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Post by Enderminion on Jun 7, 2017 13:52:30 GMT
mostly I'm buying time for the intel and comms codes to be destroyed and allowing time for the intel and comms officers to find their cyanide pills. you wouldn't board any ship, you'd board the flag ship as that has the most HVTs (and the largest crew quarters) so a maze could be far less granular then you think, there just has to be a way to get around the drones Between surrendering through radio and being boarded are dozens of minutes, if not several hours. There is no reason to stall. hey, I don't know how many emails my intel officers have on how ever many terminals, if they have to destroy anything smarter then a toaster they might need a little time, also they are going to take kill pills and may need to be talked up a bit
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Post by bigbombr on Jun 7, 2017 14:04:16 GMT
Between surrendering through radio and being boarded are dozens of minutes, if not several hours. There is no reason to stall. hey, I don't know how many emails my intel officers have on how ever many terminals, if they have to destroy anything smarter then a toaster they might need a little time, also they are going to take kill pills and may need to be talked up a bit Strap sensitive data together, pour fluorine from the propellant tanks of your missiles over it. Done. Alternatively, you can throw it near the reactor and throttle your reactor to full power (assuming it hasn't been shut down for the cease-fire), destroying any data through raw radiation. Or you can always use small explosive devices to destroy anything sensitive. Depending on circumstances, you might want to leave some data intact and use it and your cooperation as a bargaining chip. If you've surrendered, the deck is stacked against you for negotiating terms, so you might want to maximize what little leverage you can get.
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Post by ross128 on Jun 11, 2017 15:15:16 GMT
If you're planning to destroy everything and commit suicide anyway, why not just detonate any nuclear warheads you have left in your magazines? A nuke of any size going off inside the armor should handily slag everything.
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Post by Enderminion on Jun 11, 2017 15:50:20 GMT
If you're planning to destroy everything and commit suicide anyway, why not just detonate any nuclear warheads you have left in your magazines? A nuke of any size going off inside the armor should handily slag everything. you might not have any bombs left, your ship just went through hell and drew one of the short sticks already, also missile warheads that can be fired would be fired at incoming dropships and assault transports. they're boarding because you have intel not because you surrendered
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Post by ross128 on Jun 11, 2017 16:54:03 GMT
Well if you're worried about not having any missiles left to self-destruct with, you could always build a nuclear warhead into the ship's structure to serve as a self-destruct device. That way you always have a fast, reliable way to slag a ship that is in danger of being captured.
Honestly, the only way I see a boarding happening is if the ship being boarded stands down and allows it. Scuttling a ship to deny capture is too fast and easy to do, so the only way scuttling won't happen is if the crew is more interested in surviving the encounter. Which means they will have to have surrendered, because if they don't they're going to die anyway.
Pretty much how boarding goes in modern navies honestly. An opposed boarding pretty much doesn't happen with modern ships: either you're hit with an anti-ship weapon powerful enough to sink you outright, you surrender as an alternative to certain death, or you scuttle the ship in the face of certain death (though a scuttling in a wet navy usually also includes bailing and hoping you're rescued as a POW, something that might be difficult if you're using a nuke for that instead of water and gravity).
Of course, a big part of why boarding doesn't happen in wet navies is we don't have any analogue to boarding pods. You pretty much have to pull alongside (or hover overhead if you have a helicopter) and use ropes or ramps to board still. Obviously pulling alongside a hostile ship with 16" gun batteries is not the wisest of plans unless that ship has already surrendered. The space equivalent would be a docking maneuver: docking maneuvers simply don't succeed unless both sides cooperate on it.
But even if you throw in boarding pods to bypass the whole docking problem, if the crew of the ship isn't willing to surrender than they WILL scuttle as soon as they realize they don't have enough manpower to hold. An opposed boarding is a good way to get your marines turned into radioactive dust. Ship-to-ship boarding just isn't likely to be a thing unless Future Tech(tm) REALLY conspires to make it happen. Like transporters that can surgically transport the self-destruct device out of the ship, and then transport your troops in.
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Post by Pttg on Jun 12, 2017 20:16:07 GMT
One big difference between wet navies and CoaDE space navies is that crews are EXTREMELY valuable commodities in CoaDE. There are very few people, even fewer of them skilled astronauts. In space, giving smart people the choice between forced conscription into the "winning" side or else walking home has a great deal of utility, and fighting to subdue the enemy makes for more interesting combat anyway.
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Post by Enderminion on Jun 12, 2017 21:50:45 GMT
One big difference between wet navies and CoaDE space navies is that crews are EXTREMELY valuable commodities in CoaDE. There are very few people, even fewer of them skilled astronauts. In space, giving smart people the choice between forced conscription into the "winning" side or else walking home has a great deal of utility, and fighting to subdue the enemy makes for more interesting combat anyway. you are not going to conscript enemy crewers, one of them might "oops I launched a nuke at (high value target)" or "whats the auto-destruct button do?"
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Post by Pttg on Jun 13, 2017 3:29:20 GMT
Not many people are so self-sacrificing, and by happy co-incidence, the people willing to sacrifice their lives to ensure that the enemy is down a ship tend to be the ones on ships that self-destruct rather than surrender.
If the enemy ship surrenders, then you know that the crew is basically in your power. Especially if you have the only reaction mass within 6 months of flight time.
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Post by Enderminion on Jun 13, 2017 3:34:24 GMT
if I don't think they have assets worth taking the only remass they are getting is a single use orion pulse drive with no pusher plate
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Post by ross128 on Jun 13, 2017 14:39:21 GMT
One big difference between wet navies and CoaDE space navies is that crews are EXTREMELY valuable commodities in CoaDE. There are very few people, even fewer of them skilled astronauts. In space, giving smart people the choice between forced conscription into the "winning" side or else walking home has a great deal of utility, and fighting to subdue the enemy makes for more interesting combat anyway. The point I'm making is not that nobody will surrender, it's that surrender is the only way you're going to set foot on an enemy ship. There will never be an actual fight on board an enemy ship because if they surrendered, the fight's over. If they decide to go down with the ship, they're going down with the ship and there's nothing you can do to stop them. The only thing sending a boarding party would do is ensure that your marines are going down with them. For boarding actions to be a commonplace thing, you'd need some very different conditions. You'd either need Star Trek, where transporters make boarding and disabling enemy self-destruct ability easy, or you'd need a situation like Warhammer 40k (or funnily enough, Elite: Dangerous) where capital ships are huge, have crews in the thousands or tens of thousands, are too valuable to blow up, and have very ineffective weapons with sub-3km ranges that require up to half an hour to beat down an enemy ship in a close-range brawl. In a CoaDE scenario with our sardine cans in space though, it'd be like trying to board a submarine. A submarine with hypervelocity railguns, nukes, and/or gigawatt-range lasers that is quite happy to pop you from a million meters away.
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Post by bigbombr on Jun 13, 2017 14:49:53 GMT
... In a CoaDE scenario with our sardine cans in space though, it'd be like trying to board a submarine. A submarine with hypervelocity railguns, nukes, and/or gigawatt-range lasers that is quite happy to pop you from a million meters away. Or like trying to board a jet fighter engaged in long range missile combat.
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Post by Enderminion on Jun 13, 2017 14:52:29 GMT
... In a CoaDE scenario with our sardine cans in space though, it'd be like trying to board a submarine. A submarine with hypervelocity railguns, nukes, and/or gigawatt-range lasers that is quite happy to pop you from a million meters away. Or like trying to board a jet fighter engaged in long range missile combat. "hey franks being boarded, oops friendly fire"
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Post by morrigi on Jun 13, 2017 18:46:34 GMT
One big difference between wet navies and CoaDE space navies is that crews are EXTREMELY valuable commodities in CoaDE. There are very few people, even fewer of them skilled astronauts. In space, giving smart people the choice between forced conscription into the "winning" side or else walking home has a great deal of utility, and fighting to subdue the enemy makes for more interesting combat anyway. The point I'm making is not that nobody will surrender, it's that surrender is the only way you're going to set foot on an enemy ship. There will never be an actual fight on board an enemy ship because if they surrendered, the fight's over. If they decide to go down with the ship, they're going down with the ship and there's nothing you can do to stop them. The only thing sending a boarding party would do is ensure that your marines are going down with them. For boarding actions to be a commonplace thing, you'd need some very different conditions. You'd either need Star Trek, where transporters make boarding and disabling enemy self-destruct ability easy, or you'd need a situation like Warhammer 40k (or funnily enough, Elite: Dangerous) where capital ships are huge, have crews in the thousands or tens of thousands, are too valuable to blow up, and have very ineffective weapons with sub-3km ranges that require up to half an hour to beat down an enemy ship in a close-range brawl. In a CoaDE scenario with our sardine cans in space though, it'd be like trying to board a submarine. A submarine with hypervelocity railguns, nukes, and/or gigawatt-range lasers that is quite happy to pop you from a million meters away. WH40k ships have weapons with tens of thousands of kilometers of range and ridiculous energy output, what makes boarding possible is that the ships are protected with equally ridiculous armor and shielding, and Imperial armsmen are hopelessly under-equipped for the task of defending their ships.
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Post by Enderminion on Jun 13, 2017 21:52:02 GMT
The point I'm making is not that nobody will surrender, it's that surrender is the only way you're going to set foot on an enemy ship. There will never be an actual fight on board an enemy ship because if they surrendered, the fight's over. If they decide to go down with the ship, they're going down with the ship and there's nothing you can do to stop them. The only thing sending a boarding party would do is ensure that your marines are going down with them. For boarding actions to be a commonplace thing, you'd need some very different conditions. You'd either need Star Trek, where transporters make boarding and disabling enemy self-destruct ability easy, or you'd need a situation like Warhammer 40k (or funnily enough, Elite: Dangerous) where capital ships are huge, have crews in the thousands or tens of thousands, are too valuable to blow up, and have very ineffective weapons with sub-3km ranges that require up to half an hour to beat down an enemy ship in a close-range brawl. In a CoaDE scenario with our sardine cans in space though, it'd be like trying to board a submarine. A submarine with hypervelocity railguns, nukes, and/or gigawatt-range lasers that is quite happy to pop you from a million meters away. WH40k ships have weapons with tens of thousands of kilometers of range and ridiculous energy output, what makes boarding possible is that the ships are protected with equally ridiculous armor and shielding, and Imperial armsmen are hopelessly under-equipped for the task of defending their ships. ah, but in Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, Imperial Macrocannons have a 6km range
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Post by morrigi on Jun 14, 2017 0:06:13 GMT
WH40k ships have weapons with tens of thousands of kilometers of range and ridiculous energy output, what makes boarding possible is that the ships are protected with equally ridiculous armor and shielding, and Imperial armsmen are hopelessly under-equipped for the task of defending their ships. ah, but in Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, Imperial Macrocannons have a 6km range Typical problem with the "everything is canon" doctrine of GW. The books regularly reference combat happening at reasonable ranges.
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