so, in orbital assaults, whats the use of bombardment galleons and such? as im slapping one together for some world building stuff, whats some tactics and weaknesses ships like these have (its a little over kilometer and a half long by the way)
orbital bombardment warships
Basically destroying any millitary target that wanders into it's crosshairs.
Not specific to Warhammer ships, because they don't exist, but any space based weapon system is going to have a trade off between time on target and vulnerability to counter fire. If you put a weapons platform in geosynchronous orbit over a cit and rain down tungsten rods, then you're sitting still for anti-sat missiles. If you're orbiting the planet then you're only over the target for seconds to minutes every orbit but are potentially less vulnerable. The use case would be as a WMD without the radiological component, using gravity to hammerfrick big ground targets like a city or military base.
> The use case would be as a WMD without the radiological component
>he doesn’t know
Sure, you could drop MIRVs out of it too, but in that case you might as well just use an ICBM.
/k/ - Weapons
This is a /misc/ raider trying to false flag and report people to get them banned btw, I got a warning after they spam reported me for pointing out they're all raiding here. Ignore this guy, fictional weapons have always been welcome on /k/.
thanks mate, i feel nice inside
A weakness they have in the 40K setting is that they are not very accurate. They're basically firing house sized shells from the macro-battery with a CEP measured in kilometers. That doesn't matter when they're being used to hammer down a void shield, but it means they can't really be used in proximity to friendly forces.
Lance strikes are slightly more accurate, but not pinpoint. There is a reason the 40K space combat almost always ends with the ships in visual range of each other. As far as tactics, they'd be used to suppress orbital defenses and probably to delete outlying fortifications that weren't a priority to be seized, so that the guard regiments can focus on a coherent axis of advance rather than needing to spread out in every dorection.
I thought 40k space battles took place at (somewhat) realistic ranges, to the point you basically need psykers to help aim since shells could be flying through space for like 15 minutes before hitting a target?
Or is this yet another GW "depends on the writer lol" thing
Here's where I read that, I guess it doesn't say anything about how accurate they are but half an hour to hit a target implies long range.
orbital saturation bombardment is not as practical as it seems. it will always be a point target thing or you'll smash an asteroid into a planet if you need it sterilized.
luckily its precision bombardment ( as precise as a pair of nuclear warhead firing railguns can be)
SEAD for your dropships/drop pods, destroying enemy docking stations, (usually big scifi spaceships don't need runways but still need a suitable landing spot to disembark), supporting paratrooper-esque, thus lightly armed typically, troops against enemy armor
Presumably if you have specialized gallons for bombardment that means you also have other specialized ships in the fleet, take a page from Sins of a Solar Empire where siege frigates are the only non-capital class ship capable of orbital bombardment but are ONLY really good at that so they typically won't be sent in until the defending fleet has been defeated, as they're extremely vulnerable to strike craft or really any other ships
Typical sci-fi frickhuge spaceships operate like WWI-WWII era ships but IN SPAAACE, so you could just look at how shore bombardment ships were used in those eras for ideas. Just replace "ocean" with "space", "shore" with "planet", and "out of shore bombardment range" with "areas with orbital shielding" and you're good to go.
my favorite! a long reply. as a big orbital assault galleon its armed with long range PD and anti-ship weapons, a massive EWAC suite for SEAD, and 2 giant railguns running the length of the warship. lemme try to explain how it looks: its like if you cut the front arrowhead off of 2 halberd destroyers from halo, attached a kilometer long rectangle to the back of each one. put each on its side and connected them with 2 huge railguns in the middle, plus engines and fins in the back, the bridge and the weapons batteries and missiles. i have a lot of specialized vessels such as a ship class called the Jagd Donnager, a large battlecarrier style vessel. its meant to break E V E R Y T H I N G so the defending fleet doesn't matter. the batteries of cindere cannons and railguns will cut apart and opposing warships. its pretty much a really aggressive bombardment monitor. (with a massive complement)
>so, in orbital assaults, whats the use of bombardment galleons and such?
>whats some tactics and weaknesses ships like these have (its a little over kilometer and a half long by the way)
Without a decent grasp on the technical capabilities of the ships/weapons in the setting, and how close to RL science you're trying to be, there's no way to answer that. Is there any reason to not just use Cold War style 'Rod from God' tungsten telegraph poles dropped from orbit for this? If you're up in space fricking things up on the ground shouldn't be that big a problem for you - definitely not big enough to warrant the creation of a giant 1500m long ship (even if your setting can just print them out without having to worry about the costs).
What's your basic goal for this ship? Is it there to provide fire support for ground troops? Is it there to bombard strategically vital cities/targets? Or are you just trying to build a non-spherical Death Star?
ah right, an explanation. well the capabilities are close to halo level, warships are equipped with plasma cannons batteries called "cinderes" as the primary weapon, as well as railguns, coilguns and autocannons. missiles are big also. its meant to be a expeditionary heavy warship, carrying a battalion of troops and aircraft, 2 massive drop pod bays and then some. its just a massive mobile fortress. a FOB essentially
>its meant to be a expeditionary heavy warship, carrying a battalion of troops and aircraft, 2 massive drop pod bays and then some. its just a massive mobile fortress. a FOB essentially
That's a fair bit more than 'just' an orbital bombardment platform right there. Still, even with plasma cannons and other high tech macguffins, is there a reason your ships can't just drop rocks on planets from very very very (very) high up and let gravity do the work?
I don't do 40k, so this is all based on the concept of bombardment in a realistic or semi realistic setting.
Any weapon system you use bombard a surface target is probably going to need to be dedicated to do doing just that. Any missile, projectile, or bomb you're using would need a heat shield, which means a greater portion of mass not devoted to warhead, reducing effectiveness in any other role. Even if you're going with a pure kinetic energy weapon, the faster you fire it through the atmosphere, the more friction it will be subject to, which means more ablation or chance of destabilization. There's probably a critical point in both mass, velocity, and projectile shape and density where those issues become moot and enough of the projectile gets to the ground to cause massive damage, but then you have to figure out what that means for your bombardment ships capacity and power needs. Destabilization brings up the next point, accuracy and guidance. There will be forces on a weapon in atmosphere that aren't a factor in space. You could use retro rockets to guide it the whole way down, but then you have a limit on how much fuel you have, so a limit on control authority plus added mass just like a heat shield. Fins wouldn't require fuel, but their effectiveness would change based on where it is in the atmosphere.
Then there's the orbital mechanics. If you're in orbit around a planet, the most efficient way to hit something on the ground is to decelerate a projectile from your ship. You either have it shoot out the back of the ship or turn the ship and fire it opposite your direction of orbit.
The TL:DR is the best way to bombard something from orbit is to have a heat shielded pod detach from your ship, decelerate with chemical engines until it enters the atmosphere, then releases a bunch of aerodynamic, guided warheads. Or use some Plasma Cannon that has made up physics that says it wins.