances, by John Ringo.
Large tanks known as "SheVa", on this size scale.
Not *entirely* accurate... but reasonably close.
Including a bunch of off-road excitement and the
perils of getting one stuck in a valley.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Nick Wedd
when a bunch of smaller ones would be so much more flexible? The
answer, I think, must be in the power source.
Someone mentioned steam power. Steam is not very suitable for military
vehicles. All you need is a bunch of peasants and a large lever, to
turn the thing on its back, and the fire gets mixed up with the water,
the power stops working, and the whole thing becomes helpless. So maybe
the answer is to put the steam engine in a sufficiently large vehicle
that no-one will be able to turn it over.
But I have a more plausible suggestion. The vehicle has to be large
because it has a huge, and inefficient, power source. It runs on a
fermentation chamber, like a cow. This is constantly topped out with
grass cuttings, wood shavings, and other shredded organic matter. As
this ferments, it becomes hotter, eventually hot enough to produce
steam, which is used as a source of power.
One advantage of this is that the fermentation chamber is relatively
shock-proof. Unlike a coal fire, it is robust against being shaken up
and even turned upside down. Another advantage is that there is always
power available to it - the machine can "live off the land", sending its
runners out to harvest grass, or branches, or crops, from whatever
terrain it needs to pass through.
Nick
--
Nick Wedd ni...@maproom.co.uk
John Ludlow
> whole side of the vehicle is
> immobilized. Contrast a millipede with
> _one_ broken leg.
Track links could be made stronger with multiple connecting hinges.
If one hinge fails, you've got 10 more *on that link*.
Todd Zircher
>
> Uranium is not volatile :)
True. While it is toxic, you can pound on it with a sledgehammer or
throw it into a raging fire and it won't go boom. However, live steam
can be its own hazard and a landship could 'bleed to death' if the
damage control teams can not block, shunt, or patch a major leak.
Like the iron horse, water is a strategic resource. On airless and
desert worlds you have to hoard your water and perhaps fight over an
oasis or ice field.
--
TAZ
Isaac Kuo
of the ideas presented, but can't reply to everything in detail...
To better define the technology, I assume there are only the
most crude electronics, but mechanical manufacturing is precise
and generally sophisticated. Long range accurate fire is assisted
with the "fire control room", a roomful of people with lots of
slide rules and tables. This room is pretty noisy. Plain old
artillery spotting is used to home in on targets after the first
salvo, but the "fire control room" is still used to account for
vehicular motion (both of the target and firing platform).
Fire from orbital platforms to the ground is more or less
impossible. Due to the sheer speed of the platform in low
orbit, only one salvo per pass is possible. No arty spotting
will be able to account for errors, and even that single
salvo requires far more calculations than normal surface fire.
From high orbit, there's enough time to do the calculations,
and spotting can theoretically work due to the much greater
linearity of input angle-impact point variations, but at
these distances there's barely enough pointing accuracy
to hit a large city. The time of flight would make it
impossible to hit a moving target anyway.
Needless to say, if the orbital platforms can't nab a 100m
diameter land battleship, it hasn't got a prayer of nabbing
an aerial target.
Instead, I'm going to simply make it that any aerial target
big enough to be a threat to a land battleship's heavy armor
is also slow and unmaneuverable enough for the battleship's
heavy artillery to knock out of the air. It's an accuracy
issue. From high altitude, bombers simply can't hit their
targets (based on WWII record). So aircraft need to get close
to actually hit their targets...in WWII they were able to
get past AAA defenses (but often with great losses), but
it's not so clear they would be able to do so in the face of
more modern rapid fire autoloading cannon. They're even less
capable of surviving in the face of fission warhead AAA.
Re: FTL propulsion
I'm not going to bother justifying the FTL travel too much.
Fine calculations are required, but no psychic powers are
used. Just a very big room full of experts with slide rules
and tables and precise telescopes to determine one's current
position.
Re: Lasers
No lasers. The lack of electronics technology makes them more
or less useless for rangefinding or missile guidance, and other
"fancy" uses for them. Nuclear pumped X-ray lasers might be
useful in space combat, but they lack the penetration power
required to significantly inconvenience land battleships.
Continuous lasers don't do much either, and without the
electronics necessary for adaptive optics they don't have
much range through an atmosphere.
Re: track vs foot propulsion
The paired outer feet plus circular central foot mechanism
exists in real life. It works, and is a simple purely
mechanical mechanism (the central foot simply rotates around
a vertical axis; the outer feet use a simple crankshaft-like
mechanism to move in a circular motion). It's not fast, but
it's cheap and simple and rugged, and it can turn on a dime.
In contrast, tracks have a turning radius which gets
ridiculously large as you increase the size and/or
footprint ratio--and even then a lot of sideways and
rotational slipping is involved.
The other mechanism I mentioned is a variant of a mechanism
I've seen successfully used in Robot Wars. The intuitive way
to get speed out of legged propulsion is to use large strides
with few feet--like in nature. But the designers of Drillzilla
went the opposite route--shuffling long slablike "feet" in a
small turning radius. This works because circular motion
crankshafts exist in mechanical mechanisms but not in nature.
The result was a propulsion system as fast as the fastest
wheeled robots (and much faster than every tracked bot), but
with much better traction due to the vastly increased ground
contact area and extra weight. The basic operating principle
will scale up fine, as it's essentially similar to the above
system (but with more than one pair of feet attached to the
crankshaft).
In both cases, the mechanisms I described have the advantage
that they build in the gun slewing mechanism. Tracked tanks
can theoretically do this also, like the famous S-Tank did,
but it becomes a far less practical possibility if you scale
up the design.
Re: the train suggestion
A long thin "train" has a horrible volume/area ratio. It
can't mount heavy armor. It's just too fragile.
Re: the sea urchin/starfish propulsion suggestion
Generally, I like this sort of propulsion, even though in
real life sea urchins and starfish are imperceptibly slow
movers. My main concern is sheer complexity.
Re: terrain problems
These land battleships don't enter heavily built up cities.
Not until after they're "built down" with nuclear bombardment,
that is.
Isaac Kuo
Trevor Calder
<acc26c07.02060...@posting.google.com> to spread these words:
>3. All planets being fought over are rocky, but gravity and
> atmospheric conditions vary. Armed forces are expected to be
> flexible enough to fight in almost any combat environment.
>
>So what do I need in order to sensibly promote the use of really
>huge "land battleships" in favor of aircraft?
Well, the different gravity/atmosphere means no single design of
aircraft will work everywhere.
--
Trevor Calder
"..it is foolishness and endless trouble to cast a
stone at every dog that barks at you.."
Sea Wasp
>
> Mark Thomas <tho...@NOSPAMpbegames.com> wrote:
> >I think you have a larger problem. How does your 300 meter vehicle travel
> >down a city street,
>
> Over.
>
> >through a heavy forest,
>
> Over.
>
> >or down a narrow valley?
>
> Either in, or balanced on the sides of.
>
> >I don't think anything that large is really viable as a military vehicle,
> >which by definition has to perform in a variety of terrain. Naval vessels
> >don't often run into cliffs. :)
>
> ObSF: When the Devil Dances, by John Ringo.
> Large tanks known as "SheVa", on this size scale.
How big were SJ's OGREs?
I have a story arc involving a single land combat vehicle like these,
but it involves a lot of "unique situations" to make it happen.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
http://www.wizvax.net/seawasp/index.htm
Anthony Buckland
>On 10 Jun 2002 03:01:17 -0700, the disembodied brain of
>ser...@yahoo.com (Serg) transmitted thus:
>
>> ...
>>
>
>On the other hand, as long as they have sufficient heat-shielding to
>survive reentry, bombs don't lose power traveling through the
>atmosphere. Lasers do. And if you are shooting a laser at an area
>where really huge vehicles are kicking up dust, you are going to need
>a very powerful laser indeed. And if the atmosphere should be
>turbulent enough to prevent aircraft from being practical, it's almost
>certainly going to be refracting the hell out of your laser. In
>addition to messing with your visual targeting.
>
>>Even
>>with strong mainarmor such a construction should have a lot of
>>protruding external appendages (sensors, weapon, bays, etc.) which
>>could be fused by orbital laser.
>>
>
>Bah. Huge vehicles can't turn on a dime and certainly aren't going to
>do so in response to an orbital station they don't know is about to
>fire on them. Mass drivers would be a much more practical approach.
>
...
If you assume that it takes some time with a laser to break through the
shielding, ablative armor and/or heat dissipation of the huge vehicle,
then, if the terrain is dirty enough, the vehicle can start driving in
circles kicking up as much dust as possible. You could have an
interesting duel as the vehicle drives around in hot dust clouds trying
not to run out of fuel before the orbital bombarder runs out of
something or overheats.
Anthony Buckland
>I've been thinking about land battleships. Why use one huge vehicle
>when a bunch of smaller ones would be so much more flexible? The
>answer, I think, must be in the power source.
>
> ...
>
In OTL, carriers became effective because the main weapon became
the air-delivered bomb instead of the heavy shell. So a huge vehicle
could be necessary to hold a big weapon. If you'd fired a 16-inch
gun from a destroyer, you would have sunk it; you needed a battleship
to provide a stable and survivable platform. Consider the ultimate
huge vehicle, the Death Star, which had to be moon-sized to hold
the reactor and single heavy weapon -- here you have a big power
source _and_ a big gun.
John Ludlow
> johnl...@onetel.net.uk (John Ludlow) wrote in message news:<e42cdba4.02061...@posting.google.com>...
> > > But laser could be aimed by telescope,
> > Cloud cover blocking the LOS?
>
> Yep. But wouldn't the same clouds prevent laser from being effective
> AA weapon ?
John Ludlow
Carpet bombing would also work. Drop a thousand or so bombs in one
place you're gonna hit something!
Karl M. Syring
> If you assume that it takes some time with a laser to break through the
> shielding, ablative armor and/or heat dissipation of the huge vehicle,
> then, if the terrain is dirty enough, the vehicle can start driving in
> circles kicking up as much dust as possible. You could have an
> interesting duel as the vehicle drives around in hot dust clouds trying
> not to run out of fuel before the orbital bombarder runs out of
> something or overheats.
I did not think of this, really big smoke generators covering large parts of
the planet with multicolored fog. Nice idea for a game.
Karl M. Syring
George William Herbert
>> >I don't think anything that large is really viable as a military vehicle,
>> >which by definition has to perform in a variety of terrain. Naval vessels
>> >don't often run into cliffs. :)
>>
>> ObSF: When the Devil Dances, by John Ringo.
>> Large tanks known as "SheVa", on this size scale.
>
> How big were SJ's OGREs?
Large, but not hundred-meter large. 15 to 50 meters long scale?
The first Ogres were cyberbrain equipped superheavy tanks,
which are only slightly larger than the settings heavy
tanks, which are the size of contemporary MBTs (8m long, 3.5m
wide, 2.5m tall or so). They went up from there to thirty or more
times as heavy, based on the descriptions, which would be about
three times the length/width/height for the Mk V Ogre.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Isaac Kuo
>re:lasers; Isaac, do your homework!
My pet hobby of speculating on realistic space combat has made
me quite familiar with lasers. A somewhat accurate way to
describe how I've learned about lasers is that I read a lot,
posted my ideas here, and had Luke Campbell correct everything.
>>... Why would they go for legs instead of a
>>tracked system?
>When a single track link fails, that
>whole side of the vehicle is
>immobilized. Contrast a millipede with
>_one_ broken leg.
More importantly, the actual real life legged propulsion
systems in practical use are actually simpler and less
expensive than tracked systems.
>>I was thinking of people being able to build their
>>own, personalised, vehicle.
This is the idea...
>Well, that's part of the game AISI.
>You have to decide how much to risk
>against what benefit you project. Gotta
>spend money to get points.
I don't know how complicated I will eventually make things.
I'm trying to keep it simple--sort of on the same level as
the original pocket Car Wars.
>>Yes, you do have to address the issue of bombardment
>>from orbit. Maybe the atmosphere doesn't allow proper
>>targeting, or maybe a treaty or law as you suggest
Orbital mechanics don't allow proper targeting. When
your firing platform is hurtling through space along a
curved path at millions of kilometers per hour,
shooting at targets which are moving along curved paths
at a thousand kilometer per hour (due to planetary rotation),
and those targets are hundreds of kilometers below you
(for a short firing window)...let's just say that hitting
anything is really really really hard.
In contrast, land battleship artillery uses lots of
calculations just to get a salvo in roughly the right
area, and then uses arty spotting techniques and linear
approximations to adjust fire and compensate for motion.
It's still hard to hit something hundreds of kilometers
away, but you can keep adjusting until you get it right.
Isaac Kuo
Christopher M. Jones
Track breakage is a very rare occurance. The real danger
with treaded vehicles is throwing a tread. In the right
kinds of soils at the right speeds and with the right
manouvering (such as turning sharply at medium to high
speeds in loose alluvial soils) you can easily drive right
out of a track, it slips off and then you're SOL if you're
in battle. Which is why tank drivers practice a lot of
driving, learning how *not* to throw a tread.
--
Oh, yeah, an African swallow maybe, but not a European swallow. That's my point.
Todd Zircher
>
> Someone mentioned steam power. Steam is not very suitable for military
> vehicles.
Um, I was referring to nuclear powered carriers and submarines that use
steam to drive the props, turn generators for electricity, and launch
aircraft via steam catapults. Steam is the life blood of a nuclear
powered unit as the proposed land battleships would be.
--
TAZ
Todd Zircher
> In contrast, tracks have a turning radius which gets
> ridiculously large as you increase the size and/or
> footprint ratio--and even then a lot of sideways and
> rotational slipping is involved.
BTW, any tracked vehicle should be able to turn on a dime. Provided that
they have stopped. Simply turn one tread backwards and the other one
forwards. Turning speed may not be too peppy, but they only need huge
turning room when they are in motion. Even then, a land battle ship could
risk a (don't snicker too much) 'power slide' by throwing one of the treads
in reverse. The potential for serious damage to track and transmission
would make this an emergency manuver only.
--
TAZ
Erik Max Francis
> How big were SJ's OGREs?
"Up to 50 metres," according to the Ogre manual.
--
Erik Max Francis / m...@alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
__ San Jose, CA, US / 37 20 N 121 53 W / ICQ16063900 / &tSftDotIotE
/ \ Who'd ever think it / Such a squalid little ending
\__/ The American and Florence, _Chess_
Church / http://www.alcyone.com/pyos/church/
A lambda calculus explorer in Python.
John Ludlow
news:acc26c07.02061...@posting.google.com:
> First off--I thank everybody for the great response!
You're welcome
> Fire from orbital platforms to the ground is more or less
> impossible. Due to the sheer speed of the platform in low
> orbit, only one salvo per pass is possible. No arty spotting
> will be able to account for errors, and even that single
> salvo requires far more calculations than normal surface fire.
> From high orbit, there's enough time to do the calculations,
> and spotting can theoretically work due to the much greater
> linearity of input angle-impact point variations, but at
> these distances there's barely enough pointing accuracy
> to hit a large city. The time of flight would make it
> impossible to hit a moving target anyway.
And carpet bombing? You could cover a 10-square-mile area with bombs.
These super-vehicles don't sound quite *that* fast. Though it would use a
lot of resources
> Needless to say, if the orbital platforms can't nab a 100m
> diameter land battleship, it hasn't got a prayer of nabbing
> an aerial target.
>
> Instead, I'm going to simply make it that any aerial target
> big enough to be a threat to a land battleship's heavy armor
> is also slow and unmaneuverable enough for the battleship's
> heavy artillery to knock out of the air. It's an accuracy
> issue. From high altitude, bombers simply can't hit their
> targets (based on WWII record). So aircraft need to get close
> to actually hit their targets...in WWII they were able to
> get past AAA defenses (but often with great losses), but
> it's not so clear they would be able to do so in the face of
> more modern rapid fire autoloading cannon. They're even less
> capable of surviving in the face of fission warhead AAA.
See above comment on carpet bombing. As a defense for the land-ships, what
about flak guns?
> Re: FTL propulsion
>
> I'm not going to bother justifying the FTL travel too much.
> Fine calculations are required, but no psychic powers are
> used. Just a very big room full of experts with slide rules
> and tables and precise telescopes to determine one's current
> position.
And the tech to break the FTL barrier? In a low-tech society, where do
they get that?
>
> Re: Lasers
>
> No lasers. The lack of electronics technology makes them more
> or less useless for rangefinding or missile guidance, and other
> "fancy" uses for them. Nuclear pumped X-ray lasers might be
> useful in space combat, but they lack the penetration power
> required to significantly inconvenience land battleships.
> Continuous lasers don't do much either, and without the
> electronics necessary for adaptive optics they don't have
> much range through an atmosphere.
I would have thought the space ships would have more rad-shielding than the
land ships. They have to go past suns, and a sun chucks out a lot more
radiation than any laser.
> Re: track vs foot propulsion
>
> The paired outer feet plus circular central foot mechanism
> exists in real life. It works, and is a simple purely
> mechanical mechanism (the central foot simply rotates around
> a vertical axis; the outer feet use a simple crankshaft-like
> mechanism to move in a circular motion). It's not fast, but
> it's cheap and simple and rugged, and it can turn on a dime.
> In contrast, tracks have a turning radius which gets
> ridiculously large as you increase the size and/or
> footprint ratio--and even then a lot of sideways and
> rotational slipping is involved.
I've just realised what the method was - I couldn't visualise it earlier.
That could work.
But tanks can turn on the spot. I've seen them do it. I'll also make a
parallel to aircraft. When the race was on to invent a vTOL fighter jet,
many early attempts used multiple engines. You'd have one set of engines
pointing down (for vertical thrust - lift) and one set pointing back (for
forward motion). This failed for various reasons:
1) unreliable. twice as many engines to maintain
2) inefficient. more fuel, and most of the time, half your engines were
just dead weight.
3) expensive. more engines to pay for.
BAe Systems and Rolls Royce made the Harrier, which had the Pegasus engine.
This used one engine, and simply pointed the nozzles down for vertical
thrust, and back for horizontal thrust. Simple. It worked, where the
others didn't.
(BTW - I do know about the JSF, which uses a hybrid - The main engine is
mounted to the rear, like a normal plane, but the nozzle points down.
There is a small stabilizer behind the cockpit. It'll be interesting to
see how successful this is.)
My point is that the system with fewer parts worked better.
But if you're happy with the leg system, I'll go with that.
> The other mechanism I mentioned is a variant of a mechanism
> I've seen successfully used in Robot Wars. The intuitive way
> to get speed out of legged propulsion is to use large strides
> with few feet--like in nature. But the designers of Drillzilla
> went the opposite route--shuffling long slablike "feet" in a
> small turning radius. This works because circular motion
> crankshafts exist in mechanical mechanisms but not in nature.
> The result was a propulsion system as fast as the fastest
> wheeled robots (and much faster than every tracked bot), but
> with much better traction due to the vastly increased ground
> contact area and extra weight. The basic operating principle
> will scale up fine, as it's essentially similar to the above
> system (but with more than one pair of feet attached to the
> crankshaft).
OK, now I haven't seen that one. I'm trying to work out how it'd work.
> In both cases, the mechanisms I described have the advantage
> that they build in the gun slewing mechanism. Tracked tanks
> can theoretically do this also, like the famous S-Tank did,
> but it becomes a far less practical possibility if you scale
> up the design.
I don't see why.
> Re: the train suggestion
>
> A long thin "train" has a horrible volume/area ratio. It
> can't mount heavy armor. It's just too fragile.
I thought you'd say that :) It's just the closest thing I've seen so far.
Isaac Kuo
>>Fire from orbital platforms to the ground is more or less
>>impossible. Due to the sheer speed of the platform in low
>>orbit, only one salvo per pass is possible. No arty spotting
>>will be able to account for errors, and even that single
>>salvo requires far more calculations than normal surface fire.
>>From high orbit, there's enough time to do the calculations,
>>and spotting can theoretically work due to the much greater
>>linearity of input angle-impact point variations, but at
>>these distances there's barely enough pointing accuracy
>>to hit a large city. The time of flight would make it
>>impossible to hit a moving target anyway.
>And carpet bombing? You could cover a 10-square-mile area with bombs.
>These super-vehicles don't sound quite *that* fast. Though it would use a
>lot of resources
It didn't work for B17 bombers trying to hit ships trying to hit
ships in the ocean. Those bombers were practically stationary
compared to orbital bombardment platforms.
Of course, with nuclear warhead you'd think you don't need a direct
hit--but you do. These are merely fission warheads, not fusion warheads,
and these land battleships are even more heavily armored than the
real life warships which would survive relatively near misses.
(Besides the volume/area issue, the land battleships don't have to
worry about floating.)
>>Needless to say, if the orbital platforms can't nab a 100m
>>diameter land battleship, it hasn't got a prayer of nabbing
>>an aerial target.
>>Instead, I'm going to simply make it that any aerial target
>>big enough to be a threat to a land battleship's heavy armor
>>is also slow and unmaneuverable enough for the battleship's
>>heavy artillery to knock out of the air. It's an accuracy
>>issue. From high altitude, bombers simply can't hit their
>>targets (based on WWII record). So aircraft need to get close
>>to actually hit their targets...in WWII they were able to
>>get past AAA defenses (but often with great losses), but
>>it's not so clear they would be able to do so in the face of
>>more modern rapid fire autoloading cannon. They're even less
>>capable of surviving in the face of fission warhead AAA.
>See above comment on carpet bombing. As a defense for the land-ships, what
>about flak guns?
I've decided I will make aircraft available in at least some
environments, although high altitude carpet bombing will be
of relatively limited utility. It will provide extra incentive
to not crowd one's forces too much.
>>Re: FTL propulsion
>>I'm not going to bother justifying the FTL travel too much.
>>Fine calculations are required, but no psychic powers are
>>used. Just a very big room full of experts with slide rules
>>and tables and precise telescopes to determine one's current
>>position.
>And the tech to break the FTL barrier? In a low-tech society, where do
>they get that?
They're not a low-tech society--they just don't have electronics.
Why not? I won't bother specifying. Whether by taboo or alternate
physics or simply that no one really thought of it, they don't have
sophisticated electronics.
>>Re: Lasers
>>No lasers. The lack of electronics technology makes them more
>>or less useless for rangefinding or missile guidance, and other
>>"fancy" uses for them. Nuclear pumped X-ray lasers might be
>>useful in space combat, but they lack the penetration power
>>required to significantly inconvenience land battleships.
>>Continuous lasers don't do much either, and without the
>>electronics necessary for adaptive optics they don't have
>>much range through an atmosphere.
>I would have thought the space ships would have more rad-shielding than the
>land ships. They have to go past suns, and a sun chucks out a lot more
>radiation than any laser.
Why would they go past suns? The large long term spacecraft will
have heavy all around radiation shielding, which will indeed
absorb the X-ray laser's blast--but it will then explosively heat
up and blow chunks of metal into the ship in HESH style. A
land battleship has numerous extra layers of spaced/composite
armor to absorb these fragments, but a spacecraft typically will not.
The spacecraft are too valuble to purposefully put in harms way,
so they won't be designed for sustained combat.
>But tanks can turn on the spot. I've seen them do it.
Real life tanks are small even compared to many other real life
civilian tracked vehicles. But these vehicles retain maneuverability
only by keeping the tracks relatively far apart from each other,
which means sacrificing footprint ratio. Even so, the larger
civilian tracked vehicles are forced to make tedious 3 point
turns to negotiate 90 degree corners. They can NOT turn in place.
>I'll also make a
>parallel to aircraft. When the race was on to invent a vTOL fighter jet,
>many early attempts used multiple engines. You'd have one set of engines
>pointing down (for vertical thrust - lift) and one set pointing back (for
>forward motion). This failed for various reasons:
>1) unreliable. twice as many engines to maintain
>2) inefficient. more fuel, and most of the time, half your engines were
>just dead weight.
>3) expensive. more engines to pay for.
Not relevant, since the legged mechanisms I describe would only use
one engine (which powers the forward/backward circular motion via
gears, and powers rotation by hydraulics).
This does indeed imply a significant volume and mass consumed by
the hydraulic rotation motor/mechanism. However, a tracked vehicle
will require comparable expense in such a rotation mechanism
in order to slew the main turret. Since it needs to rotate only
the top part of the armor and the main gun, it might be 1/3 the
volume/mass of the legged system's rotation motor/mechanism (which
needs to rotate the whole vehicle). But this will typically be
more than lost due to the extra mass/complexity of the differential
tracked steering transmission system.
>My point is that the system with fewer parts worked better.
>But if you're happy with the leg system, I'll go with that.
Well, caterpillar track systems are tons more mechanically complex
than the legged systems I'm talking about. There are all of the
road wheels and the sophisticated differential transmission, and
all the links. It's a maintainance nightmare. The legged mechanisms
have far fewer parts--even if those individual parts are a LOT bigger,
those parts are roughly zero maintenance. Even battle damage which
bends and twists large sections of them will usually not seriously
affect performance. The same can't be said of a track link which has
been twisted out of shape...
>>In both cases, the mechanisms I described have the advantage
>>that they build in the gun slewing mechanism. Tracked tanks
>>can theoretically do this also, like the famous S-Tank did,
>>but it becomes a far less practical possibility if you scale
>>up the design.
>I don't see why.
Because larger tracked vehicles just can't turn in place. If they
could, then you can be sure larger civilian vehicles would be
manufactured with this capability. (Those vehicles are behemoths
next to a puny modern main battle tank...the vehicles I envision
would be behemoths next to them.)
Isaac Kuo
Eidre1066
>> >
>> > First ones weren't IIRC. Just gauges
>> > and nerves.
<snip>
> Finding hard data on "ancient" tech
>like this is difficult. From memory, it
>was literally gauges and nerve.
>SCRAMming a reactor involved shoving the
>moderating rods all the way in by
>_hand_.
SCRAM stands for "Safety Control Reactor Axe Man"; on the Manhattan Project,
there was such a person, holding an axe and poised next to the rope suspending
the control rods *just* out of the reactor core. Should the reactor begin to
go supercritical, he axes the rope and shuts down the reactor (hence the
creation of the verb 'to SCRAM' in nuclear power).
More to the point, the Manhattan Project, although not designed to generate
power, demonstrates that you can get measurable amounts of radiation, heat, etc
out of a reactor controlled entirely by hand. You just need lots of very
competent gauge-watchers for the nuke plant (and a whole heap of others for the
associated steam system, turbines, generators, condensors, and anything else
you want to run). Also, presumably the plant won't be very space or
weight-efficient as compared to modern reactors because you won't be able to
run the plant as close to the fine line as you could with electronic controls.
Dave
PS: High gravity is a great excuse for a lack of aviation; anything flying
would have to have either enormous lift surfaces (and therefore be a huge
target) or be composed of mostly engine, making armed aviation impossible.
PPS: For some thoughts on individualized large-scale ground transports, try the
Warhammer 40K Orks. Their Gargantua used in Epic-scale battles fit your
description very closely.
Matthias Warkus
...and John Ludlow <johnl...@onetel.net.uk> wrote:
[VTOL jet aeroplanes]
> (BTW - I do know about the JSF, which uses a hybrid - The main engine is
> mounted to the rear, like a normal plane, but the nozzle points down.
> There is a small stabilizer behind the cockpit. It'll be interesting to
> see how successful this is.)
The JSF is VTOL? That's news to me.
mawa
--
Standesgemäß sterben, #3:
Der Maurer kann nicht mehr von der Schippe springen.
Matthias Warkus
...and Isaac Kuo <mec...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >And the tech to break the FTL barrier? In a low-tech society, where do
> >they get that?
>
> They're not a low-tech society--they just don't have electronics.
> Why not? I won't bother specifying.
That's exactly the kind of thing the reader keeps stumbling over and
getting annoyed by.
If you don't feature electronics, at least say why.
mawa
--
Es mangelt nie Gelegenheit, was Gutes zu verrichten;
Es mangelt nie Gelegenheit, was Gutes zu vernichten.
-- Friedrich von Logau
Thomas Koenig
reentry capability. The differential equations to solve are
pretty mean (that's why the whole subject of multiple shooting
for solution of stiff ODEs was developed in the first place).
How do you reconcile that with your "spaceflight without electronics"
scenario?
John Pettigrew
Of course, the other problem with no electronics is that it means no radio
and hence no long-range communications. Developing radio would be a great
incentive to develop further electronics, so it's hard to see a
technological reason why you could have one without the other. It seems to
be better to invoke social reasons rather than technological ones. This is,
after all, what Frank Herbert did (as he's been mentioned already) - all the
oddities of the Dune universe arose from socioreligious developments, most
especially the revulsion towards any kind of thinking machine. So, it would
be possible to come up with good reasons to have good simple electronics but
no complex devices. The calculations that we use such complex devices for
could often be performed by talented, trained people, as Isaac has said,
coupled with copious tables for looking up results. For example, re-entry
requires many difficult calculations, but if the solutions are precalculated
to a fine degree, it then becomes simply a matter of selecting the
appropriate precalculated trajectory based on current data. If we're
postulating a culture that's been spacefaring for a very long time, such
tables aren't very farfetched.
Similar arguments could be used to protect spaceships from attack and to
suppress space-based weapons - as in the Dune universe, postulate a strong
Spacing Guild or similar and you are immediately unable to perform
bombardment from space, because any offensive space vehicle would bar the
developer from "proper" space travel. As for the FTL flight itself, there is
the easy route of using handwavium or scarce naturally occurring phenomena
such as wormholes. Or, we can go slightly more wacky and postulate a
space-dwelling lifeform like Niven's Starseeds and Stage trees, or (more
usefully) Pratchett's Sundogs (from Dark Side of the Sun), which can carry
passengers through FTL-space by some unspecified mechanism. FTL then becomes
controlled by those who can communicate with these beings, and subject to
their whims. This has the advantage of making FTL something that is
discovered rather than invented - we don't need to know the theory, only
how to exploit this resource. Alternatively, depending on how you want to
set up the game, you could live without FTL completely and instead use STL
systems such as ramscoops to connect systems. It rather depends on whether
you want to be able to flit from system to system, or whether you can live
with long objective/short subjective flights.
John
--
John Pettigrew XL Cambridge - contract and freelance editing
Biology specialist Molecular biology, genetics, biotechnology
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Thomas Koenig
Bury five or ten tons of high explosive two meters deep, then set
it off as the battleship drives over it.
This kind of field could be laid well in advance (forming part of
a strategic defence). Have a few observers in well-camouflaged
bunkers ready to detonate them, and you could form a line of defence
which would be very hard to get through without horrific losses.
Karl M. Syring
Too easy to defuse. The thanks would simply send out their big mine sniffer
dogs. Those could deal with enemy infantry, too.
Karl M. Syring
Thomas Koenig
>"Thomas Koenig" <Thomas...@online.de> schrieb
>> How vulnerable would these battleship be against mines?
>> Bury five or ten tons of high explosive two meters deep, then set
>> it off as the battleship drives over it.
>Too easy to defuse. The thanks would simply send out their big mine sniffer
^^^^^^
??????
>dogs. Those could deal with enemy infantry, too.
Dogs against infantry in bunkers? :-) I'll add artillery coverage
to my proposal (which is a good idea for any kind of mine field
anyway), equipped with special anti-dog ammunition, e.g. beef aroma.
Trevor Calder
>John Ludlow <johnl...@onetel.net.uk> wrote in message news:<Xns922AE
>1957FC05johnlu...@130.133.1.4>...
>>And carpet bombing? You could cover a 10-square-mile area with bombs
>It didn't work for B17 bombers trying to hit ships trying to hit
>ships in the ocean. Those bombers were practically stationary
>compared to orbital bombardment platforms.
So, the orbital platforms throw down *lots* of rocks.
They're cheap, the make a big bang when they hit, and they're cheap.
If one orbital platform throws down 1000 rocks of 10,000kg or so
each, it's bye-bye to anything in the area they land on.
Karl M. Syring
The dogs are engineered to go for fresh blood only. No cheap sausages,
please.
Karl M. Syring
Karl M. Syring
Uh, read up something about Vanevar Bush's Intergraph. Solving ODEs by
mechanical computers is not exactly rocket science.
Karl M. Syring
Thomas Koenig
>Uh, read up something about Vanevar Bush's Intergraph. Solving ODEs by
>mechanical computers is not exactly rocket science.
How well does this work for extremely stiff systems? What
about error checking and adtaptive error control? (And solving
this kind of ODE _is_ rocket science :-)
Karl M. Syring
No, trajectory calculations are unproblematic in this respect. The stiffness
problem only shows up if your processes have with vastly different time
scales, like in reaction-diffusion type problems.
Karl M. Syring
Thomas Koenig
(problems solving stiff ODEs with mechanical, analog computers)
>No, trajectory calculations are unproblematic in this respect.
Trajectory in vacuum is no problem. It's trajectory on reentry
that I'm talking about.
Isaac Kuo
>It was the 11 Jun 2002 19:49:44 -0700...
>...and Isaac Kuo <mec...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>And the tech to break the FTL barrier? In a low-tech society, where do
>>>they get that?
>>They're not a low-tech society--they just don't have electronics.
>>Why not? I won't bother specifying.
>That's exactly the kind of thing the reader keeps stumbling over and
>getting annoyed by.
>If you don't feature electronics, at least say why.
This is for an sf game, not an sf story. I don't need to explain
nearly as much. Besides, this is unashamedly soft sf.
But even if it were an sf story, I would not necessarily feel
compelled to explicitly explain why electronics technology doesn't
exist. The characters would not talk or even think about technology
they know nothing of. It'd be like a 19th century character
thinking about why he doesn't have APFSDS ammunition or clear
plastic wrap or Rubik's Cube puzzles of fibreglass sailboats. None
of these things would have been out of the question if the right
people had had the right bright ideas...but since they didn't no
character would even think to wonder why not.
Isaac Kuo
John Ludlow
> It was the 11 Jun 2002 21:09:59 GMT...
> ...and John Ludlow <johnl...@onetel.net.uk> wrote:
> [VTOL jet aeroplanes]
> > (BTW - I do know about the JSF, which uses a hybrid - The main engine is
> > mounted to the rear, like a normal plane, but the nozzle points down.
> > There is a small stabilizer behind the cockpit. It'll be interesting to
> > see how successful this is.)
>
> The JSF is VTOL? That's news to me.
Karl M. Syring
Why should it be impossible to model shockwaves on an analog computers?
Think of hydraulic calculators.
Karl M. Syring
Isaac Kuo
>How vulnerable would these battleship be against mines?
>Bury five or ten tons of high explosive two meters deep, then set
>it off as the battleship drives over it.
I don't think those will have much effect, because of the sheer
mass and strength of thick sturdy metal required by the feet just
to support the vehicles. It'll bend and twist up a foot pad, but
little else.
However, a fission warhead mine will disintegrate a battleships
inards into a mess of fragmented rubble underneath its heavy armor
shell! It's something for me to think about...
>This kind of field could be laid well in advance (forming part of
>a strategic defence). Have a few observers in well-camouflaged
>bunkers ready to detonate them, and you could form a line of defence
>which would be very hard to get through without horrific losses.
If I disallow even electric detonators, this will mean detonation
chords, which will have a tendency to chain react unless the mine
installations are very far apart from each other. This limits how
densely they can be packed...
However, I really like the idea of old fashioned "undermining" as
a significant tactic. The surface land battleships are going to be
slow--possibly slow enough for subsurface nuclear powered TBM
vehicles to undermine them and place timed fuse charges directly!
This can lead to a strange variant on classic WWII submarine warfare,
where vessels use seismic sensors to try and get an accurate enough
idea of where the enemy is in order to know when to attack...
The wormlike TBM needs to stop periodically to listen for the
enemy, as does the beetlelike land battleship. Once in motion,
a vessel is blind and can only guess what the other is doing.
The battleship can use drills to plant its own mines, but
it must wait for the TBM to near the surface to detonate them--and
hope one of those mines was close enough to knock out the TBM.
The TBM needs to get near the surface to plant its mines, but it
needs to do this when the battleship is blind in motion so it has
a chance of getting in and out without getting hit by the
battleship's mines.
I envision the subsurface TBMs as mainly being auxiliary forces.
Attacking alone, the faster land battleships can usually lay a
defensive set of mines and wait them out. However, in the midst
of a surface battle where the battleships are forced to maneuver,
TBMs have a chance of getting in their attacks under cover of all
the confusion.
Isaac Kuo
Isaac Kuo
>Bury five or ten tons of high explosive two meters deep, then set
>it off as the battleship drives over it.
I don't think those will have much effect, because of the sheer
mass and strength of thick sturdy metal required by the feet just
to support the vehicles. It'll bend and twist up a foot pad, but
little else.
However, a fission warhead mine will disintegrate a battleships
inards into a mess of fragmented rubble underneath its heavy armor
shell! It's something for me to think about...
>This kind of field could be laid well in advance (forming part of
>a strategic defence). Have a few observers in well-camouflaged
>bunkers ready to detonate them, and you could form a line of defence
>which would be very hard to get through without horrific losses.
If I disallow even electric detonators, this will mean detonation
Isaac Kuo
>Bury five or ten tons of high explosive two meters deep, then set
>it off as the battleship drives over it.
I don't think those will have much effect, because of the sheer
mass and strength of thick sturdy metal required by the feet just
to support the vehicles. It'll bend and twist up a foot pad, but
little else.
However, a fission warhead mine will disintegrate a battleships
inards into a mess of fragmented rubble underneath its heavy armor
shell! It's something for me to think about...
>This kind of field could be laid well in advance (forming part of
>a strategic defence). Have a few observers in well-camouflaged
>bunkers ready to detonate them, and you could form a line of defence
>which would be very hard to get through without horrific losses.
If I disallow even electric detonators, this will mean detonation
John Ludlow
>> These super-vehicles don't sound quite *that* fast. Though it would
>>use a lot of resources
>
> It didn't work for B17 bombers trying to hit ships trying to hit
> ships in the ocean. Those bombers were practically stationary
> compared to orbital bombardment platforms.
John Ludlow
> nearly as much. Besides, this is unashamedly soft sf.
characters, but you do need to provide a lot more info on unit
capabilities. Understanding something of the technology can put this into
context, and make the learning curve more enjoyable by the player.
This is how WH40K works.
>
> But even if it were an sf story, I would not necessarily feel
> compelled to explicitly explain why electronics technology doesn't
> exist.
Perhaps. In some cases you can get away with it, and just ask the reader
to accept what you give them without further explanation. But I often like
something like this to be justified.
> The characters would not talk or even think about technology
> they know nothing of. It'd be like a 19th century character
> thinking about why he doesn't have APFSDS ammunition or clear
> plastic wrap or Rubik's Cube puzzles of fibreglass sailboats. None
> of these things would have been out of the question if the right
> people had had the right bright ideas...but since they didn't no
> character would even think to wonder why not.
But the player might think about this. If he understands it's a 19th
century story, he'll accept the lack of laser targeting, hollow point
ammunition, and thermonuclear weapons, as everyone knows these weren't
around then. But in a futuristic story, you may be expected to explain
certain things. For example, take the background stories to WH40K. You
aren't forced to read them, but I found them interesting. They explain a
lot of how the game universe got the way it is in the game. That provides
context to the game, making it more fun.
Equally, I found it more fun shooting someone with a Shreiker cannon after
I'd read about how it worked. The idea of a shower of circular discs
ripping someone to pieces, or a victim of the poison ammo wondering
randomly around then exploding made the act of shooting more fun. DOn't
know why...
Thomas Koenig
>Thomas...@online.de (Thomas Koenig) wrote in message news:<ae7igp$v9o$1...@mvme66.ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de>...
>>Bury five or ten tons of high explosive two meters deep, then set
>>it off as the battleship drives over it.
>I don't think those will have much effect, because of the sheer
>mass and strength of thick sturdy metal required by the feet just
>to support the vehicles. It'll bend and twist up a foot pad, but
>little else.
I find that a bit hard to believe. What sort of armor is that
land battleship supposed to have to withstand a ten-ton blast?
What if the ten tons are arranged as a shaped charge? Can
you say "catastrophic overmatching"? :-)
(fission warhead)
>If I disallow even electric detonators, this will mean detonation
>chords, which will have a tendency to chain react unless the mine
>installations are very far apart from each other. This limits how
>densely they can be packed...
If the technology for making fission warheads is present, it should
be possible to make these at every concievable yield.
However, long-range nuclear artillery should be able to finish
off a land battleship quite easily. Think of the artillery
pieces that the Germans used in WW I to fire at Paris.
John Ludlow
> chords, which will have a tendency to chain react unless the mine
> installations are very far apart from each other. This limits how
> densely they can be packed...
some simple computers), but only to a certain level, than to allow no
electronics and try to figure out ways to get around it.
You could say that the technology is controlled by a semi-religious order,
in a similar way to Dune or WH40K.
> However, I really like the idea of old fashioned "undermining" as
> a significant tactic. The surface land battleships are going to be
> slow--possibly slow enough for subsurface nuclear powered TBM
> vehicles to undermine them and place timed fuse charges directly!
> This can lead to a strange variant on classic WWII submarine warfare,
> where vessels use seismic sensors to try and get an accurate enough
> idea of where the enemy is in order to know when to attack...
This would require some infantry, and perhaps other external units. I
think this is a good idea, but I was under the impression you wanted no
units external to the landship.
But I do think the game would benefit from a variety of smaller units. But
I would say no installations, to keep the nomadic feel and pace of the
game.
Perhaps horses would also help the low-ish tech. (horses might be very
useful without electics).
Mark Fergerson
>
> Mark Fergerson <mferg...@cox.net> wrote in message news:<3D0537D9...@cox.net>...
>
> >re:lasers; Isaac, do your homework!
>
> My pet hobby of speculating on realistic space combat has made
> me quite familiar with lasers. A somewhat accurate way to
> describe how I've learned about lasers is that I read a lot,
> posted my ideas here, and had Luke Campbell correct everything.
OK, you've locked into electronics
being essential for lasers, and your
context doesn't include electronics. Yet
another suggestion; you haven't passed
one way or another on the "semi-nomadic
culture" idea. If you go with it, I can
see how maybe up to early tube-level
stuff could get invented, but you don't
have the non-mobile infrastructure
necessary for more sophisticated
semiconductor tech. _Some_ electronics
knowledge is just plain unavoidable if
you have fission reactors.
But you don't _need_ any sophisticated
electronics or even sophisticated math
to justify gas-dynamic lasers. They
could be the serendipitous result of a
plumbing accident with just the right
gases flowing through pipes with just
the right cross-section variations, and
matched sight glasses opposite each
other in the right place. Once the mess
was reconstructed (assuming the first
one blew up), it would be easily
reproducible/scalable. They'd still be
eye-aimed (maybe heliograph-style
mirrors?), not amenable to continuous
fire (heating problems and beam blooming
in air), prone to breakdown, exhaust
noxious gases, and no more useful than a
medium big gun that has no windage or
drop to compensate for.
They're really fairly simple; see this
link:
http://home.achilles.net/~jtalbot/history/gasdynamic.html
OTOH if you just don't want lasers,
you don't have lasers.
> >>... Why would they go for legs instead of a
> >>tracked system?
>
> >When a single track link fails, that
> >whole side of the vehicle is
> >immobilized. Contrast a millipede with
> >_one_ broken leg.
>
> More importantly, the actual real life legged propulsion
> systems in practical use are actually simpler and less
> expensive than tracked systems.
Yeah, per your mention of Drillzilla
elsewhere.
> >>I was thinking of people being able to build their
> >>own, personalised, vehicle.
>
> This is the idea...
I assume by "people" you mean
"players"?
> >Well, that's part of the game AISI.
> >You have to decide how much to risk
> >against what benefit you project. Gotta
> >spend money to get points.
>
> I don't know how complicated I will eventually make things.
> I'm trying to keep it simple--sort of on the same level as
> the original pocket Car Wars.
Right. I was just pointing out that
there have to be built-in limits that
keep one player from building an
unstoppable behemoth. No fun that way,
eh?
> >>Yes, you do have to address the issue of bombardment
> >>from orbit. Maybe the atmosphere doesn't allow proper
> >>targeting, or maybe a treaty or law as you suggest
>
> Orbital mechanics don't allow proper targeting. When
> your firing platform is hurtling through space along a
> curved path at millions of kilometers per hour,
> shooting at targets which are moving along curved paths
> at a thousand kilometer per hour (due to planetary rotation),
> and those targets are hundreds of kilometers below you
> (for a short firing window)...let's just say that hitting
> anything is really really really hard.
With primitive tube tech even ENIAC is
doable, but may be seen as not worth the
resource expenditure. Gotcha.
> In contrast, land battleship artillery uses lots of
> calculations just to get a salvo in roughly the right
> area, and then uses arty spotting techniques and linear
> approximations to adjust fire and compensate for motion.
> It's still hard to hit something hundreds of kilometers
> away, but you can keep adjusting until you get it right.
Agreed. Cut-and-try is much less
likely with orbital distances and
speeds.
I guess we kinda ran away with your
idea, eh?
Mark L. Fergerson
Isaac Kuo
>However, long-range nuclear artillery should be able to finish
>off a land battleship quite easily. Think of the artillery
>pieces that the Germans used in WW I to fire at Paris.
And just what do you think is firing that long-range nuclear
artillery? The massive land battleships, of course!
All the discussions of smaller units and especially horses is
forgetting that these forces are expected to fight on a wide
variety of planets, hardly any of which will have a breathable
atmosphere. Smaller units of very limited endurance and auxiliary
capabilities may be present, but they'll get swept away by nuclear
blasts if they're exposed in a firefight. (A firefight being a
lumbering nuclear artillery battle fought at hundreds of kilometers
in range.)
I won't discuss the orbital bombardment issue further either.
I simply declare that it is more cost effective to deliver more
ammunition down to surface forces so they can hit the enemy with
(relative) pinpoint accuracy than it is to attempt to hit the
enemy directly with random "carpet bombing". True, you lose the
kinetic energy you might have had if you rained the munitions
on the enemy from orbit--but this energy density is puny compared
to the energy density of the fission warheads themselves.
I have determined my main reason for such huge land battleships,
and it's simply a matter of gun range. Bigger guns can deliver
munitions over a longer range and with nuclear fission warheads,
this more or less means commanding the entire circular area within
range. The impact detonated shells are rather primitive. Most
are a simple hollow shell with a fixed subcritical mass at the
tip and a fixed subcritical mass at the base. Upon impact,
the nose mass crushes into the base mass and results in fission.
It's not very sophisticated or efficient, but it's cheap and rugged
and still provides enough explosive force if it scores a direct hit.
The thick land battleship armor is designed to widthstand near
misses; the motive systems are slow but just barely worth it because
of the long time-of-flight of incoming shells and low rates-of-fire
of the battleship guns.
Isaac Kuo
Urban Fredriksson
Isaac Kuo <mec...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Thomas...@online.de (Thomas Koenig) wrote in message news:<ae7igp$v9o$1...@mvme66.ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de>...
>>Bury five or ten tons of high explosive two meters deep, then set
>>it off as the battleship drives over it.
>I don't think those will have much effect, because of the sheer
>mass and strength of thick sturdy metal required by the feet just
>to support the vehicles.
Considering what 10 kg does to a 60 ton tank today I'm not
sure this conclusion is valid.
--
Urban Fredriksson http://www.canit.se/%7Egriffon/
"In order to make someone a nervous wreck, apologize while they still
haven't used their best arguments." -- Runer Jonsson
Richard James
>>If you don't feature electronics, at least say why.
>
> This is for an sf game, not an sf story. I don't need to explain
> nearly as much. Besides, this is unashamedly soft sf.
>
> But even if it were an sf story, I would not necessarily feel
> compelled to explicitly explain why electronics technology doesn't
> exist. The characters would not talk or even think about technology
> they know nothing of. It'd be like a 19th century character
> thinking about why he doesn't have APFSDS ammunition or clear
> plastic wrap or Rubik's Cube puzzles of fibreglass sailboats. None
> of these things would have been out of the question if the right
> people had had the right bright ideas...but since they didn't no
> character would even think to wonder why not.
Society had expanded across parsecs of space but the empire could not hold
its people. There was a great war and electronics and other technologies
where lost. The survivors where able to piece together some of the
remaining technologies. The quest for lost technology eventually led to a
new war "the Land Battleship War" Giant behemoths landed on the colonies
and raided them. There were two factions the old empire and the new order.
Eventually all lost tech was recovered but the war carries on. Through old
colonies of the empire and empty planets. They now fight not just for
supremacy but also for materials.
That sort of thing.
Richard :)
--
Slashdot thats the game where you collect Karma isn't it?
Serg
> Isaac Kuo wrote:
> >
> > Mark Fergerson <mferg...@cox.net> wrote in message news:<3D0537D9...@cox.net>...
> see how maybe up to early tube-level
> stuff could get invented, but you don't
> have the non-mobile infrastructure
> necessary for more sophisticated
> semiconductor tech. _Some_ electronics
> knowledge is just plain unavoidable if
> you have fission reactors.
You don't need semiconductors. For crude electronics lamps are more then enough.
Serg
> Isaac Kuo <mec...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >Thomas...@online.de (Thomas Koenig) wrote in message news:<ae7igp$v9o$1...@mvme66.ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de>...
>
> >>Bury five or ten tons of high explosive two meters deep, then set
> >>it off as the battleship drives over it.
>
> >I don't think those will have much effect, because of the sheer
> >mass and strength of thick sturdy metal required by the feet just
> >to support the vehicles. It'll bend and twist up a foot pad, but
> >little else.
>
> I find that a bit hard to believe. What sort of armor is that
> land battleship supposed to have to withstand a ten-ton blast?
> What if the ten tons are arranged as a shaped charge? Can
> you say "catastrophic overmatching"? :-)
If battleship is legged this ten-ton should be under foot - not often
occurance. Big mines have limited usefulness if not set on the road,
and battleship don't need road. The battleship is slow and even in the
case of direct hit the leg could be easily replaced. Also because of
its slowness there are could be some "mine sniffers" scouting his
path.
>
> (fission warhead)
>
>
> If the technology for making fission warheads is present, it should
> be possible to make these at every concievable yield.
Not without sofisticated electronics and high precision equipment.
Thomas Koenig
>Thomas...@online.de (Thomas Koenig) wrote in message news:<ae8b2c$270$1...@mvme66.ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de>...
>
>>However, long-range nuclear artillery should be able to finish
>>off a land battleship quite easily. Think of the artillery
>>pieces that the Germans used in WW I to fire at Paris.
>And just what do you think is firing that long-range nuclear
>artillery? The massive land battleships, of course!
I see some problems with that. It doesn't take a huge structure
to fire a big gun on land. What does a land battleship do if it's
faced with 50 self-propelled guns (with equal calibre), which are
armored to the level that today's main battle tanks are?
If the SP guns have a dig-in capability, they should be
capable of withstanding nuclear blasts from quite close.
>I have determined my main reason for such huge land battleships,
>and it's simply a matter of gun range.
Why can a land battleship fire bigger guns than a dug-in SP gun can?
>Bigger guns can deliver
>munitions over a longer range and with nuclear fission warheads,
>this more or less means commanding the entire circular area within
>range.
Range doesn't mean anything if you don't find your target.
Is this done by aircraft or from orbit? How do the target spotters
report back?
From orbit: You'd only be able to see the enemy during daytime,
but only be able to report during the nighttime with optical signals.
Forget both if cloud cover is present :-)
From aircraft: If aircraft are primary spotters, shooting them
down will be the highest priority. I would then presume nuclear
flak. However, aircraft would have a problem reporting back.
They would probably have to fly back, then.
>The impact detonated shells are rather primitive.
See above. survivability for a dug-in, armored SP gun should be
high in that case.
>The thick land battleship armor is designed to widthstand near
>misses; the motive systems are slow but just barely worth it because
>of the long time-of-flight of incoming shells and low rates-of-fire
>of the battleship guns.
More important should be the time lag from observers.
Todd Zircher
>
> ... The impact detonated shells are rather primitive. Most
> are a simple hollow shell with a fixed subcritical mass at the
> tip and a fixed subcritical mass at the base. Upon impact,
> the nose mass crushes into the base mass and results in fission.
> It's not very sophisticated or efficient, but it's cheap and rugged
> and still provides enough explosive force if it scores a direct hit.
Slight change, cap the shells with a percussion detonator and an
explosive package to drive the sub critical masses together. Simple
collision will not provide enough density for fission.
--
TAZ, mad scientist wannabe :-)
John Ludlow
> its people. There was a great war and electronics and other technologies
> where lost. The survivors where able to piece together some of the
> remaining technologies. The quest for lost technology eventually led to a
> new war "the Land Battleship War" Giant behemoths landed on the colonies
> and raided them. There were two factions the old empire and the new order.
> Eventually all lost tech was recovered but the war carries on. Through old
> colonies of the empire and empty planets. They now fight not just for
> supremacy but also for materials.
>
> That sort of thing.
In the major wars we've had so far, no technology has been lost (in
fact, they promoted a surge in research - computers were developed by
the allies to break codes, nuclear power was developed to power the
A-bomb, and planes were developed first as spotters, then fighters,
then bombers).
Now if you want to say "we don't have those technologies anymore - the
data has been lost", fine. Just give some idea how they were lost.
You could say that there was a period of anarchy, and no-one really
new what was happening. That's a quick way round it.
Personally, I'd say that there was a massive feeling against
technology (pick your own reasons - some kind of disaster caused by a
new tech would do fine, or maybe a weapon used in the war) which
resulted in riots, during which universities and research facilities
were destroyed. The loss of these vast stores of knowledge plunged
the empire back into the stone age. (OK, a bit overdone, but you get
the idea.)
Chuck Stewart
mec...@yahoo.com (Isaac Kuo) wrote in
news:acc26c07.02061...@posting.google.com:
Okay, here's what you do:
First, get away from "Dune" syndrome.
An oft-overlooked alternative for oddly assorted techs is the
historical aberration.
Circumstances occur which make a certain course of action, like
land battleships, seem an attractive alternative *at the time*.
(Like people in California sending their laundry to Hawaii to be
washed, or the Pony Express... )
Later on the circumstances change, and land battleships become this
historical oddity.
Forget interstellar ships for travel... not worth the effort in the
milieu you wish to establish..
Instead, posit a collapsed Gate culture... The "Old Empire" used
gates so interstellar ships were never engineered.
The gates are immaterial structures that use Nano Quantum
Macguffin technology... and variations on this same NQM technology
was widely used on each gated world.
Often a world would be made habitable by gating in water as needed,
or air, or...
This empire fell to internal strife, and the final straw was a
weapon that transited the gates and wrecked the NQM tech base of
each gated world.
Sometimes this would wreck the world as well.
Only the gates are left intact by the weapons... deactivated...
waiting...
After the Great Fall, civilization was basically forced to reboot
from scratch on each world that held survivors.
The survivors remembered high tech and interstellar travel, but
after the slaughter of billions when NQM tech failed, the remainder
were too busy trying to develop basic survival skills to do anything
about it.
As generations passed, each survivor world developed a crude
alternate retro-technology that didn't use NQM.
Eventually they learned how to trigger the gates, went exploring...
and ran into each other.
This is skimpy, but gives you a base for the game, and let's you
give differing sides different types and styles of tech...
something much sought-after in SF games.
(The kitty gets his steam-powered Bolo underway... #27 tread is
running a bit hot, but still within limits... and the destroyer
screeb reports enemy walker movement 63 klicks ahead... The kitty
swears to teach those stupid walkers a lesson in speed and
manueverability... :)
--
Chuck Stewart
"Anime-style catgirls: Threat? Menace? Or just studying algebra?"
Sea Wasp
Yet
> another suggestion; you haven't passed
> one way or another on the "semi-nomadic
> culture" idea. If you go with it, I can
> see how maybe up to early tube-level
> stuff could get invented, but you don't
> have the non-mobile infrastructure
> necessary for more sophisticated
> semiconductor tech. _Some_ electronics
> knowledge is just plain unavoidable if
> you have fission reactors.
Why? The first fission reactor ever made was before we ever heard of
transistors or other semiconductor tricks. Big pile o' graphite bricks
and some rods that slid in an out.
Sure, you'd have to do some refining to make it WORK as a power
source, but I can't think of a single thing a nuclear reactor does
which would REQUIRE anything beyond tube-level tech. In fact, I don't
see anything it does which requires you to have anything past late
1800s tech, assuming you know it can be done and know what to refine
in order to get fissionables.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
http://www.wizvax.net/seawasp/index.htm
Isaac Kuo
>I personally think it'd be easier to allow some electronics
>(and perhaps some simple computers), but only to a certain
>level, than to allow no electronics and try to figure out
>ways to get around it.
I think it's rather fun trying to think of non-electronic
ways to do stuff. Right now, the technology level I'm
thinking of is 19th century for most technology, WW1 level
gunnery, 20th century fission technology (including NERVA
style solid core rockets), and 21st century geology and
mathematics. Advanced numerical methods are known--but
the actual calculations still have to be done by hand.
And of course, there's some sort of FTL technology, which
doesn't really fit the XXth century label. I haven't
really thought about the details, but anything I come up
with would be essentially technobabble anyway.
>You could say that the technology is controlled by a
>semi-religious order, in a similar way to Dune or WH40K.
I'd prefer not to go that route. I sort of like the
19th century->WW1 feel of clashing empires with a thin facade
of "honor" and noble dignity veiled over utter ruthlessness
to grasp victory via any and all means available.
>>However, I really like the idea of old fashioned "undermining" as
>>a significant tactic. The surface land battleships are going to be
>>slow--possibly slow enough for subsurface nuclear powered TBM
>>vehicles to undermine them and place timed fuse charges directly!
>>This can lead to a strange variant on classic WWII submarine
warfare,
>>where vessels use seismic sensors to try and get an accurate enough
>>idea of where the enemy is in order to know when to attack...
>This would require some infantry, and perhaps other external
>units. I think this is a good idea, but I was under the
>impression you wanted no units external to the landship.
The seismic sensors are inserted into the ground underneath the
battleship armor, possibly integral to the feet or track links.
>But I do think the game would benefit from a variety of
>smaller units. But I would say no installations, to keep
>the nomadic feel and pace of the game.
There will be fixed installations and cities, even though
these will be ever vulnerable to shelling and will have
to rebuild a lot. The civilian population has to live
somewhere, and fixed installations are still cheaper than
mobile battleships.
Smaller units will have severely limited capabilities.
Without nuclear power, they must rely on chemical power.
This means little endurance, since they must carry their
own oxidizer supply. They also can't afford the space
or food/water/oxygen consumed by fire control rooms (lots
of people with slide rules and tables). They have limited
communications capability compared to the battleships--no
radio, just light and sound based communications. They
can't easily mount guns big enough for fission warheads,
and don't have much ammunition supply. They simply aren't
big enough to get any resolution out of seismic or sonic
sensors. They get wiped out en masse by timed fuse nuclear
airburst shells.
Sure, smaller units will exist. But they'll have more
marginal uses.
What a "serious" battle combatent needs includes:
1. Firepower. This is a primary requirement, and the
fission shells are already large and require a really big
gun to get decent range. The warhead has a certain minimum
mass and size. The shell around it needs a certain minimum
mass just to survive firing. You can either add on the extra
shell mass to make each shell radiation shielded or you can
try to automate the entire ammunition handling and gun loading
mechanisms. The latter is just not workable with the existing
technology, so the result is some pretty hefty 12" shells at
minimum. A gun isn't worth much without a decent ammunition
supply--what with all the shots required to ensure a hit.
So, from the start you need a unit much larger than the
biggest super tanks.
2. Life support. Someone needs to actually fire and maintain
the gun. Dehydrated food supplies take care of 1/3 of the
life support equation, assuming you can handle the other two.
Oxygen and water recycling systems essentially require nuclear
power to run, but smaller units will have to make do with
supply tanks. Even so, this boosts the minimum space/weight
of a vehicle even further. Note that unless the vehicle is
of VERY limited endurance, sleeping quarters and spare crew
are needed.
3. Sensors/fire control. Someone somewhere has got to
figure out which direction to shoot the gun at and correct
for errors. Having orbital spotters is good, but you can't
count on having space superiority all the time, and the
thick cloud and dust cover limit their usefulness (if there
is a substantial atmosphere, a lot of dust can be kicked up
with nuclear blasts). The more reliable over-the-horizon
sensors are seismic and sonar sensors.
The seismic sensors are mostly useful for pinpointing sounds
of enemy gunshots and nuclear shells have impacts--differences
in the shock shapes can distinguish between ground impacts
and battleship hits and airbursts (they can provide a very
rough idea of the altitude of an airburst, to assist adjusting
fuse timing). It's somewhat possible for multiple units to
share enough data to triangulate more accurately, but in
any significant battle with dozens of shells to deal with at
a time, it's better to just rely on on-board sensors (spaced
apart by a total diameter of 100m in a land battleship). Most
sensor arrays feature "2D Visualization", where the output
of a circular ring of sensors is written onto a continuous
sheet of graph paper. Individual shockwaves look like circles
on this graph, making it possible to distinguish multiple
shockwaves incoming at the same time (they appear as
overlapping circles).
Similar sonar sensors are used, although the time delay is
longer and range shorter, because they can be used on the
move and because they can refine/supplant seismic data.
In addition, they act in a de facto semiactive mode using
nuclear blast "pings" to pinpoint the location of large
over-the-horizon audio reflectors.
In all cases, these sensors need to be very large, and they
need lots of personel to process the data.
4. Mobility. The seismic and sonic sensors used for OTH
firing have large time delays which can be several times as
long as the inherent time of flight delays. As such, even
the slow speed afforded by nuclear steam propulsion can
move a target enough to turn a hit into a miss (make sure
to not move at a constant velocity). With rates of fire
on the order of minutes per salvo, even 10mph can get you
into or out of gun range in time for it to matter. In
contrast, fixed artillery is rather doomed after firing
their first salvo.
5. Armor. By the time your vehicle design specs include
all of the above, you've already got a huge expensive vehicle
with a large crew. But unless you put some armor on it,
it's all going to die once someone puts an airburst vaguely
overhead. A certain amount of armor will prevent such an
immediate death, by allowing survival from misses. Whether
it's worth going all the way up to armor heavy enough to
survive everything short of a direct hit is an open issue,
and I hope to give different levels of armor protection
its own advantages/disadvantages.
>Perhaps horses would also help the low-ish tech. (horses
>might be very useful without electics).
Very few planets will have breathable atmospheres.
Life in most cities is miserable, like living full time
in a nuclear submarine expanded into a tangled maze of
compartments to limit the extent of battle damage. Most
lighting in the cities is piped in via light tubes from
outer surface portholes. Even in the daytime, lower
levels will be dark. Nighttime lighting just barely
adequate for seeing where you're going is supplied by
glow panel walls (an expensive luxury item; most people
make do with thin glow lines on corridor floors if they
have to move around at night, supplanted with candles
whose use outside the security forces is severely limited
to emergencies).
Isaac Kuo
Chuck Stewart
> Mark Fergerson wrote:
>> _Some_ electronics
>> knowledge is just plain unavoidable if
>> you have fission reactors.
> Why? The first fission reactor ever made was before we ever heard
> of transistors or other semiconductor tricks.
Because enough knowledge of atomic theory to design a reactor from
scratch also gives you basic electronics... if you think to look
for it.
Isaac Kuo
>Isaac Kuo <mec...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>Thomas...@online.de (Thomas Koenig) wrote in message news:<ae8b2c$270$1...@mvme66.ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de>...
>>>However, long-range nuclear artillery should be able to finish
>>>off a land battleship quite easily. Think of the artillery
>>>pieces that the Germans used in WW I to fire at Paris.
>>And just what do you think is firing that long-range nuclear
>>artillery? The massive land battleships, of course!
>I see some problems with that. It doesn't take a huge structure
>to fire a big gun on land. What does a land battleship do if it's
>faced with 50 self-propelled guns (with equal calibre), which are
>armored to the level that today's main battle tanks are?
The land battlships ARE self-propelled guns. You don't have a
breathable atmosphere, you're limited to nuclear steam propulsion,
you don't have electronic fire control or radio communications to
forward observers. All this adds up to a minimum practical SP gun
vehicle which is truly a "land battleship".
This is a bit like asking, what does a WWI battleship do if it's
faced with 50 gunboats (with equal calibre). The "gunboat" has a
lot of overhead associated with the fact that it's travelling in
a hostile environment. Add on all that overhead, and what do you
get? A capital ship.
See my other post about what that overhead is, in this case.
>Range doesn't mean anything if you don't find your target.
>Is this done by aircraft or from orbit? How do the target spotters
>report back?
It's done by over-the-horizon sensors. I hadn't really given it
much thought since I first had in mind battles within visual range.
But now that I have, I think seismic and sonic sensors will be
what's most used.
>>The impact detonated shells are rather primitive.
>See above. survivability for a dug-in, armored SP gun should be
>high in that case.
Most of the shells are simple impact detonated. But there are also
time delayed fuses for airbursts. It's just that airbursts are only
useful against smaller targets and time fuse shells are more expensive
and less reliable.
Digging in is not a useful tactic because it limits mobility. Given
the time delays between firing and impact, movement is life. A dug
in gun platform reveals its location upon firing; if it doesn't
move it will get hit.
Isaac Kuo
Sea Wasp
>
> Sea Wasp <sea...@wizvax.net> wrote in news:3D08C6...@wizvax.net:
>
> > Mark Fergerson wrote:
>
> >> _Some_ electronics
> >> knowledge is just plain unavoidable if
> >> you have fission reactors.
>
> > Why? The first fission reactor ever made was before we ever heard
> > of transistors or other semiconductor tricks.
>
> Because enough knowledge of atomic theory to design a reactor from
> scratch also gives you basic electronics... if you think to look
> for it.
True, but if you get to the point that you're making atomic reactors,
and THEN think about it, it's still going to be several years before
you go from "Hey, look at this neat effect... semi-conductors?" to
"here's my integrated circuit control boards".
This is assuming that the stuff which makes modern electronics
possible in atomic theory is OBVIOUS -- i.e., you can't imagine that
people might go several decades without running across that particular
application. There are some things like that in science, and there are
also some things where you realize that it took someone either having
a lucky accident, or happening to have a way-out thought, that led to
a given discovery. I don't know which class modern electronics would
fit in.
Isaac Kuo
>OK, you've locked into electronics
>being essential for lasers, and your
>context doesn't include electronics. Yet
>another suggestion; you haven't passed
>one way or another on the "semi-nomadic
>culture" idea.
The major empires are not nomadic, but there may be some nomadic
groups who live in true mobile "cities", like in Otomo's Memories.
>_Some_ electronics
>knowledge is just plain unavoidable if
>you have fission reactors.
The physics of nuclear reactions is as poorly understood as real life
early theories of ceramic superconductors. While they have an
excellent grasp of relativity (along with sufficiently
sophisticated mathematics to comprehend it and numerical methods
to take advantage of it), chemistry is very primitive--almost
"alchemy", with lots of trial and error and little understanding.
Of course, it doesn't help that anyone sufficiently adept at
mathematics to understand general relativity (as opposed to
special relativity) is swept up into the space services. And
of course, hordes of engineers and technicians toil away as
human calculators instead of doing original research.
>But you don't _need_ any sophisticated
>electronics or even sophisticated math
>to justify gas-dynamic lasers. They
>could be the serendipitous result of a
>plumbing accident with just the right
>gases flowing through pipes with just
>the right cross-section variations, and
I think lasers won't have much of a role in ground warfare,
but they could have a role in space warfare, simply because
guns have such utterly inadequate muzzle velocities.
I see the development of gasdynamic lasers being an accidental
discovery made while experimenting with lighting systems. The
land battleships need light to fight at night, and they've got
nuclear power. Generation of light is by heating up appropriate
gases with the reactor and piping the generated light to where
it's needed. By some fluke of the particular gas being used
and the expansion chamber's shape, a researching accidentally
got it to lase...
This would be a continuous laser, of course, and not very suitable
for doing damage. But it's be awesome for communications and
with sufficient concentrations capable of heating small spacecraft
to failure.
>>>>I was thinking of people being able to build their
>>>>own, personalised, vehicle.
>>This is the idea...
>I assume by "people" you mean "players"?
Yes.
>Right. I was just pointing out that
>there have to be built-in limits that
>keep one player from building an
>unstoppable behemoth. No fun that way,
>eh?
The main limit is that no matter how much you put into a single
land battleship, a direct hit from a nuclear shell will end it.
Thus, the idea will be to design multi-vehicle forces and tactics
for their coordinated use. I originally had been thinking of
a Car Wars/SFB/Battletech like game system where these behemoths
would pummel each other in epic slugging matches of guns vs armor vs
maneuver. But I just can't think of a reasonable way to make this
compatable with nuclear fission warheads.
Instead, I'm looking at a game mechanic more like Battleship on
a hex map, where players plot out places for their shells to land
and contend with time delays and guessing where the enemy will be.
The important design parameters would be the size and number of
guns in the main gun battery, ammunition supply, and the size and
number of secondary/tertiary turrets (and their ammunition supplies),
armor protection, and reactor/motive mechanisms. The crew,
computational systems, life support, sensors, communications systems,
and such would be more or less constants to simplify the design
process.
Already, there is a certain variety possible in the traditional
3 way compromise between offense vs defense vs mobility.
Defense will have few choices, essentially limited to heavy (only
vulnerable to direct hits), medium (vulnerable to airbursts), and
light (vulnerable to lasers).
Mobility will have a few more choices, with a handful of different
mechanisms (some of which limit firing and motion), and a range of
possible speeds depending on the power available.
Offense is where the design issues will be most varied, with
decisions of between shell weight and muzzle velocity and rate of
fire affected by the number and thickness and length and calibre
and loading mechanisms of the guns. Turret layout will affect
arcs of fire for the secondaries/tertiaries. Base bleed shells
can give better range, but at the cost of even more accuracy loss.
A force designed around over-the-horizon tactics might not even
mount secondaries, prefering to save all that weight/space for
more ammunition. A force designed around pure visual combat
might mount nothing but smaller faster firing guns. They might
take losses getting into visual range, but once there their
superior firepower can very quickly turn things around.
But I like the SFB effect of vastly different weapon systems
resulting in different tactics. Lasers don't seem to offer anything
new, gameplaywise, compared to shorter ranged guns. The subsurface
TBM does offer something different, but it's also a somewhat
dubious concept.
Hmm...maybe these people run into an alien race which doesn't
have nuclear technology, but DOES have sophisticated electronics.
These aliens don't have sufficient materials science technology
to duplicate the human nuclear technology; the humans don't have
the electronics technology to duplicate the alien's computer
circuits. The aliens use chemical rockets and solar powered
ion rockets, so they just can't match the sheer brute force of
human nuclear forces...but they have precision guided missiles
so they CAN pummel ground forces from orbit. Their chemical
lasers may not fire for very long, but their weapons have much
longer range...and they have radar...hmm...
>>In contrast, land battleship artillery uses lots of
>>calculations just to get a salvo in roughly the right
>>area, and then uses arty spotting techniques and linear
>>approximations to adjust fire and compensate for motion.
>>It's still hard to hit something hundreds of kilometers
>>away, but you can keep adjusting until you get it right.
>Agreed. Cut-and-try is much less
>likely with orbital distances and
>speeds.
It's just impossible. You're moving so fast that you're thousands
of kilometers away from where you took your first shot before
you can see where it impacted. You probably can't even see where
it impacted because you've already orbited over the horizon
already--to say nothing of being able to physically fire another
shot to the same target spot anyway. (Your orbit's speed is much,
much faster than your gun's muzzle velocity.)
Isaac Kuo
Eidre1066
>maneuver. But I just can't think of a reasonable way to make this
>compatable with nuclear fission warheads.
Find an excuse to get rid of the atmosphere (maybe a post-industrial or
post-apocalypse problem, or maybe all of the good resource worlds are airless).
This makes nuclear blasts much less imposing for anything other than a direct
hit:
* Blast wave is nonexistant, except through the earth, since the only gasses
being propelled outward are those from the vaporized shell / vaporized earth;
this is even less of an effect for air bursts.
* Heat wave suffers from the same problem; no atmosphere = no propagation of
heat.
These two cause the majority of the short-term damage in a nuclear blast. The
radiation would still be somewhat of a problem, but this can be stopped by
sufficient layers of lead, stone, dirt, or whatever else you can get from the
environment.
Likewise, the EMP would have much less of an effect because there are no
electronics to fry and no RF communications to shut down.
Of course long-term nuclear fallout, especially from ground bursts, would still
be bad, but if the planets are airless then the land battleships would have to
have a sealed, independent air supply. Not so good for the rest of the planet,
but the battleship is fine.
The only usefulness of nuclear weapons would be on a direct hit; here, of
course, they would be still be completely lethal, since the blast and heat
could conduct directly into the hull and the radiation would enter inside (not
that there would be many survivors from the primary effects).
Assuming the above, it would be absolutely necessary to have a perfect fire
control solution to shoot the 'Big Gun', since near-misses would be fairly
useless and would give away your position. Perhaps the best way to do a
deliberate attack would be to use some other cheaper mass-fire weapon to
immobilize the target, then shwack it with the nuke before it can repair itself
and move.
Some form of special forces in fast vehicles might come in handy for this sort
of thing; an armored door that can withstand a nuclear blast can still have its
hinges knocked out with a precisely placed explosive. Similarly, someone with
patience and a cutting unit (all you need is oxygen, a carbon-steel tube, and a
handle) can eventually get through almost anything. This would require a
tactical decision between buttoning up completely (to resist the big shells)
and opening up somewhat (to allow for defensive patrols and external
small-scale weapons to prevent sappers).
OK, enough bandwidth.
Dave
sanman
> > Large lasers mean enemy aircraft are
> > kinda pointless,
> Hmmm. I'm a little cagey about lasers. They sound a little hi-tech.
Why not just have a thin atmosphere, which cannot support aircraft
easily? I read that's a key problem with Mars. This could also justify
the large landship, in the sense that a smaller craft wouldn't be able
to sustain its occupants for long, in the event of a breakdown. So
your smaller units have to stay close to base, or the moving landship.
sanman
> In article <acc26c07.02061...@posting.google.com>,
> Isaac Kuo <mec...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >Thomas...@online.de (Thomas Koenig) wrote in message news:<ae7igp$v9o$1...@mvme66.ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de>...
>
> >>Bury five or ten tons of high explosive two meters deep, then set
> >>it off as the battleship drives over it.
>
> >I don't think those will have much effect, because of the sheer
> >mass and strength of thick sturdy metal required by the feet just
> >to support the vehicles.
>
> Considering what 10 kg does to a 60 ton tank today I'm not
> sure this conclusion is valid.
What about superstrong materials, like carbon or boron nitride nanotubes?
Those could make a big difference.
Isaac Kuo
>Right now, the technology level I'm
>thinking of is 19th century for most technology, WW1 level
>gunnery, 20th century fission technology (including NERVA
>style solid core rockets), and 21st century geology and
>mathematics.
My goodness, it just occured to me and I'm ashamed it took me so long...
Forget that NERVA crap. Orion style nuclear pulse propulsion is
obviously the way to go. You just can't beat it for heavy load
lifting. The pulse units could even be dual purpose--you either
fire them upward/sideways to use against the enemy, or you fire them
straight down to use as boosters. The central circular foot needs
massive shock absorbers, of course, to serve as a pulse propulsion
pusher plate.
That's right--these land battleships can fly. Single stage to orbit!
I don't need massive expensive NERVA rocket booster shuttlecraft to
get the things to and from planets. They just land and take off
themselves. Of course, accurate fire while in midair is out of the
question, and limited supplies of pulse units dictate that rocket
hops will only be used sparingly. It can be a great way to concentrate
forces, of course.
It also implies that orbital spacecraft can be massive and well
protected. It's still not possible to fire anything from orbit to the
ground with anything remotely resembling accuracy, but they'll make
excellent artillery spotters (barring cloud/dust cover).
These rocket jumps radically alter the picture from one of lumbering
giants shuffling along in a gradiously slow ballet to one with rapid
motion--a sabre dance with the occasional massive lunge or leap back.
A unit which has been bracketted can jump to get away, either to
space to fight another day, or to another point on the planet. This
hop is, for most purposes, practically instantaneous, but it does
mean the unit has to start from scratch on its own firing solutions.
The enemy has to start over with its firing solutions also, of course,
but at least gained the advantage of forcing the enemy to waste
precious pulse units.
Isaac Kuo