Level Up (A5E) VRC Sci-Fantasy Concept for Anyone

Steampunkette

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Just throwing this out there for anyone to use in any work or at any table. Little sci-fantasy thing I was considering this morning during an insomnia fit.

Space is really, really, inordinately, impossibly, big. Firing weapons across massive distances, even using predictive algorithms, is pretty stupid and dangerous... just not to your target. Consider that ships capable of traveling at light speed, being 1 second away from a collision course is approximately 186,000 miles distant. This gives us an absolutely insane engagement range where, nonetheless, it's entirely possible to collide with your opponent before either of you is fully aware of the impact since the resulting explosion at that speed will scatter the molecules of your brain before a synapse can fire.

Firstly you have target acquisition to consider. Even with computer AI assistance at that distance a ship over 1km in length is smaller than the finest grain of sand. And it's in a space larger than the entire Earth. And you're trying to find it with a magnifying glass. But let's say you acquire your target. What weapons will you use?

A Ballistic weapon (cannon, slug, asteroid launcher) is going to travel at a -very- small portion of light speed. And from that light second away might take hours or even days to arrive at it's target. Even at the -fastest- reasonable speed before the weapon turns to plasma you're looking at several minutes before it gets there! Way more than enough time to easily avoid the attack.

Meanwhile a C-Fractional weapon (Lasers, Plasma, Ions, Phasers, Etc) is going to cover that light second fairly quickly. Not in -one- second (except for Lasers) but there's not a -ton- of time to dodge the incoming attack. 1.01 to 1.4 seconds or so, most likely, is still a pretty acceptable window to dodge a punch, though, especially with computer assistance.

Now... you could fly much, much, closer to make your attack. In fact with Ballistics you'd need to be within a few hundred or thousand feet, at most, to avoid your target having time to get out of the way. MAYBE a kilometer, tops, with hypersonic weaponry. Similarly, your C-Fractional weapons would be equally effective at that range... but.

Then we have to consider the many, many, forces outside of a starship that are constantly trying to kill everyone on board. Not just Radiation (though that's a huuuuuuuge part of it), but also things like micrometeors. And we should also specify that while a micrometeor the size of a pebble can punch a hole through a ship due to the insane speeds it can be traveling at, there's also fist sized objects you have to deal with, too. And again: Grain of Sand in the vastness of space.

So you're going to have strong hulls reinforced against radiation. What's more, they're going to be reinforced against heat and energy discharges. Particularly if they're designed to travel inside of 1au from a system's star.

There's tons of cosmic radiation out beyond the Kuiper belt that gets massively worse beyond the Oort cloud, it's true, with presumably incredibly deletrious effects to human existence, it's true. But consider that our star is neither that big nor that impressive. To visit and explore planets closer to the host star of a system would require a shielding system capable of withstanding absolutely MASSIVE plasma bursts and radiation fields that would melt your crew, otherwise.

Truly, the extremes of space-travel are not for the faint hearted.

So any ship capable of dealing with both the extremes of inner-orbit stellar travel and interstellar travel would have to have incredible shielding!

... which would render most ballistics absolutely useless. After all, what is a kinetic projectile but a meteor to a starship? Whatever defenses the ship has against such objects while traveling at light speed will surely deflect and destroy any ballistic.

And the radiation shielding, likely energy based, would need to be capable of dispersing solar flares and massive quantities of plasmatic energy and material while not melting, so your laser isn't going to do a damned thing to it.

So... now we have giant, essentially invulnerable, interstellar starships whose only actual sincere threat to each other is light-speed, or even near-light, impact. Certainly plausible that some ships would engage in kamikaze runs... after all, even if someone seeks to avoid collision you can course-correct to try and ensure it.

So how the hell do you do warfare between starships of this sheer magnitude and scale?

Boarding actions.

You send a piloted object large enough to reach the hull and with enough concentrated firepower at point blank range in a super-precise and sustained manner (literally clinging to the hull and burning through over time) to get through. And then you're on board where all the systems are accessible, and the crew are arrayed to fight back.

And we're back to swashbuckling, me hearties!

Laser pistols and laser swords are great and fine, but even a ballistic weapon in a corridor is deadly. A perfectly normal cutlass can hew human flesh and may be of greater use in a tightly contained fight once you're within reach to grapple and stab.


Enjoy!
 

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Interesting points.

I think all this also depends how much a group is leaning towards the sci part or the fi/fantasy part.

Assuming a relatively sci inclined group, there could be a couple of other things to consider that may make some points less moot

1) Travelling at lightspeed or more could require something like an Alcubierre drive, warping spacetime around the ship. This could mean that as long as the ship is travelling, any object or energy beam would be deflected and miss the ship (except for the very few hitting exactly head on). This could also constitute the primary method of defense. As such, hulls wouldn't need to be so extreme
2) A lot of the radiation in space is made of charged particles. Shielding may be effective against that but less effective against non charged particles.

Other things may make space ranged combat pretty much impossible:
1) Even assuming it was possible to detect an object at distance moving at light speed, one would only know where it was. It may be possible to extrapolate where it went, but any slight deflection would mean missing the target by a huge margin.
2) Not a physicist, so I'm not 100% sure with this, but there's the very annoying fact with relativity that contemporaneity is observer dependent. Thus even the concept of hitting something (which requires that the target and your projectile are in the same place at the same time) is not absolute. From your POV it may have been a bullseye, while from theirs your shot was ill timed and missed the mark by thousands of km.

All in all, I think that the most plausible approach to this would be to either handwave everything and ignore science, or to embrace it and just deduct that space combat can only happen at very low speeds and relatively close range. In a lot of fiction combat can't happen at superluminal speed, thus they jump at lightspeed as an evasive maneuver, and sometimes this is considered a desperate measure for reasons
 

Steampunkette

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All in all, I think that the most plausible approach to this would be to either handwave everything and ignore science, or to embrace it and just deduct that space combat can only happen at very low speeds and relatively close range. In a lot of fiction combat can't happen at superluminal speed, thus they jump at lightspeed as an evasive maneuver, and sometimes this is considered a desperate measure for reasons
Oh, no doubt that's the easiest.

This is just an attempt to structure a scenario where starship advancements rendered starship weapons essentially obsolete except for clearing asteroids or planetary bombardment.

For the explicit purpose of making a setting where there is no option for ship-to-ship combat except for direct boarding actions for maximum Sword n' Sorcery space pirate amusement.

If we want to be brutally honest, the quantities of power required to push a starship into FTL speeds in almost any conditions (including the 'warp bubble' concept) are so incredibly outlandishly massive that having starships capable of using such drives would easily grant them so much excess energy outside FTL travel they could glass planets without emptying their energy reserves.

Just wasn't the goal!
 

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