Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Flare]

All you need to do to defend against magnets is to make the armor rippled. As for sticking a harpoon into a ship. I've some doubts about that, it's got to be pretty big to withstand the force of several hundred tonnes pulling the other way. A mass of them might work, or programming a missile to tie cables around the opposition ship might also be viable is said ship is small enough.
In any case, all of this is quite fanciful compared to just shutting down the opposition's engines with some salamanders and closing in.

[Vandala]

Magnets? What's wrong with your good old armour piercing hookshot? If you're going with the oldies but goodies, you may as well make them as brutal as possible

I was just being silly, suction-cup space battles ahoy!

[Doom101]

Magnets? What's wrong with your good old armour piercing hookshot? If you're going with the oldies but goodies, you may as well make them as brutal as possible

I was just being silly, suction-cup space battles ahoy!

on the topic of harpoons if anyone recalls star trek: enterprise, the short lived series on jonathan archer and the first enterprise they didn't have tractor beams i believe they had legit harpoons that fired out of the cargo bay area and dragged things back in. And in Starfarer combat the idea is not necessarily to cause damage but to keep the enemy from escaping the range of your big guns. or to pull them close enough that you can board them.

however on the topic of ground combat i have to suggest that to even participate in ground combat you must have at least 1 Valkyrie transport or another ship capable of entering atmospheres AND LANDING. otherwise you have to space drop your troops and never get them back. ever. hell that's the entire reason that the hegemony tried to restrict sale of the Valkyrie transports because of the fact that landing on a planet is so hard to do and the Valkyrie is one of the only ships if not THE only one that can. personally i have to think if any kind of in atmosphere operations happen the Valkyrie is going to become a much more prized ship.

[Simberto]

As long as you are still able to just bombard the planet from orbit if you don't have one of those fancy transports. I am still of the impression that if i have a fleet with enough firepower to blow up a small moon sieging a planet, they should better do what i tell them to do, even if i don't have some troop transporter to land there. After all, instead of landing there, i could just spent the next week firing on anything that looks like civilisation. Or maybe look for some asteroids in the vicinity to throw at that planet. I don't think people on a defenseless planet have a very good negotiating position. And if that planet has defenses which would prevent me from blowing stuff up, i don't think landing troops there would be very successful.

[Vandala]

As long as you are still able to just bombard the planet from orbit if you don't have one of those fancy transports. I am still of the impression that if i have a fleet with enough firepower to blow up a small moon sieging a planet, they should better do what i tell them to do, even if i don't have some troop transporter to land there. After all, instead of landing there, i could just spent the next week firing on anything that looks like civilisation. Or maybe look for some asteroids in the vicinity to throw at that planet. I don't think people on a defenseless planet have a very good negotiating position. And if that planet has defenses which would prevent me from blowing stuff up, i don't think landing troops there would be very successful.

But do you have the supplies for that? Bombs cost materials you know.

Besides, asteroids aren't really a viable option in real life.

[Doom101]

As long as you are still able to just bombard the planet from orbit if you don't have one of those fancy transports. I am still of the impression that if i have a fleet with enough firepower to blow up a small moon sieging a planet, they should better do what i tell them to do, even if i don't have some troop transporter to land there. After all, instead of landing there, i could just spent the next week firing on anything that looks like civilisation. Or maybe look for some asteroids in the vicinity to throw at that planet. I don't think people on a defenseless planet have a very good negotiating position. And if that planet has defenses which would prevent me from blowing stuff up, i don't think landing troops there would be very successful.

But do you have the supplies for that? Bombs cost materials you know.

Besides, asteroids aren't really a viable option in real life.

if tractor beams /  harpoons become a reality for capital's asteroids are suddenly a viable threat to planets although an asteroid would toss so much debris into the atmosphere that all you would be able to do would be kill off everything on the planet and not be able to take it over.

and one thing about bombarding a planet, other than bombs which i imagine would have unlimited range IF they can actually get through an atmosphere without burning up. the only other weapons that can hit a planet from space would be the tachyon lance and possibly missiles again if they can survive entry into an atmosphere, and the mentality of people in the Corvus sector concerning planets is that each one is precious and should be seized rather than destroyed.

and my 2 cents about the actual combat it should be either extremely simple or a numbers game similar to the boarding actions where if you throw enough marines at it you win but you should be able to dictate possibly tactics for the marines to follow like everyone flank, everyone run in a straight line or you know attack, defend, slow advance, Blitzkrieg. you know tactics everyone knows.

[Vandala]

1 You'd need a really big asteroid, small ones just burn up.
2 You'd need to find them. (there are not that many you can use)
3 You'd need to catch up with them. (we are talking some big distances here)
4 You'd need to alter their trajectory enough so they'll hit the target planet. (and do it precise enough to hit the intended target on the planet)

And all this needs to be done while under fire or the possibility of attack, because the other guy isn't going to take this sitting down while you are hauling those rocks.

Plus they have a planet, they can always build more stuff, even with the lore limitations. You don't, you got limited supplies/time.

[OrangeLima]

Since when did that infernium stuff not act as a viable means to blow stuff up?

I mean seriously, you could just drop one of them. And any target on the ground wouldn't withstand hellbore cannons and rail guns, let alone any energy weapons.

But if you think about it, flying a ship in atmosphere is a really bad idea. As soon as your engines pooped out from overload/emp, you would be falling very gracefully into a instant death sitting next to a ship engine and hyper drive thing that runs on the same stuff you shove into torpedo's. 

[Simberto]

I am pretty sure you can't build big ships on a planet, you would have to do that in orbit, since they are not built to launch from the ground.

And if we are arguing that you do not have enough supplies to blow up stuff on the planet, where would we get enough soldiers to actually occupy one? I would think that that needs at least a few million soldiers. Though i have no sources for that, i would guess that you need at least similar amounts of space to transport enough soldiers, food, and equipment to occupy a planet than you would need to just blow that area up.

But i agree, you would probably need specific equipment to blow up stuff on planets, most of your ammunition surely can't pass through the atmosphere easily. But you would also need soldiers and more to occupy a planet and take what you want, so unless you plan a longterm occupation, just bringing some anti-planet weaponry with you and saying that you will blow up a city each hour until they give you what you want is probably far more cost-effective then bringing loads of soldiers and fighting a ground combat to gain that. You don't even need that much stuff, just load a freighter full of nukes, or whatever future weaponry does that thing more effective, and you are done.

And occupying a whole planet for a long time would use up an incredible amount of resources. Just look at how many soldiers and money are needed to occupy for example Iraq or Afghanistan, and then extrapolate that for a whole planet.

[Vandala]

Anything that can launch stuff into space from the surface can be made into a weapon, even if ships are made in orbit you still have to get stuff into orbit to build those ships.

Just having the means to bomb any one thing can mean surrender of the population planet-side, you may not be able to lay waste to everything, but you would not want to be the city that gets glassed just to prove a point.

Really the main reason not to have war in orbit is to prevent orbital space debris which isn't helpful for anyone, but debris will always be favorable to occupation. Unless you depend on off-world for basic supplies.

[Doom101]

Anything that can launch stuff into space from the surface can be made into a weapon, even if ships are made in orbit you still have to get stuff into orbit to build those ships.

Just having the means to bomb any one thing can mean surrender of the population planet-side, you may not be able to lay waste to everything, but you would not want to be the city that gets glassed just to prove a point.

Really the main reason not to have war in orbit is to prevent orbital space debris which isn't helpful for anyone, but debris will always be favorable to occupation. Unless you depend on off-world for basic supplies.

debris in orbit may not always be a bad thing for one thing larger cargo vessels like say the venture could go around collecting the debris which since it would be mostly ship parts could be highly profitable for the crew of the venture. sort of an intergalactic recycling ship.

[Flare]

That's unlikely, most junk in orbit is likely to be moving at a very fast speed. The expense of simply expending the fuel to catch up with it when you're in a hulking ship would probably eliminate its profitability. At best you could try deflecting some of the stuff out of orbit and collecting a service fee for keeping orbit clean.

[Simberto]

Depends how large the average chunks that are left after a battle are. If you can salvage half a spaceship which is flying around, it is probably worth it. Half a spaceship toilet, probably not.

And there is no reason for the stuff in orbit to have unreasonably high velocity. If it is part of a ship which was in orbit, the debris will have a very similar orbit to the ship before it was blown up. And if it was part of a ship which was not in orbit, but approaching/launching/whatever, chances are high that it's orbit is not very stable, or not an orbit at all, and it will burn up in the atmosphere or just fly away into space.

And i also assume that most ships are somewhat capable of dealing with smaller space debris, so if you are lucky, your ships shields can deflect all the stuff that is not economically feasible to retrieve. Also, one has to realize that there is a lot of space in space. Even after a large battle, the debris density in orbit will still not be problematic as long as you ship is somewhat capable of dealing with it. And since all ships in Starfarer have shields and/or armor, and even freighters can survive some weapons fire, it is safe to assume that they are indeed capable of dealing with small chunks of space debris. And the larger chunks are worth salvaging.

[Doom101]

if it was me i would personally fly around and salvage every last space toilet. those things are expensive

[Flare]

And there is no reason for the stuff in orbit to have unreasonably high velocity. If it is part of a ship which was in orbit, the debris will have a very similar orbit to the ship before it was blown up. And if it was part of a ship which was not in orbit, but approaching/launching/whatever, chances are high that it's orbit is not very stable, or not an orbit at all, and it will burn up in the atmosphere or just fly away into space.

There's no fixed orbit in the sense that there's a highway for all the things to orbit to line up in one path. Orbit isn't just a process of floating either, in effect it's kinda like falling really fast. By necessity all things in orbit can stay still, they are in a word, moving at an incredibly velocity, because if they don't, their trajectory would declines and they'd hit atmosphere and fall to the ground. Think of a cannon ball and its trajectory, if this trajectory is a parabolic match for the curvature of the earth, it's like what orbit is like except without the wind resistance. The trajectory is such that the end point doesn't touch the ground, all things in orbit thus are moving at such speeds which make it possible to fall at such a velocity and miss the ground entirely. This can be done in any direction around the earth.

As for ships blowing up and remaining in the same line of orbit, I'm not so sure, as far as I know, an explosion like that of igniting the ammunition cache is likely to set it tumbling on an erratic axis and possibly sped up in linear speed due to the explosion. A hulking ship such as the venture is going to spend an inordinate amount of time and money coming into contact with it.

This is also under the assumption that ship being salvaged has a ship blowing it up from behind and the wreckage not moving despite the explosion. If the venture is coming into orbit to salvage a piece that is already disabled, it must do move at an angle and speed such that it would intercept the piece of wreckage in orbit. If it were to salvage another piece that is moving in an entirely different angle it's going to have to take an inordinate amount of time getting realigned again, and this isn't considering that the piece might be going in the opposite direction.