Boarding a vessel help

[Jhorriga]

So I'm trying to come up with a strategy for boarding ships for my sci fi universe. I 'm thinkthing that basically, an escape pod like vehicle carrying a team of commandos would be launched from a dropship. It would rocket towards the enemy vessel and ram into it with 4 prongs to keep the pod in place. Explosive charges would then bust a hole in front of the pod, then an airtight sleeve would deploy the seal the hole and create a tunnel from the hole to the pod. For larger ships, this could be used in bigger numbers. Suggestions? Comments? Other ideas?

Edited January 24, 2018 by Jhorriga

[DDE]

42 minutes ago, Jhorriga said:

So I'm trying to come up with a strategy for boarding ships for my sci fi universe. I 'm thinkthing that basically, an escape pod like vehicle carrying a team of commandos would be launched from a dropship. It would rocket towards the enemy vessel and ram into it with 4 prongs to keep the pod in place. Explosive charges would then bust a hole in front of the pod, then an airtight sleeve would deploy the seal the hole and create a tunnel from the hole to the pod. For larger ships, this could be used in bigger numbers. Suggestions? Comments? Other ideas?

Drop the air-tightedness, it cannot be relied upon to last in combat.

[Jhorriga]

So, the pod's door should make contact with the breach, and then a flex seal like bond will be deployed to seal the breach. The pod door was not making contact in the previous thing.

[Scotius]

I'm sure squishy humans inside that thing will love "ramming" part. I doubt they will be combat-ready after experiencing impact hard enough to punch through the spaceship's hull - but the ride should be unforgettable

Edited January 24, 2018 by Scotius
A typo.

[DDE]

23 minutes ago, Scotius said:

I'm sure squishy humans inside that thing will love "ramming" part. I doubt they will be combat-ready after experiencing impact hard enough to punch through the spaceship's hull - but the ride should be unforgettable

Yeah, especially in traditional pods, with eyeballs-out braking.

Quite likely to be blind for hours afterwards.

[StrandedonEarth]

An air seal is not necessary. If a boarding party is not ready for vacuum the first thing the defenders would do is seal the area and vent it to space.

Firing harpoons would avoid the discomfort of ramming.

Edited January 24, 2018 by StrandedonEarth

[Jhorriga]

Harpoons it is then. I'm thinking I'd replace the explosive charges concept with a laser cutter. 

[mikegarrison]

Any spaceship expecting to see combat should have everyone inside in pressure suits. In fact, if a hull breach is at all likely, they should probably depressurize themselves (less stress on the ship hull). All of that is unless your technology assumes ships are eggs and weapons are sledgehammers, in which case you can assume there is no survivable level of partial damage so no point in suiting up.

[YNM]

Wait, "boarding" ?

I guess... get a ticket, wait for it to dock ?

[softweir]

2 hours ago, Jhorriga said:

I'm thinking I'd replace the explosive charges concept with a laser cutter. 

Slooooow, man, slooooow! Even the ISS has enough aluminium between inside and outside that it would take hours to cut an entrance with the best lasers we have, and a far-future ship constructed in orbit could well have significantly more. It would give defenders plenty of time to mount a preemptive counter-attack. (IE, attack before the boarding party had a chance to exit the pod, by, for instance, attaching shaped charges to the outside of the pod powerful enough to breach it and kill the occupants.) And the power source needed to drive it would be large, and expensive. Whatever laser tech might exist, shaped charges will be better, as you can be sure explosives tech will also have progressed.

OK, so it is hard to blast open a ship without decompressing it. Why not plan for that and use it - force the defenders to defend in vacuum suits! (NB Remember to take lots of extra charges to cut through bulkhead doors.)

I'm also curious as to the universe-building that leads to this strategy - please tell us more!

[tater]

Any sufficiently interesting drive is also a weapon. Seems like the target needs to be entirely disabled.

In my Traveller universe (ages ago, when I ran a game), combat was so deadly to ships (high guard, for any traveller goons out there), that I decided to make a more age of sail feel (which much of that game universe had anyway, frankly). I decided that ships that were mission-killed in fleet actions would "strike their colors" in some mutually agreed upon way, and could then be taken as prizes. It's hard to recruit people to a space navy when combat is stunningly lethal, and almost no one has a better than even chance of living through any engagement.

Ships with troops might then actually have boarding actions.

Realistically, unless it's like SW where you have tractors, boarding is going to be non-trivial. Entering via airlocks is fine, except they'd be locked on a warship. Entering by cutting the hull is very troublesome, because whatever you envision cutting the hull could do so as a weapon in the first place. If you have lasers that cut hulls---not just hole them, but slice them---then any approaching boarding craft will be ripped to pieces by defensive lasers on the target craft, right?

[DDE]

5 hours ago, softweir said:

Slooooow, man, slooooow! Even the ISS has enough aluminium between inside and outside that it would take hours to cut an entrance with the best lasers we have, and a far-future ship constructed in orbit could well have significantly more. It would give defenders plenty of time to mount a preemptive counter-attack. (IE, attack before the boarding party had a chance to exit the pod, by, for instance, attaching shaped charges to the outside of the pod powerful enough to breach it and kill the occupants.) And the power source needed to drive it would be large, and expensive. Whatever laser tech might exist, shaped charges will be better, as you can be sure explosives tech will also have progressed.

OK, so it is hard to blast open a ship without decompressing it. Why not plan for that and use it - force the defenders to defend in vacuum suits! (NB Remember to take lots of extra charges to cut through bulkhead doors.)

I'm also curious as to the universe-building that leads to this strategy - please tell us more!

We're talking pretty soft sci-fi here, don't worry.

[GoSlash27]

Det cord as a breaching charge.

 

Best,
-Slashy

[Cassel]

In Star Trek Klingon had something like boarding vessels.

There is great sci-fi tv series The Expanse with space boarding scene. I don't remember how they did "open" way to target, was it explosive or they cut it with something, but I think boarding vessels were trying to use stealth attack, pretending to be space garbage to get closer to target.

edit:

In BSG Cylons also used boarding to breach into humans ships and deploy robots to eliminate crew.

Star Gate Atlantis series used some device to deliver gas to enemy ship, that is also interesting way to win fights in space.

I guess most effective would be to use drone-boarding vessel to impact target and make breach, after that you deploy autonomous drones that eliminate entire crew.
 

Edited January 25, 2018 by Cassel

[sevenperforce]

For the boarding party, armored counterpressure suits and EVA jetpacks are a must. 

The boarding shuttle would already be depressurized, at least in the area containing the boarding party. Harpoons to grapple and explosives to breach. The nice thing about explosives in a vacuum is that there's no overpressure to worry about, so you just have to make sure you don't get hit by shrapnel. A simple blast door set slightly back from the entrance will do the trick.

The breaching charge depressurizes the target module, killing anyone inside who isn't in a pressure suit. Boarding party moves in, dispatches anyone else. If the module's structural integrity is intact, the boarding shuttle can deploy expanding foam around the perimeter of its abutment to the target module, then partially repressurize, thus protecting adjacent modules when they are breached. Boarding party remains suited up the entire time.

[kerbiloid]

A starhip stormtrooper's weapon # 1.

Spoiler

 

[DDE]

@Jhorriga, all banter aside, you really need to decide what the primary purpose of the boarding party is; the less pacifist it is, the less easy it's to excuse sending your marines to near-certain death.

• If it's extraction of personnel or a peacetime Visit Board Search and Seizure, you'd want a penetration method that doesn't vent the ship, and weapons that don't pierce the hull
• If you're after non-biological intel, use maximum violence. Vent everything in your path with weapons fire; if you can't, spray fast-acting nerve gas everywhere and watch everyone unsuited choke on their own puke
• If you want the enemy ship for anything else, do reconsider; a coup de grace is much more easily delivered at a distance, and attempts to capture the ship as a prize of war are very likely to be of a greater burden - it's a different design school with a difficult logistics train, you'd be lucky if you know how to operate half the systems, and you won't be able to  fix them when they break

Furthermore,

• If the ship is assaulted while it's not mission-killed, it's going to repel the boarding team with all of its point-defence weapons
• If the ship is mission-killed and then assaulted, there's nothing preventing an attempt at a self-destruct by the crew

Spoiler

 

My personal favourite in all of fiction is the Caestus assault ram. A lot of armour tipped by a Mega-Melta that vapourizes a few (dozen) meters of armour as the craft, well, rams the target to disgorge squads of Terminators.

Spoiler

 

 

[Jhorriga]

The reason I want to keep airtightness is because this method is going to be used to capture vessels intact and usable. I like the idea of pretending to be space junk, so the pod will make very discreet thruster firings and cloak organic life signs. For less extreme boarding procedures I'm going to use a method from angels fall first (great game, check it out) where a drop ship approaches the vessel, turns around and makes the door of the infantry carrying area make contact with the ship. Then a hole is cut and a tube extends through the armor. The infantry module is then detatched from the dropship and left there.

Edited January 25, 2018 by Jhorriga

[tater]

So in your universe, ships ignore large "space junk" that are on trajectories that will hit them?

1. No intact vessel can be boarded. If it's intact, it moves, shoots down the boarding craft, or both. Assuming you are talking about warships.

2. Civilian ships would be better hijacked, not boarded.

3. If piracy is supposed to be a thing, then merchants will be armed, see #1.

Edited January 25, 2018 by tater

[Piatzin]

On 1/24/2018 at 9:09 PM, Jhorriga said:

So I'm trying to come up with a strategy for boarding ships for my sci fi universe. I 'm thinkthing that basically, an escape pod like vehicle carrying a team of commandos would be launched from a dropship. It would rocket towards the enemy vessel and ram into it with 4 prongs to keep the pod in place. Explosive charges would then bust a hole in front of the pod, then an airtight sleeve would deploy the seal the hole and create a tunnel from the hole to the pod. For larger ships, this could be used in bigger numbers.

Sounds like these escape pods/dropships would be alarmingly easy to get shot down by the enemy ship's defenses....It might be better to have a larger, more heavily armored gunship of sorts, instead of large groups of smaller craft.

[vitekc45c]

In Wh40k universe boarding pods use combination of drill and melta charges (shaped charge) to breach the hull of a ship, then spiked conveyor belts on the pod to pull it in.

Maybe you could use something like that, perhaps coupled with harpoons.

[DDE]

2 hours ago, Earthlinger said:

Sounds like these escape pods/dropships would be alarmingly easy to get shot down by the enemy ship's defenses....It might be better to have a larger, more heavily armored gunship of sorts, instead of large groups of smaller craft.

The armoured gunship would, however, be in turn more vulnerable to the bigger guns.

[Jhorriga]

I'll go with the AFF approach for everything then. If you want to see how it looks, look up angels fall first boarding. We're talking about warships and civilian ships here aswell.

[mikegarrison]

The only realistic method of boarding another ship is basically the one modern navies use now: You point really big anti-ship guns at the target ship and say "if there is any resistance, you will all be killed". Then you send over some marines on a little boat with a few rifles and the target ship lets them come on board.

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

A head-on rendezvous at 10 km/s — and you're inside the ship.