Not quite. They at least hit each other. Damaged, well, not so much.
Let us take, for sake of argument, two TL 14, 700-ton Zhdoq class Zhodani SDBs, featured in PP:F and assume one was taken over by some intrepid PCs and faced off with its counterpart. These boats have armor 14, meaning they can only be damaged by spinal mounts, nuclear missiles or pulse lasers. They have a factor 6 fusion gun battery which cannot damage the boats but can be used to defend against the other guy's factor 4 missile battery. So assuming long range, the missile battery hits on a 12, penetrates the factor 6 fusion guns on a 7 and the factor 4 nuke damper on a 10, which yields a net chance of ~0.27% of damaging (unless you roll "no effect" on both damage rolls) your opponent's ship. On average this will thus happen about every 370 turns, or in other words every five days. Chances are the battle will have to be called off for lack of fuel at some point.
But wait, there's more! If you use the damage control rules, any damage to the weapons is liable to be repaired far more quickly than it is dealt. That leaves us with fuel hits. You'd have to score about 10 of these to run the other vessel out of fuel. I won't bother you with new calculations but on average, this will take about 1 year. At this point, the battle is actually going to be decided by whose yearly maintenance was earlier.
All of this rests, naturally, on the SDBs' ability to magically produce nuclear missiles out of thin air since HG2 has no ammunition rules.
If this defines "reality", then "reality" is the dream of a madman in that TU.
You have started, Tobias, by making an assumption that these spaceships SHOULD be capable of doing one another significant amounts of damage by shining lights and hurling 50kg missiles about. If you discount THAT assumption, then what is wrong with the conclusion that if they try, the "battle" will rage unabated until one of them runs out of fuel? There is no shortage of pairs of boats I could point to in the world today which would be quite incapable of damaging one another were they to attempt to fight it out, and whose battles would be similarly inconclusive.
In the early days of aeroplanes at war, in 1914 and 1915, before aircraft were fitted with machine guns, pilots attempted their own means of making their aircraft more offensively-capable - with mixed results. Some of them were effective, some of them less so (one Russian pilot tried hanging a plumb line below his aeroplane in the hope of catching and fouling the propellor of an enemy beneath him, thereby downing the enemy plane: unfortunately, whilst it did catch the enemy propellor, his own aeroplane was then winched down onto it and both pilots died in the resulting collision!). But either way, the point is that there was a period during the Great War when pilots were frustrated by the fact that when they sighted an enemy, there was damn all they could do to harm him.
The military lesson from both scenarios (and predictably so) is that if you want to harm your enemy, you have to ship a weapon which is
capable of harming him. And one of the joys of Traveller and HG is that the answer to the question "OK then, so what weapon
is capable of harming my enemy?" will vary according to TL and, to a certain extent, enemy design choices. As an abstract system, therefore, I reckon it's got a lot going for it. (Moreover, if you house-rule away the inifinite missile supply, then the "I like capital ships" brigade will be even happier with the tilt of the balance in favour of their particular prediliction ... )
I should say, as well, that the "Island Clusters" campaign in TCS (which I've not played yet, but have been reading through and analysing carefully before sitting down to draw up a few fleets for doing so) looks like a beautiful model with which to demonstrate this.Most of the protagonists are TL12, with broadly equal populations and fleet budgets; one of the protagonists is only TL11, but with approximately 10 times the population and fleet budget of the TL12 mob; and the last one is TL13 but with approximately a tenth of the population and fleet budget of the TL12 mob and an essentially defensive only posture. I like it! I have difficulty in seeing why "informed diplomatic circles" should (according to the briefing) "agree that war is inevitable eventually" ... but then I suppose that if you sit a load of wargamers down, invite them to design fighting fleets, and then put them in a setting where their fleets
can fight each other ... well, I guess it probably
is inevitable that they will :rofl:
However, I think that the naval revenue formula in the TCS campaign rules B = Cr500 x GM x P does result in massively bloated budgets and over-size fleets.
I have reality tested this against the UK budget figures for 2010:
The UK has a population of approximately 70 million (let's say 66 million for the sake of round numbers) TOTAL government spending on EVERYTHING in FY 2010 was £660.8 Billion - implying expenditure of £10,000 per capita. Of this £660.8 Billion, the defence budget was £43.2 Billion, but this was not all military defence. A number of other things (including, bizarrely, foreign economic aid) are included in the defence budget. The ACTUAL spend om military defence was £32.3 Billion - which is ALMOST EXACTLY £500 per capita.
The formula B = Cr500 x GM x P therefore diverts the WHOLE of the defence budget into navy shipbuilding and maintenance. This cannot be right. I have not been able (thus far - having done only some very cursory internet research) to break this down any further - but let's do some "fag packet economics" and see where it gets us.
First, the Navy is not the only force clamouring for a share of the military budget. In a space era the space navy will probably get a disproportionate share of the budget - but even so, the other forces between them could well add up to half the budget. So that reduces the TOTAL navy budget multipler to Cr250 rather than Cr500.
Second, the navy budget must pay for salaries as well as ships. This is actually, in the big scheme of things, a fairly minor issue. I analysed it against a canonical ship from
Fighting Ships - the
Gionetti class light cruiser. We have a ship with a capital cost of MCr 18,000 odd with 35 officers and 176 ratings (I ignore the marines as they are paid for out of the Marines budget, not the Navy budget). Using Book 2 salary rates, and averaging across the rates for pilots, navigators and engineers (but allowing the uplift for the default assumption of skill level 2) we arrive at officer salaries of MCr2.3 per annum; and if we assume that average rating salaries are half average office salaries then we arrive at MCr6.3 per annum for the ratings; a salary cost which rounds to MCr9 per annum for the entire crew.
The initial fleet budget rules allow for a starting fleet with a value of ten times the annual fleet budget - so for every MCr 18,000 of annual budget we can assume MCr 90 of annual salary commitments for crews of ships in the fleet. This means that approximately 0.5% of the fleet budget is required for fleet salaries. Not a huge dent in the budget, admitedly, but this brings our multiplier down from Cr250 to Cr248.75 - those hamsters get everywhere!
Thirdly, there is the cost of non-fleet naval operations. Building and maintaining base facilities, training establishments, recruiting operations, payroll, supply & logistics and so forth.
How much of the budget do these require? How long is a piece of string? Whatever they take, however, it is going to reduce the amount available for fleet budget. And I am going to be totally arbitrary here, and say that this "logistical tail" takes up approximately 60% of the navy effort. Why this figure? Well, it makes for simplicity ... it brings the fleet budget multiplier down from Cr500 to Cr100 and gives us a nice, round, easy-to-compute figure. And it reduces the size of fleets to one fifth of the size that the raw, unadulerated TCS campaign rules give. This is much more manageable, although still giving the players plenty of money to throw at their ship designs.
Any further thoughts or comments on the number crunching gratefully received.
