Battleship and Battlerider

[Orr]

As a suggestion?

You're still examining the issue from the wrong perspective. Comparing single ships or even single groups of ships against each other as if combat is merely a one-on-one boxing match doesn't reveal as much as you'd like or want it to reveal.

IJN Yamato was built to smash any existing battleship and comparing her to other designs shows she could have, with the possible exception of the USN's Iowas, done just that. However, when the war was over Yamato and her sister proved to be flops. One-on-one contests don't tell us as much as we'd like them to do.

Take and build a single 200,000 dton hull at TL 13...

Stop right there because TL13 is the wrong place to do that. The one rider squadron we know about from canon was made up of individual battleships when the Imperium was a TL13 power. The IN shifted to it's emphasis on riders after TL13 and for the reasons your flawed experiment "exposed".

This is very similar to the utility of fighters in the setting as their usefulness is also wholly dependent on what TL you're examining. Someone only looking at TL15 will "deduce" that fighters are useless and someone only looking at TL11 will "deduce" that fighters are ship killers. Both will be correct but, because both ignore the effect of TL, both will be completely wrong.

THAT is why I suggested that people team up and try to build the ships according to the rules and THEN discuss the relative merits rather than working in abstracts that may or may not be possible within the rules, and probably are not workable using the combat rules as written. <shrug>

They are workable in the rules as written. They're just not workable within the flawed constraints of your experiment. If you really want to examine riders look at them across the TL spectrum just as the Yahoo group did with fighters years ago.

 

[rancke]

If you really want to examine riders look at them across the TL spectrum just as the Yahoo group did with fighters years ago.

Or how about looking at them at TL15 (such as the Imperium has been for a century) and at TL14 (as the Imperium's chief opponents have been for at least that long).


Hans

 

[McPerth]

They inherited a disconnected setting/rules situation. MT, within it's parameters (consolidate CT & striker) couldn't fix the setting, but made a valiant effort. In MT, due to the lower JFuel rates, TL15 J4 M6 spinal mesons in the 50KTd range really rule the roost. Also, the ability to have Spinal, Bay, and Turret batteries in the same types ups the nastiness of meson cruisers.

Another thing that ups the 'suicide' status of all first line ships in MT is the fact that having a high agility is near impossible in MT, due to energy needs.

In HG, the need for a PP 6 is a ship with MD 6 usually makes agility as a byproduct, not even looked at (a 50k dton with PP 6 would have 3000 ep. If 900 are used on a J rated Meson Spinal and 1000 more secondary armament, computer and so on, you’ll still have agility 2. If you just enlarge you PP to 7, you’ll have 500 ep more, so your agitilty would be 12 if possible, but you cannot put a fractional PP to avoid this ep wasting
.
In MT, the use of energy for anything (life support, MDs, etc…) makes it impossible.

In fact, in HG your ep are the energy your PP gives you after feeding your MD. In MT is the energy you have before feeding MD. In this sense, one of the flaws HG has is that PP in excess of MD gives you the same ep.

 

[mike wightman]

When building HG ship I always build a power plant equal to the m-drive rating to get the max. agility of the m-drive and then start making the power plant bigger until it can power all the weapons, computer and screens desired.

In MT the designers allowed you to cheat by only needing to run your power plant at combat ratings for a day, thus conserving fuel space for other uses.

 

[AndreaV]

They are workable in the rules as written. They're just not workable within the flawed constraints of your experiment. If you really want to examine riders look at them across the TL spectrum just as the Yahoo group did with fighters years ago.

Go to the CT-Starships group, look in the files section and find BBvsBR. Something I did back before the earth swallowed half my city

You'll find a high end and low end (when possible, high jump high end ships can not be designed) ship, rider and hybrid for each jump number at each TL between 10 and 15. It was an effort to compare apples with apples, so all the ships are designed to meet the same specs.

 

[pendragonman]

Isolated experiment vs. campaign setting

Like Orr said what we have here is the time-honored attempt to prove that one style/type/design of ship will beat another type/style/design in an isolated--ahem--"vacuum". (No pun intended)

What we need to look at for this to be relevant is the whole naval system that would cause such ships to be designed. What logistic support is there? What are its normal consorts? What are its normal mission specs? etc...

When we have those, a more true comparison can be made. Notice I said "more true". We can never, short of playing a little campaign ourselves, truly know the outcomes within this discussion.

 

[Orr]

Like Orr said what we have here is the time-honored attempt to prove that one style/type/design of ship will beat another type/style/design in an isolated--ahem--"vacuum". (No pun intended)

Nicely put. I wish I'd been able to explain the underlying problem that neatly.

What's being chewed over here is nothing more than a scifi version of the myopic battleship design A vs. battleship design B "examinations" which first began appearing in newspapers as far back in the late 1800s and are still the staple of naval discussion boards today.

As you pointed out, the fundamental flaw in these examinations is that they occur in a vacuum. It's always one ship versus another with no others involved, with perfect weather, with perfect intelligence, with no tactical or operational or strategic issues, and with nothing else that might impinge on the perfect one-on-one boxing match being staged.

Of course the actual reality of any engagement is always different, even the "reality" of an RPG setting. As stated in the article in The New Yorker, "... any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality.".

Which brings me to my next point...

When we have those, a more true comparison can be made. Notice I said "more true". We can never, short of playing a little campaign ourselves, truly know the outcomes within this discussion.

We cannot even do that because Traveller does not have a campaign game which even begins to approximate the many issues we all know should be part of space combat. Issues like sensors, logistics, and the like have either been ignored or folded into other rules in the interest of game play.

I used Panzer Blitz as an example earlier. While that game somewhat approximates armored combat on WW2's Eastern Front, anyone attempting to lead a mechanized battalion in the manner they learned from the game would have their ass handed to them in reality. The same holds true for Traveller's various space combat games.

They're only games and because they're only games we can only analyze and infer so much from them.

 

[Hal]

The problem with comparing apples to apples, and then saying that we're not seeing the broad picture of how it would fight in a "real" fighting environment where you don't know the true battlefield picture is this:

You need to know if it is even tactically feasible as a fighting group to begin with before you can determine if it can be strategically feasible. If it can't be tactically feasible - it will never be strategically feasible. If it can be tactically feasible, then, and only then, is it worth pursuing to see if it can be used in the broad scheme of things. Once you determine what its strategic weaknesses are, then you have to insure that you use your "tools" properly instead of throwing them into the grinder willy-nilly and wondering why you end up losing the overall strategic battles.

Now, what are my criteria for evaluating the Battleship versus Battlerider scenarios?

A) Cost effectiveness
B) Survivability
C) repair and maintenance (A versus B starports)
D) construction issues (how long does it take to build replacement hulls)
E) Tech level considerations (who will be manufacturing the bulk of the hulls)

Case in point: SUPPLEMENT 9: FIGHTING SHIPS has a whole slew of TL 15 designs, including those small hull classes. The problem here is that in order to repair the ships, they have to return to a TL 15 starport. As if that weren't enough, you have to remember that larger class hulls have long build times, which tie up construction capabilities - essentially a bottleneck issue as it were.

Now if the Imperial Navy has a few "Battlerider" groups that can be manufactured at TL 14 levels, all the better. And as I've mentioned in the past threads elsewhere (either TML, here, or perhaps at GURPS) "Boats" make for good planetary defense fleets which make a ready reserve for battle rider ships. In other words, you can have four damaged battleriders that are brought back to a reserve location, and be instantly swapped out for four functional undamged battleriders without having to wait for those battle riders to be repaired. Turn around time is measurably shorter than having to dock a battleship in a starport and undertake repairs. And as was mentioned up-thread earlier - class B starports take twice as long and cost twice as much, to repair jump drives.

So, if we're talking about Zhodani fleet versus Imperial Fleet engagements, the Zhodani battleships have to limp back Zhodani fleet bases behind their own lines because they can't utilize captured bases for a set period of time. Lest you think I'm neglecting the fact that Imperials have the same issue, they too have to limp back to an available port, and pray that the Zhodani aren't rapidly advancing to the point where the ship being repaired isn't caught with its pants down at a repair dock and captured when the system falls.

So, I'm not attempting to compare apples to apples in vacacuum. I'm starting with step ONE of finding out whether or not it is cost effective at a tactical level. ANY ship design can be overwhelmed by numberical superiority by an enemy. The question becomes one of whether or not such a design is even worth fielding in the first place...

 

[Hal]

Which brings me to my next point...



We cannot even do that because Traveller does not have a campaign game which even begins to approximate the many issues we all know should be part of space combat. Issues like sensors, logistics, and the like have either been ignored or folded into other rules in the interest of game play.

I used Panzer Blitz as an example earlier. While that game somewhat approximates armored combat on WW2's Eastern Front, anyone attempting to lead a mechanized battalion in the manner they learned from the game would have their ass handed to them in reality. The same holds true for Traveller's various space combat games.

They're only games and because they're only games we can only analyze and infer so much from them.

And herein lies the problem with your argument...

When all you have to simulate the reality of a given fictional universe, are a set of rules, then you use the rules in your simulation to give you a simulated result to give you your "historical events" that you as the GM utilizes for their traveller universe. Other than by fiat where the GM says "This happened, and that happened - end of story", the option is to use the game simulation rules to handle the battles as given. Heck, even THE FIFTH FRONTIER WAR board game is a set simulation for just that area of the region in which the FFW took place. Saying that the simulation imperfectly handles the "reality" of the fictional universe and is not to be taken seriously ends up telling people "don't even bother to use the board game to simulate the events of the Fifth Frontier War - as it can't handle all that well, the realitiy of the Third Imperial Universe."

<shrug>

The fact that the universe contains physics defying technology should be a clue that nothing can simulate it realistically enough All we wargamers can do, is worth with the rules we're given, and enjoy the process involved in solving the problems stipulated by the war scenario. Otherwise, you comments imply to me (or perhaps I'm inferring differently than you intended to imply) that I shouldn't take the rules seriously, because they can't handle the job. When they're all one has, then you do the best you can with the rules you have, or the game board product you purhased with your hard-earned money, and work against your friend/opponent in order to have a good time playing a game.

 

[Orr]

And herein lies the problem with your argument...

The real problem is your continued insistence that the game's rules can somehow be analyzed reveal "deeper" truths about the setting's "reality". The truth is the rules can only take you so far and after that point you're simply making stuff up to suit your own expectations.

We don't even have a canonical budget mechanism for the Third Imperium and yet people insist on "costing" out fleets and whatnot. Without knowing how much money is involved, you can't even begin to begin.

When all you have to simulate the reality of a given fictional universe, are a set of rules, then you use the rules in your simulation to give you a simulated result to give you your "historical events" that you as the GM utilizes for their traveller universe.

The rules were and are designed for game play. They support ship building, world building, culture building, and all the rest as aids to game play. The game is about adventure in the Far Future and not accounting, naval architecture, sociology, or other topics. As such, the rules can only support so much analysis and you're attempting analysis which is far beyond what the rules can support.

Saying that the simulation imperfectly handles the "reality" of the fictional universe and is not to be taken seriously ends up telling people "don't even bother to use the board game to simulate the events of the Fifth Frontier War - as it can't handle all that well, the realitiy of the Third Imperial Universe."

No it doesn't. The FFW boardgame enjoys the same relationship to the "actual" FFW as Panzer Blitz does to the actual WW2 Eastern Front. Both games can be used to determine some things about the conflicts they present, but both games cannot be used to completely understand the conflicts they present because they are games and not textbooks.

If you're unsure of just how bad a "guide" the FFW boardgame is to the "actual" war, let me remind you that among many other things the game doesn't contain tankers, that ships use their entire fuel load when jumping regardless of jump distance, that the entire Darrian-Sword Worlds conflict is missing, that the Sacnoth Fleet whose rapid destruction led to that polity's surrender is missing, and - most importantly of all - it's next to impossible to recreate the war presented in the JTAS TNS briefs with the game.

Reminding people that the rules are "... a very incomplete approximation of reality." allows them to focus on what the rules are actually about, game play.

Remembering what the rules were actually written for and remembering what was the actual thinking behind them keeps us from wasting our time on quixotic and barren analysis efforts which return results that have more to do with the myriad of assumptions that need to be added to the rules than the actual rules themselves. , The rules are a very slender reed which can only support a certain amount of analysis. Anything beyond that amount is futile.

All we wargamers can do, is worth with the rules we're given, and enjoy the process involved in solving the problems stipulated by the war scenario.

You are going far beyond that. Traveller's various ship combat games present the players with exciting sessions. What they don't do is present us with a basis for "deep" setting analysis.

Otherwise, you comments imply to me (or perhaps I'm inferring differently than you intended to imply) that I shouldn't take the rules seriously, because they can't handle the job.

You should take the rules seriously, seriously for the job they were intended for. You cannot successfully use the rules in the manner you're suggesting however. They were not written or intended, consciously or subconsciously, to support the depth of analysis you continually attempt and your repeated failures to analyze the rules at those depths should have taught you that.

When they're all one has, then you do the best you can with the rules you have, or the game board product you purhased with your hard-earned money, and work against your friend/opponent in order to have a good time playing a game.

Exactly, and the best you can do with any game's rules is to play the game and not pretend they are a financial, sociological, astronomical, and engineering textbook from the far future.

Returning the your original suggestion, throwing a single battleship squadron at a single battlerider squadron will tell us nothing that isn't already known. Andrew years ago produced the designs you're looking for across more TLs than you're looking for. You can break your wrist rolling dice in hundreds of HG2 battles using those designs but the "deeper" truths about why the IN has decided emphasize riders over ships cannot be determined from HG2 because that game ignores far too much of the "reality" of the situation.

The rules won't give you what you're looking for because they weren't written with that in mind.

 

[mike wightman]

Once again to be the pedant.

You'd better go check your counters for FFW cos mine includes tankers - oh and there are rules for using them too =)

 

[mike wightman]

And now a more in depth reply.

The design rules and combat system in LBB5 HG 2nd ed are meant to be a model for the large ship combat in the OTU setting. They even went to the trouble of giving us trillion Credit Squadron as a sandbox.

Now once you actually sit down and design fleets, play a campaign or two, and pit differing TL opponents against each other various things become apparent from the
design rules and combat system that would have an impact on the fictional universe in which they are found.

Did the folks at GDW intend this?

Probably not - I doubt if they play tested the rules to the extent that they were thrashed over by the player base.

Did the folks at GDW intend for the rules to model the setting? - yes.

Do the rules produce setting implications? - yes.

Were the folks at GDW bothered? - no

The OTU was a sandbox for them, as I have stated many a time they changed the underlying paradigms in subtle or major ways and yet still called it the OTU despite the inconsistencies and ramifications.

LBB2 1st ed - LBB5 1st ed - LBB5 2nd ed -LBB2 revised

Each iteration changed something that has a major setting effect - but the designers just ignored it and said this is the way it is now.

 

[Rigel Stardin]

To me the answer is simple:

Superior numbers will destroy a single target no matter what the target has in weapons or defenses.

Then it becomes a matter of losses. What side is willing to lose more over the other.

What people fail to realize in wargaming is the human condition.

Example: Enemy battleship destroy the Battlerider carrier. The next issue (which is not covered in the manual) Do those crew surrender or go down fight or even better yet sucide mission?

When playing a wargame it is all about winning the scenario. Begining bogged down by the human charactisitics of survival doesn't matter.

So with no chance of escape, the wargamer will throw those units away when in reality, there comes a point where human beings start looking for an exit. Reality doesn't figure into the game play. It's all about winning.

 

[rancke]

To me the answer is simple:

Superior numbers will destroy a single target no matter what the target has in weapons or defenses.

To me the logic is simple.

If superior numbers will destroy a single target no matter what the target has in weapons or defenses, no one will buy one battleship instead of six or eight cruisers or battleriders.

The Imperium and the Zhodani do buy a considerable number of battleships. The Imperium, for instance, maintains somewhere between 160 and 224 500,000 Tigresses.

Therefore superior numbers of cruisers (plus escorts) will not destroy a single battleship (plus escorts) as long as those numbers are moderate.


Hans

 

[Rigel Stardin]

Which brings us back to the second point I made about reality verses gaming.

Mitchell proved that land based aircraft could destroy battleships in the 1920s. Everyone, didn't take him seriously until after Pearl Harbor. Then Battleships were reduced to the role of support ship in landing operation. Bismark was taken down by torpedo planes and (Battle) cruisers. Heck, look at the Philippine's landing operation. In two enguagements, only one of thoses was battleship on battleship. The other was Destoryer/aircraft vs Battleship, cruiser and destroyer.

The British and American both had wargamed all those scenarios before hand. The one that stands out for me is what the Americans said about Pearl Harbor. "The water in the harbor is to shallow to drop torpedos..."

Traveller through all it's incarnations (And this is what I'm reading here) has holes as big as semi-trucks when it comes to wargaming fleets. The article I pointed out early in this thread points to that.

The designers want battleships to win, that is why they put limitations on Missles, fighters and smaller ship weapons. Because it fits into the idea of a grand scifi scenario.

The real world has proven, Battleships are no longer necessary because a jet armed with a harpoon missile can take it out.

The point I'm trying to make is do you want wargaming or a reality base combat scenario?

 

[Hal]

Well Orr,
It would seem you've just argued the point of saying that this entire thread is pointless, and that further commentary is a waste of time. Thank you for convincing me of that.

<shakes his head and gives up>

 

[Orr]

Mitchell proved that land based aircraft could destroy battleships in the 1920s. Everyone, didn't take him seriously until after Pearl Harbor. Then Battleships were reduced to the role of support ship in landing operation. Bismark was taken down by torpedo planes and (Battle) cruisers. Heck, look at the Philippine's landing operation. In two enguagements, only one of thoses was battleship on battleship. The other was Destoryer/aircraft vs Battleship, cruiser and destroyer.

There are so many things wrong with the various claims made in that paragraph that I can't even decide where to begin. Thankfully this forum is not the place to correct those misconceptions. Let me suggest that you post the same claims to a discussion board like navweps. The members there will be happy to begin your education, after they stop laughing that is.

The British and American both had wargamed all those scenarios before hand. The one that stands out for me is what the Americans said about Pearl Harbor. "The water in the harbor is to shallow to drop torpedos..."

During the 1930s the USN regularly gamed carrier attacks on Pearl Harbor and it took the RN's attack on Taranto to convince the IJN that torpedoes could be used at Pearl. Again, let me suggest you post you beliefs at a naval warfare board where you can be disabused of them.

The designers want battleships to win, that is why they put limitations on Missles, fighters and smaller ship weapons. Because it fits into the idea of a grand scifi scenario.

Complete and utter nonsense. HG2 covers several tech levels and it has been proven time and time again that fighters are deadly in many of them. Fighters may be useless against warships at TL 15, but TL 15 is not the whole of Traveller.

The real world has proven, Battleships are no longer necessary because a jet armed with a harpoon missile can take it out.

The real world had "proven" that battleships are no longer useful NOW. They were useful in the past and, depending on technological developments, they may be useful in the future. Like the excellent wargame designers they were, Traveller's creators took care to ensure that technological development changed the way wars were fought just as it does in reality.

 

[Orr]

Well Orr, It would seem you've just argued the point of saying that this entire thread is pointless, and that further commentary is a waste of time.

This thread has been far from pointless as it has pointed out that the utility of battleriders, like the utility of fighters, will vary according to tech level.

Thank you for convincing me of that.

If I've been able to convince you that any game's rules cannot be analyzed past a certain point, you're welcome.

 

[Rigel Stardin]

I'm quite aware of what happen to the Italian navy and the delivery system the British used to drop those torpedoes which sank their ships. Which brings up the point of why those biplanes were able to hit the Bismark.

Technology isn't always the answer the Germans proved that in the WW II.

Which brings us back to wargaming verses real world combat Scenarios.

Numbers will always win the battle unless you start tossing nukes at everything. And even then, the person with the most nukes still win. If you call that winning...

 

[Orr]

You'd better go check your counters for FFW cos mine includes tankers - oh and there are rules for using them too =)

Yes, there are tankers.

How about all the other missing pieces I mentioned? Or do you want to suggest that the FFW boardgame is an wholly accurate simulation of the setting's "real" Fifth Frontier War?

As you wisely state:

The OTU was a sandbox for them, as I have stated many a time they changed the underlying paradigms in subtle or major ways and yet still called it the OTU despite the inconsistencies and ramifications.

LBB2 1st ed - LBB5 1st ed - LBB5 2nd ed -LBB2 revised

Each iteration changed something that has a major setting effect - but the designers just ignored it and said this is the way it is now.

GDW was writing rules and settings materials for a game and not writing text books to describe the Far Future they had envisioned. Because the materials are meant for gaming, they can only be analyzed up to a certain point. Any "facts" inferred or deduced beyond that point is nothing more than mental masturbation whose results will be more dependent on the many assumptions imposed by the analyst than anything else.