[Traveller] Grapeshot in starship combat

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Harl Quinn

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A while back I read through Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet series and was intrigued by the arsenal the fleet had - hell lances (plasma cannons?), the null field (a disintegrator field), and grapeshot. Yep, grapeshot, you heard right. Now, grapeshot, in the historical sense, was basically large (grape) sized lead balls packed into a canvas bag which was then loaded into a cannon to make a large shotgun. It was devastating against massed infantry and could cut rigging and puncture sails (as well as anyone topside) in a naval engagement.

In Campbell's series, the starship-grade grapeshot effectively serves to wear down an enemy's shields by depleting them (or in the case of Traveller, overloading a black globe to either force the defender to lower the flicker rate or turn it off altogether).

As far as mechanics go, I'm envisioning grapeshot functioning on the same level as a sandcaster - ammo is packed in barrels which are stored in a magazine and launched through an emplacement in a turret. The barrel reaches a certain range and releases its contents, which then go speeding into the target's screens or hull to cause damage. Grapeshot could also be used as an anti-missile defense, but I'm not entirely sure that would be terribly effective.

My issues are figuring out the range and damage it would cause. I'm going to go back and take a look at BTRC's 3G3 books and even TNE's Fire, Fusion, and Steel to see if I can get an idea of how to sort that out, but if there are any Traveller gearheads here who want to help puzzle it out, I'd appreciate it.

Oh, and if you're interested in Campbell's series, it's great. There's a review written here (not by me, but it's still very favorable).
 
Without shields, I imagine tiny projectiles accelerated to very high, relativistic speeds (and composed of material that can withstand said acceleration without disintegrating) would be a nightmare — a 9mm bullet accelerated to .1c would hit with ~89MJ, about four times the energy of a M829A3 (Google-assisted napkin math on my part).

I imagine a tiny sliver of metal going through the hull and several decks' worth of plating to hit a reactor or something. Really bad news.

Now imagine a bunch of them. Yeah.
 
I read a SciFi short story where an alien fleet jumped to the outskirts of the solar system and then fired off a load of large ball bearings. A bit later, they jumped to engage an enemy fleet and forced them to deploy into an area where they were hit by the ball bearings and torn apart. It probably took a few newtonian calculations to work out the trajectories, but seems like an excellent tactic.

You could do the same when attacking a base on a body with no atmosphere, just work out the trajectory, orbits and revolutions, fire off a thousand bill ball bearings and leave, the ball bearings would hit the buildings/base/domes, shattering them and exposing the inhabitants to vaccuum. I'd allocate a Penalty to hit based on the complexity, perhaps negated by good Computers or Aiming equipment.

What it means, though, is that such bases could be attacked/devastated with surprise, without detecting a nearby ship, at any point. That might be unplayable or unwanted in a game.
 
Without shields, I imagine tiny projectiles accelerated to very high, relativistic speeds (and composed of material that can withstand said acceleration without disintegrating) would be a nightmare — a 9mm bullet accelerated to .1c would hit with ~89MJ, about four times the energy of a M829A3 (Google-assisted napkin math on my part).

I imagine a tiny sliver of metal going through the hull and several decks' worth of plating to hit a reactor or something. Really bad news.

Now imagine a bunch of them. Yeah.
They show what this might look like on the TV show The Expanse. They have scenes where bullets are ripping through the hull and flying through the ship.
 
Yeah, nasty stuff indeed in a setting like The Expanse where you don't have screens (or even nuclear dampers) to save you. In Campbell's series they never hit relativistic speeds and I don't recall any description of grapeshot scoring a penetrating hit. It mainly seemed to be a tactical weapon meant to wear down an enemy's screens and physical armor; the fleets would pretty much make close broadside passes at one another and just let each other have it until one side or the other was eliminated, surrendered, or otherwise broke off the fight.
 
Jeff Swycaffer wrote an article, "Antimatter and Roundshot," in Dragon 95 which discusses this in general - that is, no specific rules for implementation. He sees it more as a means of denying space by forcing ships to avoid the projectile field; in his specific example, canister shot are short range weapons which ships can avoid in High Guard combat by moving to long range. Fire enough of these and you open up range to maneuver or even escape.

Striker includes rules for flechette ammunition, but the 'merchant's best friend' in our campaigns was a triple-turret with sandcasters fired in an anti-personnel role . . .
 
I like the idea. Unlike the age of sail starship grapeshot I see primarily as increasing the chance to hit small targets.

The effective range would basically be the range of the missile The is used to accelerate it towards the target. The shot itself will be deadly until it hits something the limiting factors are the shot has a predictable trajectory and is going to show up big time on radar if nothing else unless made up of some special material that does not build any charge.

The latter is the hard part as if your grapeshot is going fast enough to damage a ship it’s going to hit a fair amount of stuff per unit time.
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Grapeshot sounds very cool, but I think it would be tricky to do right. If you just fired it like a shotgun from a ship's cannon, considering the ranges that engagements that space combat is often imagined to occur at (often thousands of km), I would think you're unlikely to hit anything. It would just spread too much. But if it was the case that a shell explodes into shrapnel about a klick or two before hitting the target, I could see that being a great way to turn a near miss into a hit.

It still sounds like a point defense weapon, and to be honest, that's kind of how I assumed PDCs would work. It might be hard to fire an explosive shell at relativistic velocities, I'm thinking, but maybe future technology can deal with that.
 
Jeff Swycaffer wrote an article, "Antimatter and Roundshot," in Dragon 95 which discusses this in general - that is, no specific rules for implementation.
I do seem to recall a Dragon article which had actual rules for grapeshot and some other odd armaments. Fortunately, I don't think I saw any chainshot...
 
Without shields, I imagine tiny projectiles accelerated to very high, relativistic speeds (and composed of material that can withstand said acceleration without disintegrating) would be a nightmare — a 9mm bullet accelerated to .1c would hit with ~89MJ, about four times the energy of a M829A3 (Google-assisted napkin math on my part).

I imagine a tiny sliver of metal going through the hull and several decks' worth of plating to hit a reactor or something. Really bad news.

Now imagine a bunch of them. Yeah.

I read a SciFi short story where an alien fleet jumped to the outskirts of the solar system and then fired off a load of large ball bearings. A bit later, they jumped to engage an enemy fleet and forced them to deploy into an area where they were hit by the ball bearings and torn apart. It probably took a few newtonian calculations to work out the trajectories, but seems like an excellent tactic.

You could do the same when attacking a base on a body with no atmosphere, just work out the trajectory, orbits and revolutions, fire off a thousand bill ball bearings and leave, the ball bearings would hit the buildings/base/domes, shattering them and exposing the inhabitants to vaccuum. I'd allocate a Penalty to hit based on the complexity, perhaps negated by good Computers or Aiming equipment.

What it means, though, is that such bases could be attacked/devastated with surprise, without detecting a nearby ship, at any point. That might be unplayable or unwanted in a game.
I've got nothing else to add. Essentially, it's a series of micrometeorites...except they're coming in a bunch, at once. The shields might overload, or the energy might go low.
And then the heavy hitters are shot.
 
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