What is the issue with Aerospace? Why is it supposedly "unpopular" with players?

[Retry]

Space: It's VERY BIG!!!

Meanwhile, it takes a while to accelerate anywhere, and nobody has Inertial dampening or compensators.  That means your 5/8 or higher accel curve on your super-duper warship is subjecting the crew to enough gravity to damage their circulatory systems and make tripping in the corridor a hospital worthy event even for someone in fantastic shape, complete with "maybe won't survive the trip to sick bay".

Sustained ops have to be done within a reasonable range of one gee's acceleration, which becomes problematic if you're trying an interception against someone who can change vectors or speed.

Because space is big, it's also more than two dimensions, so you're trying to cover a spherical volume with your pursuit/patrol ships that is massive, has response times delayed by speed-of-light, and requires quite a lot of prediction being right to make it work. 

For Orbital distances, (the only place an intercept might actually work consistently) you have to be positioned over the right hemisphere when your opponent makes his landing runs (or takeoff runs).

otherwise the planet's in the way.

The scale would be ike trying to secure the U.S. Coastline using a couple of speedboats-a successful detection and interception in the Gulf requires a concentrated search and knowledge ahead of tie, or the narco-sub's going to land their load of  Cocaine somewhere on the coastline.

Mechanics of jumpship travel and the mechanics of ballistics say that an attacker can already come from damned near any direction and the detection grids, being focused on 'easiest approaches' because resources are FINITE including the resource known as "guys to watch the screen at headquarters who have enough experience to have a clue what they're seeing and enough devotion to watch it instead of playing Space-Tetris because they're bored."

so interception LOOKS easy-assuming the other side wants to be cooperative about letting it happen, but it's not necessarily going to BE easy even if your fleet is made of Leviathan III's.

If there's one thing that Terra Invicta has taught me, it's that intercepting an enemy fleet en route to your planet is... surprisingly straightforward.  Especially if your cruising acceleration and delta-V is comparable.  Just gotta put your fleet in LEO and slingshot to 'em.  The hostile fleet has to slow down enough to enter the atmosphere instead of face-planting into the planet... but you don't.  Earth-like planet at LEO?  You make a full rotation about the planet in 2 hours; that's basically nothing in terms of space.  As long as someone on the planet has eyes on the approaching fleet, from LEO you're well positioned to counteract any maneuvering your OPRFOR may make from deep space by adjusting your own orbital plane, which takes much less thrust, time and delta-V than whatever your opponent is doing (unless they're already at LEO themselves, but then you've failed your intercept). 

[CarcosanDawn]

I did mention SDS in my post - space defense system.

Having ground-to-orbit weapons that can make a WARSHIP FLEET think twice certainly will make an invasion fleet think twice... not sure that helps ground battles be terribly relevant, except in limited war cases like raids...

... which I already mentioned you don't really need a justification to not have aerospace in. They're just not around when that company of mechs booped in and out.

[RifleMech]

Or rarely deployed.  You wouldn't want to risk your flight corps on just any unidentified inbound dropper.  The planes, themselves are also expensive to produce, so replacing them wouldn't be that easy.  And, as has been pointed out in another thread questioning maintenance, Fighter Craft are maintenance Hogs, meaning that some may be stuck in a hangar at an inopportune moment because a circuit board is on the fritz, or the fuel line isn't injecting right. 

Actually, you would send your flight corps on unidentified droppers. At the minimum they'd gain flight time and experience. At best, they'd engage an enemy before they get to the ground.

Yes, fighters are expensive but building them shouldn't be the problem.  Granted unit has cost of purchase, maintenance, and training but aircraft usually have higher maintenance like you said. Keeping them in flying shape should help keep them rare as they don't want to have a problem and crash or be stuck in space.

Training should also take longer as you don't want trainees crashing valuable planes. I do think that conventional fighters would be built in higher numbers though. Aerospace fighters should be for more skilled pilots.

(snip)
And, this goes back to the lore needing a bit of a touch-up.  Would people be okay with that, though, in light of the 1st and 2nd Succession War source books that came out recently?  You want warships in BT, they really need a presence in the fiction other than key moments in major wars throughout BT history.  I'm not strictly drawn to BattleTech for the Historical Battles.  I don't mind playing in historical eras, but the big draw is generating a custom force for the period and seeing how far they get, and what kind of impact they may have in the back yard of history in BT.  That will be true of Warships, Aerospace and Dropships just as much as my star Mech Force and the hero characters I have in them.

I can see how easily the IS lost their warships. If they loose their shipyards you can't build more or maintain what you have, and the IS did that. And they didn't make more do to the expanse and because they weren't really needed. The ground based anti-ship defenses were pretty much gone as well. If they weren't, the IS would have been encouraged to restart their warship programs far sooner. And that would  have encouraged more strikes against shipyards, which could have ended jumpship production.

So, one thing I'll come back to as a problem I have with Aero game rules is the performance dichotomy between units in the air and in space, and units on the ground. 

While I did state that I like the concept behind the range bands and the scale of hexes for the different low- and high-altitude/space theaters of play, that's for a very explicit cross-over reason. 

I'm one of those people who look at the short engagement ranges on the ground and take them at face value and have worked out a whole slough of reasons as to how that works.  Aerospace units are using the same weapons, especially fighters, as well as the same armor, and have probably adopted the same active defensive maneuver algorithms that make it effective on the ground.  That means to me, that they should be shooting at each other at matching, dangerously close ranges.  This would be hard to emulate while they're moving at speeds that see them clear whole ground maps in a matter of a fraction of a ground turn.  But, I think it can be done. 

So, part of the turn-off is consistency in performance across the games.
(snip)

The range and consistency bothers me too. I get added range with height but it should apply to all units and those units should still be fighting at dangerously close ranges.

Speeds are also an issue. Right now, if feels like the Space Shuttle engaging in a dog fight or ground attack while the orbital boosters are going at max thrust. I can see a high altitude bombing run but at those speeds it shouldn't be easy to hit the target and it should be very dangerous to strafe or strike. And that doesn't get to how fast props and airships move.

There is also pilot death to think about.  When a mech goes down the pilot survives.   When an ASF goes down there is a good chance the pilot is lost as well.  Even higher in space after a losing engagement.

Good point.

you can smash lots of shit flat with air strikes and artillery, but if you're trying to take something of VALUE, you need boots on the ground that do less.

Yes, I said LESS.

why? because whatever it is you're fighting over, if you destroy it, you have wasted megabucks on nothing.

Damage it? not so much, but if you want it intact enough to fix, you're going to have to put men in harm's way to take it.

Denying something to your enemy has a value of it's own.

Make a really expensive ground to ~orbit setup being a light SCL pointed up.  From the new errata here, a defending energy weapon emplacement is tuned to the local atmosphere so it doesn't get the range reduction.

So the SCL/1 is firing a 10 standard pt shot every minute which will keep hostile cargo/pirate Dropships from wanting to be overhead near it.  A Warship will accept the light damage from that weapon, and bombard the general location.  The SCL are not that expensive (220k-450k), so the limitation would be tech ability to build/maintain them.

That's my point. IS militaries will work on keeping and developing warships because they can shrug off those attacks.

This lets you have pirate raids affecting the rest of the planet since the orbital defense is only in the most critical locations, a reason for wanting to capture the planetary capital (it has the SCL defense), and an assault still being able to go in (its Dropships are armored enough to take the hits).

Now all we need is TPTB making a variety of canon bunkers mounting the SCL/1 (and the other two types).  You'd need armor, comms, quarters (for the tech crews, gunners, troops to protect it, etc), and other fun stuff.  Or fan designs placed elsewhere.

Attackers can strike other parts of the planet now. The thing is sometimes the only targets worth attacking is the planetary capital. If the dropships can't get in to even drop troops they have to do so further away. The problems with landing further away is the distance. Pirates and Raiders want to get in and out quickly, not get into a running gun battles. Landing further away gives the defenders time to prepare their defenses. The distance also allows reinforcements to arrive while they're moving more slowly with their loot. Those are things any attacker does not want.

[Retry]

Having ground-to-orbit weapons that can make a WARSHIP FLEET think twice certainly will make an invasion fleet think twice... not sure that helps ground battles be terribly relevant, except in limited war cases like raids...

No.  The premise is that orbital defenses is common enough to protect key installations like big cities, but not so common that one can readily protect every molehill on, say, Albion.

IOW, an orbital battery around Avalon City is going to do a good job protecting Avalon City from orbital fire, but it will not do a good job at protecting Jameston from orbital fire, and will not protect the city from an invasion force landing 'Mechs outside the firing arc of the Avalon City defenses in the Grand Avalon Mountains and bum-rushing the capital.

[Cannonshop]

We have examples of in system jumps being used.

So yes space may be big, but a Warship properly utilized solves a lot of that problem.

Especially since on the defense a Warship knows where any inbound invaders are going for with rather rare exception.

Add in orbital bombardment from a rules perspective has not been Warship exclusive since at least since Battlespace and while yes it may be a consideration, it is clearly not the biggest threat they pose to the ground game.

In-system jumps solve a lot of problems if you're outside the jump limit, remeber: Zenith and Nadir aren't the only jump points, they're just the closest STABLE ones.

followed up by L1 points.

Now, that means you've got minutes to hours of light delay between emergence and detection.

It also means your in-system jumps can range from "very close' to "kinda far away' but only a stationary target's going to be there when you arrive.

(Hint: Sensor nets are still confined to real-world issues, such as the speed of light, and at those distances the delay is minutes, to hours, to potentially days.)

the writers sometimes forget the biggest use of those massive SLDF cargo fractions, is being able to emerge from OUTSIDE the limit on any angle you want, then burn in from a direction the local defense can't afford to monitor fully.

[CarcosanDawn]

No.  The premise is that orbital defenses is common enough to protect key installations like big cities, but not so common that one can readily protect every molehill on, say, Albion.

IOW, an orbital battery around Avalon City is going to do a good job protecting Avalon City from orbital fire, but it will not do a good job at protecting Jameston from orbital fire, and will not protect the city from an invasion force landing 'Mechs outside the firing arc of the Avalon City defenses in the Grand Avalon Mountains and bum-rushing the capital.

That also means it won't interfere with warships firing over the horizon with orbital bombardment missiles to silence them...

either the whole planet is protected in every arc, or the WarShips can use the planet's own mass against the defense installations by hiding in their blindspots and firing missiles. It's not like nuclear missiles can only fly in a straight line, even today.

So to summarize, either the orbital defenses don't have blindspots (ergo making them just as lethal against an invasion force) or a WarShip can bomb from the blindspot.

[Retry]

In-universe, capital-scale missiles are rather lousy at orbital bombardment, especially compared to other weapon options (Cap Lasers and ballistics).  They're really heavy and inaccurate and don't deal much orbit-to-ground damage for that weight.  Unless it's a nuke you're not going to accomplish much of anything (believe me, I've tried).  Plus it only works if you have complete information: That battery is definitely there, not here, there is no hidden batteries located here, this silo is totally not a fake 10k C-Bill chunk of ferrocrete meant to waste your fire...

Putting aside any retcons we could make to the setting, even in the current setting, with the rules as it exists right now, the defender has a good chunk of options at their disposal if they have a nonzero budget.  Having been on both sides, it's not nearly as easy as you make it sound.

[monbvol]

In-system jumps solve a lot of problems if you're outside the jump limit, remeber: Zenith and Nadir aren't the only jump points, they're just the closest STABLE ones.

followed up by L1 points.

Now, that means you've got minutes to hours of light delay between emergence and detection.

It also means your in-system jumps can range from "very close' to "kinda far away' but only a stationary target's going to be there when you arrive.

(Hint: Sensor nets are still confined to real-world issues, such as the speed of light, and at those distances the delay is minutes, to hours, to potentially days.)

the writers sometimes forget the biggest use of those massive SLDF cargo fractions, is being able to emerge from OUTSIDE the limit on any angle you want, then burn in from a direction the local defense can't afford to monitor fully.

Which all said and done still translates to Warships still being far better at intercepting an invader than any other unit and conversely being better able to deliver ground forces intact.

Which is a far bigger problem for the ground game than orbital bombardment.

Or do I have to ask who are you and what you've done with the real Cannonshop?

You know the one that has spend many a posts espousing how Warships in Battletech are more akin to U-boats than line of battle behemoths?

The rules and fluff do frankly show how there are already plenty of ways to counter orbital bombardment and how Battletech Warships are vulnerable while doing it.

[CarcosanDawn]

I feel like 1 and 2SW would've turned out differently if it was "easy" to defend against warship attacks.

The unit that extincted the warship (by destroying all the warship factories) was ... the warship.

My hunch is that landing ground troops will always be harder than bombing from orbit, because you have to get equally close to the planet. The only benefit is that the ground troops can move across the ground and be dropped somewhere else...

... except so can basically any drone, missile, Aerospace fighter (well, at low altitude anyways).

The times when it is more efficient to drop ground troops than assail the target from orbit are:
1) you want to capture the thing intact (it is important)
2) it has a magic shield generator that prevents bombardment if you come out of hyperspace too close- er, I mean works against spacecraft but not ground units
3) it has a magic surface-to-orbit weapon emplacement that can hit ships dropping ground things that skim across the ground when those things are weapons, but not when they are troops.

[DevianID]

I mean, it was brought up earlier, but truly bombing the planet isnt a job for a warship.  A warship can do it, but its inefficient to put warships in ASF range of the planet.  Boomer dropships were used for that, and they didnt stat up the dropships that did the nuclear blasting cause the 1st + 2nd succession wars never really got stats for how hellish the nukes were beyond 'bad enough for the rest of the game to exist.'  There isnt much value to bombing things gameplay wise, cause like was pointed out you dont get to take what you bomb, and bombing with less then nuclear yields are pretty inefficient when you have to cross the stars to put a rain drop (conventional bomb) in the ocean (planets infrastructure). 

Using just in game assets, the big deal is dropships orbital dropping mechs.  These seem to get to the surface with only the arrival turn being vulnerable to AA fire, so its a quick insertion and greatly favors mechs (which the universe likes).  Since ASF arnt good at chasing down dropships in orbit, we have a game scenario for playing space combat, where defending dropships and short range fighters try and intercept the dropships before the orbital insertion, after which point the attacking dropships back up or go to a moon or something.  The exfil of ground troops in the lore often is uncontested, even with the clans.  They did token chases, but seeing as planet after planet fought the clans and then packed up and left, the lore has included X token defenses of whatever type being enough to allow dropships to flee even under fire.

Warships are fun to include, but when I play a game for space its focused around the orbital drop, for the rest of the game on the ground to happen.  So 1 warship max per side, with 3-6 dropship groups and 3-6 fighter groups, using battleforce/the free alpha strike warship/dropship stats to make playing 12ish units per side manageable.  Smaller games with 1 player character ship I play like the millennium falcon, more or less the hero dropship of the campaign doing a blockade run fending off fighters.  For the hero ship of a campaign, the players can modifiy their dropship like they can modify a mech, for that 'she aint much to look at but she's got it where it counts' feeling.  I use Leopards a lot for this, trying to keep to 4 PC mech units.  The leopard featured heavily in MW5 and HBS battletech, so I can pull up video clips of it to show the players what the ship is like to try and 'sell' the space side, but honestly the space side is super neglected.  I ignored it entirely for the clan campaign cause it wasn't interesting enough for the group of clan PC mechwarriors.

[Cannonshop]

Which all said and done still translates to Warships still being far better at intercepting an invader than any other unit and conversely being better able to deliver ground forces intact.

Which is a far bigger problem for the ground game than orbital bombardment.

Or do I have to ask who are you and what you've done with the real Cannonshop?

You know the one that has spend many a posts espousing how Warships in Battletech are more akin to U-boats than line of battle behemoths?

The rules and fluff do frankly show how there are already plenty of ways to counter orbital bombardment and how Battletech Warships are vulnerable while doing it.

Generally, you're right.  There are a few narrow applications where a Dropship can play the role-but they're at close orbital and that's...really it.
Yet!

yet we have authors and devs literally insisting that a dropship is adequate for patrolling a star system.

So sometimes, I try to figure out where in the hell they're getting that idea.

and you're right-it doesn't compute, except in the developer's studio.

but that goes back to how thoroughly Naval/Aviation really has been neglected.

However, that said, warships don't make good defending assets-they're stronger players playing offense...but not as bombardment platforms.

and yeah, that CAN impact the ground game, if the conflict is big enough.

Very few conflicts in Battletech actually get big enough for that to be a factor, not even the Clan invasion really got that big, and the Can-spawned Clanners Brought warships.

I think we've beat the REASON to death in here-the level of neglect means the devs never really considered how any of this would actually work, beyond "Do the formulas add up and can we put it on two six sided dice?"

That is, Nobody, not FASA, or FanPro, or Catalyst, actually tries to think about this stuff Strategically.

as in, "What Strategies, given how these things operate, would or could actually work??"

because if they did, yes, indeed, it would impact the ground game, and that's WITHOUT needing orbital bombardment to do so.

That aversion is probably a core reason they have been trying to slowly make warships extinct, but without admitting that they're trying to make warships extinct.

(the real problem, is that while Warships are BETTER at it, the same basic concepts work with jumpship/Dropship combos, which they have also not really examined or investigated, if they had, we wouldn't have gotten PWS at all.)

The upshot is, you can't defend a star system-not entirely.  You can defend specific points within it, but that costs a HELL of a lot of effort, because any enemy fleet-in-being is a threat to your garrison or your occupation forces, a threat to their logistics, a threat to communications, and a threat to the forces themselves...and that fleet-in-being has the initiative, they don't HAVE to give you a stand up fight you can win.

One of the things you may have noticed in Liberation of Terra, and the other invasion (Operation Scour)  is that the Sol system's defenses largely didn't need fire ships to overcome them.  They could be rendered irrelevant just by leveraging fuel supplies and cargo fractions.  At the same time, the defenders invested in a structure that simply doesn't work-and that's whether you're talking Amaris, Comstar, Word of Blake, or Devlin Stone.

in every single case, they used their aerospace and naval assets as badly as humanly possible, in every case, they invested in 'defenses' that were overcome at great cost...and didn't even need to be engaged to render them irrelevant.

it's because, sadly, the writers really don't think about how the mechanics of their setting actually play out.  This translates to a sense, among the players who pay attention, that there's no point to Aerospace, no reason to demand consistent rules and nothing to recommend it beyond some cartoonish Anime Recreation scenes.

which is why it doesn't sell-there's no commitment to making it good, so the gamers don't buy the product.

[CarcosanDawn]

I think the architecture for system defense is in place: jump points.

When at war, declare one point "open" for traffic, and just scatter trash at the other points - people jumping into the other points will misjump because a starship and a crumpled soda can interact badly when decelerating from FTL/materializing into existence.

Then, you will need sweeps/patrols (probably from drone ships, like the old SDS Caspar system) to find and monitor the "pirate points" (which are, I think, kept infinitely and deliberately ambiguous) and a heavy bastion/monitor presence at the "open" jump point.

Once the threat of war subsides (or deep into the core systems of a state) you can relax the amount of space trash you dump onto the other jump points.

[AlphaMirage]

The problem is that you can and should come in via non-standard points (which are infinite) when attacking a planet. That is unless you are trying an infiltration mission (putting mechs in a modded freighter). This keeps your jump ship 'safer' than via a normal point and encourages patrols in your outer system.

[monbvol]

I think the architecture for system defense is in place: jump points.

When at war, declare one point "open" for traffic, and just scatter trash at the other points - people jumping into the other points will misjump because a starship and a crumpled soda can interact badly when decelerating from FTL/materializing into existence.

Then, you will need sweeps/patrols (probably from drone ships, like the old SDS Caspar system) to find and monitor the "pirate points" (which are, I think, kept infinitely and deliberately ambiguous) and a heavy bastion/monitor presence at the "open" jump point.

Once the threat of war subsides (or deep into the core systems of a state) you can relax the amount of space trash you dump onto the other jump points.

Just random space junk floating around isn't that big of a deal as Warships do annihilate small chunks of stuff jumping in without detrimental effect.

Also stations and PWS patrols only work because the authors do keep thinking 'point'.

The Earth Moon L1 point at it's smallest is big enough for a pretty sizable fleet* to jump in and still be outside the weapons ranges of any defense stations positioned where gravity is too strong to safely jump around the point.

This is made all the more impossible once you start talking Zenith/Nadir.

*I'd have to find the thread where the volume was calculated but yeah it was more than enough to handle dozens of Warships coming in at the same time.  Possibly hundreds.

[SteelRaven]

Warships have already been established in the BTU as potential planet killers (depending on their load out) orbital bombardment has been a thing in fluff, fiction and has been brought up as a strategy in the forum both in jest and seriously multiple times so saying Warships are easily to counter or not as big of a threat is already a misnomer.

If you want to bring Warships into the meta of the game game, this needs to be addressed.

Strategic vs tactical has been mentioned many times and it's true; Battletech is very much a tactical game. Though TW has added books to 'zoom out' to the strategic level, the meat of the game is the tactical side from the ground up.

Battlespace could be it's own game on the strategic level, Aerospace it's own with the radar map but then you need to address how these games don't divorce themselves from another by being their own thing.

Then your back to the original problem of someone playing Battlespace just playing area denial for planetary orbit thus denying the tactical game that it's built on.

It's a balancing act that's hard to get in Battletech as Warships where original written as this force from a bygone age. Now warships are back, plugging them into the ground game without those ships becoming a beast is a challenge. Not to mention that sci-fi loves the 'do everything' ship so you need to justify Warships not replacing existing ships the universe has been built on.

I personally think less is more (hey, it's better than none) but getting the balance right is still a chore.

[idea weenie]

the issue there is that Subcapital weaponry like the SCL1 didn't exist until 3073.. and didn't become available to non-WOB factions until the mid 3080's.

so it doesn't really fix the bombardment issue.

You'd have to make a lower-tech version of the SCL/1, much larger in mass (and cost).  A Primitive version.

the Peacemaker Missile system (basically a ground launched Killer Whale Capital Missile with a nuclear warhead) becomes available around 3056, which works a little better.. but proliferation of such systems to various worlds isn't going to be fast,  plus you have the issue with using nuclear weaponry so close to a planet. (Article I of the ares convention prohibiting nuclear use within 75,000km of a planet being one of the few parts of the conventions that both the IS and the clans seem to actually follow.) conventional warheads would be an answer there, but still runs into the issues of proliferation.

Conventional warheads would have to do enough damage, and you'd need several of them.

Killer Whale missiles are recovered in 3051, so you'd still have decades where a planet is relatively undefended.  At least if you can recover them, Killer Whale Launchers and their ammo are very cheap.  Tech Manual 6th printing page 292 has a Killer Whale Launcher at 150k C-Bills, or 3/4 the price of a PPC.  A single Killer Whale missile is only 20,000 C-Bills, or 2/3 the price of a ton of LRM ammo.

My 3 C-Bills;

1.) Make Warships vulnerable. I know people love the idea of Warships being near invulnerable war machines but considering the number of Battleships lost to fighters in history, it will increase the value of Aerospace fighters in orbit and risk for such a gun platform to enter orbit.

2.) Make them expensive, in terms of money and personnel needed. I know the game already does this to some extent and people just ignore it so they can have Leviathans duke it out in theater but I still think it's important for the in universe reason why ground battles are still the most important aspect of keeping a planet. You just can't afford to have a warship in every orbit.

3.) Overkill is a thing. Dropships with Aerospace fighters can cover allot of task in the BTU, a Warship ready to orbital strike a city shouldn't be plan A when a Steiner Scout Lance can murder the opposing forces hilariously without turning the city into a creator with orbital guns.

1) Warships are vulnerable.  Take any canon Warship, deploy 1% of its mass in ASF, and have just the Warship fight the ASF.  Chances are the Warship will die.

2) The KF Core is expensive, such that all the rest of the equipment is ~10% of the total cost.  Price out a Warship and see how much of that cost is due to the KF Core/DS Collars/LiF Battery and Warship support systems, vs the rest of the Warship.  You also have the Warship losing almost half its mass to its KF core, while combat Dropships and ASF can devote 100% of their mass to tactical fun stuff.

3) Maneuvering to strike a city will take time, and the Warship will need to hover over that city in order to fire more than two shots.  Assuming you are 7 space hexes (18 km/) up, that is a footprint of ~126 km.  LEO velocity for Earth is ~7.8 km/second.  Dividing 126 by 7.8 means the Warship will be overhead for only 16 seconds.  So the Warship might get 1-2 shots off before it is out of arc to fire at the selected mapsheet.  If you want more turns, you need to burn fuel at the tactical rate to hold position against 1G (or whatever the local planet has), and have a decent helmsman who can thrust the ship out of the gravity well in case of trouble (with a bonus to this roll based on the Warship's Thrust rating?).

Attackers can strike other parts of the planet now. The thing is sometimes the only targets worth attacking is the planetary capital. If the dropships can't get in to even drop troops they have to do so further away. The problems with landing further away is the distance. Pirates and Raiders want to get in and out quickly, not get into a running gun battles. Landing further away gives the defenders time to prepare their defenses. The distance also allows reinforcements to arrive while they're moving more slowly with their loot. Those are things any attacker does not want.

Actually, I'd see the pirates attacking other towns and cities.  If the planet is important enough to have a Primitive SCL defending it, I'd expect the planet is also prosperous enough to have towns and cities too far away from the capital to be protected by the Primitive SCL.  Exceptions would be where the critical location is something like a Germanium mine or fully automated Mech factory.

This also allows for various politicking, lowered tax rates (due to being outside the protection radius), mindsets of 'the people in the city don't know what we have to deal with during pirate attacks', 'the people attacked by pirates don't know how long it takes us to get there because the bridge was washed out last week', etc.

That also means it won't interfere with warships firing over the horizon with orbital bombardment missiles to silence them...

either the whole planet is protected in every arc, or the WarShips can use the planet's own mass against the defense installations by hiding in their blindspots and firing missiles. It's not like nuclear missiles can only fly in a straight line, even today.

So to summarize, either the orbital defenses don't have blindspots (ergo making them just as lethal against an invasion force) or a WarShip can bomb from the blindspot.

The Orbital defenses won't be shooting down the Capital missiles.  The on-site and nearby AMS systems will be shooting at the Capital Missiles.  Now those on-site and nearby AMS systems are potentially vulnerable to an attacker landing an army over the horizon to march and try to smash them.  But at least the capital doesn't have to deal with a ship right overhead firing energy weapons, NAC, and NGauss freely into its skyscrapers.

[CarcosanDawn]

Can AMS engage capital missiles? Or, point defense, same diff.

If you're building a warship's worth of PD and capital weapons to fire up from the surface, why not just put those weapons in orbit on a monitor (i.e. no-KF drive but still armed and armored) and give them greater range, cover, and maneuverability? After all, if they can wax a warship without getting waxed in return... then just put them on a warship.

It is hard for me to believe that a stationary system will so thoroughly deny a mobile system of equivalent tech level that you have to land *ground troops* to remove that denial asset.

Think of planets like islands in a sea: if the coastal defense systems can keep a DDG or CG from striking it with missiles, what suddenly makes LHAs and LPDs able to get close enough to land ACVs?

[monbvol]

Can AMS engage capital missiles? Or, point defense, same diff.

If you're building a warship's worth of PD and capital weapons to fire up from the surface, why not just put those weapons in orbit on a monitor (i.e. no-KF drive but still armed and armored) and give them greater range, cover, and maneuverability? After all, if they can wax a warship without getting waxed in return... then just put them on a warship.

It is hard for me to believe that a stationary system will so thoroughly deny a mobile system of equivalent tech level that you have to land *ground troops* to remove that denial asset.

Think of planets like islands in a sea: if the coastal defense systems can keep a DDG or CG from striking it with missiles, what suddenly makes LHAs and LPDs able to get close enough to land ACVs?

It is technically an optional rule for AMS to engage capital missiles and have any effect upon said capital missiles under current rule sets.

[RifleMech]

By definition of my suggestion, the planetary defenses would be common enough to make bombardment via Warship high-risk.  Sending a multi-billion C-Bill warship to blast an important multi-million C-Bill factory if you're likely to be blasted by a million C-Bill orbital defense array (Capital and sub-capital weapons are surprisingly cheap C-Bill wise).  Even if the chance of failure during the bombardment is low, like 1% per engagement, those are bad odds and not something you'd like to do regularly if you'd wish to keep your fleet.

Alternatively you send a Dropship near the objective to the surface and send a ground team on foot.  Each 'Mech only costs millions, many orders of magnitude cheaper than an entire Warship, so most can afford losses in pursuit of the objective.  Even in a worse-case scenario where you lose the entire Dropship due to incomplete information, that hundred-million C-Bill ship is still magnitudes cheaper than a Warship, so the loss is still far more palatable, though still not pleasant.

That's the problem. Stronger defenses result in stronger attacks. If the factory can't be captured or raided, you can still deny it to your enemy. If warships aren't available, there's nukes. I do think there should be more SDS and WS, but if there's too many Battletech becomes a space game.

I would like more but too much changes too much. The retcon wouldn't just be there being more SDS and WS. There's also Wolf's Dragoons wouldn't have left their warships behind when they arrived in the Inner Sphere. If they didn't leave them there wouldn't be a need to go get them, so how would Jaime Wolf's son be killed? And then there's Comstar and Word of Blake. They wouldn't have hid their warships and shipyards.

So basically the less magical shield version of:
(snip)

I can see that happening. Not all the time but I can see it happening.

No.  The premise is that orbital defenses is common enough to protect key installations like big cities, but not so common that one can readily protect every molehill on, say, Albion.

IOW, an orbital battery around Avalon City is going to do a good job protecting Avalon City from orbital fire, but it will not do a good job at protecting Jameston from orbital fire, and will not protect the city from an invasion force landing 'Mechs outside the firing arc of the Avalon City defenses in the Grand Avalon Mountains and bum-rushing the capital.

I imagine that's the way it used to be and that they've been either destroyed in all the wars or fallen to neglect and a lack of parts.

Actually, I'd see the pirates attacking other towns and cities.  If the planet is important enough to have a Primitive SCL defending it, I'd expect the planet is also prosperous enough to have towns and cities too far away from the capital to be protected by the Primitive SCL.  Exceptions would be where the critical location is something like a Germanium mine or fully automated Mech factory.

This also allows for various politicking, lowered tax rates (due to being outside the protection radius), mindsets of 'the people in the city don't know what we have to deal with during pirate attacks', 'the people attacked by pirates don't know how long it takes us to get there because the bridge was washed out last week', etc.

Pirates do attack smaller towns. The thing is one attack can wipe out a town. Enough towns get wiped out and there won't be anyone living in rural areas. That leaves the bigger towns, cities, and installations as targets and with increase ground defenses you get increased space attackers. How long would it be before Pirates used capital missiles to bombard the SDS? How SDS will die not do to weapons fire but lack of money for upkeep, or were stripped by the pirates because the locals surrendered rather than risk being nuked? Worse, how many pirates will set up shop on the planet and use the planet's SDS for their own defense?

The Orbital defenses won't be shooting down the Capital missiles.  The on-site and nearby AMS systems will be shooting at the Capital Missiles.  Now those on-site and nearby AMS systems are potentially vulnerable to an attacker landing an army over the horizon to march and try to smash them.  But at least the capital doesn't have to deal with a ship right overhead firing energy weapons, NAC, and NGauss freely into its skyscrapers.

There's how many standard scale weapons that can be used for anti-missile fire?

[monbvol]

There's how many standard scale weapons that can be used for anti-missile fire?

For the sake of clarity since we're talking game rules I will point out this too is an optional rule.

Even if we assume it is in use the ranges of what a standard scale weapon can cover at any given time versus how big space is means you'd need to put a prohibitive number of defense satelites/stations over a world to actually defend it.

[Retry]

I think the architecture for system defense is in place: jump points.

When at war, declare one point "open" for traffic, and just scatter trash at the other points - people jumping into the other points will misjump because a starship and a crumpled soda can interact badly when decelerating from FTL/materializing into existence.

Then, you will need sweeps/patrols (probably from drone ships, like the old SDS Caspar system) to find and monitor the "pirate points" (which are, I think, kept infinitely and deliberately ambiguous) and a heavy bastion/monitor presence at the "open" jump point.

Once the threat of war subsides (or deep into the core systems of a state) you can relax the amount of space trash you dump onto the other jump points.

The entire Inner Sphere simply does not have nearly enough trash to cover even one standard Zenith/Nadir Jump Point as described, not least because Jump Points aren't actually points but fairly big regions of space where the net gravitational force is close to zero.  You could move Jupiter onto the Nadir "point" and it would barely budge the needle.

[RifleMech]

For the sake of clarity since we're talking game rules I will point out this too is an optional rule.

Even if we assume it is in use the ranges of what a standard scale weapon can cover at any given time versus how big space is means you'd need to put a prohibitive number of defense satelites/stations over a world to actually defend it.

Yes, but how many are there?

Around an entire world? True. But you won't need as many just to defend vital areas against missiles.

[Cannonshop]

I think the architecture for system defense is in place: jump points.

When at war, declare one point "open" for traffic, and just scatter trash at the other points - people jumping into the other points will misjump because a starship and a crumpled soda can interact badly when decelerating from FTL/materializing into existence.

Then, you will need sweeps/patrols (probably from drone ships, like the old SDS Caspar system) to find and monitor the "pirate points" (which are, I think, kept infinitely and deliberately ambiguous) and a heavy bastion/monitor presence at the "open" jump point.

Once the threat of war subsides (or deep into the core systems of a state) you can relax the amount of space trash you dump onto the other jump points.

The problem you're missing, I think, is that you didn't fully read the description of what a Jump Point IS.

Out past a certain point, in any given direction, and your jumpship works just fine.  The Zenith/Nadir and L1 points?

They're merely the closest stable points in a system-that is, the shortest transit distance from a stable (there all the time or on a regular schedule) gravitational null.

Anywhere OUTSIDE that? and it's just a matter of how many more hours you want to spend burning, and your fuel fraction.

Ever notice how big the cargo fractions are on Star League ships?  Yeah, that's not party favors, that's reserve fuel bunkerage, because it's bloody obvious that you don't go in through the front door and announce yourself if you want to catch the other guy with his pants down...because Space! it's BIG!!! and Detection grids and ranges are SMALL.

Lemme put it another way, imagine a dark, moonless night on the prairie, with no light pollution (or very little) from the faraway houses of the city, and you have a flashlight, and some asshat is out there with you, and he has a gun.

do you turn the flashlight on?

Pro for turning it on-within the light cone, you see better, and if you're in close enough proximity, you can flash it in his eyes.

Con against it: He can see you coming and knows exactly where you are when you turn on the flashlight-and he can stand outside the illuminated area.

That's active sensors and deep space.  Great resolution within a reasonable range, at the cost of skylining the emitter for incoming hostile fire.

This is made even WORSE because Light isn't instant.  a sensitive enough reciever and you get to interpret images minutes, hours, even days after it was relevant.

and if your receiver isn't sensitive enough, then you don't get THAT much warning.

Now, there are canon combos that can get around this to an extent, like putting a satellite with an HPG out there to relay what your early warning sats are seeing, or using a Black Box (before BB's were nerfed into uselessness).

But, that's limited-because you need a lot of them to cover the volume of just your commercial shipping routes.

Without detection, there is no interception,without interception, there is no defense.

The compromise is to concentrate on the easiest approaches-your "Jump Points"-the stable ones, which are still big enough (if you READ THE TEXT) to easily accomodate a War fleet without overlap...at the closest reliable approach.  Not the ONLY  reliable approach, just the closest reliable emergence point from hyperspace.

Which an attacker doesn't need to use, unless he feels like it, or he's got a food/water/air/fuel shortage problem.

This is what makes System Defense very difficult-difficult enough, that the writers ignore the elephant in the room created by their own fictional physics and model everything on Salamis or close coastal riverine warfare-which is the only way a Dropship can make any sense as a SYSTEM defense asset, as opposed to a close orbit planetary defense asset.

How close? Luna would be too far away for a triple of Castrums to defend to that orbital plane...or even the stable L1 point between Luna and Earth.

They don't get useful until you're already IN close orbit of one body, or the other.

not even as a deterrent against amatuers.

That, is if you actually read the physics as written in Battletech's magic system regarding spaceflight, and do basic velocity and time calcs that you had to learn in High School (well, if you took Calculus in high school, or junior college, or because it looked REALLY interesting and the correspondence course was cheap.)

This, in turn, is because of the magic system as detailed.  non-jump vessels go at newtonian to relativistic speeds only-and they have to use the rocket equation to do it, no reactionless thrust, no inertial dampening, no handwavium artificial gravity or other means to shift that, and no FTL sensors to give you enough early warning to manage a long range intercept.

and they didn't include anything within the tech magic system as a canon workaround.  No early warning sats with FTL capability  so that you get real-time location on an arriving vessel, no hyperspace telescopes, nada.

Do you know why so many SLDF warships had the bulk of their weapons mounted side-and-aft? because on approach, the engine nozzles are coming at the target-they have to, it's the only way to slow down-and you're pointing the bulk of your guns at the target you're approaching, instead of into interstellar space.

because Constant Thrust does not equal constant velocity outside of a gravity well.  Turning off the engines and you're no longer accelerating (at least, if you're not pointed at a point source of gravity), but you're not stopping either.  to get 'all stop' you've got to apply reaction thrust as brakes, and you're going to pull gees doing it.

That, in turn, requires you to use reaction mass-aka "FUEL". 

do you see where this is going?  We don't have artificial gravity, that means passengers/invasion soldiers/occupation troops are subjected to the G-strain and forces of Acceleration and DECELERATION.

Which, if sustained above one gee, is proven medically NOT to make you a comic book superman, but to mess your circulatory system, bones, joints, and nervous system up across the board.  It can even kill you where you're sitting if it's high enough, for long enough.

but if you're locked down properly, a few seconds or minutes of it at a time won't do lasting damage, and it only takes a little bit of thrust difference to make major changes in your approach vector.  Apollo 13's margin was paper thin between making earth orbit after the accident, and wheeling out into interplanetary space without any fuel.

That's our scaling problem, and it's big enough that people who don't do aviation for a living often underestimate just how big a scale we're talking about.

Eighteen thousand meter hex sounds damned impressive, until you realize that it's millions of kilometers to Luna from earth at closest approach.

Never mind a running battle from Jupiter to Earth past Mars-that 'running battle' would take months, and most of the cool scenery would be out of position to get a good look at for most of the year.

Patrolling out to Jupiter and actually giving coverage would take years.

That's roughly the scale just the Solar system, the most mapped collection of objects known to man off the surface of earth, presents.

to do it, and follow the physics as presented in the game, as opposed to the authors of novels ignoring them, requires either massive aerspace forces, or easy FTL travel that isn't jumpships, and we're not presented with either one.

[monbvol]

Yes, but how many are there?

Around an entire world? True. But you won't need as many just to defend vital areas against missiles.

To provide complete coverage of an area the size of New York City from an orbital height equal to the ISS? You'd need A LOT.  Like easily in the thousands.  Probably more.  And that's if you have Extreme Range standard scale weapons and no overlap.

[glitterboy2098]

One could base it on the principle of over-penetration, in that regular shots drill deep but narrow holes, so you would need ways of spreading the damage out.

But capital weapons can't be made too weak or it will undermine the universe, so my preference would still be for lots of ground-based cap missiles that are optimized against warships, which would be a natural technological development during the age of war.

i wasn't suggesting an overall reduction including space stats, just a recognition that bombardment as it is currently written is a little overpowered? going by the rules for it, a naval weapon that is an order of magnitude or more weaker than the official nuclear ordinance stats in a space battle, suddenly becomes a near peer to a nuke in terms of damage and area of effect when fired at the ground of a planet.

which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. energy weapons are going to be weakened by the passage through the atmosphere (as the gases of the atmosphere absorb energy from the beams and heats up, the matter diffracts the light of N-lasers, and atoms absorb charged particle from NPPCs), and naval autocannons, naval guass, and naval missiles normal munitions are going to have been designed for penetrating the armor and structure of other warships. not really designed for area effect attacks against small targets. when you look at the design of real world warship guns and missiles, munitions designed for fighting other ships tend to have their explosive payload surrounded by thick metal housings designed to penetrate stuff (or use shaped explosive charges designed to punch through stuff), while the ones designed for use in shore bombardments are usually thin metal skins around a lot of explosive, sometimes with some added shrapnel. which can't penetrate worth a damn but blows up with way more force and area effect than the penetration focused shells.

if we fix the bombardment rules so that naval guns don't gain that leap in power just because they're pointed down at a planet, some of the problems with the idea that warships would just be a 'delete' button agaisnt ground forces gets fixed. and by making special munitions for bombardment that offset the reduction a little (but not to the same near-nuke levels as currently) we preserve the existing examples of bombardment being used to cause heavy damage to ground targets.

it does help that we've only rarely seen an orbital bombardment "up close" in the fiction. most of the time it tends to happen either 'just off screen' or as a reference to a recent event. and with those we rarely get told how long it took for it to occur.. even with this change, you could still level a city like the jaguars did Turtle Bay, it's just going to take a prolonged time of sustained bombardment to do so instead of it being something that occurs rapidly. hours, instead of minutes.

[RifleMech]

To provide complete coverage of an area the size of New York City from an orbital height equal to the ISS? You'd need A LOT.  Like easily in the thousands.  Probably more.  And that's if you have Extreme Range standard scale weapons and no overlap.

I'm sorry but that isn't what I was referring to. How many standard scale weapons can be used for anti-missile defense?

[CarcosanDawn]

Lots of good points in here and I am learning!

The only thing I have to add is that it is extremely odd to me that AMS is helpless when confronted with Arrow IV (AFAIK) but if you make the arrow IV even bigger and harder to down, it becomes able to shoot it down again.

[DevianID]

if we fix the bombardment rules so that naval guns don't gain that leap in power just because they're pointed down at a planet, some of the problems with the idea that warships would just be a 'delete' button agaisnt ground forces gets fixed. and by making special munitions for bombardment that offset the reduction a little (but not to the same near-nuke levels as currently) we preserve the existing examples of bombardment being used to cause heavy damage to ground targets.

I find naval bombardment weapons incredibly weak compared to nukes still.  They are not near peer weapons to nukes, as far as I have seen.  Earlier in the thread someone mathed out 3 years for a mckenna to level LA, versus one barracuda nuke in 1 minute.  A warship broadside from a mckenna isnt all that impressive on a strategic scale.  Scale is the operative word here.  A mckenna weighs like 50 Iowa battleships.  Its broadside is impressive versus a ship, like a single Iowa, but they weren't using Iowas to destroy cities.  The short bombardment from battleships was questionably effective for the effort, especially when you are collecting something worth 50 Iowa's in mass in 1 single place.

Im guessing you mean that the naval weapons gain AE damage on the ground, dealing 150/75/37 damage.  Yes I agree with you there, AE damage is super duper great, cause a standard 4v4 mech game just cant handle AE damage in volume.  Its true of the big bombers on aerospace, and artillery companies, as well.  A Slayer casually putting 150 AE damage into a mech, ignoring TMM and such, versus the less accurate space laser attack that still does damage on a miss, I have found roughly as frustrating... frustrating in that, why bother bringing my stalker and other mechs if AE damage is just gonna evaporate them with no interaction.  And I do 100% agree with you there, the bombardment rules are just too out of scale with the ground game. 

My 260 tons of random mechs just isnt able to interact with a 6000 ton space laser in a meaningful way in the game, and the lack of anything else for the warship with 6000 ton death rays to do always loops back to ground bombardment to play the part of the game most people care about--the ground game.  Yet, the space lasers ruin the ground game due to such asymmetry. 

[thedancingjoker]

I think part of the actual problem is that folks get too bogged down in simulationist modes of thought.  The rules are an abstraction.  Actually trying to cover everything results in a VERY clunky system.  Plus it has a cognitive disconnect where you need to think of tactical things in realistic detail, but strategically thinking that way destroys the setting.  We just need to accept that rules are an abstraction, and hope the Devs can come up with fun rules for integrating Aerospace into ground combat, dogfighting and a spiritual successor to battlespace, be they all one rules set or multiple ones.

[ColBosch]

I think part of the actual problem is that folks get too bogged down in simulationist modes of thought.  The rules are an abstraction.  Actually trying to cover everything results in a VERY clunky system.  Plus it has a cognitive disconnect where you need to think of tactical things in realistic detail, but strategically thinking that way destroys the setting.  We just need to accept that rules are an abstraction, and hope the Devs can come up with fun rules for integrating Aerospace into ground combat, dogfighting and a spiritual successor to battlespace, be they all one rules set or multiple ones.

I think this is the best mindset. BattleTech is a board game - a complicated board game, yes, but ultimately leaning a bit more towards the "abstract" rather than the "simulationist" ethos.