Author Topic: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser  (Read 6672 times)

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Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
The idea is based on this RL ship of the Imperial Japanese navy :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_cruiser_Kitakami
http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery/cl/ijn/kitakami-700-ak/ak-index.html

IRL this ship porpuse was to tip the balance in favour of IJN against the capital ship supperiority of the USN.

It uses a very long range (for the time) torpedo (The long lance torpedo).

The idea for the game is to have a cruiser, longer than a leviathan, but thinner, faster and with less armour (but good shields) capable to launch a handfull of helios bombs in a single run.

Bomb launchers are to be placed around the ship lateral line.

If the helios bombs prove unsuitable (due to too much strenght or too slow travel for a surprise attack) you could develop a new intermediary missile less powerfull than a full helios bomb but faster and with longer range, longer lock range etc.

Give it to the side wich uses more hit and run tatics.

The idea is to be able to overwhelm a capship by numbers.

A flight composed of fighters, bombers and those cruisers could engage and win against a destroyer, greatly tipping the balance of a battle where one side has capship numerical advantage.

What you think ?

 

Offline Woomeister

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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
Well we used to have the cruiser torpedo in R1, but we found that if you make it a bomb that can be shot down then the game would starts to show collision errors once so many of them are launched, so we had to drop the idea of them being able to be shot down, then we more or less removed them in favour of our newer anti-warship plasma cannons and railguns.

Currently the EA have a long range rapid fire missile system on several of their ships including cruisers, with the destroyer variant capable of going toe to toe with the Vasudan Apothess destroyer at range.

 

Offline NGTM-1R

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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
A flight composed of fighters, bombers and those cruisers could engage and win against a destroyer

How is that different with beam-armed cruisers, really?
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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
IRL a kitakami was almost suicidal tatics.

The idea is to have something capable of utter destruction (a volley of some 20 helios bombs simutaneously) but from a platform with weak defenses. This would force fighters to protect capital ships more closely and create a sense of drama by having to intercept so many bombs at the same time.

You cannot place 10 huge beams on a cruiser and balance this, casue you cant intercept beams.

But you can place 10 helios launchers on a cruiser (a small and manouverable one) and balance this in FRED by issuing sufficient escort to all capital ships (or not).

This is a kind of assymetrical warfare usually done by the parties that cannot face their enemies in usual tatics.

I can see GTVA using this kind of ships/attacks to attack the superior Sathanas forces in stock game, for one...

Colossus + Psantik etc keep the sathanas occupied while a flight of those cruisers close in and drop their deadly payload...

The Sathanas force should be escorted by fighters, so if you manage to keep the cruisers alive against their fighters you have a credible force to stop the Shivans, else, the torpedo cruisers get destroyed and GTVA destroyers (and super-destroyers) are not enough to stop Shivans so you lose the battle.

But really i find the Kitakami concept cool so i wanted to have it in game :P
« Last Edit: July 10, 2012, 02:54:59 pm by jorgealdo »

 

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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
Have you played Blue Planet WiH?  both sides use Tactical range capship launched torpedo strikes and the GTVA launch several Subspace Missile strikes during the campaign which would be the in universe equivalent of the concept.
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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
But do the ships risk theyselves by doing so ?

Cause a kitakami night attack against a USN battle line was quite a risky business...

(Actually this never happened but was the theory behind this ship).

The basic idea is assimetry : I cannot build a ship the same size (and cost) as my enemy so i will have to do with something else if needed.

Actually, during the start of modern battleship era we saw the development of the torpedo. Some navies wanted to defeat battleships by using small torpedoboats. Thats how the Destroyers started to appear. The original name was "Torpedo Boat Destroyer", a escort ship basically tasked with repulsing torpedoboats attacks against capital ships. This added a new tatical dimension to the fight wich else revolve entirely at battleships duking it out.

You will see that a battleship could fire at the torpedoboat, but this would distract the battleship from the enemy battleships. A salvo less on the other battleship is a great deal of probability of killing the enemy battleship lost.

So even if the torpedo boat is destroyed, the battleship is still in danger. Its a kind of bait.

This tatical problem can be extended to spaceship where a swarm of smaller ships can overwhelm a bigger (and costlier) one. Its all about economics.

This can be ported to FS2 and looking at the size of the ships involved in inferno mod (looking at wiki) is something i believe the belligerants would invest their resources.

On the plus side this will give a new task to Gunboats (Small ship armed with a big beam gun) : Escort the capships and kill approaching torpedoboats (Cruisers with good beam weaponry can be tasked with that too).

(Ah and i never played blue planet).
« Last Edit: July 10, 2012, 03:22:02 pm by jorgealdo »

 

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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
The weapon damage to size is fairly consistent through the combat classes.  A cruiser(ignoring the Aten) will always cream civilian traffic (and fighters if beam equipped) Corvettes will top a cruiser and a destroyer(ignoring the hecate) will top a corvette.

the breaker on this is that a structured bomber strike will cream any capital ship because the heavy weapons are either too slow or cant target then while the bombers carry potent weapons for dealing with capships.
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Offline The E

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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
However, if you have SSMs (as demonstrated in BP), you can saturate defenses without risking your launch platforms (you DO risk your spotter, but it is assumed that they are more expendable than the missile platform). If you do not know what an SSM is, it's a missile that spends most of its time in Subspace, only popping out to go the last few meters to the target's hull.
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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
Well the EA have the Soter Cruiser and Skotas(Darkness) Corvette that both have a bunch of off-axis "vls" torpedo tubes. They could probably be outfitted for this purpose, though I don't know if it would really fit into the EA's doctrine or if the EA has suitable torpedoes. They could also serve as SSM platforms...

I'm not exactly sure what they're armed with right now, since I never really had the chance to play missions - I just deal with assets when I have the time. :P

I can say that the ideal with the HTL Darkness's VLS tubes was to arm it with super long range MIRV-type torpedoes (that can each down a cruiser by itself, and the fully alpha strike would be able to take down destroyers), limited to one per tube, per mission, but I doubt Inferno is following that per se....actually I think I recall that the Skotas had a few of its torpedo tubes re-purposed into fighter servicing/launch tubes (which is a pretty intelligent use of the giant torpedo bays if you lack giant missiles for them to fire) :D
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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
Yeah that could work, but...

What i wanted to make is a "gotterdammerungng" battle where the remmants of GTVA, Vasudan, Earth Alliance etc, join forces against a armada of Sathanas Juggernauts. Kind of last stand.

"The battle to end all battles"

Jugding by the supperiority of Shivan Juggernauts i believe the human/vasudan party would have to go with assymetrical warfare, and a bunch of Light "suicidal" cruisers is something that could tip the balance. All navies when pressured against this kind of odds (German navy for exemplo) have to resort to this kind of tatics.

Other topic i like is "Privateering". Like : take a freighter, put guns on it, and send it as blockage runner.

I imagine a scenario where you pilot a modified shivan freighter across Shivan controlled space and have to kill shivan freighters without raising suspicion from their behemoths...

Other missions would revolve around sneaking across shivan controlled space to deliver strategic materials without being spotted/killed...

Maybe we need a special porpuse blockage runner freighter, user controlled and with more manouverability/firepower/armour but with less cargo space. Might add "deep" to the current gameplay...

Unfortunately i cannot use blender (tried today but did not got the graps of it), but i have some hand draw ships with the torpedo boat concept.

I imagine a collonial ship line : Anti-Fighter/Anti-Bomber Collonial Light Cruiser and Anti-capital Collonial Torpedo Cruiser.

Both are the same "Kitakami" based formula. Long ship, low armour, fast, with guns distributed in broadsides plus some defensive turrets.

The anti-fighter/anti-bomber light cruiser would use Subach dual casemated turrets (10 each side) to bring down fighters/bombers ...
The anti-capital light cruiser would use 10 Stiletto II launchers on each broadside to disable subsystems on larger ships...

I believe the faster travel time of Stilettos II would remove the collision problems that helios bombs could trigger, while being still credible as anti-capital weapons.

Even if a light cruiser cannot outright kill the capital ship it still can utterly disable it in a single pass.

10 launchers X dual launch = 20 Stilettos in mid air. Each launcher should have 10 missiles giving 5 launches per side, enough to disable most capital ships...
« Last Edit: July 11, 2012, 12:46:02 pm by jorgealdo »

 

Offline Mobius

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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
You'll probably see warships relying on long range missiles in INFA2, used mostly by the Jovian Coalition.
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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
Well we used to have the cruiser torpedo in R1, but we found that if you make it a bomb that can be shot down then the game would starts to show collision errors once so many of them are launched, so we had to drop the idea of them being able to be shot down, then we more or less removed them in favour of our newer anti-warship plasma cannons and railguns.

I assume that was fixed at some point, since BP's massive swarms of torpedoes seem to work just fine.
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Offline headdie

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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
Well we used to have the cruiser torpedo in R1, but we found that if you make it a bomb that can be shot down then the game would starts to show collision errors once so many of them are launched, so we had to drop the idea of them being able to be shot down, then we more or less removed them in favour of our newer anti-warship plasma cannons and railguns.

I assume that was fixed at some point, since BP's massive swarms of torpedoes seem to work just fine.

depending on level of "realism" this sort of tactic will run into ammo supply issues if sustained for long periods during one mission in more realism based mods, though this can be used to the advantage on story driven mods.

Beams on the other hand dont take a lot to hand wave as near unlimited ammo.
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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
Beams on the other hand dont take a lot to hand wave as near unlimited ammo.

How do you know? As far as I can say, I see no reason why a beam cannon should fire ad nauseam without stopping at some point.
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Offline The E

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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
I think he meant "near unlimited ammo" in the context of a mission. On a larger scale (that is, on a campaign writing level), they may very well have logistical constraints, but as far as gameplay and verisimilitude goes, they can be used with much greater frequency than missile strikes.
Consider: A given missile has a certain size. We know then that the ship firing the missile has to be a certain minimum size to fire a given number of volleys, even without taking things like loading mechanisms or other stuff into consideration.
With beam weapons, it's a bit different. We know their emitter sizes, but beyond that, we can't tell anything about them by looking at them from the outside. Everything that goes on behind that emitter is opaque to us, an area where we have to rely on the word of the creator for information.
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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
That's exactly why I see no reason to assume that beam weapons have "more ammo" than missile launchers. Whatever warships use to unleash beams, it can be depleted in a given amount of time and such ships may have to rely on supplies in order to make full use of their beam turrets. Or they may even have to reduce the intensity of each beam salvo after a while, thus becoming more vulnerable to ships armed with missiles.
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Offline The E

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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
You've missed my point. When we look at a missile launcher, and the missiles it fires, we can infer a little bit about the internal layout of the ship, and its ammo reserves, simply by extrapolating stuff based on the sizes involved. True, there's going to be a lot of uncertainty in that data, but still, it's data.

With beam weapons, given that we have no real-life analogue for them, no such calculations are possible. We know that there should be constraints, given what we know about thermodynamics, but we have no way to tell what those constraints are based on data available to us while watching the gameplay. It's something that has to be dealt with entirely as a storytelling concern, there's no point where a player would be able to say "well, this is unrealistic now". Which is not the case when you have a ship pumping out missile after missile on minimum intervals.
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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
Well I would find a continuous beam spree unrealistic. And people have seen anomalous amounts of missiles being fired by fighters, bombers, ships, whatever for ages, yet only some of them have showed disappointment. It's so common I hard believe it would be criticized.
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Offline headdie

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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
Lets take a ship that is a 500 meters long, 100 meter high, 100 meter wide block

we arm this ship with a launcher that fires 2 m3 torpedoes.
disregarding everything else we know that the ship has a maximum internal volume of 5,000,000 m3
assuming there is nothing else in the ship, it is just a container for torpedoes that is a maximum of 2,500,000 torpedoes, the fact that this is the maximum that can be carried in this is indisputable but we also know it will be much smaller than this because of the mechanisms needed to make the ship work.

we arm this ship with a beam cannon with a 2 m3 emitter, what else do we know?
there must be a weapon assembly behind it,
 - but how big is it?
 - How much heat does this generate?
for example BP lore states that Blue Beams have their own dedicated reactor but
 - how big is it?
 - how much fuel does it use per shot?
 - how much heat does it emit?
How much heat can the ship handle?

in short with energy weapons of any type there are so many variables where the only answers that can be found in the lore behind the story that virtually anything can be justified with made up numbers.  With weapons where there are physical representations such as missiles we have enough data to determine upper limits from which we can infer general numbers, for example I would be surprised if dedicated ships can dedicate more than half it's internal volume to missile storage
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Re: Suggestion: Torpedo Launching Cruiser
Just because A is less plausible than B it doesn't mean that B is correct. We're talking about a game where you can hear sounds in space, not to mention the fact that ships which take months or years to be constructed can sustain 99% hull damage and get their hull integrity back to 100% over extremely short periods of time.

Also, in the case of missiles and all issues related to their volume compared to that of the ships that fire them, this technology can solve the problem. :P
« Last Edit: March 26, 2013, 01:31:53 pm by Mobius »
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