SENSORS : THE SILENT SAVIOUR 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
         All too often, I see people go out of their way to design incredibly powerful starships, loaded to the gills with weapons, shields, a near-invulnerable hull, and fast engines, only to be pounced by twenty or so TIE fighters. After hearing about how well their ship fared in the fight (usually requiring large repairs), I always ask "What kind of sensors do you have?" to which I get a variety of replies.
  1. I don't know.
  2. Who cares?
  3. Well, my search range goes out to forty units
        However, for me, first and foremost, I invest in sensors. Quite frankly, in all the campaigns I've been in (and run), I never award character points based on the number of kills - indeed, I usually award bonus points if the characters manage to AVOID combat. Being able to hold your own in a fight is all well and good, but why risk damaging the ship you spent over 2000 being-hours and almost a million credits working on? Why risk an almost instantaneous fiery death, for no other reason than they were on you before you knew they were there?
        Consider this example: A heavily modified ship decked out for combat that has a sensor range (on search) of say 40 or so. Now this ship, they make quite a reputation for themselves, smuggling goods for the alliance, blowing up a couple of TIE fighters, and just generally making life difficult for the Empire. What would a captain of an Imperial Star Destroyer do if he detected them at long range? Let's consider this very harshly for now. First off, he'd launch two squadrons of TIE fighters (or TIE Interceptors if he has them/been invented yet). Then he closes to 75 Space units, lines up twenty or so turbolasers, and POW! gets in a first shot that could very well vapourize the poor heroes without warning. AND even if he missed, the TIE fighters will be screaming in along that vector - and at 40 units/round, being forty units away at maximum detection range (assuming the characters are that lucky), they have a little lesst than four seconds to react and get a vehicle dodge in - highly unlikely, even if the bridge crew was sitting at the controls.

        There is a side point here. Under the second edition scale rules, a Star Destroyer spending twice as long as it needs to line up its weapons on a ship at long range flying straight, level, and at a constant speed still has an almost 70% chance of missing. However, with the NEW and VASTLY IMPROVED scale rules in second edition, revised, this drops to almost 0% (they can, after all, roll poorly).

        There is another side point here. "Wait a sec!" I hear a voice cry out, "Wouldn't they be able to SEE the Star Destroyer with the naked eye?" My answer is - possibly. I admit, a Star Destroyer is rather stupendously huge. However, if you think a Star Destroyer is huge, think about all of the rest of space. That is a whole heck of a lot bigger. Now consider the fact that there are stellar phenomenon, planets, stars, suns (being distinguished from stars by proximity), asteroids, comets, other starships, and dozens of windows to look out of in a light frieghter, what do YOU think the odds are? I'm not going to tell you - you have to run YOUR campaign YOUR way. But I think it's obvious where my feelings lie :) And before anyone says it, YES, there are not all that many windows on an X-Wing, but I GARUNTEE that ANYONE who would be flying an X-Wing would be looking straight ahead. No F-18 pilot would ever look out the side of his cockpit to keep track of his position.
        That is why I always want powerful sensors - because the reasons that I just gave work both ways. In well over three quarters of all starship combat I have ever run/participated in, the starship that gets in the first shot wins. And not only do they win, they almost always escape unscathed. Furthurmore, in 100% of all starship combat, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, the ship who knew where the other guy was first also shot first. THIS is why TIE fighters never stray from the sensor coverage of
their home base/ship - they don't have the sensor power for it (but a skipray blastboat does - which is what it was designed for, patrolling space). I'm sure that my idea of the ideal ship very closely mirrors all of yours out there, but I GARUNTEE that mine would have better sensors, and that if you had sensors that scanned less than 123 (48 <speed> + 75 <weapon range>) space units, you'd be in deep, deep trouble. Ideally everyone should get a Crystal Gravfield Trap (CGT) Array - it's impossible to jam (though large masses, such as planets, asteroids, or gravity wells do disrupt it somewhat), and it has phenomenal range. Here are the statistics that I play with:

        Passive:  500 / 2D
        Scan:      750 / 4D
        Search: 1000 / 5D
        Focus:      50 / 7D

        For those of you who can't afford to try and a) steal one of the fifteen or so in the galaxy or b) spend over fifty billion credits to develope one yourself (don't bother looking on the black market - a CGT will shatter if subjected to more than 200 N of force (say, a 2 lb. rock falling about a foot), you should consider a multiple sensor system. DER's, FST's, EPR's, the works. It is NOT difficult (though it is expensive, roughly 90,000 credits) to get your sensor range out to around 200.

        Just think for a second too - If you have a range of 200, and that pesky Star Destroyer has a range of 200, you could detect one another over 200 space units away - plenty of time for you to turn, shut off your sensors, and gun your engines. By the time anyone else gets into the area (assuming you have a space move of 4 and they have TIE's on patrol 50 units from the Star Destroyer), you'd be over 60 space units away by the time those TIE fighters showed up - FAR beyond their sensor
range, and odds are beeter than fantastic that a Star Destroyer will NOT alter its course to check out a fuzzy sensor image detected at long range, especially when the TIE fighters report nothing present.

Sensor Countermeasures : The Ultimate Strike Tool

        Shields are nice, and powerful guns, and deadly torpedoes and missiles and whatever else you want. AND nessesary! I'm not diminishing their importance. I AM pointing out that there are more important things, like stealth. You see, at heart, I'm a sneaky person, and I do sneaky thinks, and sensor countermeasures are super at being sneaky. Design your super ship, then mount a single Nuetron bomb on the undercarriage (12D capital scale damage - this is the Star Wars equivalent of modern day nuclear weapons). How close could you get before they detected you? Not closer than 100 space units, and certainly no closer than 60 before you would be under heavy fire (from whatever your target may be and the ships defending it)(If there are no ships defending it, then why are you attacking it with something as impressive as a nuetron bomb?). BUT - if you were to equip yourself with a BrightStar Industries Ship Stealth System (SSS), designed and built by Dev BrightStar (my favorite character), you would certainly be able to get to 60 space units out before being detected (or if you were detected, misidentified), at which
point, with engines gunning, you can scream in (figure 1 round of surprise and two rounds of confusion), and BOOM! You're streaking away from the scene, a massive EMP wave travelling out from the explosion (6D capital scale ion damage, moves at 24 space per round) disabling all the beig, stationary guns, and voila! Out and gone, with not a clear sensor or visual inspection to definitively say who done it. Here are just some of the many types of SSS's (pronounced essessesses) available on the black market (needless to say, the Imperial, and later the New Republic,  government discourages the use of this type of system)

NOTE: Unless otherwise specified, all sensor masks described below have
Availability : 3, X and are all totally innefective against a ship with a CGT Array

Sensor Jamming : The Desperate Tool

        If remaining unidentified is your goal, then sensor jammers are for  you. The basic premise here is that, instead of concealing or  misdirecting your own ships signals, you instead broadcast lots of  signals - enough so that the area of space around your ship (out to  about 300 space units is pretty standard) displays over twenty signals  per cubic meter. There are few sensor operators who can sort through the  billions of signals to pick out the ship(s) from the stellar static. But  lets take a closer look, shall we?
       By flooding space with billions of signals, you definitely mask your  identity and exact location - but the sensor operator on the other end  DEFINATELY knows that something is up, and will usually press that big  red button that says ALERT on it. So regardless of how powerful your  jamming systems are, there is no sneakiness involves. It's kind of like trying to swat a fly with a Buick (a type of car, for those who don't  know).
        Sensor operators aren't stupid. Regardless of how much other junk is out there, they WILL NOTICE a potential ship signature that moves in a  linear fashion (ie from point to point to point without disappearing). Things like this just beg for visual identification, and will almost always attract two or more starfighters.
        EPR sensors, which rely on ambiant light from the surrounding objects,  couldn't really care about sensor jamming. Niether could CGT arrays,  which only look for mass. This means that, if you ARE spotted visually, weapons accuracy will not be affected (except on larger ships, but that is discussed immediately below). Not only that, laser fire carries a long way in space, and is obvious in about a 200 space unit radius as  little green flashes (or red flashes or, my favorite, little blue flashes).
        Sensors are powerful, designed to defeat jamming. They are, therefore,  difficult to jam. Also, the larger the ship, the more powerful the jamming device required to affect it. That is, an X-Wing cannot jam a Star Destroyer. It simply is not possible. The Star Destroyer has so many DER's that it can almost instantaneously screen out the static and focus on the source of the jamming. The basic rule is that a starfighter jams starfighters (all of them) but not capital ships, and a capital ship jams capital ships and starfighters (all of them).
       Finally, sensor jamming is best used on solo missions. Why? Because not only are your sensors fouled up, so is every one of your teammates sensors. The potential for ship collision increases by a factor of, say, a thousand or so, when you suddenly blind them all.
       For those of you who want to know why I include it on every ship I build, I'll tell you:

  1. It also jams communications, since they operate in the same bandwidths as sensors
  2. If I use my sneaky sensor masks to zoom in, odds are good that the ordanance that I drop is NOT similarly masked. Just before I deploy, I activate the jamming. This does two things, one of which is to increase the survivability of the weapon, and the other is to increase the survivability of the ship itself. If they have a hard time tracking you, and the area is flooded with sensor radiation, then they are going to have a hard time tracking you. The standard procedure is to drift in, masked and concealed. At the release point, you open the weapons bay door, drop the weapon, activate the jammers, and gun the engines, almost simultaneously. It IS very wise to make the weapon a smart weapon that knows where it's supposed to go, and to have your ship pointed at your escape cooridor before gunning the engines. To the sensor operators on the other side, they'd have a second's warning or so before their screens light up with static. Odds are they won't distinguish the weapon in time to let any of the gunners know where it is, and even if the gunners DO get it, the weapon should be rigged to detonate on damage, letting blast damage do the work if impact won't. It helps to release it about four seconds out, so the weapon has a minimal chance of being intercepted. Meanwhilst, you and your stealthy ship are hurtling towards the outer defenses, when BOOM! from behind you, instinctively drawing every eye towards it. Immediately after the blast, you'd be wise to turn off your jamming, because it will throw off suspicion - everyone will assume that the jamming was caused by the weapon that just drifted in. Then pow, you're gone! Sensor jammers can be constructed out of a standard comlink. This is old technology, and any ships system can be slightly modified (very easy repair roll, costs about 100 credits) to turn it into an effecient jammer. If you want your little light freighter to be able to successfully jam the Star Destroyers massive sensors, well, you'd have to turn your ship into a giant comlink.
        Last but not least, paint your ship black! if you want to hide,  why not take advantage of the backdrop? It is also incredibly cheap, and effective. Scanning with they eye for targets in space is almost impossible. Doing so when your opponent is black IS impossible (well, ALMOST totally and completely impossible). You should also consider putting Infra-Red shields and blinders on your drive emmissions, both so simple (and out of date, yet  functional) IR tracking weapons cannot get a lock on you, and so that your drive exhaust is concealed from visual site (nothing like a blue spotlight moving away from the scene of the crime to tip off the authorities!).
 
Copyright © 1997 Bryan Cole


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