Carrier Battles Mod Stories

[Suicide Junkie]

Early History of Carrier Battles #1 (A PBW game)
Note: Game time has been multiplied by ten to make it sound more plausible

2410 - 2420: Dawn of the Carrier Age
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In the years leading up to 2410, the Cult of SJ had colonized most of the planets within reach, and explored enough to know that there was no hope of habitable systems further out along the northeastern galactic arm. With each system less habitable than the last, the galactic core began to look more and more appealing. The subsequent push for coreward explorations would change the course of galactic history.

In 2410, an exploration fleet was commissioned and began construction on the Cult homeworld of Udix VII. The original plans called for a great number of missile-armed support gunboats and supply tugs to escort a flagship. The impracticality of this was soon apparent however, and the plans were repeatedly scaled back. By 2415, the grand exploration fleet was comprised of only a single Heathen-class anti-ship bombardment frigate and the flagship carrier, CSX Assisted Suicide. Sporting ten missile tubes with a wide range of small warheads, it would theoretically be able to destroy whatever the Heathen and its heavy missiles could not.

Command staff were under an ever increasing amount of pressure from above to locate more colonizable worlds, and late in 2415 they decided to halt construction of more ships and launch the expedition ahead of schedule. With only a single escort, and a mere third of the carrier's fighter complement loaded, the exploration fleet was quite underpowered. However the expected risk of an exploration mission is typically quite low, so the fleet was launched anyways.

In what may be the shortest exploration mission in recorded history, the Cultist explorers made their very first warp transit in 2417, and emerged right in the middle of a hostile fleet. Although the warppoint was unexplored at the time, we now know that it led directly from Udix to Narcisston. Many of you will recognize Narcisston as the homesystem of the Memnorak, and that is quite correct. Back in 2417, the Memnorak had been busy building a fleet of their own, and those ships were all positioned right where the Cultists were headed.

Now, in order to understand how the subsequent conflict played out, we must take note of early Memnorak design theory. Pre-reformation warships were completely under manual control. The bridge crew is much the same as today, however behind the scenes, tasks were done almost entirely by hand. Reactor stabilization, thrust vectoring, weapons management, they all were done by real people in the bowels of the ship. The other thing to note is the emphasis on weapons over defenses. The Memnorak Crusader, which is not to be confused with the later Cultist design of the same name, had four medium laser cannons, a depleted uranium cannon, and a cluster missile tube. Absolutely bristling with weapons for a frigate sized ship. However, in fitting all of those guns they completely neglected armor or shielding; the Memnorak battle plan relied instead on the ability to destroy their targets before the enemy could fire back.


Once the warp transit began, conflict was inevitable. The Memnorak could see the gravitational wake of the Assisted Suicide approaching, and knew that they could not afford to hold back. If any sigificant incoming object turned out to be a hostile warship, they needed to fire first or take heavy casualties. Memnorak commanders gave the only order they could; fire on sight. The Cultists on the other hand, were not under such pressure. Whatever the situation was, they needed to pull back and put room between them and the targets. The long range missiles carried by the Cultist ships would be only half as effective at point blank, so regardless of whether the sensor blips were friendly or hostile, a rapid retreat to weapon safe range was mandatory.

From surviving logs of the event, we know that the CSX Assisted Suicide emerged from the warppoint just south of the Memnorak fleet, while the escort emerged to the east. As ordered, the seven Memnorak ships immediately opened fire with their laser cannons on both ships. The Heathen was destroyed so quickly by the Memnorak ships that there are no recordings of the actual event. The Assisted Suicide, on the other hand, managed to deploy its defensive ice field in time and suffered almost no damage. The Memnorak laser cannons were the perfect size for shooting down fighters, but far from optimal for breaching thick defenses; the beams were refracted and diffused by the field, and what little energy did leak through to the hull during each shot was harmless. If the carrier had had one fewer field generator, it would have been badly scorched by the caustics generated... or, if the Memnorak cannons had been one size larger, they would have punched holes deep enough through the ice fields to score serious hits. With the luck characteristic of this early period, the cultists were effectively immune to the enemy fire. On the other hand, however, the carrier did not have any anti-ship weaponry and was thus unable to damage the enemy ships either. With no weapons capable of hitting the enemy, and laser fire pressing down from all directions, the Assisted Suicide had to launch fighters in the hopes of stopping the assault before a Memnorak ship got a lucky hit through.

This is when the design flaws of the Memnorak caught up with them. Orders are said to have come down from the Memnorak captains to target the fighters. However, the gunnery crew misunderstood, and opened fire with their cluster missiles only; the laser cannon batteries continued to target the carrier. Missiles were what the Cultist fighters were designed for, and the missiles were shot down almost before they could leave the tubes. Then, while the carrier's defenses glowed with the laser bombardment, the fighters were able to use their small anti-missile weapons to pepper the unprotected hulls of the Memnorak ships with fire. The small bore anti-missile cannons were certainly not efficient by any means, but since the Memnorak had no armor or shielding, every hit was to a vulnerable point.
The battle lasted quite some time, but in the end the Memnorak ships fell to a thousand tiny stings while the Cultists deflected or shot down almost everything; over 90% of the Cultist fighters were recovered from the battle in serviceable condition.

Although the Cultist military denies any damage to the CSX Assisted Suicide in the first battle of the Narcisston warppoint, crew members serving on the carrier at the time say that one of the Memnorak laser beams did in fact manage to penetrate the ice field and the armor plating to start a fire in the port side crew quarters. Many Cultist museums have picked up on this story, and half-melted trinkets are sold by the thousands daily in gift shops across the empire.

Shortly after the warppoint battle, the CSX Assisted Suicide was attacked by four more Memnorak Crusaders which were en route to the warppoint, presumably to join the now-destroyed fleet. The incoming ships were swiftly destroyed by the Cult fighters long before they could close to anywhere near laser cannon range. This devastating loss of 80% of their standing navy over a mere two years was the driving force behind the Memnorak design reformation. By 2420, the Memnorak would be finishing the emergency construction of their first defense carrier to push the Cultists back, and with that, the Age of the Carrier had truly begun.

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Carrier Battles Mod can be found on imagemodserver, at:
http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/...arrierBattles/

A number of PBW games are also active.

[Suicide Junkie]

History of Carrier Battles #1

The 2420s: An Analysis of Early Reformation Memnorak Warship design.
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Memnorak ship design circa 2420 would prove critical to the course of galactic history in the coming years. The reformation was still underway, and there was mounting pressure from the Cultist forces to the north. Only a few short years earlier, 80% of the Memnorak's standing navy had been annihilated by the CSX Assisted Suicide and her quarter-squadron of fighters at the first battle of the Udix-Narcisston warppoint. Time was running out for the Memnorak; the Cultists would soon be back with an invasion force, and they desperately needed to come up with a defense.

By the year 2419, the Memnorak had finally found a combination they believed could defeat the CSX Assisted Suicide. Utilizing short range assault craft based in a large, mobile mothership like the Cultists were doing was the key. Production of the "Hive" class carrier and "Wasp" class fighters would dominate the Narcisston economy for the next decade, and it would not be until early in the 2430s that the Memnorak would finish building a new design for the front lines.

The Hive class Carrier was unlike the Cultist "Pew" class carriers mainly in that all of its systems were totally dedicated to its primary purpose of launching fighters. A Hive could hold a greater tonnage of fighters than its Cultist counterpart, and was also capable of launching its entire complement in a single wave. This dedication to fighters precluded the use of support weapons on the carrier itself; the fighters aboard had to fend for themselves while the carrier retreated. This rapid-launch ability of the Hive's was crucial to the Memnorak strategy, which involved using mostly "Wasp" class Heavy Bombers. The faster they could launch bombers, the more compact the resulting missile volley would be, and the less time there would be for enemy point defense to operate. A full Hive would thus by proxy unleash such a huge number of missiles that the enemy would be overwhelmed and blasted to pieces.

In stark contrast was the Cultist system, in which fighters were launched in as many as three waves, and cargo capacity was secondary in importance to support weapons. The Cultists also utilized smaller fighters; although each fighter was relatively weak, the larger number of them allowed for wider coverage. A Pew would also follow its fighters into combat, providing a stream of light missiles to suppress enemy targets.

The most crucial thing about the whole situation was the fact that the primary function of the Cultist "Flame" class fighters was to shoot down missiles. The destruction of the crusader class ships by Cultist "Flame" fighters may have misdirected the Memnorak researchers into thinking they were really anti-ship fighters, and pressure from a panicked government may have forced them to chase the first option to show any promise. Still, the fact remains that they chose to respond with the proverbial "rock" to the Cultists' "paper". Missiles were what the Cultists were best at taking down, and missiles were what the Memnorak were providing.

Now, a full Hive worth of Wasp class bombers could certainly take down a quarter-loaded Cultist Pew, but since the CSX Assisted Suicide immediately retreated when the first Hive was completed, such a battle would never occur. Two Hives could cripple or destroy a fully loaded Pew as well, although their bombers would certainly be wiped out. Without the anti-fighter weapons that would be found on truly post-reformation designs, Memnorak bombers would be helpless against any defense fighters that survive the destruction of their mothership.

When the second battle of the Udix-Narcisston warppoint occurred in 2425, the Memnorak had two full Hives against the Cultists' single Pew and two support ships. Normally this would have resulted in the destruction of at least the carrier, or possibly both support ships. However, with uncanny timing, the Cultists arrived while the second Hive was still moving into position, and they were able to split the two waves of bombers. The first Hive's bomber wave opened fire at point blank range while the second wave was just reaching maximum missile range; about six minutes out from the warppoint. The slow launch rate of the Cultist carrier limited their antimissile power in the first two minutes of combat, and the CSX Assisted Suicide took moderate damage despite the best efforts of her interceptor pilots.

The second wave of Memnorak bombers, on the other hand, found itself facing two-thirds strength missile fire from the wounded carrier and the full fury of 60 swarming Flame fighters. The Memnorak bombers failed to score any further damage on the Cultists, as their last missiles were picked off with only seconds to spare. Although the cult support ships were unable to engage in the battle with the bombers, they were able to breach the shields of the Memnorak carriers with their heavy missiles. The Cultist interceptors were unable to do any noticeable damage, but with nothing to lose, they swarmed and attacked anyways. The Memnorak carriers, with no weapons and heavy missiles pounding on their armor, were unfortunately doomed. Although they lasted for over half an hour, the long range bombardment was relentless, and both Hives were eventually destroyed.

With the advantage of hindsight, it seems certain that the best the Memnorak could have done, given the socio-economic and political conditions, would be to stock their Hive class carriers with dogfighters and a small anti-ship missile battery. Dogfighters would have quickly stripped the Cultist's fighter screen, and subsequently allowed the missile battery to bombard the unprotected Cultist ships. It is quite certain that there would have been heavy casualties in the fighter ranks, and the Memnorak carriers would have suffered some damage in the subsequent missile exchange with the support ships. Had they done so, however, they would have scored a key victory and put the Cultists on the defensive for the next twenty years at a minimum.

In the end, Memnorak weapons technology and industrial capacity were more than advanced enough to turn back the Cultist assault in 2425. However, the Memnorak were still burdened both by the lingering effects of their pre-reformation designs and by the immense pressure from a government once self-described as "scared ****less". Due to these factors, the Memnorak engineers seized on a highly inefficient design which happened to show a glimmer of potential in their simulators. The Memnorak defenders would have been beaten at the second battle of the Udix-Narcisston warppoint even had the Cultists been late, but inexplicable timing of their attack allowed the flagship carrier of the Cult of SJ to escape destruction. The Memnorak design problems combined with the unbelievable timing of the Cultist forces in that battle would pave the way for the full scale Cultist invasion of their home planets a mere twenty years later. Although fully post-reformation designs would be much more effective, they would then be badly outnumbered by the Cultists, who had so far only lost a single frigate and a handful of fighters in the war.

[dogscoff]

Just discovered this subforum - good to see you writing again S_J, i always enjoy your work.

[Kana]

Want more...It might help in my CB game...

Kana

[Combat Wombat]

Just don't do what the Memnorak did

[Suicide Junkie]

I'm actually working on this:
http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/...CBmodTutorial/

I've almost finished the FIG 360 course, but I'll have to write up the prerequisites before I upload it

[Kana]

Can't wait...

Kana