Fleet Action Aftermath

[AnotherDilbert]

Yes, personnel can be easily repaired if we talk about numbers, but trained personnel not so easily.

HG assumes skill level 2 for most personnel (or so I've been told several times in this board), and that represents several years training. So, if you took heavy losses in personnel, you're likely to be able to replace them, but at a cost on crew quailty...

Training a crewman or building a battleship takes years, but building a competent navy or shipyard takes decades.

Any major navy is continuously building ships and training crew, fully prepared to expand both activities in case of war.

Reasonably you recruit and train more people than you need in peacetime in order to have a trained reserve when war comes.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

About the refuelling, see that we're talking about hte battle aftermath, not the battle itself. So, if you cna repair the fuel tanks, you can also fill them.

Unless you lost the battle so the crippled ships were captured during battle. Then it's the winners that get to refuel the ships.

 

[Silverhawk]

Training a crewman or building a battleship takes years, but building a competent navy or shipyard takes decades.

Any major navy is continuously building ships and training crew, fully prepared to expand both activities in case of war.

Reasonably you recruit and train more people than you need in peacetime in order to have a trained reserve when war comes.

A point that is made in David Weber's Honorverse where Manticoran Merchant Marine officers are also naval reserve subject to call up in times of war. Even so by the later novels the Manticorans are automating as much as possible to deal with trained manpower issues.

 

[McPerth]

Unless you lost the battle so the crippled ships were captured during battle. Then it's the winners that get to refuel the ships.

Of course. Sorry if I made not clear enough, I was talking about winner cripples or prizes. Loser's cripples are either destroyed, scuttled or captured.

That's the basis of my thoughts on this.

 

[Whipsnade]

To the extent you have a point, it's certainly not decisive: would loss of personnel be significantly more debilitating than loss of materiel to a squadron?

Yes. By 1945, the USN had more ships afloat, in repairs, and on the building ways than it had trained personnel for and more than it was allowed to train personnel for.

And if it were, would not a TL 13/14/15 interstellar navy develop responses to such an obvious limiting factor?

The more a system does the more it must be monitored. Stoop labor, broom & mop technicians, and the like will be automated away along with positions we now view as technical. All this means that even "simple" jobs are going to require significant training. Someone always has to be "smarter than the machine".

Robots, computers, wafers, frozen watches are all known technologies in the OTU.

All have their limitations. Automation and computers still require repairs and monitoring. While not evident to the casual reader, the wafer tech presented in AotI has limiting issues too. Wafers must be differentiated just not by skill but also by the sex and species of the user. Wafer use can lead to brain damage and the skills wafers impart can "glitch", as indicated by Bland's anecdote regarding a wafer-wearing accountant finding the solution to every equation being "one".

A single pop A world has more than enough population base to support several sector fleets without any real impact on the planetary economy.

Which raises the question of whether you want your subsector and/or sector fleets predominately manned by personnel from a single world.

I'm not saying personnel isn't important, I just don't see this as the ultimate show stopper for this discussion.

I do because I've worked inside the equation. There's no magic wand or black box. You don't pour X number of sophonts into a process and get Y number of crewmen out of the other end.

 

[Condottiere]

"Two short siren blasts rang out over the water as the main battle fleet, steaming in four groups, turned to port to form themselves in a single line of battle—the last line ahead battle formation in the history of the British navy. Not wooden walls this time, but walls of steel, with streamlined gray hulls instead of gilded stern galleries and figureheads, and funnels belching black smoke instead of sails close-hauled. But it was a formation Blake or Rooke or Rodney would have recognized, and approved. King George V and Ajax were first, followed by Orion, Royal Oak, Iron Duke, Superb, Thunderer, Benbow, Bellerophon, Temeraire, Collingwood, Colossus, Marlborough, St. Vincent—twenty-seven in all, names redolent with the navy's past […], names of admirals and generals, Greek heroes and Roman virtues. And all slowly bringing their guns to bear as they steamed into harm's way—just as their predecessors had for so many centuries in exactly the same sea. […] Scheer's position was dangerous but hardly hopeless. [...] Scheer might have looked to his heavier armor to protect his ships from British shells (many of which were defective and failed to explode), while overpowering theirs with his own faster and more accurate fire. Certainly this was the moment of decisive battle he and Tirpitz had been yearning for. But as Scheer gazed out at the flashing fire along the horizon, he saw something else. He saw before him the entire history of the British navy, a fighting force with an unequaled reputation for invincibility in battle and bravery under fire." "The English fleet […] had the advantage of looking back on a hundred years of proud tradition which must have given every man a sense of superiority based on the great deeds of the past." His own navy's fighting tradition was less than two years old. At that fateful moment, Scheer was confronting not John Jellicoe but the ghosts of Nelson, Howe, Rodney, Drake, and the rest; and he backed down."[26]

 

[SanDragon]

You don't pour X number of sophonts into a process and get Y number of crewmen out of the other end.

Except where X > Y...

 

[kilemall]

Hmm, an interesting thought about TCS and crewing.

The TCS revenue generation mechanism suggests that different government types have different abilities/limits to funding a war machine in war or peacetime.

Perhaps the same percentage could apply to how many of it's population it could convert per year OR support to naval crewing?

So a Rich pop 6 planet may be able to build ships 'above it's weight' but is chronically short of people to crew them, thus the ships have to be built a certain way.

 

[Carlobrand]

Unless you lost the battle so the crippled ships were captured during battle. Then it's the winners that get to refuel the ships.

Why wouldn't the losers scuttle the cripples before leaving? Set a nuke to go off in the engine room as you're abandoning?

 

[Carlobrand]

...
This isn't a case of YMMV or differing visions ...

Yes, that is exactly what this is. Traveller is a game with gamemasters. The gamemaster imposes his own vision on the milieu offered, drawing his own conclusions from the published materials based on his own knowledge base and his own experience.

We come from a wide variety of backgrounds - engineers, historians, sociologists, businessmen, and so forth, and so forth. We are quite naturally limited to the knowledge and experience we bring to the table, and we come to this forum specifically because we are limited and want to benefit from the ideas and perceptions of others. Your observations are correct and your position solid and well-reasoned, well worth considering, but I do not think the game has reached the point where we need to police things for orthodoxy. The game's published history is generalized enough that a gamemaster can get away with drawing on High Guard or TCS or some such thing in his own universe without outraging his players in the process, and that ultimately is the only test that matters.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Why wouldn't the losers scuttle the cripples before leaving? Set a nuke to go off in the engine room as you're abandoning?

You could do that. Or at least a small charge to slag the drives, making it very expensive to repair.

But it might be detrimental to morale to nuke a ship full of wounded crew. It would take some time and outside effort to search an entire heavily damaged battleship and evacuate a thousand casualties.

I agree that would make sense in the vicious fighting of the Rebellion, at least after the atrocities have started, but less so in say a Zhodani war. The Zho can't repair Impie ships and the Impies are hardly interested in Zho ships with unfamiliar and inferior technology. I'm under the impression that most recent Imperial wars have been fairly gentlemanly without too many atrocities.

 

[McPerth]

Why wouldn't the losers scuttle the cripples before leaving? Set a nuke to go off in the engine room as you're abandoning?

As we're talking about the losing side (the wining one has no reason to scuttle anything), the fact of saving the crews counes in force here.

I guess in most situations, the losing side, being in reatreat, has no time to recover the crews of those cripples. Maybe the crews of some BBs would have evacuated, but for BRs, if you can evacuate the crew you probably can recover it to the Tender.

So, most cripples are left with the remains of their crews inside, who face being stranded in space if they scuttle the ship, or can surrund it and be taken prisoniers. Unless true fanatics, I guess the second possibility is more usual...

After all, why where ships in the Age of Sail surrundered instead of scuttled?

 

[Condottiere]

In the most famous Traveller recounting of such a situation, the Bard Endeavour suicidally held out against a Confederation task force that had managed to ambush an Imperium raiding group, to allow some prefueled Imperium ships to escape, and then to prevent cutting edge technology to fall into Confederation hands.

 

[Whipsnade]

Yes, that is exactly what this is.

No it isn't. This isn't a case of MTU, YTU, OTU, etc.

This is a case of someone laboring under profound incomprehension deciding that 1+1=308 and then pronouncing all of mathematics wrong because it produces a result of 2.

... police things for orthodoxy.

This isn't about policing for orthodoxy. If McPerth had said "I don't like the history of the Rebellion so I changed it for my game... no one would bat an eye. He isn't saying that however.

McPerth is saying the history of the Rebellion is wrong and that GDW made a mistake when they wrote it. Not wrong or mistaken for him, me, or you, but wrong and mistaken for everyone. His assertion, however, is a result of his fundamental incomprehension of the relationship between the game's various rules and the OTU's history.

McPerth actually thought GDW used HG2, TCS, and/or some other ship combat rules set to chart the naval campaigns of the Rebellion.

Telling someone they're suffering from a gross conceptual error is no more policing orthodoxy than telling someone their hair is on fire.

 

[aramis]

You really need to rethink your posting style, Bill...

...because you've been coming across as "Traveller Orthodoxy Police" .

 

[Whipsnade]

You really need to rethink your posting style, Bill...

McPerth has been nattering on about how ship losses in the Rebellion cannot be squared with HG2 or TCS for years now and I've been trying to explain his conceptual error to him for just as long.

When someone cannot or will not understand, sometimes a "dope slap" is the only thing that works. McPerth got that dope slap in this thread and, hopefully, he'll now be able to comprehend his incomprehension.

Whatever McPerth wants to do in his TU is fine by me. However, h is not going to keep claiming that GDW got it wrong.

Just today you cautioned posters about conflating real history with OTU history and how OTU history is not "... just real history pastiched over the setting". You further explained that reducing OTU history "... to the level of "Borrowed History" is a gross oversimplification. And quite unfair to the creative minds who formed GDW."

Your same caution holds true here. McPerth has been unfair to the creative minds who formed GDW because of his demonstrably false belief that they used the game's rules to determine the course of the Rebellion.

 

[McPerth]

In the most famous Traveller recounting of such a situation, the Bard Endeavour suicidally held out against a Confederation task force that had managed to ambush an Imperium raiding group, to allow some prefueled Imperium ships to escape, and then to prevent cutting edge technology to fall into Confederation hands.

Sure, and Lawrence's cry of Don't give up the ship made the Shannon vs Chesapeake one of the most famous frigate fights in 1812 war (despite the Chesapeack was taken nonetheless).

Heroic acts are usually remembered, but don't use to represent the usual attitude in most wars. In most naval history, surrundering ships as prizes was an accepted practice to spare the crews.

The end of this practice was more or less when two facts went against it:

1. the ships were no more woden and used to sink, instead of becoming dead in water
2. conventions formally protected crews and war prisoniers, regardless if they scuttled their ship or not.

In HG/MT, the first point is not true, as more ships are expected to become crippled than outright destoryed, and while prisoners seem to be usually honored, I'm not sure if such conventions (and so "legal" duty) are "in force".

So, my guess is that surrundering the crippled hulls in Exchange for crew rescue can be a standard practice in Traveller setting.

 

[McPerth]

No it isn't. This isn't a case of MTU, YTU, OTU, etc.

This is a case of someone laboring under profound incomprehension deciding that 1+1=308 and then pronouncing all of mathematics wrong because it produces a result of 2.



This isn't about policing for orthodoxy. If McPerth had said "I don't like the history of the Rebellion so I changed it for my game... no one would bat an eye. He isn't saying that however.

McPerth is saying the history of the Rebellion is wrong and that GDW made a mistake when they wrote it. Not wrong or mistaken for him, me, or you, but wrong and mistaken for everyone. His assertion, however, is a result of his fundamental incomprehension of the relationship between the game's various rules and the OTU's history.

McPerth actually thought GDW used HG2, TCS, and/or some other ship combat rules set to chart the naval campaigns of the Rebellion.

Telling someone they're suffering from a gross conceptual error is no more policing orthodoxy than telling someone their hair is on fire.

McPerth has been nattering on about how ship losses in the Rebellion cannot be squared with HG2 or TCS for years now and I've been trying to explain his conceptual error to him for just as long.

When someone cannot or will not understand, sometimes a "dope slap" is the only thing that works. McPerth got that dope slap in this thread and, hopefully, he'll now be able to comprehend his incomprehension.

Whatever McPerth wants to do in his TU is fine by me. However, h is not going to keep claiming that GDW got it wrong.

First of all, I've never said the history of the Rebellion is wrong. It makes an interesting setting to play, and, being that its goal, it cannot be wrong.

An entirely different thing is that I say it is not consistent with the rules expected to have created this setting, and this seems to me quite odd, and no "dope slap" will change this view (though some good reasoning might).

As I see it, there are two kinds of RPGs: those tied to a previously established setting (as SW, ST, MERP, TOR, etc...) and those free from this tying (As D&D, Traveller, etc).

In those that are tied to a previously established setting, the game rules should conform with the setting, representing it as good as they can, as you said about wargames and real history.

In those free from this tying, though, the settings should be established to support the rules in play, and I keep thinking that there should be posible to recreate them with the game rules. If the setting does not conform with the rules, it seems odd to me, and that's the case of Rebellion history (as well a some other parts of OTU history and games).

You see it as a conceptual error, but the only explanation you give to me is that they use different rules and paradigns, while I understand they try to represent the same universe, and so the same paradigms.

So, when I'm asked

How did you derive your estimates? And can you point me toward the source of the Rebellion losses? (I can only find commercial losses.)

As the question relates to HG after battle losses, I can only explain my estimates and say that they don't match in any way with those loses, while pointing him the source of them.

Just today you cautioned posters about conflating real history with OTU history and how OTU history is not "... just real history pastiched over the setting". You further explained that reducing OTU history "... to the level of "Borrowed History" is a gross oversimplification. And quite unfair to the creative minds who formed GDW."

Your same caution holds true here. McPerth has been unfair to the creative minds who formed GDW because of his demonstrably false belief that they used the game's rules to determine the course of the Rebellion.

I'm sure you know better than myself how GDW or GDP memebers determined the course of the Rebelión, and I never wanted to be unfair with their creative minds (after all, they were those who created one of my favorite games), but you are making me right when I say this course is imposible to reach with the rules given in the game, and that they did not use them to reach it.

 

[Carlobrand]

Good points all, but:

1. if I'm an admiral, I don't want this thing coming back and shooting at me,

and

2. a big reason for scuttling modern ships is to deny intelligence that might be gained from the ship: coding machines, code books, important papers, computers that might contain sensitive information. That and the things are navigation hazards, but that's not an issue here since we're expecting the enemy to board and salvage.

Yes, every effort would be made to take off the wounded - just as we do now. Unless someone's about to say there are no conventions in the far future preventing people from shooting up lifeboats, there should be time to get anyone off except those unfortunates trapped in wreckage. Hey, war's an ugly thing.

Absolutely vital is to kill the computer. Utterly kill it. Thermite, micronuke, whatever it takes. There can be absolutely no chance remaining of the enemy drawing actionable intelligence from the computer. Might be a good idea to do that to any part of the bridge that might harbor usable intelligence as well, including command centers and chart rooms, or whatever future equivalent there might be. Very useful is to slag the drives, or at least the jump drive. Also useful is to slag the spinal weapon. If it needs to be done in such a way that the crew can still shelter aboard for rescue, fine, but it needs to be done. Short of a nuke big enough to gut the ship, it'd be difficult to prevent the enemy from repairing the ship, but the longer it takes them, the better - especially if they end up having to use lower tech replacements to do it.

Maybe I'll assign the job to the marines. They like blowing things up.

Though me, I'd still favor getting everyone off that you can and then setting off a nuke. It'd be just my luck that some fool captain would download orders to his hand-comp to study later, then forget the thing in his haste to get off the ship.

 

[Garnfellow]

I would guess the likelihood of scuttling a ship would be directly proportional to ship value. A first rate dreadnought? You have to activate the self-destruct. A TL 10 SDB? Take it, with compliments.