Making Battleships Work

[Xerxeskingofking]

As you said, not a single ship was sunk in the battle (though some did not arrive to port after it), and most mission killed ships (you're right, not precisely with a single hit) were there to take for the winner. I've said many times this is what would happen at space battles with the HG/MT system: vrey few destroyed ships and many prizes to take (unless scuttled, of course). As always, most of that on the thread 'Use of caputred ships'.

well, i do note most capital designs have a significant number of ships troops attached to thier crew, so they clearly expect to be conducting boarding actions (or proforming company scale interventions on member worlds, i´m not sure).

but, as trafalgar shows us, not every ship captured is suitable for refitted and putting into service. a lot of the hulks were just that: hulks, too damaged to be worth repairing. the events after the fight meant that quite a few prizes were cast off for one reason and another.


think of it this way: do traveller starships have the means to repair somthing like a "fuel tanks shattered" hit, or a destroyed jump drive? can you jury rig a bridge for a ship where the orignal one is a glowing hole of meson irraditaed slag? and do this in "the field" with only what repiar equipment you carried? (i'll accept that specialst fleet tenders may be able to affect better repairs, but would you bring those along on an attack?)

 

[Dragoner]

Recovery crews often recover tanks in the middle of the battlefield, thus why they have armored recovery vehicles, don't see why a recovery ship wouldn't be armored to do the same, it could be something to do with your old lower TL BB's.

As per the question of making battleships work, how many battleships are we talking about? The Imperium can make and support quite a few as far as I can tell. Not only does the Imperium have size, which battleships can represent well, but BB also have the magic fifth element of weapons impact: psychology. If you mess with me, I'll swarm you with battleships; could be the IN motto.

 

[skyth]

The best way to make battleships work would be to have non-spinal weapons actually be able to do significant damage.

In a TL 15 fight, only 4 weapons can actually do damage...Spinal Mesons, Spinal PA's, Nuclear Missiles, and Pulse Lasers.

If Traveller used some sort of structure point system so that even if an attack didn't take out a turret or something similar, enough cumulative hits would incapacitate/destroy the ship then battleships would actually be useful. They would both be able to absorb more damage, and they pack more weapons that can do structural damage.

Another way to make them useful is to tie Meson guns to having a jump drive. (Maybe a certain size jump drive depending on the size of the gun)

 

[Maccat]

Seems a bit unclear if the idea here is battleship design or rules mods/tweaks.

Battleship would be big, have a +2/ to hit modifier when shot at. Spinal mesons get a best to hit of 4, so for equal hitting of each other the nuc missile bays, spinal PA even better. I can see a very large ship with an immense number of nuclear missile bays for an attempt at overwhelming "first shot" or one shot destruction capability, at long range! But nuc missiles and spinal PAs against Ag6 and armor 15, you'd essentially be after enough fuel-n hits to cripple it that way (many MANY nuc missile bays!). Of course the weapons would very likely be scraped off so the ship not a threat before that stage as well.

Economically it doesn't match up or make sense, but maybe the OTU of many battleships the idea is the richness through trade profits sheer size and structure of the imperium allow for use of overwhelming force and "unfair fights", not economically matched. TCS uses matched fleet MCr/BCr/TCr, but that's not necessarily the nature of fleet warfare in the universe...

A lot (all?) of the fighting ship battleships had a whole carrier worth of fighters and large troop complements as well. Many dismiss the fighters as ineffective at higher TLs but they become as deadly as earlier fighters versus wounded vessels.

Much has been said about OTU and official write ups of fleet compositions, I remember being struck how large and often crippled/nonsensical most of the ships in fighting ships were when it came out lol. These all came in as a major increase from the 5kt of book2. HG has some major balance issues, to the extent I favor more cinematic and fightable limits on vessels rather than minmaxxed ubervessel slugfests, so tend to limit maneuver and agility to have fighters be able to hit things and be hit in turn, also limit armor as well. I actually don't like using TL15 because of the extreme efficiency of the power plants, tbh. J4 M6 is doable at TL 13, but even then too much armor problem still exists.

So I'll get to work on a ship that can overwhelm a 19kt spinal J meson beastie with massed nuc missile bays and a back up spinal PA, cost be darned! Then another vesion trying to match cost with low maneuver/agility and as big as possible for many bays...

 

[skyth]

The big Spinal PA's are good against the small Battleriders. If I design a fleet, I make sure I pack a couple just to deal with smaller Riders.

 

[Orr]

Battleships already work in HG2 and all this whining has to do with battleships not working at specific tech levels within HG2 rather than battleships not working in HG2.

HG2 covers several tech levels, from 9 to 15 IIRC, and different design paradigms work at different tech levels. Just as with people whining about fighters, you don't need to modify damage tables or juggle weapon availabilities. All you need to do is pick the tech level where battleships work and stick to it.

The game is already flexible enough to provide what you want. You just need to be flexible enough to realize that.

 

[McPerth]

Some have suggested in several threads about this theme to reduce the effectiveness of MG by allowing meson screens to act as armor against them.

Maybe this idea is just garbage, and feel free to consider it as such if you so think, but I thought another possibility would be to use them as armor, but reduce this armor depending on the success in the penetration table.

So, if you fire a J rated MG against a ship equipped with 7 rating meson screen you need a 8+ to penetrate. If you roll an 8, the screen acts as armor 7. If you roll a 12 (4 over what you need), the screens act as armor 3 (7-4). If you roll a 4 (4 less than needed), screens act as armor 11 (7+4).

This way, screens are not anymore an all or nothing affair (either you are unscratched or dead, in case of meson spinals), but act more as real world defenses.

Also, this way, a big ship that avoids automatic critical hits is really quite more survivable in battle than a lesser ship.

 

[skyth]

I think the best bet would be to limit armor to half the size class of a ship in addition to the tech levels. This will make the smaller riders more vulnerable to normal weapons that other ships carry, while rendering BB's almost immune to them.

 

[rancke]

HG2 covers several tech levels, from 9 to 15 IIRC, and different design paradigms work at different tech levels. Just as with people whining about fighters, you don't need to modify damage tables or juggle weapon availabilities. All you need to do is pick the tech level where battleships work and stick to it.

The game is already flexible enough to provide what you want. You just need to be flexible enough to realize that.

The tech level for the Imperial Navy in the Classic Era is picked for us. There's no flexibility there.


Hans

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

Some have suggested in several threads about this theme to reduce the effectiveness of MG by allowing meson screens to act as armor against them.

Maybe this idea is just garbage, and feel free to consider it as such if you so think, but I thought another possibility would be to use them as armor, but reduce this armor depending on the success in the penetration table.

So, if you fire a J rated MG against a ship equipped with 7 rating meson screen you need a 8+ to penetrate. If you roll an 8, the screen acts as armor 7. If you roll a 12 (4 over what you need), the screens act as armor 3 (7-4). If you roll a 4 (4 less than needed), screens act as armor 11 (7+4).

This way, screens are not anymore an all or nothing affair (either you are unscratched or dead, in case of meson spinals), but act more as real world defenses.

Also, this way, a big ship that avoids automatic critical hits is really quite more survivable in battle than a lesser ship.

However, considering how the meson screen is supposed to work (by causing the incoming shot to decay early, and thus short), having it as armour would make little sense "thematically", as the round would either go off as intended inside teh ship, or go off outside the ship far enough away to not affect the ship.

 

[far-trader]

I think the best bet would be to limit armor to half the size class of a ship in addition to the tech levels. This will make the smaller riders more vulnerable to normal weapons that other ships carry, while rendering BB's almost immune to them.

Sorta like an idea I floated once (or meant to, might have just steered clear of the fight, I don't recall if or the idea really).

My idea was to limit armour by tonnage code in some fashion. To model the effectiveness of weapons by force brought to bear vs capacity for damage soak and backups for size generally. The TL limit never really made sense to me.

Small ships (up to 5Kton) should fear everything, even turret weapons in single turret batteries. Large batteries and bay weapons should kill them.

Medium ships (up to 50Kton) should shrug off single turret batteries while large batteries and bay weapons should hurt and spinals kill.

Large ships should shrug off anything but spinals and while the spinals should hurt it shouldn't be an instant kill.

All imo of course.

 

[whartung]

However, considering how the meson screen is supposed to work (by causing the incoming shot to decay early, and thus short), having it as armour would make little sense "thematically", as the round would either go off as intended inside teh ship, or go off outside the ship far enough away to not affect the ship.

You could argue that that screen rating affects that much of the incoming meson attack. Ostensibly, the larger the meson gun, the more mesons that are coming through and inflicting damage. But if the meson screen interdicts those same mesons, and makes then go off early, you can say that each rating of meson screens reduces the rating of the meson attack. And as TL advances, each screen rating gets does a better job of absorbing the meson attack.

So, a low TL screen might affect 1/2 of an attack rating for each screen rating, while a TL 16 (or whatever) screen affect 2 attack ratings per screen rating.

So, if you have a low TL screen with a 6 rating, and get hit with a Meson-9, it's reduced to a Meson-6. If you had the high TL 6 rating, the Meson-9 would be reduced to 0 and effectively absorbed by the screen.

Later there can be other effects that ablate the screen rating as its used, or whatever (such as each attack in a round can weaken the screen, but it regains strength on the next turn, or something like that), and it gives a simple, TL scalable protection against the attacks. Also, since it reduces the overall attack rating of the mesons, it lowers their capability for critical hits as well, since these tend to be based upon discrepancy between attack factor and ship size.

This give MGs a TL advantage especially against forces that don't have them (or at least screens) and later they're promoted to more lethal weapon than a PA (since they cause interior explosions) but it's no longer necessarily a one shot, one kill weapon. It also bring back size advantage to large ships over similarly equipped smaller ones.

A large ship with a good screen may well take damage from a MG, but less and less chance of critical hits vs a smaller ship. And being larger will have more stuff that can be hit and absorb damage.

Add in the ablative aspect of the screen, and then if you have several ships concentrating on a single ship, then, likely, that ship will go down, but it takes a large portion of the enemy fleet to do it each round.

All seems to have a good feel to it and works thematically I think.

 

[McPerth]

However, considering how the meson screen is supposed to work (by causing the incoming shot to decay early, and thus short), having it as armour would make little sense "thematically", as the round would either go off as intended inside teh ship, or go off outside the ship far enough away to not affect the ship.

Then you think in 20 minutes only a shoot is fired? Or the screen either affects all mesons or none?

Sorry, I must disagree in both cases

 

[AndreaV]

However, considering how the meson screen is supposed to work (by causing the incoming shot to decay early, and thus short), having it as armour would make little sense "thematically", as the round would either go off as intended inside the ship, or go off outside the ship far enough away to not affect the ship.

True, however having ARMOUR work as armour for reducing the number of hits and criticals, but not the actually damage rolls; does work.

This can be justified because armour is actually more than just a thick external skin. Its also improved internal subdivision, thicker and more bulkheads, void spaces etc. Thus the armour doesn't help with the damage where the meson gun goes off, but it does help limit it from damaging other areas of the ship.

Andrew

 

[McPerth]

True, however having ARMOUR work as armour for reducing the number of hits and criticals, but not the actually damage rolls; does work.

This can be justified because armour is actually more than just a thick external skin. Its also improved internal subdivision, thicker and more bulkheads, void spaces etc. Thus the armour doesn't help with the damage where the meson gun goes off, but it does help limit it from damaging other areas of the ship.

Andrew

While this is surely true in HG, where armor uses tonnage, it's not so evident in MT, where armor doesn't take it, just adds woight and cost.

 

[rancke]

While this is surely true in HG, ehre armor uses tonnage, it's not so evident in MT, where armor doesn't take it, just adds woight and cost.

This is one of the places where either CT or MT is wrong (or, if you like, not applicable to the same universe). And if you ask me which one sounds more likely to reflect "reality", I'd have to say that I'm going to go with armor taking up volume rather than the paperthin starship walls.


Hans

 

[McPerth]

This is one of the places where either CT or MT is wrong (or, if you like, not applicable to the same universe). And if you ask me which one sounds more likely to reflect "reality", I'd have to say that I'm going to go with armor taking up volume rather than the paperthin starship walls.


Hans

I agree here. I'm was not talking about my opinion, but about rules.

 

[AndreaV]

This is one of the places where either CT or MT is wrong (or, if you like, not applicable to the same universe). And if you ask me which one sounds more likely to reflect "reality", I'd have to say that I'm going to go with armor taking up volume rather than the paperthin starship walls.

Hans

From memory, in all the other Trav design systems armour takes volume as well as mass. So not only does "reality" favour HG, it would seem "setting" weighs in on its side too

Andrew

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

True, however having ARMOUR work as armour for reducing the number of hits and criticals, but not the actually damage rolls; does work.

This can be justified because armour is actually more than just a thick external skin. Its also improved internal subdivision, thicker and more bulkheads, void spaces etc. Thus the armour doesn't help with the damage where the meson gun goes off, but it does help limit it from damaging other areas of the ship.

Andrew

I aggree with you completly on the armour thing. Indeed, i suggested the very same thing at the start of this thread in post #4.

Then you think in 20 minutes only a shoot is fired?

No, I take the view that the shot rolled for is the one shot in that 20 mins that has a good chance of hitting, in the same way you only get one attack in a 6 second DnD round.

Or the screen either affects all mesons or none?

in the same way a guided missle either penetrates ECM and Point defense or doesn't, yes.

 

[McPerth]

I aggree with you completly on the armour thing. Indeed, i suggested the very same thing at the start of this thread in post #4.

IMO, this could be good for play balance, but takes all the meaning of meson weapons, whose main 'raison d'être' is its immunity to armor, and gives unintended defense to low tech ships against them.

No, I take the view that the shot rolled for is the one shot in that 20 mins that has a good chance of hitting, in the same way you only get one attack in a 6 second DnD round.

Or you can think is the average damage of hits during this time

(BTW I understand you talk about D&D. If so, in AD&D, ate least 1st ed, that was what I played, a round was 1 minute. 6 seconds was segment, and was not used for normal combat)

in the same way a guided missle either penetrates ECM and Point defense or doesn't, yes.

And if only one missile, then it's true... About a missile salvo, I didn't tell this way of working must be limited to meson screens, one way or another it could be adapted to any attack.