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Inside those Standard Turrets

ok, we've got the numbers squared away,

9 for triple
6 for double
3 for single

internal, unless it's a specific 'outside mount'
(perhaps added, in place of an 'antipersonnel' mount, so there's a reasonable limit? vis: high guard rules.)

gunners couch, optional, by design.

as for 'size and mass'?
how big is a missile, in it's 'safety rated, shipping tube, one each'?
a meter and a half, and 75lbs? bigger? smaller?
that sandcaster round? yeah, ok, it's a bucket of plastiflakes, or same doped with a handful or six of electromagnets or the 'ball-bearing'-like 'pebbles'.
standard round is... about an eight gallon bucket? 50 lbs.?
 
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I've always taken the missiles available to civillian vessels in Traveller as having far less punch and reliability as those directly vended to the military.

That said, I don't rule out savvy engineers or those with ordnance experience from doing a little post-production modification to said projectiles. Mind any tinkering would have it's consequences during such action and of course once in the turret-being fired.
 
CT Turrets

In CT Special Supplement 3 (p 7) it states each RACK has one missile ready to fire and two more ready for future turns (i.e. 3 total in the RACK). The TURRET also has STORAGE for 12 additional missiles.

Once the ready rounds (3) are used the rack must be reloaded. Logically the gunner would use the storage rounds first. Once the 12 storage rounds are used the turret must be restocked from a missile magazine or cargo.
 
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Strictly IMTU, but I assume manual loaders to be standard for civilian ships and auto-loaders to be assumed for military ships ... so having an autoloader on a civilian ship is possible, but will attract the sort of inspection questions and issues that mounting a 50 caliber machine gun on your fishing boat would attract in the real world.
For my TU, also based on CT LBB2 & LBB5, an auto-loader not only costs more to add-on to a missile turret, it also takes up more space. The magazine requires a minimum of 2 dtons which supplies 52 standard missiles. The transfer chute takes up .5m x .5m from the magazine to the turret, double that for a corner; eliminate if adjacent to the turret. One magazine may supply multiple turrets.
 
Just as an interesting aside, that is exactly what the USN gave to Ernest Hemingway (2 x .50 cals plus a case of grenades) if he promised to go away, leave them alone, and play nice with German Subs off Cuba.:devil:

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2009/08/11/the-hemingway-you-didnt-know-papas-adventures/




One might have thought the Germans would have been wise to that ruse in the second world war, after their experiences in the first (see William Guy Carr, By Guess and by God )​
 
1m long, 50kg, capable of maintaing 6g acceleration for 120 minutes.

The jump drive I can believe, the missile I have difficulty with ;)
 
1m long, 50kg, capable of maintaing 6g acceleration for 120 minutes.

The jump drive I can believe, the missile I have difficulty with ;)

It's a panzerfaust. Available from Tech 5 ...

(At Tech 4 you can have a PIAT ... but due to range limitations, it is not recommended that you fit them with nuclear warheads ... )
 
Just curious, what does T5 say about such things as whether gunners need to physically be in the turret to get their skill bonus, as opposed to operating from a remote console?
 
Just curious, what does T5 say about such things as whether gunners need to physically be in the turret to get their skill bonus, as opposed to operating from a remote console?

IIRC, I don't think T5 says anything about Gunners needing to be in a turret. In fact, based on the way computers, consoles, and controllers work in T5 in terms of operating ships' systems, I would strongly suspect that the norm is for gunners to be elsewhere in the ship.
 
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T5 on Turret Gunners

P. 162 "Turrets are the simplest and most easily used weapon installations. A simple armored structure contains the weapon; the gunner may work within the turret, or from a remote location."
See also the illustrations on p. 389 which shows three turrets, one of which has a gunner located inside.
P. 517 Control Console states "A Control Console is attached to a weapons turret, the pilot function on a ship, or the driver function for a vehicle." It does not specify that the control console must be collocated. See the p. 162 ref above.
 
The standard turret is, presumably, the turret players are likely to encounter in roleplaying, therefore the civilian ship's turret. Role-playing rules seem to assume the gunner is loading missiles - no autoloader, but perhaps some machinery to ease the job. Of course, simply neutralizing ship's gravity in the loading area and giving the gunner magnetic boots would be a big help.

Then High Guard came up and gave us Navy ships and a ship-creation and combat system that didn't bother to account for missile reloads. Of course, the IN doesn't play by civilian rules. The IN puts one gunner in charge of a battery of up to 10 missile turrets - which leaves a half dTon of space per turret that would otherwise be occupied by crew positions now available for missile reloads and autoloaders. (That's maybe 50-60 additional rounds, allowing space for the autoloader - say 60 since it divides by 3 easily. Means your Navy ship has 23 shots before you need to start wondering where he's hiding the reloads.) And, it'd kinda have to have autoloaders; there's no way that one guy is running from turret to turret. Even allowing ship's troops and service crew to take up missile loading as a battlestation assignment, there just aren't enough extra bodies.

Which suggests maybe that military ships have autoloaders but civvie ships don't.
 
One thing that strikes me about this mini-missile, is that this plays hell with the Traveller rule of 1 turret per 100 tons.

Of course, that little puppy can't have more than a few miles range. Traveller missile has the ambitious task of trying to reach out to touch someone who may be a light-second or more away. It's like the difference between hitting a target on the horizon and hitting a target orbiting the moon.

That looks a lot like White Sands Missile Range. Explains a lot. White Sands is this huge expanse of desert fenced off for missile testing, with radar domes and odd whatsit buildings scattered randomly about. There's a state freeway that runs through the middle of White Sands from Las Cruces to Alamogordo. Every time they test one of their new things, they have to shut down the freeway for a couple hours - can't have something crashing amidst traffic if something goes wrong. White Sands also hosts a training facility for Predator drone pilots.

I always thought of that 1 per 100 dT rule as more a very old intergalactic agreement sort of thing - on the idea of the Washington Naval Treaty - dating back to when nukes were the queen of battle, rather than a technological limitation. No real pressure to go back and revise it after nuclear dampers came on the scene, and it limits the firepower of civilians and potential renegades, so they just kept the old implementing laws on the books.

I also think that little rule is just ripe for some in-house modification: say, small pocket empires that aren't signatory to the agreement who depend heavily on missiles to offset their weakness against the major powers. You'd have to come up with your own rules, 'cause the way computers affect missile hit and penetration suggests that aspects of the launching ship would still remain a bottleneck - none of this "cargo hold dumps a thousand missiles into space" stuff, probably still need a discrete launcher to guide the missile to at least terminal phase, if not to impact.

Although, I've sometimes fancied having some sort of rule that allowed fighters carrying short-range self-guided missiles on pylons to deliver the things directly to terminal range and then release them - maybe make some rule that they have to be at short range and then spend agility to offset the target's agility and match course or something.
 
1. Interstellar Arms Limitations - who'd enforce it? Also, trust and verify part would be impossible.

2. About all you could do would be make an agreement would be where to place a Neutral Zone, and what could violate it.
 
1. Interstellar Arms Limitations - who'd enforce it? Also, trust and verify part would be impossible.

2. About all you could do would be make an agreement would be where to place a Neutral Zone, and what could violate it.

Who'd enforce it? About the same as now: when they saw advantage in an agreement, they'd make an agreement, monitor it, and keep it to the extent that it was in their interest to do so. When they no longer saw an advantage in an agreement, the agreement would be scrapped. So long as your incentive to keep the other guy honoring his end was high enough, you'd mostly honor your end, and so long as his incentive to keep you honoring your end was high enough, he'd mostly honor his end. There isn't any need for enforcement as the agreement only exists while it is mutually beneficial.

That's the way it worked with the Washington Treaty: the signatories signed on because they saw an advantage in the agreement. There was some cheating and some stretching of interpretations, but they generally adhered to it because it served their own needs to do so. Eventually, one party backed out of it when they felt there was no longer sufficient advantage.

The real question isn't who will enforce it; the real question is whether the opposing sides see advantage in coming to agreement on a limit, and whether - having accepted a limit - they continue to see advantage in respecting that limit. The larger the empire - the more ships they have, and therefore the less the fate of any single ship matters to the overall war effort - the easier it becomes to agree to terms that set limits on the power of an individual ship. Similarly, the higher the tech level involved, the easier it becomes to set and adhere to limits because the increasing power of nuclear dampers makes missiles less useful.

Put another way: you have a problem - an arbitrary rule. You have three choices. You can house-rule away the problem, but then you're out of step with others who use the rule. You can wave your hands while giving some techno-mechanical mumbo-jumbo explanation for the canon rule, but no one's actually gonna buy the explanation. Or, you can lay the blame on sociopolitical forces and say it's because of some old treaty. The advantage there is that you as game master are the sole arbiter of what is or is not possible in your setting's political landscape - no one can argue, at least not the way they'd argue if it were some science or engineering based rationalization - and there's just enough historical precedent there for you to say it's at least feasible.

A sociopolitical rationalization leaves open the option for the game master to keep the bulk of canon ship design while introducing house rules that depart from the rule - pocket empires that refused to be bound by such treaties, pirates who modify their ships, earlier eras when ships were built by different rules and so forth. You'd need to make up those house rules: the computer DM mechanic implies that some feature of the launching ship remains a bottleneck at least to terminal range, if not to impact, so it's likely you'd still be restricted to one launched missile active per launcher - none of this "cargo bay dumps a thousand missiles to space" business. However, it'd be very interesting to design warships that ignored the rule and test them against warships that followed the rule. My guess is it'd make the biggest difference in the smallest and lowest tech ships and progressively less difference as you progressed to larger and more advanced ships.

As for "verify", we're talking about sci-fi interstellar empires here: spy verses spy, brave Bothans dying to bring you information, scouts mining ice so they can sneak about in the distant hinterlands of a system spying on its central worlds, ships with densitometers scanning you down to your deck plans as you cruise by. Goodness knows, it'd still be difficult - the other guy is doing his level best to keep his secrets - but where there's a will and the resources to find them out, there's a way. It's only impossible if you want it to be impossible in your own campaign setting.
 
1. With hindsight, the WNT is a mistake from the British POV, despite the fact that it was based on preventing another naval arms race and more importantly for Whitehall, a budget gimmick.

2. It allowed the Japanese to catch up in tonnage terms, and yet by it's nature, still managed to insult them by not treating them on equal terms as the British and Americans.

3. By setting limitations, the Japanese knew where to game the system to try to gain as much armament parity, while the RN made compromises like the half-assed NelRod, and scrapping some older but still viable capital ships.

4. As for verification, it's hard to hide building a battleship, though the Japanese succeeded with the Yamato class, Most experts can estimate fairly well warship stats and tonnage, so they could tell if anyone cheated, though in the interests of diplomacy, no one was really called on it since a great deal of sleight of hand was being used by everyone.

5. The British were caught out when the Japanese didn't renew the Limitations Treaty, and were forced to proceed to construct the KGVs, a compromised design to fight the next war.

6. The RN desperately needed cruisers to protect it's LoCs to the colonies, and came up with a compromise variant, the light 6" gunned eight thousand tons, so that more could be built, and needed to incorporate that clause in so that the others wouldn't all build 8" ten thousand ones. The Japanese designed their light cruisers heavier than declared and replaced the 6" with 8" later on.

7. Space is huge, you can find some remote corner and build a black budget fleet. The only ones who might know about these Skunk Works would be the Zhodani with their crystal balls.

8. The British should have kept their alliance with the Japanese and let them bankrupt themselves, and had an informal understanding with the Americans as to how many battleships would be stationed in the Atlantic at any one time. The French had already proved that they didn't have the industrial capacity to compete and only needed parity with the Italians, and the Italians could go and bankrupt themselves if they chose.

9. Another factor that the Imperium has to consider is that it takes time to transfer ships around, so they would need overwhelming numbers though spread far apart.
 
7. Space is huge, you can find some remote corner and build a black budget fleet.

it is. but there are only a few corners where "fleets" can be built and the em activity alone would be very difficult to conceal. the best place to build a "black" fleet would be in the middle of a large known fleet in the middle of a large known shipyard.
 
it is. but there are only a few corners where "fleets" can be built and the em activity alone would be very difficult to conceal. the best place to build a "black" fleet would be in the middle of a large known fleet in the middle of a large known shipyard.
What about one of those Deep Meson Sites. ;)
 
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