Anyone here remember Renegade Legion?

[Azazal]

there's some fluff material (I dont remember where, this is all from skimming) that fighters carry enough hydrogen propellant to cover 4 AU to and back before running out. They're also listed as having low accels (10-15 G I think for one fighter), but that's usually with "balanced" power distribution (IE weapons, etc.)

There's also the fact that Capital ships (and their "parasites" like corvettes, ,gunboats, patrol ships) can all enter T space, and that requires accelerating up to higher speeds than 3 km/s as well (up to .5c given one source.)

As for firepower, one of the Centurion fluff bits mentions Grav Tanks carrying 10 GW lasers, and being able to withstand nuclear detonations (of an unspecified yield), so that alone tells us quite a bit about what fighters should be capable of handling (fighters can engage capital ships.)

I know that a number of the different gaming systems tend to indicate that the game data is "abstracted" somewhat (prefect does with distances.) so I'm less inclined to go by that as "definitive"

Yeah we are going to need to go by as much fluff as we can get and not game mechanics. Looking at the Leviathan rule book:
1 hex = 75 km
1 turn = 5 min
Shiva class battleship can spend 2 thrust points per turn or 150km per 5 min = 500m/sec acceleration
hard to hit .5C anytime soon there

[Connor MacLeod]

Is this background text from the computer game material? Impressive, if it is, but I would be wary of a lot of that being in- universe hyperbole.

Initially from the computer games, but reading some of the other sources I'm slowly getting my hands on, it seems to match up pretty well. The more specific example coming to hand is Ivanolo bombarding that Kessirth world - his ships wipe out all ife on the planets in "moments" (This basically is goign to mean a huge number of fireballs, if not outright heating up the atmosphere.. many billions if not tens of billions of megatons) which then went on to boiling the oceans (possibly some if not mostly vaporized - large bodies of water make GRERAT heat sinks) and blowing off the atmosphere (which is largely transparent to the bulk of an energy weapon, so you end up "destroying" that indirectly.)

The bare-ass minimum is going to be e26-27joules, and thats assuming nigh-perfect efficiency. It could go much higher (E28-e29 if vaporized ocean water saturates the atmosphere prior to removal, ,for example.)

There is a novel spin-off from Leviathan- Renegade's Honour, William H. Keith, which I think I have somewhere- have to dig it out and post quotes- but off the top of my head, it's not that impressive.

Essentially, it follows one small squadron as they go renegade, and get chased half- way across the TOG. The initial moment is when they refuse to take part in an extermination bombardment, which we get to see the assets assembled for and the start of.

From what I recall, it doesn't really support teraton to petaton energy firepower. The bombardment is the political sequel to a major fleet operation, so there are large numbers of units present anyway, it might be possible to do it with less- but I get the feeling TOG's too centralised for that. Any officer military or state, with the authority to order that kind of bombardment would have large forces available to do it with anyway.

It was to be a full- blown melt the land and boil the oceans bombardment, but it was to involve fifty battleships and their escorts, with substantial use of missiles, (nertial-confinement laser 'clean' fusion heads) and expected to take two days.

Secondly, as I recall they use grav fusion type warheads, so they probably dont always need to use ICF. They may use something else, but I havent really looked into that hard yet.

Anyhow, how much crust was melted, how much ocean was boiled? Both can be very energy intensive to great depths, depending on efffect (boiling the oceans can be at LEAST e26 joules, but I know Mike's caluclated it up to e28 joules if youo include at least some vaproziation) and melting the crust can mean comparable levels of energy all its own, and that's not even including inefficiencies. If it included "removing the atmosphere" like most do, then that energy input can go up even further.

And if it is conducted over a matter of "days", cooling and redadiation of energy becomes a BIG issue.. that alone I believe can significantly jack up the calcs (at leat going by what I know Curtis has mentioned on BDZ ops lasting longer than a fwe hours.)

Later in the book, they pass by, while on the run, a gas giant that they detect strange signals from- and needing to stop for rest and repairs anyway, they investigate and find lifeforms similar to saturn rukh. Wondering what to do with them, the pilots reckon TOG would just bombard them until the atmosphere got hot enough to cook them. Jupiter- sized planet, here, they reckoned it would take weeks- for a fleet the size of which isn't mentioned, but probably around fifty ships again.

heating up the atmosphere to kill off all life on an earth sized planet (accorindg to Mike's planet killer page) requires tens of billions of megatons alone (1500K or so) because atmosphere doesn't heat up very well directly. I have no idea how much more nasty it might be for a bigger planet (orders of magnitude more?)

[qquote]
Gigaton range firepower, maybe on par with the Imperium of Man- and a lot more than the game numbers justify, true.

As far as ship size/mass goes, I'd stick with the mass. Reason being that in the design system, the mass of the ship is an established figure. Components are chosen, costed, and added up, while the length seems to come from the land of that-sounds-cool.

The mass and cost of the ship are grounded in some kind of economic model, however simplistic, and as far as I can tell the size simply isn't. [/quote]

I need to do scaling on the images in Leviathan, but OTOH It looks like another case of "ships less denser than air" like we see in the honorverse (and 40K to be honest.) Back of the envelope calcs I did indicate that most Battleships should be at least in the tens if not hundres of millions of tons range, possibly higher.

Oh, and there are spinal mounts, which are basically RL version of nova cannon (except they're direct fire.)

Ground combat- their most competitive edge. Numerous and efficient combined arms formations, equipped with transonic- speed multi-hundred ton grav tanks and IFVs. They definitely have a lot going for them there.

Tanks can reach certain altitiudes, ,and travel at upwards of 900 kph. They have weapons ranges at LEASt comparable to modern tanks, use railguns (20 cm at least for one railgun IIRC) and 10 GW lasers. The tanks themselves mass around as much as a baneblade or so.

Infantry weapons are scary, not least because they fire hypervelocity projectiles and can average ranges of 2-3 km for "long" range. They also use powered armor.

[Connor MacLeod]

there's some fluff material (I dont remember where, this is all from skimming) that fighters carry enough hydrogen propellant to cover 4 AU to and back before running out. They're also listed as having low accels (10-15 G I think for one fighter), but that's usually with "balanced" power distribution (IE weapons, etc.)

There's also the fact that Capital ships (and their "parasites" like corvettes, ,gunboats, patrol ships) can all enter T space, and that requires accelerating up to higher speeds than 3 km/s as well (up to .5c given one source.)

As for firepower, one of the Centurion fluff bits mentions Grav Tanks carrying 10 GW lasers, and being able to withstand nuclear detonations (of an unspecified yield), so that alone tells us quite a bit about what fighters should be capable of handling (fighters can engage capital ships.)

I know that a number of the different gaming systems tend to indicate that the game data is "abstracted" somewhat (prefect does with distances.) so I'm less inclined to go by that as "definitive"

Yeah we are going to need to go by as much fluff as we can get and not game mechanics. Looking at the Leviathan rule book:
1 hex = 75 km
1 turn = 5 min
Shiva class battleship can spend 2 thrust points per turn or 150km per 5 min = 500m/sec acceleration
hard to hit .5C anytime soon there

Err 500 m/s VELOCITY average. Accel is only going to be about 2-3 m/s^2 tops, probably, by game stats.

Mind you that assumes that you're accelerating the entire time. As I said, game stats can be abstracted.

Plus, they also hve this lovely fact they can T-Space hop across systems (kinda like Freespace) which is going to be a not-so-minor advantage, really.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

On the subject of those nuclear detonations; the air-to-ground rules in Centurion can be made to produce a real world number, by taking the stated effects of the standard bombardment warhead- the standard heavy antiship round, also- and juggling with their stated radius of effect and description against the main site's nuclear weapon effects calculator to get a real yield.

It works out at 21.5 megatons, to produce an air blast radius (20 PSI overpressure) equal to the stated radius of effect. Unfortunately, the shields deflect blast and heat pulse very well- it's prohibitively expensive to completely shield a tank, but most medium and heavies would take light damage only anywhere outside the fireball, and most capital ships completely immune to a single warhead.

Fighters attacking capital ships do so in swarms; the very smallest unit the capital scale rules are equipped to handle is the 6-strong squadron, which fire lasers and launch warheads collectively; Flights of 24 and Groups of 72 are common, and a fighter Wing- stated in one of the scenarios to be the rough tactical equal of a battleship- is 360 craft.

Armour is stated (on the back of the Centurion box) to be 'composite ceramic and stress-aligned Titanium'- and grav tanks and fighters basically exist on the same scale, using the same interchangeble weaponry, except the tanks are usually better shielded.

[Imperial Overlord]

Armour is stated (on the back of the Centurion box) to be 'composite ceramic and stress-aligned Titanium'- and grav tanks and fighters basically exist on the same scale, using the same interchangeble weaponry, except the tanks are usually better shielded.

And the fighters use tac nukes for ground bombardment (HELL missiles).

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Yes; it was trying to remember the derivation of that acronym- there is one somewhere, i'm sure of it- that got me confused and thinking they were somehow laser- fired.

Re-reading the rules, incidentally, it seems likely that a HELL artillery shell from a standard field artillery piece is going to do more damage to a grav tank from the gravitic initiation pulse scrambling the grav drive and sending the thing nosediving into the ground than the actual blast does.

On unit organisation, the Terran Overlord Government can deploy 'more than eight million Legions'- that is front line mobile forces, not garrison.
A Legion- well, we are talking about a deliberate, self- conscious recreation of Imperial Rome among the stars here, and it is a duplicate, with adjustments, of the standard early- imperial Legion of Octvian Augustus' time.

Ten combat Cohorts, the first cohort of ten combat Centuries, the second through tenth cohorts of six combat Centuries each, type variable- armour, infantry, etc.

Cohorts are never broken up, but can combine into Manuses- 'hands'- ad hoc tactical formations of two to five cohorts.
The artillery detachment is a Manus- level formation, three Cohorts of artillery, an air defence Cohort and an independent Rocket Century- which launches Thor bombardment and other observation satellites into orbit.

An Engineering Cohort is attached, and consists of three Combat Engineer centuries and three Construction Engineer centuries; the Military Police cohort consists of six infantry Centuries fore rear area security.

Auxilia are usually assigned in opposition- a predominantly armoured legion will have an infantry auxilia attached, an infantry legion in a defensive mission may have additinal aerospace defence or engineer units, assigned to attack it is likely to collect an armoured auxilia; these units generally consist of four to six cohorts.
Fighter Wings can also be attached as auxilia.

A Century consists of a service and three combat platoons each of three units- squads or vehicles; the lead platoon is commanded by the Centurion, the other two combat platoons and the support platoon by Optios.

Nine combat units in a Century, six Centuries in a line Cohort, nine line and six auxilia cohorts- plus the ten centuries in the lead cohort- nine hundred tanks and IFVs in a Legion, backed by 162 nuclear capable artillery pieces and up to 360 space capable fighters; an exceptionally nasty outfit to come up against.

Incidentally, the guy in the ad with the face tattoo was Legatus Marcus Lee, commanding officer First Cohort, Raulta command 13379th Legion; normally a tribune's job, but the rank entitles him to command Manus- level units. A fanatic.

On the bombardment thing, Connor, I've just realised we're talking past each other slightly; you're talking about the power required to carry out the bombardment mission (and incidentally, if that Kessrith world was done in 'in the blink of an eye', that's a change from how it was originally written up in Interceptor), I'm talking about individual ship power.

Spinal mounts, their power on the tabletop was nowhere near what it ought to be if they actually lived up to the description. You could one-shot kill a destroyer or frigate, but nothing bigger- and the damage they did declined with range. In space. Nuts.

Again, there is a ship design system in Leviathan, and that produces the mass and cost stats for the ships; you can make your own, or take an existing design and deconstruct it. I consider the mass a much more trusteworthy figure, because I can see where it's coming from, than the length of the ships for which there is no derivation that I can see.

[Connor MacLeod]

I'll get to my replies later on this, but I do want to know..

Does ANYONE around here with RL have the capital ship briefing? That seems to be the hardest one to get to, but I'd like to get a hand on it.

[Azazal]

I'll get to my replies later on this, but I do want to know..

Does ANYONE around here with RL have the capital ship briefing? That seems to be the hardest one to get to, but I'd like to get a hand on it.

Got it

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I have a copy. What do you need from it?

[Typhonis 1]

Thats a fun scenario idea.....Can Comstar hold Thukkayid against a TOG force the size of the Clan force during the Battle of Thukkayid? IE They land as many legions as the Clans landed Galaxies.

[Imperial Overlord]

Thats a fun scenario idea.....Can Comstar hold Thukkayid against a TOG force the size of the Clan force during the Battle of Thukkayid? IE They land as many legions as the Clans landed Galaxies.

Fuck no they can't. TOG nuclear artillery for the win and that's without getting into longer engagement ranges, grav tanks, and shields.

[Azazal]

ok, got some numbers to throw into the pot to simmer, mostly from background description, not much fluff in the rule books. This is a first pass so some things might be tweaked as time goes buy

From the Space travel section of Legionnaire
FTL travel is through T-space, kind of like SW Hyperspace, where the minimum speed is 12 times the speed of light and your speed on entering T-space is directly proportional to the speed in T-space. To enter a ship must be traveling between 7500 meters per second with a max speed of 187500 meters per second. When entering at 7500 m/s you will be traveling in T-space at 1ly/month, max speed would be 10000 ly/month. Travel in T-space does cause one to build up a special radiation (technobabble), as such an object can only exist in T-space for a max of 725 continuous hours. The radiation is dispelled after an equal amount of time in real space, ie travel 5 hours in T-space and you will need to spend 5 hours in real space to allow the radiation build up to bleed off.

Travel through T-space does take precise calculation before the jump, no need to quote Han here. A jump of up to 100 ly would take 6 minutes to calculate, while a 10000 ly jump would take 600 minutes. This is for an average ship computer and navigator , the numbers can be lessened with more sophisticated navigation computers and skilled navigators.

Fuel usage:
The average fight sized craft has enough hydrogen to use as reaction mass to accelerate from a relative stand still to 187500 m/2 and then back to 0 once, while capital ships have enough to perform the action twice, though Prefect states that most large ships can accelerate and decelerate 3 times , this is also where it is stated that most fighters can travel 4 AU under maximum thrust.

Pulling Gs:
From the Interceptor rule book description of the TOG Lancea fighter, "With 11 Gs of acceleration, a high-thrust Lancea is one of the fastest fighters in the galaxy." The high thrust version removes the fighter's lasers to allow it to be a high speed interceptor that fires off a salvo of missiles and the run away. In comparison the Renegade Legion/Commonwealth Na'Ctks Moquka (Fluttering Petal) heavy fighter, deigned by the KessRith, an alien race that believes in brute strength and endurance over speed, pulled a max of 4 Gs of acceleration when originally designed. It was modified for human use and had some of the extra weapons removed to lighten its mass, it now pulls ~5 Gs.

Firepower:
Not much in the books for numbers or descriptions, but on the back of Centurion, "you ride in 250 tons of moleculary aligned crystalline titanium wedded to a ceramic ablative shielding. You carry a 200mm gauss cannon, two massive 10 gigawatt lasers, two SMLM fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles, a Vulcan IV anti-missile system, and a medley of of equally lethal weapons."

The weapon load out is pretty much a description of the aging TOG heavy Trajan tank, though there is a discrepancy with the mass, the vehicle description shows the Trajan as having a mass of 377, but this is never quantified and is used in the design rules for determining it's final thrust, as such it could very well be an arbitrary number. In the game, each of the lasers on the Trajan can burn away the equivalent of 1 ton of tank armor in a shot. The issue here though is game mechanics, in game armor is represented by a block of squares, 10 across and how even many deep as a tank has armor. The Trajan has 90 points of armor on it's front face, or a 9 deep x 10 across block, every 10 points of armor is 1 ton. If hit with one of its lasers, the front would take 10 point of damage the would burn straight through the 9 rows of armor to the do a point of internal damage. So the argument can be, the laser vaporized 9 tons of armor, and had energy left over to do damage, or that is simply bored a whole through the armor, but did not actually vaporize the equivalent of 9 tons, and what we see is just quick easy game mechanics to keep the game going.

OK, that's it for now, off to dinner, back later with some more after a second pass and look for more fluff in the various scenario books.

[Azazal]

Ghetto edit "each of the lasers on the Trajan can burn away the equivalent of 1 ton of tank armor in a shot"

That should be 10 tons of armor, not 1

[Azazal]

Ghetto ghetto edit:

Fuck it is 1 ton, damn I need to stop over proof reading

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Noting, on the side, that the TOG has a serious case of biggunitis; this actually gets much worse when looking at the battleship designs, but to stick with the Trajan heavy tank for the moment as a worked example- those lasers are the least efficient models available.

Tanks and fighters here use the same weaponry, and lasers come in a range of sizes; varying length, longer barrel longer range, varying diameter, larger bore higher damage.
That's actually backwards, isn't it? Worse yet, damage declines with range- slowly, but definitely.

The point is that as all combat in the ground scale is well within close range for the space use they were designed (i.e. written up in Interceptor) for, there's simply no call for the likes of a 7.5/4. Centurion lists the lightest and smallest weapons capable of doing a given amount of damage and ignores the rest. The Trajan's 7.5/6s make sense for a heavy fighter or a corvette turret, when you need substantial damage at range, but that last 20% of their performance costs 35% of their mass and power requirement.

A laser capable of half the depth of burnthrough in ground combat is only 33% the mass and power drain. Slightly more realistically, the main limit on vehicle armament is the number of weapons the gunner can control; and the Trajan has a pair of AP lasers and a relatively useless two-round missile launcher. Strip the 7.5/6, the SMLM-2 and one AP laser, and add two 1.5/6 and two 3/6, you get a 50% increase in effective damage potential, better redundancy, and a weight and power saving.

Oh, and those burn holes are large enough that if a 200mm shell manages to hit the same spot, it stands an excellent chance of passing through and detonating inside the armour.

The point being that TOG have a big- gun fetish that often causes them to make less than fully effective use of the assets they do have- take the Commonwealth/Renegade Deliverer, the Trajan's opposite number, fractionally heavier- 404 vice 377 tons, or mass units- which caries one heavy and two medium- heavy lasers, three chances to slip a shot past shielding instead of two and 20% more firepower, and an additional light gauss cannon. Same thrust, slightly better armour.

Starships, especially. Some of the TOG destroyer and frigate classes are so badly outclassed it isn't even funny.

[Connor MacLeod]

On the subject of those nuclear detonations; the air-to-ground rules in Centurion can be made to produce a real world number, by taking the stated effects of the standard bombardment warhead- the standard heavy antiship round, also- and juggling with their stated radius of effect and description against the main site's nuclear weapon effects calculator to get a real yield.

It works out at 21.5 megatons, to produce an air blast radius (20 PSI overpressure) equal to the stated radius of effect.

That's about what I got too, but it wasn't an anti-ship warhead from what I read, it was anti-fighter. The anti-ship weapons were lasers.

Unfortunately, the shields deflect blast and heat pulse very well- it's prohibitively expensive to completely shield a tank, but most medium and heavies would take light damage only anywhere outside the fireball, and most capital ships completely immune to a single warhead.

Since fighters are stated to be capable of wiping out a city (wheras warships have enough firepower to "boil planets") I'm inclined to think these are fighter to fighter missiles, not cap ship ones.. The Centurion rules about HELL missiles strongly suggest that they're mainly for use against fighters and kinetic impactors, rather than starships (which are the province eof the big laser arrays.) The fact the exampoles use fighters and patrol craft also hints at this. If cap ships do use these, its probably in a "tactical" role rather than ship to ship combat.

Incidenally I suspect the laser barrage (which are implied to be of broadly similar effect) from cap ships is probably the same - they use reduced yields to stop from fucking the place up too badly.

What is also interesting is that if you use the ADC to calc the size of the rock that might be dropped on the planet (that a 20 megaton missile might wipe out) you get some very interesting figures, IMHO. (assuming velocities typical of an asteroid impact.)

I'm not goign to touch on shields because the way they're hinted at in Centurion (and the "painting" method to penetrate them) has some interesting implications, but confusing with other material.

Armour is stated (on the back of the Centurion box) to be 'composite ceramic and stress-aligned Titanium'- and grav tanks and fighters basically exist on the same scale, using the same interchangeble weaponry, except the tanks are usually better shielded.

It sounds technobabblish to me even if it does include titanium (they do something funky to the titanium anyhow)

[Connor MacLeod]

Re-reading the rules, incidentally, it seems likely that a HELL artillery shell from a standard field artillery piece is going to do more damage to a grav tank from the gravitic initiation pulse scrambling the grav drive and sending the thing nosediving into the ground than the actual blast does.

The grav bit of the hell rounds is odd. I'm not sure they're "just" nuclear warheads really.. there seems ot be a technobabble effect (or some other reaction ) going on. Mind you, given the capbilities I'm estimating, some asort of annihilation reactions for the big ships may be required.

Another interesting thing I've noticed that while they run on reaction drives and have propellant limitations, they apparently do not have reactor fuel limitations. At least, the big ships don't.

On unit organisation, the Terran Overlord Government can deploy 'more than eight million Legions'- that is front line mobile forces, not garrison.
A Legion- well, we are talking about a deliberate, self- conscious recreation of Imperial Rome among the stars here, and it is a duplicate, with adjustments, of the standard early- imperial Legion of Octvian Augustus' time.

-snip rest for brevity-

I suspect they have alot more than just eight million Legions, because they supposedly have quadrillions of inhabitants and billions fo worlds. half a trillion soldiers just won't cut it (its not as bad as 3 millionc lones, ,but its not exactly GOOD either.)

Two things argue for larger potential armies: 1.) a vast majority of men (and some women) who aren't slaves are apparently required ot severe at least 3 if not more years in the military. At least Citizens are, though I suspect a fair number of Plebians do to gain Citzenship too. With quadrillions of people, that is going to be a potential number many orders of magnitude above the 8 million legions, even if you assume only a percentage (say 1%) could apply.

The other bit is that for the "garrison" legions, Its stated several times that 1 Garrison legion is expected per million inhabitants. With billions of planets, that's going to be "billions" of legions alone, and that assumes an average population of just 1 million per planet. Even if you had a a few million planets with say, 50 million each, thats tens or hundreds of millions of legions.

What I suspect is is that the 8 million legions is the "standing" army. Its what they currently operate with, while the rest are probably "reservists" or "militial" (IE probably Garrisons) Lets face it, the TOG doesnt have any significant threats to its power, ,so it seems that they're not even utilizing their full warmaking capability. If they DID have a significant threat, I bet you'd be seeing far more troops than half a trillion. Hell, they may even start spamming out more warships.

On the bombardment thing, Connor, I've just realised we're talking past each other slightly; you're talking about the power required to carry out the bombardment mission (and incidentally, if that Kessrith world was done in 'in the blink of an eye', that's a change from how it was originally written up in Interceptor), I'm talking about individual ship power.

The two sources I was referring to weren't from teh game manual, t hough they coincided. It was interceptor and Legionnaire. Interceptor mentions that the atmosphere ws boiled away and the planet burned "red with heat".

legionaire hints at a bit more. It mentions the population being killed within "moments", but that Buntari continued the bombardment long after extinction took placee. The oceans vaporized, the atmosphere then burned off, and "sterile cinders glowed with the heat of repeated attacks."

In both sources, the bombardment is mentioned to have occured while Buntari had the KEssrith leaders over for dinner, and made t hem watch. THat tends to suggest a fairly constrained timeframe for the ocean vaping and atmosphere removal. The killing of all life on the planet was just the immediate effects.

We dont know precisely how manyn ships were involved, but Intercecptor mentions that Constantin went after Buntari with a Carrier group, which suggests that Buntari probably didnt have more than a battleship group at his command, possibly less.

That data is quite enough to establish quantitative figures for firepower, and to be blunt, its quite impressive (TT level at least, maybe single digit PT tops, for battleship-grade vessles that is.)

Spinal mounts, their power on the tabletop was nowhere near what it ought to be if they actually lived up to the description. You could one-shot kill a destroyer or frigate, but nothing bigger- and the damage they did declined with range. In space. Nuts.

reemmber, I dont adhere very strictly to game rules no amtter how sensible they are. Game rules are invariably abstractions on some level or another, ,and while RL seems to be well thought out and intelligent (far more so than any game I've encountered), its still game stats.

Mind you, there's the "Asteroid" bit I hinted at above which gives us indcation of firepower, ,and there's also power required to accelerate ships (since we can figure mass and acceleration, we can determine figures.)

Again, there is a ship design system in Leviathan, and that produces the mass and cost stats for the ships; you can make your own, or take an existing design and deconstruct it. I consider the mass a much more trusteworthy figure, because I can see where it's coming from, than the length of the ships for which there is no derivation that I can see.

I actually did a scaling of a Shiva class BB from Leviathan. I assumed (roughly) half a cone shape, and a density somewhere around that of cork for the hull. You know what the mass was?

Tens of millions of tons at least, more like hundreds of millions.

As I said, as well thought out as alot of this seems to be, there's still some pretty goofy stuff in here regardless. For example, I've noticed that the stated ammo for their needle/slug weapons in Legionaire? "ballistic polymer".. or "plastic". Plastic bullets. I didnt think this was a problem initially, but i've had it pointed otu to me plastic is pretty stupid for ammo, so that may hve to be disregarded also.

Starship masses may very well need to be too. The same problem has cropped up in Star Wars, Honoreverse, STarfire, and 40K (especially the latter.) J ust because its written down doesnt automatically mean its incontrovetibly fixed. The other option is to rescale the ships, and of the two, I tend to consider the masses more "game-stats" based.

[Connor MacLeod]

From the Space travel section of Legionnaire
FTL travel is through T-space, kind of like SW Hyperspace, where the minimum speed is 12 times the speed of light and your speed on entering T-space is directly proportional to the speed in T-space. To enter a ship must be traveling between 7500 meters per second with a max speed of 187500 meters per second. When entering at 7500 m/s you will be traveling in T-space at 1ly/month, max speed would be 10000 ly/month. Travel in T-space does cause one to build up a special radiation (technobabble), as such an object can only exist in T-space for a max of 725 continuous hours. The radiation is dispelled after an equal amount of time in real space, ie travel 5 hours in T-space and you will need to spend 5 hours in real space to allow the radiation build up to bleed off.

It gets better. Interceptor's rules (and also doubled up in my "Battle for Jacob's Star game manual) mentions that max etnry speed is .5c, and that with that velocity they can make 100,000 LY/month. I'm still thinking of how to factor this in (burst speed perhaps, or maybe its only certain rare or special ships that can achieve it, since other sources state the max as 10,000 ly/month. Nevermind the problems this presents with the FTL comm speed limit of 20,000 LY/month for non VLCA)

Prefect ( or some other sourcee around like that) mentions that T-space hops hav ea minimum time of around 60 seconds or something before you can re-emerge, meaning that a minimum of a minute interval occurs between in-system jumps, where they can cover about 1.4 AU per jump (at 12 LY/month)

Travel through T-space does take precise calculation before the jump, no need to quote Han here. A jump of up to 100 ly would take 6 minutes to calculate, while a 10000 ly jump would take 600 minutes. This is for an average ship computer and navigator , the numbers can be lessened with more sophisticated navigation computers and skilled navigators.

funny enough, they rate computers in G's, which tends to suggest that warships (at least some warships) can hit double digit Gs (IF no ship could, whats the point in hving a nav computer that could plot a course at a 20 g range?) One source mentiones 75 Gs, and I've heard one guy mention destroyers had an 80 gee accel rate, but those may be outliers/errors.

Mind you, the rules tend to suggest warships tend to balance power between weapons/shields/engines in combat, so no system is operating at max capacity. It may be that engines could hit higher gees, if power was divreted from other systems. So the lower accels may be combat speeds (something similar would be true in Star Wars)

Fuel usage:
The average fight sized craft has enough hydrogen to use as reaction mass to accelerate from a relative stand still to 187500 m/2 and then back to 0 once, while capital ships have enough to perform the action twice, though Prefect states that most large ships can accelerate and decelerate 3 times , this is also where it is stated that most fighters can travel 4 AU under maximum thrust.

I rememver the 4 AU it and the 3 transit bit, but not the first part. Where are you getting that from.

Pulling Gs:
From the Interceptor rule book description of the TOG Lancea fighter, "With 11 Gs of acceleration, a high-thrust Lancea is one of the fastest fighters in the galaxy." The high thrust version removes the fighter's lasers to allow it to be a high speed interceptor that fires off a salvo of missiles and the run away. In comparison the Renegade Legion/Commonwealth Na'Ctks Moquka (Fluttering Petal) heavy fighter, deigned by the KessRith, an alien race that believes in brute strength and endurance over speed, pulled a max of 4 Gs of acceleration when originally designed. It was modified for human use and had some of the extra weapons removed to lighten its mass, it now pulls ~5 Gs.

Already commented on this.

Firepower:
Not much in the books for numbers or descriptions, but on the back of Centurion, "you ride in 250 tons of moleculary aligned crystalline titanium wedded to a ceramic ablative shielding. You carry a 200mm gauss cannon, two massive 10 gigawatt lasers, two SMLM fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles, a Vulcan IV anti-missile system, and a medley of of equally lethal weapons."

Other sourcse mention tanks have enough firepower to waste cities, which suggests some nuclear-grade firepower somewhere (same as with fighters.)

The weapon load out is pretty much a description of the aging TOG heavy Trajan tank, though there is a discrepancy with the mass, the vehicle description shows the Trajan as having a mass of 377, but this is never quantified and is used in the design rules for determining it's final thrust, as such it could very well be an arbitrary number. In the game, each of the lasers on the Trajan can burn away the equivalent of 1 ton of tank armor in a shot. The issue here though is game mechanics, in game armor is represented by a block of squares, 10 across and how even many deep as a tank has armor. The Trajan has 90 points of armor on it's front face, or a 9 deep x 10 across block, every 10 points of armor is 1 ton. If hit with one of its lasers, the front would take 10 point of damage the would burn straight through the 9 rows of armor to the do a point of internal damage. So the argument can be, the laser vaporized 9 tons of armor, and had energy left over to do damage, or that is simply bored a whole through the armor, but did not actually vaporize the equivalent of 9 tons, and what we see is just quick easy game mechanics to keep the game going.

Whre was this from? 1 on of any material will generally require gigajoules of energy to vaporize (1 ton of iron will need around 7.5 GJ minimum,for example.)

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Yes, eight million legions ready to be used offensively, and hundreds of millions, possibly billions more standing garrison and police duty.

Although, consider the operational factors; a Strike Legion- predominantly armour, infantry auxilia- has no non-grav drive assets. It is expected to manoeuvre on a continental if not planetary scale, spread out to pursue and group up to assault an enemy- they simply do not need numbers to control an area, with the available sensors and mobility.

Counterforce is what matters, and if you have more than the other guy, good. I do agree, eight million legions is probably all the TOG needs in the first echelon.

When it comes to wasting cities, well, yes, but I got the impression that this was Battle of Berlin style, demolition through sustained conventional firepower, burning foundations out with laser fire and shattering supporting members with gauss cannon shot, that sort of thing.

The standard 21.5- megaton heavy HELL round isn't an anti-fighter weapon, because it can't move fast enough to catch them. It has a thrust of 4 'g', and is basically not much more than a warhead on a stick. Other types of missile are used for anti- fighter work, with much lighter (conventional?) warheads and higher thrusts, all listed in Interceptor- radiation seekers, scanner silhouette seekers, etc, none of them with anything like the lethality.

These rounds are fired at capital ships by the hundred, they are the main antiship weapon of the fighter swarm, and the way the attack usually goes is, swarm of missiles to boil off some of the armour and the point defence turrets followed by charge in to close quarters and exploit the flaws the barrage has left; sometimes it works. That is their primary purpose. Surface attack is just a bonus. Normally, these things are fired in hundreds if not thousands in mass roll- back attacks; one at a time is enough for a city, two or three hundred for a cruiser.

'Carrier', in the navies of the TOG and Commonwealth, is not a class, it's a type; a qualification added to the mass categories which run Destroyer, Frigate, Cruiser, Battleship- so you get designation- abominations such as frigate and battleship class carriers.
We're talking about grand fleet flags in relation to that incident, unlikely to have been small units, and as far as I recall from Leviathan a 'group' is ten, with their associated escorts.

So that would be ten five-wing battleship- class supercarriers, each with a battleship, pair of cruisers, three frigates including a frigate-carrier, and six destroyers as escort.

[Coalition]

The point is that as all combat in the ground scale is well within close range for the space use they were designed (i.e. written up in Interceptor) for, there's simply no call for the likes of a 7.5/4. Centurion lists the lightest and smallest weapons capable of doing a given amount of damage and ignores the rest. The Trajan's 7.5/6s make sense for a heavy fighter or a corvette turret, when you need substantial damage at range, but that last 20% of their performance costs 35% of their mass and power requirement.

A laser capable of half the depth of burnthrough in ground combat is only 33% the mass and power drain. Slightly more realistically, the main limit on vehicle armament is the number of weapons the gunner can control; and the Trajan has a pair of AP lasers and a relatively useless two-round missile launcher. Strip the 7.5/6, the SMLM-2 and one AP laser, and add two 1.5/6 and two 3/6, you get a 50% increase in effective damage potential, better redundancy, and a weight and power saving.

The point being that TOG have a big- gun fetish that often causes them to make less than fully effective use of the assets they do have- take the Commonwealth/Renegade Deliverer, the Trajan's opposite number, fractionally heavier- 404 vice 377 tons, or mass units- which caries one heavy and two medium- heavy lasers, three chances to slip a shot past shielding instead of two and 20% more firepower, and an additional light gauss cannon. Same thrust, slightly better armour.

The way I could see the tanks preferring to use the heavier laser, is that it has a better chance of getting through the armor with the first shot. You are paying more for the tonnage, but if you can cripple or kill the enemy unit before their smaller lasers penetrate through your armor, you have won.

It also lets lighter units threaten heavier units. RL light tanks might only be able to threaten TOG light tanks, but TOG light tanks can threaten RL light and mediums. It gives the TOG forces more combat flexibility (TOG light tanks on the flanks of a RL medium tank force are a serious threat; while RL light tanks on the flanks of a TOG medium tank force are not as much).

I can't find my books right now, so I don't know the specific damage and armor ratings for the lasers and tank armors.

Similar to the Sherman vs Panther/Tiger tank comparison, but not quite as much difference between the two.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yes, eight million legions ready to be used offensively, and hundreds of millions, possibly billions more standing garrison and police duty.

Although, consider the operational factors; a Strike Legion- predominantly armour, infantry auxilia- has no non-grav drive assets. It is expected to manoeuvre on a continental if not planetary scale, spread out to pursue and group up to assault an enemy- they simply do not need numbers to control an area, with the available sensors and mobility.

Counterforce is what matters, and if you have more than the other guy, good. I do agree, eight million legions is probably all the TOG needs in the first echelon.

I said, they're probably greatly under-milistarized. Its theorized in other sources that the TOG may be using the Commonwealth as a unifying factor to keep it together (giving it an external enemy, but one not strong enough to threaten it) which is why TOG Hasn't crushed them yet. (And possibly why the Free Traders still live)

Those 8 million legions represent mostly the "Space Marine" aspect of the TOG Ground Forces, those designed more to attack and take and (for certain Legions) hold briefly, territory until it can be properly garrisoned.

When it comes to wasting cities, well, yes, but I got the impression that this was Battle of Berlin style, demolition through sustained conventional firepower, burning foundations out with laser fire and shattering supporting members with gauss cannon shot, that sort of thing.

Tanks and fighters can fuck over an entire city singlehandedly. (That's easily megaton range firepower, possibly more depending on how thoroughly one means "fucked"). Capital ship sare so far above that its not even funny.

The standard 21.5- megaton heavy HELL round isn't an anti-fighter weapon, because it can't move fast enough to catch them. It has a thrust of 4 'g', and is basically not much more than a warhead on a stick. Other types of missile are used for anti- fighter work, with much lighter (conventional?) warheads and higher thrusts, all listed in Interceptor- radiation seekers, scanner silhouette seekers, etc, none of them with anything like the lethality.

Its main purpose as stated is to stop big fuckoff kinetic attacks like asteroids, but it can still be used as an anti-fighter weapon. THe blast radius if anything will guarantee that. Moreover, it doesnt' need to "catch up" with the fighter neccesarily, especialyl as a proximity weapon. It just has to Plot a decent intercept course (any fighter that is entering the atmosphere is going to be moving too fast to rapidly change its course, ,even their best acccels won't be THAT much different.) And to reach something like a THOR satellite, they need to reach at least excape velocity.

Mind you, It looks to me like you're going by game stats for the accel, and I've already established I tend to take those stats with a fuckoff huge grain of salt (unless you're telling me the game never abstracts its rules)

These rounds are fired at capital ships by the hundred, they are the main antiship weapon of the fighter swarm, and the way the attack usually goes is, swarm of missiles to boil off some of the armour and the point defence turrets followed by charge in to close quarters and exploit the flaws the barrage has left; sometimes it works. That is their primary purpose.

Uh, what? That's not what the Centurion rules said. IT said their primary purpose was to stop kinetic orbital bombardment attacks. It MENTIONS attacking spaceships, but it doesnt specify what KIND. (fighters and patrol craft can qualify as spaceships as well.)

21.5 MT missiles even in their hundreds are goign to do precisely fuck-all against warships that can dish out enough firepower (even in groups) to blow off a planet's atmoshphere or boil off the oceans. do you even realize how much firepower that requires? We're talking hundreds of billions or TRILLIONS of megatons, bare ass minimum.

Seriously, where are you getting this from?

Surface attack is just a bonus.

Again accoridn gto Centurion, those missiles can't be used againt ground targets.

Normally, these things are fired in hundreds if not thousands in mass roll- back attacks; one at a time is enough for a city, two or three hundred for a cruiser.

which is STILL not going to be enough. A teraton is a MILLION megatons. You'd have to fire those off in their hundreds of thousands to even hope ot scratch a ship. Even assuming the aforementioned feats fo bobmardment take dayS (not bloody likely) naval ships can engage for hours of fighting as far asI've determined, that's HELLISH in terms of durability.

'Carrier', in the navies of the TOG and Commonwealth, is not a class, it's a type; a qualification added to the mass categories which run Destroyer, Frigate, Cruiser, Battleship- so you get designation- abominations such as frigate and battleship class carriers.

We're talking about grand fleet flags in relation to that incident, unlikely to have been small units, and as far as I recall from Leviathan a 'group' is ten, with their associated escorts.

So that would be ten five-wing battleship- class supercarriers, each with a battleship, pair of cruisers, three frigates including a frigate-carrier, and six destroyers as escort.

Source? I'm pulling the breakdown on battleship groups form Prefect (2-5 Battleship squadrons). Carrier groups are referenced in Interceptor, and it also mentions that while larger formations occur, they're quite rare.

Rereading "interceptor" offers a slightly different interpretation of Battleship groups, so that might be open to interpretation. And for the Record, Buntari's flagship was a battleship, which strongly suggests its a battleship group (or squadron) in my mind.

[Azazal]

Fuel usage:
The average fight sized craft has enough hydrogen to use as reaction mass to accelerate from a relative stand still to 187500 m/2 and then back to 0 once, while capital ships have enough to perform the action twice, though Prefect states that most large ships can accelerate and decelerate 3 times , this is also where it is stated that most fighters can travel 4 AU under maximum thrust.

I rememver the 4 AU it and the 3 transit bit, but not the first part. Where are you getting that from.

That one is from the Legionnaire RPG game in the space travel section.

Whre was this from? 1 on of any material will generally require gigajoules of energy to vaporize (1 ton of iron will need around 7.5 GJ minimum,for example.)

Using the bits and pieces that are the game mechanics so heap on the salt, 1 ton of armor is 10 boxes, the laser type on the Trajan can destroy 10 boxed in a single shot, so on the surface it looks like 1 ton of armor is destroyed. But given that this is game mechanics which are going to be simplified to make the game easier, they’re not going to be 100% true, which is why I think it is better to think that the shot bore through the armor, and while compromising a full ton’s worth of armor, it did not boil it off.

Also re-reading the design rules the Trajan is in fact 377 tons, so while the weapon description form the back of Centurion does match the Trajan, the mass is way off, and sadly I could not find a tank in the vehicle brief that has a 200mm gauss gun, lasers, missiles, etc, and massed 250 tons

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Isn't the idea that a tank or a fighter is capable of destroying a city single handed begging the question?
That is, they can do it...if they have nuclear level firepower. How do we know they have nuclear level firepower? Because they can do it. That is circular reasoning.

There's no indication anywhere outside the equivalent of a recruiting poster that this can be done, and every indication in the durability of the vehicles against conventional fire, the numbers for buildings, that it is conventional crossfire.
Artillery can lob nukes, sure, but a front line MBT? Not by anything in the vehicle rules or the manual, nor by anything in the fluff that isn't open to a much more moderate interpretation.

On the game rules in general- this is a game. It is a game. Let me repeat that again. It's a game. What the hell are you going to analyse, if not the game?
What I am doing is looking at the on- table performance and thinking, 'If this is true, then...' and trying to produce sensible results out of the game material, which fortunately happens to have a lot of SI units lying about here and there.

Suspension of disbelief. When did that become a bad idea? And look at the fighter briefings and the cap ship manual- Renegade Legion suffers from the Unreliable Narrator problem. Look how politically slanted the write-ups are, and in many cases that was the game designers simply having a bit of fun, or pulling something out of their asses.
I do regard the in-game numbers as more reliable than the in universe equivalent of 'No Shit' stories and propaganda, and I remain to be convinced that the 'Blink of an eye' comment on the dinner- party bombardment isn't the equivalent of the dialogue from ST;TDiC.

The other reason to take the game numbers seriously is that they provide a relatively hard lower limit. Even on my own relatively minimalist take, the numbers justify a level of firepower roughly equivalent to ST;TOS, lower sublight and higher translight speeds, vastly greater numbers, extent and political will.

That bombardment; game stat again- capital ships do use heavy missiles as a main weapon- and they are usually used in the opening and the end game, to kill small ships outright at the opening of a fight or finish big ones at the end; they are salvo fired in large rollback attacks. From the dmage they can do to another ship, I get a total of two gigatons per salvo per battleship.
There's the kaboom, and the laser fire on the rest of the planet to turn it red with heat followed- no necessity for a one second BDZ.

The third reason to take the game material seriously is that almost everything there is available on how these forces interact is in there. What does what to which? can a Fluttering Petal survive a strafing attack by two Ictus? Is the new renegade Huntress class battleship- trading off a spinal mount for more lasers- really a match for a TOG Shiva? By going with an analysis based solely on sustained fire, inert target, you're throwing half the reason for bothering to analyse away. And especially when the numbers bring you into flat contradiction with the game material, on what the hell fighters actually use as missiles, then I have to think maybe it's time to put down the sack of salt.

The fourth reason is the in game history, which, again, unreliable narrator, but it does seem that the human race was in a bad way at the beginning of the seventh millennium; plague- or biowar- followed by alien invasion. Most of humanity was politically dependent on the KessRith at that time, and the Terran Republic was born out of a revolutionary movement to overthrow the alien overlords.

The 'reason' the Toggies are so xenophobic is that hostile history. There is a lot of bad blood there- but the Terran Republic was founded in 6565, and collapsed into the Terran Overlord Government by 6680. An old civilisation, an old galaxy, but a very new power, and not really a stable one- it's still in it's vengeful, expansionist phase. I'm not sure they could be that much more militarised; on the evidence of the background, they're already trying to be as nasty as they can.

Calling orbital defence the HELL missile's primary purpose is stretching it a bit; they are the defensive installation's primary means of defending itself, sure, but cut to Leviathan and "Interceptor describes anti-fighter types, and Centurion describes anti vehicle missiles. These are not weapons of mass destruction but missiles designed to damage a small target. HELL munitions, first described in Centurion, are much more powerful."

The reason that doesn't seem to make sense to you is that you're way out in big number land far beyond what the rulebook evidence will bear.

On the group formation thing, the desctiptions change as one rub#lebook gets superseded by another; what weas described in Interceptor as a 'group' is stated in Leviathan to be a 'Squadron', and carriers are no longer a distinct type, but a qualification to other designations.
Ten battle squadrons forming a group is in the fluff text for the Renegade Repulse- class battleship, describing a deployment of such.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

With the adidtional note, of course, that some things really do fail to make sense and need to get severely re-examined. Spinal mounts- the on table description of their behaviour makes no physical sense.
Apparently, they decelerate. In vacuum. After being fired at 'relativistic' velocities. Ger-fuck? The interplanetary dust isn't that thick, is it?

Obviously not right, and needs to be looked at to work out what is going on. The spinal mount installation includes it's own magazine- no need to buy rounds separately, so no way to get the mass of a shot from that.

On the power issue; if this can be cracked if we can get a robust "1pp= X joules" relationship, that can be used to calculate the raw power output of a lot of weapons and other systems.

Going by the Trajan's 23pp, melt/vapourise one ton of titanium, I get 10.74 gJ to do that, which /23=0.467 gigajoules per 'power point'. So, yes, either they made the same mistakes writing up the box copy as I just did or 'a pair of ten gigajoule lasers' is about right. of course, there's no factor for waste heat in there, and as these are explicitly stated to be 'Gennium(?)-Arsenide crystal lasers', there may be a lot of that.

So, you have this keel- mounted electromagnetic accelerator thing. Drawing fifty thousand power points, or varying from 23.35 terajoules a shot- and charging at a much lower rate than that in actual watts- to, assuming 20% efficiency in the lasers, 116.75 terajoules. Assume velocity is important, go for the minimum mass the description justifies, and see what comes out.

One, two, many? Six hundred ton crowbar?
Lower estimate (F=MA, so A=M/F, 23.35tj, 600,000 kg)- 38,916,667 m/s. I must have screwed this up. That number's so big, it's actually reasonable- over a tenth lightspeed. Assuming one hundred percent efficiency. Is that even the right equation for the job?

Using KE=1/2 MVsquare,
23.35tj/ 300,000kg and root what's left, 8,822 m/sec. That makes slightly more sense. 8.8kps isn't really relativistic, though.
High end estimate. Assume the laser is only about 20% efficient go with 116.75tj, and use a smaller crowbar- hundred ton round. 48,322 m/sec.

H'm. OK, there may be something wrong here. Either they got it wrong or I did. (possibly both.)

There are two other elephants in the room, anyway. One of them being- does the way shielding is supposed to work make any sense at all? I may be the wrong person to talk to about physical sense after that, but I don't think so. Momentarily creating a wall of extremely sharply curved spacetime to deflect fire, and letting it spring back again to avoid it imploding and taking it with you, and cycling again, and doing this at 30 to 80 hz (for most fighters and tanks)- um.

The in-universe overweight kessrith is, if they can do all this fancy gravitic manipulation, why are they still tooling around in single to low double digit 'g' fusion torches?

[Connor MacLeod]

I'll touch off on the rest later, but I thought I'd do the corrections on the math

So, you have this keel- mounted electromagnetic accelerator thing. Drawing fifty thousand power points, or varying from 23.35 terajoules a shot- and charging at a much lower rate than that in actual watts- to, assuming 20% efficiency in the lasers, 116.75 terajoules. Assume velocity is important, go for the minimum mass the description justifies, and see what comes out.

One, two, many? Six hundred ton crowbar?
Lower estimate (F=MA, so A=M/F, 23.35tj, 600,000 kg)- 38,916,667 m/s. I must have screwed this up. That number's so big, it's actually reasonable- over a tenth lightspeed. Assuming one hundred percent efficiency. Is that even the right equation for the job?

Uh, F=MA is "force = mass x acceleration". None of the variables you plugged in save mass actually APPLY there.

Using KE=1/2 MVsquare,
23.35tj/ 300,000kg and root what's left, 8,822 m/sec. That makes slightly more sense. 8.8kps isn't really relativistic, though.
High end estimate. Assume the laser is only about 20% efficient go with 116.75tj, and use a smaller crowbar- hundred ton round. 48,322 m/sec.

You get 52 GT if you use 38,000 km/s at 300 tons, twice that for 600 tons.

I'll note that given the ranges I've seen mentioned for Leviathan (and what i've been able to geuss at) if we assumed a Spinal Gun had a mere range of oh, 500 km, which is a fraction of what it is for t he broadside mounts, and that's going to only work if the ship is virtually still or not moving very much (or not manuvering at all), even with single-gee accelerations. Getting into the thousands of km range only makes this worse (nealry a minute to hit the targeT?)

H'm. OK, there may be something wrong here. Either they got it wrong or I did. (possibly both.)

The latter. You screwed up using the F=MA figure because you didnt know force or acceleration. Perhaps you were thinking of the formula for work (force times distance), although you dont knwo the distance and even if you did I doubt it would work out that well. (other people have tried using it on 40K tanks for example, but it would screw up.
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