Jump-4 X-boat Tenders

[shield]

Looking at the other designed with variable tonnage and J performance, all of them are ships with high jump ratings, with the J rating dropping when things are attached - The RCES clippers, the Jump ship from Supp 9, and the Leander from the old FASA ship plans. The only discrepancy is the gazelle.

If you build one using HG2 you get a 300tn ship J5 M5, PP7 with fuel for PP and J2. Adding the drop tanks gives you the reduced performance quoted for J4 etc. The only discrepancy is the 4 turrets instead of 3. I think this was mentioned in another thread and the errata now limit the number of turret to the base ship size rather than ship+attachments.

Could someone check the offical errata?

As for 3 turrets on a tender being light - its not a military ship, its a base for a communications system. A best its an auxiliary vessel in wartime.

 

[far-trader]

Regards the unused drive letters - over engineered can be a good idea for certain roles - as supported by the combat and maintenance game mechanics.

Absolutely. BUT...

...not for the X-Boat Tender. I don't buy it for a second.

Get stranded where? They spend most of if not all of their operational life sitting in a single system.

Begs the question of why the have any drives at all if the argument is they have overspeced drives that are not meant to be utilized to their full in getting deployed and on those rare delivery and recovery missions, because of A) rampant graft in procurement, or B) to be able to stand in combat with a plainly undergunned three turrets out of a possible ten, or a bay weapon.

Nope, nobody has won me over to that idea yet

 

[Rigel Stardin]

What if they are apart of the ultra secret J6 X-boat routes....

...The mystery deepens....

 

[Matt123]

The only discrepancy is the gazelle.

If you build one using HG2 you get a 300tn ship J5 M5, PP7 with fuel for PP and J2. Adding the drop tanks gives you the reduced performance quoted for J4 etc. The only discrepancy is the 4 turrets instead of 3. I think this was mentioned in another thread and the errata now limit the number of turret to the base ship size rather than ship+attachments.

Could someone check the offical errata?

Its a legacy from HG1. The flaw is in having the extra turret. It is technically a 300ton ship with 100ton drop tanks that it retains in normal use and ditches in combat gaining the stats you mention above.

Refer also to the Fiery, a Gazelle variant based on a 400ton hull.

 

[Matt123]

Nope, nobody has won me over to that idea yet

As Ranke says, its not intended for combat, just to deter the (very) lightly armed would be pirate that might be tempted come their way. Tenders close to "the core" are not armed.

So far we have established that Tenders cannot leave their duty stations. That stranded X-boat pilots are either dead or have made their own way back into the system. That X-boats have little more than scrap value to most passers-by and most systems will baby sit the hull whilst removal is arranged.

So... A Tender will have to be arranged from the reserve. The reserve for a Sub-sector will likely consist of vessels returned to the Scout Way Station for maintenance.

Fortunately, there is no immediacy to recovering a misplaced X-boat. (SOP's for a X-boat pilot will no doubt include scrubbing the computer and taking key elements from the system to render it in-operable.) So a J1 recovery vessel with a 6 parsec range will be perfectly adequate (5 parsec return range holding an X-boat), with if needed a carried companion Scout ship for fuel skimming purposes (again reducing range to 5 parsecs).

On the oversized drive... Nope I haven't got an explanation for that. Using the same type of argument though I can more easily prove that Drop Tanks come equipped with a hard-points every 100dtons... Otherwise I rank the oversized drives up there with fact that nearly every ship in cannon is broken in some form (I prefer to think of cannon ship listings as Imperial or sales propaganda).

A better question is why do you think a J4 recovery effort is needed? And wouldn't it be cheaper to contract out the return of 100dton of cargo than upgrade every Tender to computer 4? Or perhaps have on hand a Dispersed Structure Tender variant? Certainly the Scout service has no issue with delivering up to 4 X-boats at a time, at J1.

I'll also note that the deck plan for a Tender shows the vehicle bay occupies a 40 metre high section through the centre of the ship. Thats a big surface area the jump field has to conform to in order to exclude that very large (600dton large, 60% of the ship large) part of the ship from jumping.

Whats to stop the Jump field from just slicing the vessel in two and jumping just the Engineering section and fuel tanks? (path of least resistance & on that deck, there ain't much resistance...) I'd love to know the additional surface area required to be covered by the jump field for this to work!

 

[BytePro]

...
Nope, nobody has won me over to that idea yet

... (from various posts)
Why else (I'm interested in your opinions) have the Type H drives when Type E* would do?
...
Supp 7:

"They also undertake recovery missions to pick up damaged xboats or boats which have misjumped to off-route systems."

Can't be much clearer that they also do rescue and salvage.
...
Well I imagine the fetch and retrieve would come after the search and locate (done by Type S imtu) so you'd already have some additional resources on scene. And the tender would probably be using drop tanks on the way out and carrying some bladders. If they can't fix the X-Boat in-situ to enable it to jump back by itself then the return trip is going to be slow, relying on Type S escorts for fueling along the way.

...
On the oversized drive... Nope I haven't got an explanation for that.

I'll give this a shot - YMMV

So... the Imperium has spent a huge amount of effort and a good many weeks of committed resources (S-Types and Tender and all their personnel) to locate a wayward XBoat and fuel a Tender to a location... only to have the whole mission a scrub (lots of weeks to get another on location) all because they didn't 'over-invest' in the most critical on the scene element that could fail and not be repairable on scene...

'Overspec-ing' mission critical equipment is exactly what militaries and government do. Its not their money - but it can be their missions, their jobs or their very lives and/or the lives of many others! This is aside from the scenarios like saundby pointed out with regards to the U.S. space shuttle, politics, graft, historical precedences, etc.

Given its role - and that it is a specialized vessel - I can see it having exceptional design aspects. An extremely reliable jump drive (ingame purposes - metagame, CT rules only had complete failures, IIRC) certainly fits that bill, IMO.

 

[Starviking]

Which just goes to show that the rules are not infallible.

The rules were designed for a purpose. You are obviously intent on circumventing that original purpose. Whether you label that intent 'innovation' or 'cheating' depends on your POV. It's YTU and you can do what you want, but it's pretty obvious to me that your 'innovation' wasn't intended to exist by the rule writers.

Is it really necessary to adopt such a combative tone? As regards the rule writers, who knows how they'd regard such an observation.

If you're getting into topology as a solution, all you really need is a tiny vent-hole somewhere...

Not sure if that's an insult or not. I will say that my background is in physics and engineering - so what seems obvious to me may not seem obvious to others.

Peace.

 

[mike wightman]

Sure, the design rules don't explicitly rule out up-ranging a drive when ship dtons is reduced, but operationally, it is not written in the rules to allow it. However, for drop tanks and the like, rules are explicitly written for design and operations allowing them and under what game balancing circumstances.

Good try.

Just one slight problem.

There were no rules for drop tanks when the X-boat tender or the Gazelle were designed.

Someone probably noticed that if you could dump the hull that was used for tonnage in the design sequence you could increase drive performance and hence the Gazelle was born.

I actually think that the idea that it was designed as a 400t ship - the hard points - and that the drop tank idea was an add on is probably why we have the broken design.

The rules for drop tanks came later - 1st edition High Guard. They were never included in any version of LBB2 ship design though.

So the rules as written don't allow it - they just don't expressly disallow it - not the same thing. Don't recall a rule that said anything not disallowed is defacto allowed.

It's mentioned a few times in Traveller, the referee gets to make stuff up.

Now if the rules don't state something explicitly but they can be implied and made to work then that's allowed in my book.

And yet not used as otherwise Jump routes would be longer and more connected, which they don't appear to be. So the setting doesn't support the theory of too common to mention.

Why would the jump routes be longer? It's the jump 4 x-boats that are the signal carriers, not the tenders.
It would require an upgrade to jump 5 or 6 to speed up the communication system.

The setting does mention the tenders being used for recovery (thanks Dan ) so having jump 4 capability would be well worth it.

Regards the unused drive letters - over engineered can be a good idea for certain roles - as supported by the combat and maintenance game mechanics. Getting stranded because of a marginally spec'ed drive could be, er, annoying. One might have to call on a Tender - er - somehow?

Fair point but the tender isn't intended as a combat vessel otherwise it would be considerably up-gunned.

 

[mike wightman]

Its a legacy from HG1. The flaw is in having the extra turret. It is technically a 300ton ship with 100ton drop tanks that it retains in normal use and ditches in combat gaining the stats you mention above.

Refer also to the Fiery, a Gazelle variant based on a 400ton hull.

It may even predate that since it first appeared in JTAS.

There are 3 possible reasons for it being broken:

1 - MWM can't follow the design rules

2 - MWM is allowed to just make stuff up that the rules don't support

3 - the rules for drop tanks were still in pre-published flux and MWM was using an early draft.

It's still broken under the rules as written though.

 

[rancke]

Well I imagine the fetch and retrieve would come after the search and locate (done by Type S imtu) so you'd already have some additional resources on scene. And the tender would probably be using drop tanks on the way out and carrying some bladders. If they can't fix the X-Boat in-situ to enable it to jump back by itself then the return trip is going to be slow, relying on Type S escorts for fueling along the way.

It's still totally unsuitable for the purpose. The best explanation I can come up with for the quote you gave is that when the idea was pitched, the pitchers included this as an extra option: "And... and... and... and it can go fetch lost and stranded X-boats in deep, deep space! It can carry 600T of extra fuel in the boat bay, so it has an effective range of seven parsecs! That means it can reach any spot in Charted Space! Ain't that something?!?"

And this hype made it into the ship description. In "real life" the Scouts have much more suitable rescue vessels, but the X-boat division also has a number of superfluous X-boat tenders for rescue work to inflate its budget.


Hans

 

[Patron Zero]

Since 'secret' projects were mentioned, why not suppose-assume the Imperium also had X-boat tenders participate in black-ops roles, say a portable outpost composed of three tenders which are-were modified to join-dock together once on site ?

Perhaps a bit 007 villain-ish but definitely within the capacity of Imperial Intelligence to have possibly been considered.