Small Ship 3i
- Thread starter Mithras
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Not without lowering he standards for psychological fitness significantly, or moving to unlawful entry training methods. The navy already rejects 10% of applicants as unfit, according to a friend who was a navy recruiting staffer around the turn of the century. Press gangs would most likely only grab more who are unwilling and unfit, or, as with the American Revolution, move people from the non-military half who are suitable to the military side, reducing the merchant marines. The draft didn't work out well for the navy in WWII, either. Yes, it doubled the number of men in the navy, but according to many, it only added 10% to those actually working. And it also rapidly raised the injury and self-injury rates.
The issues for crewing are real, and profound: ability to tolerate enclosed spaces for months on end, ability to deal with no contact with home/family also for months on end. A ship deployed for a month long patrol of an adjacent system is gone 6 weeks, but mail can arrive on a two week cycle (In and back) if courier service exists. A ship on "self selected patrol within region X" (as was the case for most pre-WWII warships, and is the case for most boomers) is out of touch for 6 months.
People have trouble with that level of isolation. It's not the crowding, but the cut-off from society that is the big issue.
And I'll note that the last navy studies I've seen (mid 90s, on the web in the 2000s) said that bigger ships are easier on morale, because there is less feeling of the loss of "society" when there's 3000 people aboard vs 300, and 300 is better than 100 or even 30.
So a big ship universe should be better able to make use of the marginal cases than a small ship one.
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Your math is whacked in several places, I think. (Not to mention specifically tailored for the results you want.)
Note that the US Navy would amount to about 5 frigates in your model. Yeah, well, I don't think so.
A few more consequences of your "no one wants to go to the stars" universe:
- Next to no interstellar trade. In your example, you pop A world could have, say, a thousand type Rs? These can carry about 200,000 dtons of stuff around, and make a trip to a nearby world every two weeks, or 25 times a year. So 5 million dtons of goods shipped a year from a world with 10 billion inhabitants (you seem to have used pop multiple 1 as a baseline.) This is about as much as our own world's ports, in containers alone, handle - per day.
So, interstellar trade would be insignificant in the context of individual worlds' economies. That also means there is no need for an Imperium.
- Those few who do take the apparently highly unpopular job of spacer will be rich. If personnel availability is truly a bottleneck, and if starships cost as much as they do, there is no reason not to pay spacers a lot more than they are canonically paid.
- There would not be an Imperium in the first place because there would have been no incentive for mankind to go and conquer space.
Worlds have an average Pop Multiple of 5. So you'd have on average, 5 times the above values.
You have not "gutted the rates a bit". You have, in this instance...
... divided them by 600. If your pay was reduced from $60000 a year to $100 a year, would you say it was "gutted a bit"? You have also, and I don't know why, broken up...
... the progression between Pop levels. Every population level is 10 times as many people as the next lower one. So why, in your modified formula, does every navy only have 3 times as many people as the next lower one? What did you use as a baseline there? There is absolutely no rhyme or reason I can see.
Note that the US Navy would amount to about 5 frigates in your model. Yeah, well, I don't think so.
A few more consequences of your "no one wants to go to the stars" universe:
- Next to no interstellar trade. In your example, you pop A world could have, say, a thousand type Rs? These can carry about 200,000 dtons of stuff around, and make a trip to a nearby world every two weeks, or 25 times a year. So 5 million dtons of goods shipped a year from a world with 10 billion inhabitants (you seem to have used pop multiple 1 as a baseline.) This is about as much as our own world's ports, in containers alone, handle - per day.
So, interstellar trade would be insignificant in the context of individual worlds' economies. That also means there is no need for an Imperium.
- Those few who do take the apparently highly unpopular job of spacer will be rich. If personnel availability is truly a bottleneck, and if starships cost as much as they do, there is no reason not to pay spacers a lot more than they are canonically paid.
- There would not be an Imperium in the first place because there would have been no incentive for mankind to go and conquer space.
No, drafting suitable people who were unwilling to volunteer is keeping the standards. Keeping not quite perfect volunteers would be lowering the standards. As for how significantly they would be lowered, that would depend on how many people were needed compared to how many were suitable by the high standards, wouldn't it?
Unlawful? Our hypothetical star nation makes the laws.
Then lowering the standards would not help a lot. Looks like the draft would be a better solution.
I mentioned press gangs as an allusion to the lengths a government will go to to keep its ships manned if it feels itself justified. The "press gang" of any nation sophisticated enough to have psychological suitability tests in the first place would be a selection board. Surely I don't have to explain to you how a draft works? Every potential recruit is required to attend a selection board at a certain age and is tested.
In wartime that would undoubtedly happen. In peacetime, just draft another non-spacer civilian. A suitable one, of course.
Ah, but nowadays we have psychological tests to determine suitability. How much more effective tests would they have in the Far Future? Why, the character generation rules give no DMs to getting kicked out of the navy that distinguishes between draftees and volunteers.[*] Obviously the selection board knows how to pick them!
[*] I don't believe the 'draft' in the CG rules represent a real draft, but you do, right?
There's a difference between having trouble and giving up. The Royal Navy of the Napoleonic Wars had trouble manning its ships. It still manned every ship it could build, steal, or capture.
Hans
I'd also like to mention at this point that there are other interstellar nations in addition to the Imperium. The Zhodani Consulate probably wouldn't have any problems motivating people to volunteer for the Navy. The party-run Solomani Confederation would have some, but still less than the Imperium. The Hivers would just have robots do it. It's not like the Imperium maintains its immense Navy just for policing the space lanes.
Then again, in Aramis' proposal, it is not possible to wage meaningful interstellar warfare either.
Wrong. Meaningful interstellar warfare is DEAD simple, and requires only a single ship loaded with nukes. 200Td of nukes should be sufficient to eradicate the civilized life off any world.
Moreover, with neutron bomb warheads instead (remembering, a 500MT Neutron bomb warhead is in real life under 1Td at TL7.5 or so), most of the biome will be useful within a couple years.
Big ship fleets are only essential for showing the flag. Even under HG, ships over 250KTd have no mechanical reason for existing. Once you can mount a high-end meson gun, there's no reason for big ships in the opposing fleet. Much harder to swat gnats than horseflies, let alone horses.
And that's before the issues with a 100Td ship at 1G steady acceleration for 3 weeks being equivalent to a many megaton nuclear detonation...
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No, the navy has found that drafting people simply ups the AWOL rates. Much of the problem with the navy is the cramped quarters. Even in WWII, most of the US navy was volunteer. (Often just ahead of being drafted into the army.) THe IJN was also mostly volunteer. And the IJN was a much higher percentage of the Japanese population than was the USN of the US.
Draftees in the navy have, historically, been BEATEN into submission. Even then, most of the work wound up being done by the volunteers - pressed men were more prone to mutiny, more prone to vanish into uncharted isles and foreign ports... and far more prone to be useless at sea.
Most of the people with the mindset to handle the situations aboard ship are likely to volunteer.
The issues shipboard are enclosed space, long time, drinking your own recycled moisture. (a psychological stress, even tho' it's been purified past the standards for tap water, according to NASA...)
Also, Hans, you have again misread the nature of a table. Doing tables as rates for PM 1 is so that the table can be easily used. Not a claim they're all PM1... that's YOUR misread, not my error.
I take it nuclear dampers don't exist in your universe either? Nor do orbital or planet-based defenses because people for some reason can't be arsed to man these even though they would not need to be away from the family for more than 12 hours at a time? They'd rather take the risk of being annihilated for granted?
In any case: My idea of "meaningful" is not that you can unleash nuclear holocaust on other worlds. In fact, if it only requires a single ship loaded with nukes (doubtful for the mentioned reasons and others), there is no possibility for meaningful interstellar warfare. There is MAD at best.
However what I'd consider meaningful are planetary invasions, campaigns to conquer and control territory etc.
These are made impossible if there are no (or next to no) ships to transport troops, meaning that any planetary defense force of even roughly equal TL would squash any invasion force with ease. Since, realistically, any world under military threat would be bristling with ground-based SDBs, orbital weapon emplacements etc., a planetary assault would be pretty much impossible anyway though. The same goes, unless you intentionally rig the technological assumptions of your universe against defenders somehow, for planetary bombardment. I'm assuming the standard kind of planetary bombardment here, not the one where you use your magical reactionless drive to turn a ship into an unstoppable superweapon.
There is no such thing as a 500Mt neutron bomb in real life. In fact, all actual implementations of the concept had yields in the low kiloton range.
Yes, but that's not the point here, is it? Even if the largest fleet vessel was a 30,000ton Battle Rider, it would still be much larger than the proposed small ship universe.
When I served in the German navy, we still had conscription. In fact, I entered the navy as a draftee, and only volunteered after a few months of service. I have never heard of any particular problems with draftees going AWOL, nobody had to beat anybody into submission, and draftees did the same work as others in their rank group.
My case was not atypical: Drafted personnel discovering that shipboard life isn't so bad after all, and volunteering for term of several years. A comparably short stint as a draftee was one of the most important ways to recruit volunteers, in fact.
At that point, West Germany had used conscription for decades. AFAIK it was never necessary to force any draftee into the navy rather than the army either - invariably more conscripts would opt for the navy than were needed. At this point the German navy had about 30,000 personnel, about one third of whom served in the fleet. So basically, twice the personnel strength you would assign to the navy of a world with 10+ billion inhabitants.
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Nuke Dampers don't exist in most Small Ship TU's because they don't appear until Bk5:HG.
But, for the same bang, one can build simple deadfall ordinance about half as effective. Orbit down makes a simple 15 million gram tungsten penetrator a major potential holocaust.
Mithras: Mike Wightman and Steve Osmanski are the guys to talk about regarding extending Book 2 to cover larger ships, smallcraft design, and other considerations you can take or leave.
As Aramis said, grep for the Prototraveller threads for one batch of ideas.
As Aramis said, grep for the Prototraveller threads for one batch of ideas.
So our space navy uses psycological tests to select draftees who aren't likely to mutiny. In any case, I doubt that things are as bad as your paint it.
That sounds extremely unlikely. Sorry, but you can't seriously propose that there won't be plenty of people in any population who would be able to stand the life but simply prefer not to spend several years in any military service at all. It may be less than the 9 in 10 among the volunteers, but to suggest that the volunteers include most of the people who are capable of handling it seems... unsupported even by anecdotal evidence. Just how do you know how many civilians would have been able to handle shipboard life?
I've no doubt that life aboard a ship has its stresses and life aboard a spaceship even more so. I just don't think it's something that would stop most governments from building as many ships as they feel the need for and manning them any way it takes. You could, of course, easily imagine a government that wouldn't do it, for whatever reason. Perhaps the US is one such. But the jump you're making is from the specific to the general, and that simply does not follow.
I don't understand this. What does PM 1 mean?
Hans
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Actually, if I'm not mistaken, and I'm usually not, they first appear in Bk4:Mercenary.
You wouldn't realistically make it to orbit because before you arrived, you'd already be swarmed by System Defense Boats manned by locals who can finish you off and still be home for dinner, not having to endure the terrible hardships of shipboard life for more than a few hours.
Isn't that completely irrelevant? We're not discussing the difference between Book 2 and Book 5 but between Small Ship universes and Big Ship universes. While Book 2 ship design does not support a Big Ship universe, the reverse is not true; HG can (AFAIK) be used for Small Ship universes with no trouble at all. So to minimize extraneous (i.e. non-ship-size) differences, it makes sense to use HG for the underlying assumptions. Or any other ship design system that supports both small and big ships, of course. Personally I'm partial to QSDS1.5.
Come to that, while you couldn't come up with addendums to Book 2 rules that would increase ship size significantly (not without increasing the tech level above 15, and even then the ships wouldn't get that much larger, I think), but one that introduced -- make that 'one that covered' ;-) -- nuclear dampers would fit right in with no trouble at all.
Anyway, Small Ship universes and nuclear dampers are not mutually exclusive.
Hans
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Most people using Small Ship Universes also use only book 2.
There are 3 different paradigms under potential discussion...
LSHGU
SSHGU
SSBk2U
A small ship HG universe has no reason to stay a small ship universe. The optimal ship size mechanically is over 50KTd (not much over, but over - has to do with spinals). At least, not unless one is imposing other limits, like limited persons capable of adapting to life aboard, or some other means of limiting it.
And the computer limits are very generous - you don't need a TL 10 computer until you hit 10KTd under HG.
Further, the HG Combat system is badly aligned for small ships (anything under about 10KTd)... it makes a mess of trying to get any damage done.
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So? I trust you're not going to claim that Book 2 is essential to running a small ship campaign. If I were to run a small ship campaign, I'd use QSDS1.5 or possibly GT[*]. Though I'd simply make the ships small by making the budgets small (I did, in fact, at one time work on a Pocket Empires game set in the Sword Worlds subsector during the Five States Era. Sadly, it never got off the ground.)
[*] Houseruled GT, of course; no deducting 20% of interior space for streamlining. 
Not under potential discussion by me. I consider the distinction completely moot (As well as missing various rules sets, such as MT and GT). I touched off this sub-thread by stating that in a setting that allowed umpteen big ships, limiting the size of ships would merely result in the navies having umpteen hundred small ships. Nowhere did I mention a specific rules set. You countered by claiming that there wouldn't really be enough people to man umpteen hundred small ships. I'm embarrassed to admit that I completely missed that you were shifting the goalposts. If you don't have enough men to crew umpteen hundred small ships, you won't have enough men to crew umpteen big ships[*]. Going by the RAW (Rules As Written), there is no such problem with manning as many ships, big or small, as you can afford. And that applies equally to Book 2 and HG.
[*] Yes, you did later add an aside about more people being capable of handling life in a big ship than being able to handle life in a small ship, and that sounds reasonable enough, but the difference would be incremental, not by orders of magnitude; most of the stresses you mention, such as drinking recycled water, apply equally or almost equally to big and small ships[**]. And if manpower IS limited, you'll still have fewer ships if some of them can be big than if they all have to be small.
[**] Besides, we could always claim that, contrary to expectations, it turns out that there are few or no people who can handle life in big ships but not life in small ships. We are, after all, adding to the RAW either way.
You would have to amend RAW HG by one line -- though possibly a whole paragraph would be more customer-friendly -- to make it apply to a small ship universe, sure. "Ships bigger than 5000T don't work". So what? Rules are supposed to reflect the setting. If you can't use the rules to emulate the setting you want, just change the rules to emulate the setting you want.
The bottom line is that unless you change the way the cost of ships scale (i.e. almost linearly with size) pretty drastically, limiting the size of ships in a setting where worlds could afford and man lots of big ships (if they could build them) would merely result in the navies having lots and lots and lots of small ships instead.
Hans
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Actually, just removing spinal mounts would do the trick as well. Do that and the rationale for big ships is gone from HG. You'd be looking at a universe where the main offensive weapons for warships are missile bays, backed up by lasers and sandcasters (non-spinal PAs and meson guns are basically worthless, as are plasma and fusion guns unless you modify the rules.) Tweak the combat rules a bit (reduce the size DMs to hit a little, for example) and you're set to go.
You still have a combat system that requires at leas 20 weapon mountings to reliably do damage.
Well, as I said you would need to tweak it a little to work better with small ships. Besides adjusting the size DM (say -1 for small craft, +0 for ships under 1000 tons and +1 for ships above 1000 tons), halving agility modifiers at short range will go a long way in doing so. Also get rid of the +6 damage DM for non-spinals. That makes more sense and will reduce non-meson weapons' comical ineffectiveness against armored hulls.
Actually I think tweaking HG with a small ship paradigm would be easier than getting it to make some goddamn sense at the scale it is supposed to work at.
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