[Diaspora] Designing a Mine Field for Spaceship Combat

[Lon Sarver]

Sorry this is so behind the times, I've been having email troubles...

 

Mines in space would not, I think, function quite like naval mines or
land mines.  It could be done, but might be impractical except for a T2
or higher system with relatively rich resources.

 

Space is big, yeah?  So any minefield that would be useful to defenders
would have to be big, too, including umpteen million mines.  Which means
the system has to have the tech not only to build them, but also to
exploit the resources of the system thoroughly enough to get all the raw
materials needed.  Said materials have to exist in the first place, too.

 

If you've got the tech and the stuff, then you can mine space.  But you
don't try to mine all of space, because that would be a waste of energy
and resources.  What you do is plot the most likely orbits that would
connect your planet (or whatever defensive position) with the slipknots
or other probable points of attack.  These points of attack are going to
be finite, perhaps even few, because an attacker won't have infinite
fuel/remass and therefore can't come at you from just anywhere.  They'd
be limited to a few corridors of attack, coming in from the slipknot, or
in from other planets in the system where they might stash/buy/skim
fuel, remass, and other consumables.

 

So you would have volumes of mines set along predicted orbits.  The
mines would have to navigate to keep up with the fact that the planet
they're protecting is moving, and that which they're protecting against
is also possibly moving.

 

Minefields wouldn't be dense.  Chances are, your navigator could plot a
simple curved orbit "straight" through the middle without even seeing
(with the naked eye) anything.  Filling millions of cubic kilometers
with mines so thick passing ships would hit them would be very resource
intensive.  Therefore, it's unlikely that you'd have mines which went
off on impact.  They'd all be proximity mines.  Sort of.

 

The mines likely have passive sensors and targeting computers, so that
ships passing within range could be attacked, regardless of whether or
not they even come close to hitting anything.  Mines would target drive
emissions, radio transmissions, radiant heat, and especially RADAR/LIDAR
or whatever navigation/targeting scanners your game uses.  Sweeping the
minefield with your *DAR paints you as a target.   They're probably
mobile, too, and might swarm a target.

 

You'd have four kinds of mines, I think: Shooters, Boomers, Squealers,
and Zappers.  Any minefield would probably be a mix of them.

 

Shooters are basically small missile platforms.  They lock on target and
fire whatever they have, be it guided mininukes or KK weapons or
whatever.  Probably, they'd wait until your ship was already in the
minefield, or close enough to several shooters to set up an effective
crossfire.

 

Boomers explode.  Now, there being no shockwaves in space (sorry, Mr.
Lucas), all the damage to an invading ship would come from shrapnel or
radiation.  For this reason, boomers are probably mobile, using cold gas
jets to alter their orbits to get as close to the target as possible
before going off.  They might also be shaped charges, set up so that
most of the blast is focused on the enemy, limiting incidental damage to
the rest of the minefield.  You'd see "hot" boomers, which deal damage
in heat and ionizing radiation, and "cold" boomers, which deal out
shrapnel.

 

Squealers are electronic warfare platforms.  They might also serve as
targeting benchmarks for other mines, helping their targeting computers
to triangulate enemy positions by noticing which squealers go off in
overlapping patterns.

 

Zappers are bomb-pumped lasers.  A mininuke goes off inside, and lenses
focus the energy generated into a truly wicked laser.  These would
likely be directional, too, and might wait to set up crossfire like the
shooters do.

 

It's also likely that most all mines have IFF keys, so that the forces
who placed the field would be ignored by the minefield.  I can see a
session structured around the players trying to buy or steal the IFF
transponder they need to sneak through the minefield...

 

All that said, let me offer a minority opinion as to how to realize a
minefield mechanically.

 

I wouldn't stat it out as a ship.  Spaceship combat in Diaspora is all
about, tactically, intercept orbits.  The abstracted map isn't so much
about raw speed or distance as it is about the difficulty of plotting an
intercept with your target, for your ship or your guns.  And while
spaceships aren't exactly ducking and weaving and dog-fighting, mines
would be even less maneuverable.  So...

 

I would treat a minefield as a challenge to the navigation skills of the
player flying the ship.  Negative shifts create stress damage to the
ship, targeted against specific tracks depending on the kind of mines
encountered.

 

So a minefield might be a 5 or 6 or higher difficulty, if it's the only
defense the players have to deal with.  Negative shifts are allocated
among the applicable tracks by the players, and of course they can take
consequences instead.  Other skills might be used to assist the
navigation roll: Beam and Missile skills to clear a path, EW skills to
jam the mine's targeting arrays, and so on.

 

To combine a minefield with ship-to-ship combat, just use the minefield
as an aspect on the encounter.  It would be very handy for the defenders
to be able to compel the attackers.  And if the defenders are using an
IFF system (a ship aspect?), that's two Fate points spent on one roll,
in different scopes.

 

Yours,

Lon Sarver

 

From: diaspora-bounces at phreeow.net [mailto:diaspora-bounces at phreeow.net]
On Behalf Of Sam Friedman
Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 10:38 AM
To: diaspora at phreeow.net
Subject: [Diaspora] Designing a Mine Field for Spaceship Combat

 

I have this story in my head of a paranoid system, or what's left of it,
leaving behind a vast swath of a mine field.  Think looking up from
Earth and seeing the faint band of the Milky Way... that's the mine
field.

 

How could I go about representing that in spaceship combat?  If I want a
scene whose purpose is to illustrate the rough time the characters have
navigating their ship through this minefield to get to whatever their
goal happens to be, how do I represent this stationary mine field
without letting the V-Shift of the characters' spaceship allow an easy
escape?  Also, how might I represent the mines detonating on impact (or
proximity)?

 

Here's what I thought.  I'd love suggestions.  I haven't had a chance to
playtest this, so it could be over/under-balanced.

 

Standard Explodey Minefield

[We represent the minefield as a T2 spaceship.  17 Build Points]

 

V-Shift: 2 (2 bp) - trying to represent the fact that the mine field is
labyrinthine, and difficult to work through.  It doesn't move,
necessarily, but it's not easy to just plow through.

Beam: 0

Torpedo: 4 (6 bp) - trying to represent the self-detonating nature of
the minefield.  Also ties to the sink-stunt "Self Detonate"

EW: 0

Trade: 0

 

Stress Tracks:

Hull: 7 (4 bp) (there's so much to shoot at, it hardly makes a
difference)

Data: 3

Heat: 3

 

Stunts:

Automaton (sink stunt): these are machines, not people. (1 bp)

High Capacity Magazine (1 bp)

Automated Defenses (no beam or missile defense to represent that
shooting a mine is an impact and it'll go "boom")

- Firewall (1 bp)

Self Detonate (sink stunt): they explode on impact, or when in close
proximity (2 bp)

 

Aspects:

Huge

"This thing goes on forever!"

"Don't get too close!"

A relic from a bygone war

"We could just plow right through"

 

All this got me thinking about other sorts of mine fields a crew might
encounter.

 

Special Laser-Shooting Minefield

V-Shift: 2 (2 bp)

Beam: 4 (6 bp)

Torpedo: 0

EW: 0

Trade: 0

 

Stress Tracks:

Hull: 6 (3 bp)

Data: 3

Heat: 6 (3 bp)

 

Stunts:

Automaton (sink stunt) (1 bp)

Automated Defenses

- Vector Randomizer (1 bp)

- Firewall (1 bp)

- Point Defense (1 bp)

 

Aspects:

Huge

"A thousand floating turrets"

A relic from a bygone war

"There's so much to shoot at!"

"This thing goes on forever!"

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