The manpad warheads are not going to be particularly large (maybe 20 kg or so) and I don't think they would work against starship armor. Typically warheads have a fragmentation cup mounted over them and the damage results from that fragmentation piercing the fairly thin skin of an aircraft and damaging its engine or other flight control systems. Starship armor, at least the way I have it set up) is not thin enough to be vulnerable to that level of kinetic energy, at least by gut feeling.
You can always have a shoulder mounted surface to air missile system, but the altitude is limited and the warheads are small. They do work against light attack aircraft though, as we saw this weekend in Syria.
Nowadays missile launche warnings in aircraft, at least the initial warning, is generally done through detection of the thermal signature of the ejection charge and rocket of the SAM igniting. There are a lot of false warnings. If a sensor suite can see MWIR, though, ship's computer software monitoring that should at least be able to give a warning of some kind. That is probably dependent on the ship's build, though, as an option during the build process.
I suspect that a Traveller ship operating on gravitic motors inside an atmosphere is going to make a confusing target for a TL6 lightweight SAM with a heat seeking head. If there is thermal exhaust, it's probably not coming from the engines but rather the power plant, and it might be dumped through some other means than direct venting from a single point.
My gut feeling is that it's unlikely that a TL6 heat seeker will lock on to a starship unless modified to do so and even if it did, it's unlikely it would do more damage other than denting and scarring.
-------- Original Message --------
On February 5, 2018 1:28 PM, Timothy Collinson <xxxxxx@port.ac.uk> wrote:
- am I right in thinking that at that TL, they're heat seeking - does that work with Traveller ships? I know TML has lots of discussion about waste heat in space but for this purpose?
- at that TL would they be vehicle mounted by necessity or could you have, I don't know, a shoulder mounted thing? (We're out in the backwoods so vehicles will be limited - although there must be access to the mining camp.)
- would sensors on a Far Trader pick up that kind of thing 'incoming' or just if it hits?
- would any of you allow a Single Hit or just say it bounces off?
- could it hit some external antenna, fuel/waste port, <something> that might be damaged instead or would they be armoured like the ship at Traveller TLs?