The judge will sorta decide what we have, but you know, it doesn't really matter. Assume the teams are evenly balanced, spread across about 10 or 20 star systems each, and both teams have access to the same mode of interstellar travel.

As for the gravity well hypergate idea, lets say sure. The way you jump between systems is to accelerate towards the star. Once you hit... lets say .1 c, you immediately jump to the far side of the next star, within a range. So we would be using essentially Edwards' map (Though it really doesnt matter). This way there is no contention over weather a bridge burning team would be penalised for rendering systems permanent islands. Unless they can move a sun, they cant mess with the jump points. This also has the interesting point that battle fleets end up on the far side of the sun from the direction theyve come, which i think is cool. Ah, time for travel is instant, you just need to accelerate to the proper speed.

Hmm... Team up with Edwards et alia or team up with Neb et alia? This is a really tough choice. I'd love to be on either team.

I'm almost too scared to go against Edwards, so that's exactly what I'll do. Hiya Neb, let's get to work strategizing.

Current Teams:

Referees: rmx256, Koshinn
Team Awesome: phyco with power1, NebuchadnezzaR, typhoon of typhus, Qaanol
Team B: Mispeled, Edwards, Mackilroy, Skyfox, The Apple Cřre

Here's what I see for a scenario:

We are factions of humanity who have been sparring on and off for decades, but never gone into open warfare. An exploratory expedition has confirmed that a certain planet astronomers pointed out some years ago is indeed habitable and resource rich. It also happens to be at a strategic location that would provide whichever side controls it with a strong positional advantage over the other, due to flanking. Both factions feel they have a right to exclusive use of this new sphere, and set out to stake their claim. The goals are to:

a: Secure the planet.
b: Prevent the opposing team from doing likewise.
Bring a colony ship to the secured world.

The final goal is not actually part of the game. All we have to accomplish are a and b, then c is assumed. We want to do this while using as few resourses as possible, and in the simplest way possible. Gravity-well jump points are good.

Thoughts?

I can't use IRC, but I've got AIM, or we could just plan over email.

I have a little trouble with not using resources. Most games like chess that don't have resources have fixed units. (In chess this is easy, make all sides have the same units. For reality, varied units means you have to pull of hours of constant testing to make sure that the units are balenced. StarCraft maps that have no resources are difficult to balence perfectly. There is a reason why most RTS's contain resourcing as a large part of the game. Why did the US win WW2?)

IE you can have someone go "oh i'm gona make a fleet of mega-gargantuan starships out of a small moon.". Resources make heavier units worth more, and make losing heavy units a real consideration. It would also make "burning bridges" cut yourself off from a large amount of resources, starving your side.

My question is, if you don't have resources, how are you going to decide who gets how much of what? To me, saying "I'm going to devote 1/4 of my war machine to building fighters" is a little vague. So if I kill off 1/4 of your war machine, how many ships will remain, will or will you not be able to still defend your homeworld?

I agree with the primary focus being on strategies, and ideas instead of tactics. But I think if you want to truely simulate a realistic situation in space you have to take a more realistic approach then just theorizing about X, you have to simulate the situation. I don't think we should reduce it to just numbers, but I think it would be a little clearer the more numbers we can make.

Side A has railguns on light cruisers, side B has carriers and fighters. Who would win? Well, thats nearly impossible to tell without numbers. How much did it cost each side to build its fleet? How many ships are on each side?

I don't think it should be a side A doles exactly this much damage and side B doles exactly this much, rather given the technology A or B has a higher % chance of coming out.

Thats what a wargame means to me.

i reccomend that communication between teams should be by e-mail, for everyone at this webboard has email. my recommendation is that everyone on team A sends a email to someone on that team, who would send a email of all the email adresses to all the people on team A, so if you wanted to communicate with everyone on team A then you could just copy and paste the list of email adresses so it sends the message to everyone on the list. the same thing can be done with team B.

i reccomend this way over telling your email adress on this topic because i dont want this to become a "what is your e-mail adress" topic

Neb: Jump points can be mined. And unlike commercial games, we can put 50-megaton charges on these mines.

removed

This post has been edited by rmx256 : 13 October 2005 - 05:54 AM

1. Nukes:
   They would need to be a direct hit (Or near enough to it) to do any damage. The energy a ship would recieve from a blast would fall off by the inverse-square of the distance from the blast.

2. Destroying Gates:
   Destroying the gates to stall attackers is a viable tactic... Right up until some bright spark on the other side cooks up a way to circumvent the gate system. The first side to develop such a technology would have an insurmountable tactical advantage.

Unless you know your side is going to be the first with such technology, you run the risk of cutting off your only means of attacking the enemy, and being vulnerable to attack.

The thing about the rules of war: They aren't set in stone.

Mm.. Qaanol + Neb should be interesting.

I'd suggest both teams find out how to coordinate amongst themselves. AiM Chatrooms would be helpful as Email takes a long time to receive and to bring points up. IRC would also work.

Btw rmx, it's not just strategies, it's also technology. Technology makes the strategies. Would one technology require more resources to make? I don't know. No one can really know. Would it take more resources to develop? I don't know that either. You could have the private sector develop new technologies for you through subcontracting, thus reducing the expenses to your government. You could do all the development in-house, possibly increasing the speed and reliability. A new technology may be easy to develop but expensive to deploy, or may be expensive to develop by cheap to deploy, but things like this no one can really judge on with any degree of certainty.

Interesting... I'd like to join Team A, if it's not too late. This could be quite fun if some of the details are ironed out. Right now, I'm a little confused as what this is supposed to be. Where's the line going to be drawn between just pitting more vague strategies against each other in a debate war and actually having detailed lists of forces and having to make some sort of battle engine? Or am I missing the whole idea of it?

Current Teams:

Referees: rmx256, Koshinn
Team Awesome: phyco with power1, NebuchadnezzaR, typhoon of typhus, Qaanol, Azdara-Ace
Team B: Mispeled, Edwards, Mackilroy, Skyfox, The Apple Cřre

Just a word on resources, I think you need to take into account the golden rule that space is big. Assume that there has been plenty of time to plan initial attacks, and if you want an entire civilization of multiple planets to work towards a military goal, it will be relatively easy to accomplish. I like the idea of just saying "we put 1/2 of our efforts into fighters" and working with strategies. Resources are simply an unknown at this point.

hmm, we also need to decide how faster-than-light communication works.

Can communications be intercepted? If a ship is captured, will the location of all other ships of that team be known?

If we're striving for technologies that we can reasonably predict to exist I think that FTL communications are probably the least realistic we can think of. Messengers are much more likely. I've read a lot of the 'physics' behind Star Trek's 'subspace communication net' and that is a bunch of pretty stuff, but highly unlikely. For my own continuity reasons (read: spoilers) I can't go farther into why I think that ships as a ftl device is more likely than energy waves for communication.

Also, keep in mind that unless the system hypergates are within reasonably close distances to the habitated planets of the system they could still take some time to reach- how long does it take at currently available speeds to fly to even Mars or Venus at thier closest approach? Even assuming a doubling or tripling of current speeds it would still take perhaps months. Would Earth's hypergate be out by Luna somewhere- still a several day voyage? If you had to fly to the sun and slingshot it would still take even longer. If this is to be the case then I bet a lot of the tactics in interplanetary warfare would involve being able to disrupt the enemie's flight paths required for the slingshot method, or being able to impede thier acess to thier hypergates; unless they were reasonably close.

NebuchadnezzaR, on Oct 13 2005, 01:35 PM, said:

hmm, we also need to decide how faster-than-light communication works.View Post

I would say that any FTL communication would be done either by courier, or by sending radio signals through a hypergate (if applicable). Nothing faster-than-light would be possible in-system.
From reading though this and the beginning of this, it seems that quantum entanglement is not usable for FTL communication, without also using slower-than-light communication. With that out of the way, there is no currently known method of effectively sending any information faster than light, so any such messages would need to use the interstellar travel system. However, you could use entanglement and light-speed communication to encrypt messages, so there would be no trouble from intercepted transmissions.

Edwards

If a ship is captured then it is unlikely that the positions of all of the others will be revealed. In a theatre as big as a solar system there are likely to be many many ships- probably more than all of the planet's navies and merchant marines together, especially if more than one planet is habitated or if there are widely spaced stations- space is REALLY BIG! Compound that across multiple systems and the numbers start to get pretty big. In a tactical situation it is unlikely that any individual ship will have orders farther than it's own place in line- you capture the USS Heptologic and you're not going to know where the USS Jeromianible is, across the system.

The "Space is Really Big" paradigm is the best thing going for, and against, us. Is flanking still a viable strategy? Does it gain any noticeable advantage over not flanking? Or is every conceivable relative position simultaneously both flanking and being flanked by every other coneivable position? Would a defense fleet consist of enough ships to surround a planet at spaces of 100km and an altitude of 1000km, or would they just defend specific locations? Are one-shot-kills the norm, or out of the question? Is war a "take-no-prisoners" or a "kill none, take everyone prisoner" sort of deal? Can ramming be successful? Would an active radar require too much power to provide any sort of useful data beyond 1000km for a sustained time period? Do shields provide omnidirectional defense against incident projectiles, or are they auto-activated in a directed cone when a threat is sensed? If this can be design by shipwrights, does one provide a significant advantage, either in defense, energy conservation or the ability to communicate with friendlies over the other? Are there stray explosive projectiles from age-old conflicts whipping around the solar system just waiting to have their proximity sensors triggered?

All these questions and more are rendered utterly moot by my supreme combat plan that will decimate the entire opposing force at first contact. Cower in fear, Edwards, cower in fear.

Ramming would require so much hull reinforcement for the rammer that it would be very slow to deploy, perhaps giving the rammed enough time to move but I am not sure on that. The concequences of ramming would probably be lethally effective- the rammed ship would probably be dead in the water with a dead or mostly dead crew, the loss of atmospheric containment probably unrecoverable even with bulkhead closure/the Titanic concept. Recovery of lost atmosphere will probably overtax the life support systems, killing more than the initial hit, and gravity control (although that in and of itself is almost totally out of the question) would probably be ruined. Also the loss of crew space and storage will be taxing- this could be easily the most leathal ship-to-ship combat tactic. Conversely it will very likely be as damaging for the ramming ship, even with hull reinforcement. Secondary explosions and the concequences of not being able to separate from a disabled, exploding vessel stuck to the bow/ram of the ship will be terrible. It would take retro engines as large as the main thrusters that provide the initial ramming speed to separate at any speed. Ramming in some way could possible also be seen as an adjuctant to boarding parties- probably the easiest way to board, actually, assuming a special kind of ram was developed and was tactically efficient enough to be used (and was not effectively destroyed in the ramming process).

Flanking is going to be extremely complicated as there are 360 degrees on the fore & aft and the port & starboard and coincedent on the above and below to consider ships to approach from- not just a 2d plane as in on the ocean. This is totally unexplored area and what this exercize will ultimately depend on in my opinion- being able to open up our minds to three-D fleet tactics.

Prisoners will be hard to manage, assuming it is somehow effective to go chasing all of the large numbers of escape pods that a capital ship would have in all of the various directions they would fly off in.

Radar or advance direction will probably be useless outside of an immediate theatre area- no strategic radar. Radar pickets are the most likely in my opinion, or shadowing stealth ships using existing tech and perhaps compressed gas for manouvering as opposed to large heat cross-section thrusters.

Shields- someone please explain how this can work. If not they should not be a factor at all. More likely are specified forms of armor and paints or ceramic coatings to deflect versus particular kinds of weapons.

With the vastness of space we can probably rule out random unexploded projectiles except for mines, though clouds of dust and dense asteroid fields will be killers.

(Edit: added more thoughts on ramming)

This post has been edited by rmx256 : 13 October 2005 - 06:15 PM

rmx256, on Oct 13 2005, 07:00 PM, said:

Ramming would require so much hull reinforcement for the rammer that it would be very slow to deploy, perhaps giving the rammed enough time to move but I am not sure on that. The concequences of ramming would probably be lethally effective- the rammed ship would probably be dead in the water with a dead or mostly dead crew, the loss of atmospheric containment probably unrecoverable even with bulkhead closure/the Titanic concept.

So that means projectile weapons would have to be very massive and dense, and perhaps sharp, to be of any use whatsoever?

Will ships have "weak spots" that a close-range projectile could conceivably hit with slightly improved damage potential? Exhaust exit ports, maybe?

Quote

Flanking is going to be extremely complicated as there are 360 degrees on the fore & aft and the port & starboard and coincedent on the above and below to consider ships to approach from- not just a 2d plane as in on the ocean. This is totally unexplored area and what this exercize will ultimately depend on in my opinion- being able to open up our minds to three-D fleet tactics.

It's not unexplored, I don't think. Lestways, dogfights certainly take place in the open air, and many sci-fi books, such as Ender's Game, have some very good ideas.

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Prisoners will be hard to manage, assuming it is somehow effective to go chasing all of the large numbers of escape pods that a capital ship would have in all of the various directions they would fly off in.

What, at heart, is different in this case from naval warfare? Prisoners can certainly be taken there. Yes, escape pods are faster than life boats, but presumably spaceships are faster than ships. And besides, if the purpose of an escape pod is to allow one to be rescued...

Quote

Radar or advance direction will probably be useless outside of an immediate theatre area- no strategic radar. Radar pickets are the most likely in my opinion, or shadowing stealth ships using existing tech and perhaps compressed gas for manouvering as opposed to large heat cross-section thrusters.

So, detecting nearby objects with radar cross-sections below cosmic background levels (shaping is very important here: think F117-A Nighthawk), and guiding missiles to them?

Quote

Shields- someone please explain how this can work. If not they should not be a factor at all. More likely are specified forms of armor and paints or ceramic coatings to deflect versus particular kinds of weapons.

Magnetosphere: a large, rotating electromagnet. Whips ferous objects out of the way.

Or a jet of plasma (or other high-speed gaseous particles, or perhaps liquid with a high enough surface tension, like very small water droplets, or even a hail of solids like sand) at an angle so a projectile will be "blown" off-course and miss the target. Could also be used in conjunction with the magnetosphere to blast iron filings en masse perpendicularly to an incoming shot.

Quote

With the vastness of space we can probably rule out random unexploded projectiles except for mines, though clouds of dust and dense asteroid fields will be killers.
View Post

Ah, man! I was so looking forward to basing my entire strategy on advanced alien weapons of unknown design that just happened to have drifted into the theater many thousands of lightyears from where they were launched in a chaotic war long ago.

Qaanol, on Oct 13 2005, 06:20 PM, said:

So that means projectile weapons would have to be very massive and dense, and perhaps sharp, to be of any use whatsoever?View Post

Quite right- think lots of depleated uranium fired at extremely close range, though I am inclined personally to think more along the lines of missiles.

Qaanol, on Oct 13 2005, 06:20 PM, said:

Will ships have "weak spots" that a close-range projectile could conceivably hit with slightly improved damage potential? Exhaust exit ports, maybe?View Post

That's what fighters are for. The constant manouvering of capital ships to produce the smallest and most armored crosssection to each other versus capital ship classed ranged weaponry would make them almost required in my opinion. The easiest way to deliver signifigently damaging ordinance to anything other than the presented face of the enemy cap.ship is probably a smaller craft that is fast and manouverable enough to be able to disregard the presented face. Destroyer-type ships will be the most damaging capital ship, but also the mostlikely to be shot up and destroyed.

Qaanol, on Oct 13 2005, 06:20 PM, said:

It's not unexplored, I don't think. Lestways, dogfights certainly take place in the open air, and many sci-fi books, such as Ender's Game, have some very good ideas.View Post

Dogfighting will be much the same, but I am mostly refering to large ship combat.

Qaanol, on Oct 13 2005, 06:20 PM, said:

What, at heart, is different in this case from naval warfare? Prisoners can certainly be taken there. Yes, escape pods are faster than life boats, but presumably spaceships are faster than ships. And besides, if the purpose of an escape pod is to allow one to be rescued...View Post

Escape boats for oceanic ships pretty much stay where the ship sank. Escape ships from spacecraft will have to be launched to prevent thier destruction by an exploding ship, concievably forever moving untill they come across the gravity to capture them. Therefore escape ships will probably have limited manouvering capacity.

Qaanol, on Oct 13 2005, 06:20 PM, said:

Magnetosphere: a large, rotating electromagnet. Whips ferous objects out of the way.

Or a jet of plasma (or other high-speed gaseous particles, or perhaps liquid with a high enough surface tension, like very small water droplets, or even a hail of solids like sand) at an angle so a projectile will be "blown" off-course and miss the target. Could also be used in conjunction with the magnetosphere to blast iron filings en masse perpendicularly to an incoming shot..View Post

How is a large, rapidly spinning magnet not going to wreak havoc on onboard systems? Magnetic fields powerful enough to deflect high-speed ferrous particles (read:bullets) will probably rip a ship apart. Hails of solids will present great difficuty when it is time to leave the area thus shielded.

As usual, only my opinions.

http://www.schlockme...d/20020723.html <- I felt this was relevant

Qaanol, on Oct 13 2005, 06:43 PM, said:

The "Space is Really Big" paradigm is the best thing going for, and against, us. Is flanking still a viable strategy? Does it gain any noticeable advantage over not flanking? Or is every conceivable relative position simultaneously both flanking and being flanked by every other coneivable position? Would a defense fleet consist of enough ships to surround a planet at spaces of 100km and an altitude of 1000km, or would they just defend specific locations? Are one-shot-kills the norm, or out of the question? Is war a "take-no-prisoners" or a "kill none, take everyone prisoner" sort of deal? Can ramming be successful? Would an active radar require too much power to provide any sort of useful data beyond 1000km for a sustained time period? Do shields provide omnidirectional defense against incident projectiles, or are they auto-activated in a directed cone when a threat is sensed? If this can be design by shipwrights, does one provide a significant advantage, either in defense, energy conservation or the ability to communicate with friendlies over the other? Are there stray explosive projectiles from age-old conflicts whipping around the solar system just waiting to have their proximity sensors triggered?

All these questions and more are rendered utterly moot by my supreme combat plan that will decimate the entire opposing force at first contact. Cower in fear, Edwards, cower in fear.
View Post

Flanking is largely irrelevant, you have to assume that detection is as good in any direction as any other. The only advantage would be if weapon systems had blind spots, but I don't think ships in space should have such blind spots (unless they are very very maneuverable). If they do, you deserve to lose.

One-shot one kill I think is fairly reasonable, depending on the ordinance. A slug accelerated to 0.9 C is going to cause a lot of damage to a ship. The way to defend really is served by a very smart computer that calculates the path of incoming slugs and hits them with other slugs. Missiles of course can serve to defeat those systems more of the time. But then it becomes an odds game.

Prisoners on such a massive scale is wasteful, really, unless you can force them into labor for you. Assume a planetary war is a last resort for all the beans. You're not going to negotiate a peace treaty halfway through and exchange prisoners. Considering it also probably takes a particularly... bad.... kind of government or culture to engage in planetary war, I don't think they'll care that much about saving the lives of enemy soldiers.

Ramming I imagine would be fairly useless as an overall strategy, unless you can do so at the kinds of speeds over the kinds of distances that the rest of combat will be going on at. You don't really see naval ships ram each other anymore, you may notice. Space just makes the distances and speeds necessary far greater, and it's more efficient to just toss mass at each other from range.

In terms of efficiency, a cone of energy to deflect or destroy incoming projectiles is better than a constantly-active shield. This can be done just like a point-defence battery. Of course, detection is the first line of defense.

I really can't emphasize enough the importance of computers and (even limited) artificial intelligence for defensive capabilities of a ship. Unless you go for the win by superior odds (basically, kill lots of them before they kill all of you) defense, which while may prolong the attack from occurring because of increased costs, you really need to at least try to stop incoming projectiles. Simply put, humans can't do the math quick enough.

Stray explosives would only come into the overall equation for both offense and defense. You assume that a certain percentage of your overall forces will be lost to accident. I'd go as far to say 10% in combat. Maybe even more.

Why don't we figure out some basic rules and just start? The more we discuss possible strategies on here, the less a surprise the final result will be.