Luddwars

Luddwars is an annual tournament run since 2016, largely by the members of the Pareton nearbaseline-majority Bishop Ring. A team combat tournament, Luddwars is centered around space engagements between craft built with deliberately low technological levels, which has varied between the level of Qhevak's founding in Luddwars V and late 1800s Old Earth in Luddwars VI. 10 teams, each composed of 40 volunteer modosophonts, are given a month in isolated bubbles to design and build their fleets with their allotted nanofabs, allowed near-blank check resources but a maximum metric fleet tonnage of 5,000. While craft can be built using any advanced methods wished, the craft themselves must not incorporate any technology not available in the designated era. The fleets would then be positioned around the arena at equidistant spacing, and fight till the point of destruction or surrender.

=Previous Luddwars Tournaments=

Luddwars 1
Luddwars 1 was fought at Early Tier 5 on the Excidian Standard Scale, comparable to pre-nuke WW2. The battle was fought around the small moon Ullr 6, which provided for ample manuevering capability even with propulsion limits. Larger craft were generally deemed over vulnerable by most teams, with most consisting entirely of 1-4 man craft with an average total tonnage over an order of magnitude under the mass limit. 20-30mm rotary guns were the primary armament of most craft, with hydrogen peroxide rockets used for thrust. The tournament was won by Team Vulcan Raven after a day long engagement.

Luddwars 6
Luddwars VI set the limits of technology at the edge of Tier 4 on the Excidian Standard Scale – comparable to the late 1800s of Old Earth. Due to the natural limits this would place on range and performance, this tournament had a relatively limited battlefield – restricted to the area around the 680 km planetoid Torg’s Folly, orbiting the brown dwarf Nachimor. Teams converged towards two schools of thought, one focused on heavily armoring small numbers of craft to resist the limited degree of firepower that could be brough to bear, and another leaning towards larger numbers of small one-to-two man craft focused on volleying overwhelming numbers of solid fuel kinetic kill rockets. Ammonia cold gas thrusters were the most common form of spacecraft propulsion, though smokeless powder solid rocket clusters were also popular for burst maneuvering. Heliographs and steam engines were universally used for signaling and power respectively, while common weapons included kinetic kill rockets, breach-loading 75mm cannons and 37mm electrically powered rotary guns.

The tournament on April 11th would begin with a very literal bang. Team Marble Hornets had come up with a rather unique strategy, immediately sending much of their fleet zooming up the gravity well on strapped on solid boosters before detonating their “primary” ship, which mostly consisted of 20,000 tons worth of TNT and scrap metal shaped to create a counter-rotating debris ring. The resulting shrapnel took out all of Team Leaping Lizard and Team Flaming Troll, and heavily damaged most of the others, with armor focused teams weathering the shrapnel batter. Team Screaming Yrthak, which had starting on the other end of the planet from Marble Hornets and had mostly been focused on maneuverable rocket-craft, managed to weather the barrage best, getting most of their craft into a higher orbit with time to spare.

As the battle continued, the heavy armor strategy proved fatally flawed. While they had weathered Marble Hornets, the lumbering behemoths took more time to maneuver out of the shrapnel ring than lighter craft, and many would take multiple hits from the ring. As they slowly made their way out, smaller gunboats would manuever in, avoiding their firing arcs, and strike their more vulnerable sections with rockets and 75mm guns. Screaming Yrthak, meanwhile, managed to intercept the craft of Marble Hornets, and swiftly crushed them with their tonnage advantage.

With most other teams shredded up in the morass below, Screaming Yrthak stayed in their higher orbit and waited for opponents to come to them, crushing remnants with their delta-V advantage when they did. The battle ultimately ended in the surrender of the three other remaining teams, with a victory for Screaming Yrthak, and the winning prize of a customized personal Bernal Sphere.