Two Empires in conflict

[kinnison]

I don't think I've seen this one - please forgive if it's been covered, or if it's a bit obscure.

The two empires I am talking about are Star Wars Empire and Megatraveller's Imperium. My take on this:

Wars ships have much better strategic and tactical maneuverability, and much higher brute-force firepower; however, in many ways Imperium weapons are higher tech - for example, meson guns, which use near-lightspeed exotic neutral particles that Wars ships may not be able to detect, much less their shields stop. Internal explosions are nasty! And Imperium ships manoeuvre on a strategic scale undetectably.

IMHO Imperium ground emplacements are pretty formidable, too. One reason is that one of the primary ones can be buried under a hundred kilometres of rock and still work - see above.

As for ground forces, the disparity is a joke. Standard Imperium Marines equipment is personal plasma rifles with a bolt so hot that fusion occurs within the bolt - using the rules as written, one shot from one of these is capable of destroying a 21st century tank. In addition, some special units will have neural and relativity rifles, which respectively kill by destroying the nervous system and by shutting down chemical activity within the target (IIRC). Both can be shielded against, but by Wars tech?

Armoured units typically have armour roughly equivalent to four or five metres of Chobham armour, and of course artillery-level plasma and fusion guns. And they can and do fly.

So GE wins the deep-space engagement but is then stopped dead in low to medium orbit space, to say nothing of on the ground.

By the way, talking about planet killers, the Imperium's version is simply a very large antimatter bomb that fits into a 100-ton scoutship. The Empire's version is a tad more expensive. And the Imperium version arrives at target without warning.

I do realise that the GE owns an entire galaxy, or at least more or less so - but here I would like to speak of comparitively sized forces and areas.

[Ghost Rider]

Numbers or I lock this. I got sick and tired of vague allusions over the bullshit Starcraft versus.

[kinnison]

The numbers as I remember them:

Imperium capital ship and ground emplacement weapons have a power requirement of approximately 500GW (2000 units and the standard unit is 250MW). The gun can be fired once per minute, so pulse energy is (at 50% efficiency) approximately 4GJ or about 1 ton of TNT - all of it hard radiation, and internal.

Imperium military ships have acceleration of about 6G and the jumpdrive takes a week. The typical distance covered is 4 parsecs - 6 is possible but takes too much fuel tankage and engine to make a useful ship for most purposes.

Regarding armour and infantry-weapon penetration, a modern tank works out at armour value 40 or so in Traveller rules, and a fusion gun's penetration is about that. Penetration value of fusion artillery in Traveller is about 70, and IIRC the function is not linear but a power law - about square I think. Typical power requirement is about 50MW and it can be fired about once per 10 seconds, except for designated rapid-fire weapons.

Imperium territory is about 600 parsecs across in a rough sphere, and contains around 30,000 inhabited systems, some of which have more than one world and some of which are entirely belt colonies.

Will that do? And has anyone any memories of playing this game?

[Ryan Thunder]

Have you even read the website?

Based on your description, they get assraped, end of.

Heavy turbolasers, such as those mounted on an Imperial Star Destroyer, put out firepower on the order of a teraton of TNT per shot, once per second.

So, you're outgunned by a factor of about a million or so. And this is on a ship-per-ship basis.

[Ghost Rider]

The numbers as I remember them:

Imperium capital ship and ground emplacement weapons have a power requirement of approximately 500GW (2000 units and the standard unit is 250MW). The gun can be fired once per minute, so pulse energy is (at 50% efficiency) approximately 4GJ or about 1 ton of TNT - all of it hard radiation, and internal.

So less then most modern ICBMs....Unless this is the ultra light guns they affix to ass end of the Starfighters, this is extraordinarily poor for their side.

Imperium military ships have acceleration of about 6G and the jumpdrive takes a week. The typical distance covered is 4 parsecs - 6 is possible but takes too much fuel tankage and engine to make a useful ship for most purposes.

Which is basically on par with our tech, with a bit above.

Only the drive system is above modern aircraft.

Regarding armour and infantry-weapon penetration, a modern tank works out at armour value 40 or so in Traveller rules, and a fusion gun's penetration is about that. Penetration value of fusion artillery in Traveller is about 70, and IIRC the function is not linear but a power law - about square I think. Typical power requirement is about 50MW and it can be fired about once per 10 seconds, except for designated rapid-fire weapons.

So you're using game stats?

Wow, there's a low. Small hint, game stats are for the player and thus invalidated because it is skewed in some form or fashion.

Imperium territory is about 600 parsecs across in a rough sphere, and contains around 30,000 inhabited systems, some of which have more than one world and some of which are entirely belt colonies.

From this alone, it sounds closer to being challenge for maybe part of the Federation, and even then.

[kinnison]

Ghost, I am using game stats because AFAIK there are no others - it was a pen and paper RPG to begin with.

One thing I ought to have noted is that a typical Imperium battleship has a truly astounding number of secondary weapons and sometimes fighters - 600 independently targeted batteries of 10 500MW beam laser cannons is typical, and the Imperium's premier warship, the Tiger Class, is 500,000 tons and has 300 fighters onboard.

Power plant of such a ship, from memory, is about 500GW.

Incidentally, I agree - this system is intentionally damped down, to avoid PCs becoming unstoppable combat monsters probably; which is a known and common problem in RPGs especially SF ones. It's also supposed to be realistic, or at least believable - which warships with a power output equal to a B0 supergiant star are not, at least to me.

In addition, the firing rate is a rules artifact; for example, Traveller lasers are usually continuous-fire. Engagement range, also BTW, is usually a couple of light-seconds.

[Ryan Thunder]

Have you even read the website?

Based on your description, they get assraped, end of.

Heavy turbolasers, such as those mounted on an Imperial Star Destroyer, put out firepower on the order of a teraton of TNT per shot, once per second.

So, you're outgunned by a factor of about a million or so. And this is on a ship-per-ship basis.

Ghetto edit: For some reason, I thought kinnison said a megaton of TNT. So he's actually outgunned by a factor of a trillion.

Ghost, I am using game stats because AFAIK there are no others - it was a pen and paper RPG to begin with.

One thing I ought to have noted is that a typical Imperium battleship has a truly astounding number of secondary weapons and sometimes fighters - 600 independently targeted batteries of 10 500MW beam laser cannons is typical, and the Imperium's premier warship, the Tiger Class, is 500,000 tons and has 300 fighters onboard.

Power plant of such a ship, from memory, is about 500GW.

Incidentally, I agree - this system is intentionally damped down, to avoid PCs becoming unstoppable combat monsters probably; which is a known and common problem in RPGs especially SF ones. It's also supposed to be realistic, or at least believable - which warships with a power output equal to a B0 supergiant star are not, at least to me.

In addition, the firing rate is a rules artifact; for example, Traveller lasers are usually continuous-fire. Engagement range, also BTW, is usually a couple of light-seconds.

Its still rather pitiful, actually... If you realize its been dumbed down, why did you bother bringing it up at all? I mean, have you not even looked at the main site at all?

[fusion]

Lets look at this step by step:

Their power difference is on the order of a trillion.

It would take them over a hundred years to cross the galaxy while it only takes the empire a day or two to cross the galaxy.

Their weapons are as weaker than the first atomic weapons.

And I doubt that the Imperium has millions of ship (which is best shown by the blockade of Naboo).

Ground is not a problem when the Trade Feds made quadrillions of droids which all fire MW- GW weapons. Also there are the viper droids which have turbolasers mounted on them (Which would be on the kiloton level or higher).


So why are you bringing this up?
My judgment, READ THE SITE!!!!!

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Kimball, much as I appreciate you flying the old sunburst, it's a curbstomp.

Yes, Traveller is a roleplaying game, but one of moderate hardness- in both senses; dying during character creation, anyone?- and occasionally there are some real world numbers to be extracted.

Problem is, there are six distinct versions that I know of.

Classic Traveller which you're quoting from, probably the most generous and most loosely tied.
MegaTraveller, where the Third Imperium tore itself apart, and good riddance too,
Traveller; The New Era, the roleplaying game of post- apocalyptic interstellar trading and raiding, and the one in which GDW produced a design-your-own-equipment book, which would be a good source of numbers if it wasn't conservative to the point of absurdity- I don't mean 'no use in vs', I mean 'predictions of technical advance so slow as to suit a crippled snail',
and then GDW went bust.

The creator, Marc Miller, bought out the license and went off on his own, and T4 was basically traveller-from-the-very-beginning, at the dawn of the Third Imperium rather than the bloody end, and managed to take everything that wasn't technically accurate enough for the techies about Fire Fusion and Steel, and far too technical for the casual player, and make it much, much worse.

Then GURPS bought out the license from him, and exposed us all to the horror of GURPS Vehicles, which is still better than the horrors of FF&S now I think on it. Although it did kick off on an alternate timeline that spared us the death of the Third Imperium.

Finally, there was a D20 version, which quite frankly I refused to buy, being all Travellered out.

Bits and pieces with numbers attached; the standard missile was thruster plate drive in CT and MT (6g, endurance 1 day), solid fuel chemical rocket in TNE and GT(12 'g' for half an hour), 200-600kg chemical explosive warhead in CT, MT and GT, detonation pumped xaser in the rules in TNE if you could ever get hold of the damned things with base yields up to 500 kt, and they believed in sensor whiteout.

A BI-15 Dreadnought from Shattered Ships of the Fighting Imperium (actually published as fighting ships of the shattered imperium, but the misprints, mistakes, the fact that virtually none of the designs were reproducible with the design rules, made the nickname kind of inevitable) from MT, reads something like;
700,000 displacement tons of liquid hydrogen- either 9,800,000 or 9,450,000 cubic metres depending on which ruleset was in use at the time. 61,868,003 tons mass, according to the design rules 57,124,200 tons of which is armour.
561,000 m3 total of fusion power plant delivering 11.22 terawatts for 24 days before refuelling,
Gravitic/electric fuelless, reactionless drive, 2 'g',
jump drive rated to 4 parsecs before refuel, ship is capable of gas giant skimming to collect it's own fuel though. Comms, one of everything. Sensors, two of everything, which still adds up to less than .15 m3 of passive electromagnetic receptor. Weak meson screen and effective nuclear damper.
The bang; spinal mount 300GW meson cannon, taking up 95,000 m3 and weighing 18,000 tons.
That's pretty much it. The ship is heavily enough armoured to be at no risk from the rest of it's own weapons according to the rules, despite kicking out a total of 675 GW from 2700 separate beam lasers, taking up a total of 12,150 m3.
200 separate 1350m3, 15 GW neutral particle beam accelerators,
200 bay and 900 turret missile launchers, with enough on board magazine space to provide...absolutely no reloads at all.
Crew 16,277, 100 heavy (50 dt) fighters carried, and a total cost of 3,306,716mcr, or roughly a hundred and eighty million times the average citizen's income.

If that wierd, wonderful, and severely spotty slice of stat isn't an adequate introduction to the frustratingly half-reasonableness of Traveller, well, there are lots more numbers out there.

One thing; Traveller did produce what to my mind is the best roleplaying supplement ever written- Survival Margin. It was a blow by blow account, in-universe taken from the news services and the diaries of the principal participants, of the death by suicide of the Third Imperium.
I would probably sell my car, at least, for an equivalent look at the breakup of the Galactic Empire following Palpatine's death.

Other point; the only part of the entire Traveller universe that could give the Empire trouble is probably the Zhodani, not because of their technology, but because depending on which version you're using, somewhere between one sixth and one fifth of the entire population of seven thousand worlds is a psion.

In plot terms, the Zhodani were set up as a civilisation which actively believed in the goodness of and embraced psi power, to the point where even the tavrchedl', which outright translates as Thought Police, have no cynicism at all. They actively believe that they are the good guys, protecting their citizens from unhappiness and mental illness like that which plagues the Third Imperium. Picture about thirty billion Junior Lensmen, with another trillion willing deputies.

This might only result in seven thousand simultaneous BDZ, in fact if the Empire has any sense it will, extreme measures are quite strongly indicated.