Naval Terminology

[Clay Bush]

Looking back to the history of names of ship types, the history is confused by nations to not use the same terms as each other. So if Russia's Duma funded a class of 'patrol cruisers' then the English publication Janes' might list them as 'coastal destroyers.'

I see the main thrust of Space navies moving back to the battle-line versus smaller craft split of the Napoleonic Era. There is no submarine equivalent in space, because there is no surface to hide under. So polities build capital ships, and then they build the smaller vessels with the range and armament needed for today's missions.

As a side note, most TRAVELLER players think of purpose-built warships. Consider that the 1800's India merchants used the same hull as the 74-gun ship-of-the-line, and they were confused. Sometimes deliberately. There's a long line of thought behind subsidizing a peace-time merchant that can perform some wartime patrol duties. It just never worked, however, to use the auxiliaries against equal tonnage warships.
But there is some adventure possibility in a small scale frontier setting. The ex-military PCs are impressed to run a 1,000 ton auxiliary and prevent 100-ton scout ships from resupplying the rebels...

Last note:
Ther are lots of adjectives in from of classes that meant life or death in certain circumstance -- those circumstances where they weren't entirely irrelevent. And these adjectives appear with the smaller classes, not the battle line.
A 'protected' design put concentrated armor around gum mounts and the bridge. An 'armored' design put the armor throughout the whole structure. After some small wars tested the concept, the protected designs largely disappeared. Auxiliaries (mostly liners) were funded with 'protected' armor, and a few patrol designs carried the scheme into World War I.

 

[Clay Bush]

Trying to using historical terms is complicated by nations not using the same terms the same way. The Russian Duma authorizes a class of 'patrol cruisers'; the English-language Janes' lists a new class of 'coastal destroyers.'

Without a serious 'asymetric' threat (submarines or planes -- something that differs fundamentally from the main ship classes), I see space navies turning back toward the Napoleonic Era split between the battle line and everything else. The battle line has variations, but is basically heavy stuff.
The everything else, then, runs all over the place. Some places build small sloops to patrol inlets, other build mid-size ships that can travel farther. And then one day the captains in bars are discriminating between ships based on sail layout, and the laymen get horribly lost in this 100-ton brig is obviously better for the proposed mission than the 50-ton or 300-ton designs present, and the space man smile at the poor silly laymen.

 

[Gatsby]

Megatraveller or one of the later had a Starships of the Shattered Imperium sourcebook. It was basically 'Fighting Ships', but had a section on how the Imperium organizes the fleets - I liked it because it was in sync with Fifth Frontier War (game) terminology....BatRons, AssaultRons, CruRons and the like. Broke down fleet names, assignments, squadron types and what was in a squadron. I'll dig it out if someone wants and give a synopsis.

Gats'

 

[Uncle Bob]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Clay Bush:

As a side note, most TRAVELLER players think of purpose-built warships. Consider that the 1800's India merchants used the same hull as the 74-gun ship-of-the-line, and they were confused. Sometimes deliberately. There's a long line of thought behind subsidizing a peace-time merchant that can perform some wartime patrol duties. It just never worked, however, to use the auxiliaries against equal tonnage warships.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
One speculation I rather liked was that the Titannic was on a test speed run to satisfy the Royal Navy when it hit the iceberg. I understand there was a RN Commander on boardin civilian clothes, listed on the manifest as just "Mister." I don't believe it, but it's a great story.

And how about this (I haven't run the numbers yet):
A fast 6000 ton containership with engines and crew on the centerline, surrounded by cargo, say J2 M2. When mobilized, you replace the cargo pods with modular weapons and armor and you have a J3 M3 4000T protected cruiser. Should be good enough against 1-2KT commerce raiders. Or build the weapons/armor modules so they look like cargo modules, and you have a Q ship.

[This message has been edited by Uncle Bob (edited 19 May 2001).]

 

[aramis]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Gatsby:
Megatraveller or one of the later had a Starships of the Shattered Imperium sourcebook. It was basically 'Fighting Ships', but had a section on how the Imperium organizes the fleets - I liked it because it was in sync with Fifth Frontier War (game) terminology....BatRons, AssaultRons, CruRons and the like. Broke down fleet names, assignments, squadron types and what was in a squadron. I'll dig it out if someone wants and give a synopsis.

Gats'<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I too love it for that section; the rest of the book, however, is riddled with problems... as in the designs are frequently broken. (I did the math for all the TL 15 ships at one point; each had errors of great import.)

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-aramis
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Smith & Wesson: The Original Point and Click interface!

 

[Murph]

Yes, but all the ships had errors in them. Also I do not like the fact that I had to use excel or Lotus 123 to design a MT starship. Plus I HATED with a passion Kiloliters.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Gatsby:
Megatraveller or one of the later had a Starships of the Shattered Imperium sourcebook. It was basically 'Fighting Ships', but had a section on how the Imperium organizes the fleets - I liked it because it was in sync with Fifth Frontier War (game) terminology....BatRons, AssaultRons, CruRons and the like. Broke down fleet names, assignments, squadron types and what was in a squadron. I'll dig it out if someone wants and give a synopsis.

Gats'<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

 

[aramis]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Murph:
Yes, but all the ships had errors in them. Also I do not like the fact that I had to use excel or Lotus 123 to design a MT starship. Plus I HATED with a passion Kiloliters.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Kl = m^3
killoliters = cubic meters.

Correct and proper measurement units for the SI system. (SI = System Internationale, aka metric).


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-aramis
=============================================
Smith & Wesson: The Original Point and Click interface!

 

[TheDS]

Ship design and tactics will always be based around the mission the ship is to accomplish and the threats that are arrayed against it. Note that threats can change as tech changes.

The Battlecruiser (BC, not CB) was designed under the concept that SPEED = ARMOR. It turned out to be false, because the ships of the day had reasonably accurate gunfire, fairly high firing rates (once a minute was pretty fast, multiplied by a dozen guns) and could not go fast enough to get out of the sure-hit zone. As long as the BC didn't try to engage the BB in a head-on fight, it was a good design, capable of popping up in the enemy's rear and laying the smack down, and then getting away quickly.

The only defense against a battleship is another battleship. Hence the reason military power was measured solely by the number of battleships one had in one's navy. This has been true until recently, until something new came along; the aircraft carrier (CV). (Now military might is measured in number of CV's.) Aircraft were small and fast and could strike targets far away; gunnery duels were rare in WW2. They are even more rare now with anti-ship missles being so potent and defenses against them being so lacking.

Designs for space ships are going to depend on a few things, the biggest being how lethal weapons are (how much damage they do, how likely they are to hit, how many shots can be fired in a given amount of time...). If a BB is roughly able to destroy other BB's in a 1:1 exchange, then the winner of the battle is the one with the more BB's.

If weapons are very effective, where you could routinely expect one ship to defeat 3 or 4 other equally configured ships, then you are going to see ships operating fairly independently, built as small as possible (why waste all that money building large, vulnerable ships), and not carrying much armor. The ability to deliver large quantities of ordinance will be the overriding concern.

Notice that this is how the modern navies are built? Modern ships are not "armored". They are "protected". The CV is as small as it can be and still accomplish its mission of power projection with modern aircraft. All the other ships around it, protecting it, are getting smaller and smaller. Missles are too powerful, too accurate, too dangerous to worry about putting massive amounts of armor on ships, or building large ships.

On the other hand, if weapons are not very effective, then you will see large ships mounting huge guns; it takes 2-4 ships ganging up on a single ship to really take it down in a reasonable amount of time. Ships will have armor to increase their survivability and they can be big so as to mount more and bigger guns. This is where ponderous battleships rule the spacelanes.

Notice how this follows along with the pre-aircraft navies? The beginning of the age of steam and iron battleships was a bit confusing as each nation tried to figure out how best to use the new technologies that made each ship obsolete by the time it was commissioned, so try not to feel the tactics of those days were defining of anything. (Yes, Dreadnought was a major evolution in BB design, but this is still an experimental period.)

But this doesn't mean that weapon effectiveness is the only concern of ship design. The purpose of a battleship is to destroy the enemy's ability to make war. The battleship hunts down ALL enemy ships and destroys them, denying a nation or world its ability to trade with others. With highly effective weapons, what we think of as a battleship will not exist; think "Arsenal Ship". Think DDG with 122 VLS tubes, filled with Tomahawks and Sea Sparrows. The battle won't last long! Naval combat is decisive.

With ineffective weapons, Carriers are probable. Small fighters might have the agility or small size necessary to avoid enemy fire, especially if that enemy fire is low-ROF and not especially powerful. Missles are more likely than TNE suggests, if they can traverse the enemy's gunnery range quickly enough that they only get a couple shots off.

So, what do you want your ships to do? Do you want to make a massive, barely affordable behemoth, capable of devestating anything in its path, save another behemoth? Do you want a small, cheap SDB so you can overwhelm the enemy with 1000's of units? Do you have a weapon with limited characteristics that you need to design a ship around? Do you have a way to cheaply defeat those specialty ships?

Battletech, Traveller, and other popular games that are designed as games go with the idea of less-effective weapons. Sure, it's fun bringing Goliath down with a pea-shooter, but then the world is filled with little kids carrying pea shooters. This reflects the modern world, but it's not terribly fun to build up your character and have him destroyed by a spitball. So games that are designed with playability in mind allow a person to take a few hits and not be destroyed. Either approach is valid. Either approach has historical prescidence. Either approach is possible in the future, and therefore to your games.

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"This is a spaceship! Why did you throw that grenade here?"
"I was just trying to get the bad guys."
"Uh guys,..."
BOOOMM!

 

[Gatsby]

Which brings to mind one of my more vigorous complaints about High Guard combat...I KNOW it is primaraily a fleet action game with generalized systems for smmoth play - but one ship's defenses do not protect another ship. There can be no Aegis sheild system in space. But, then, it WAS the 70's....

A possible rule- During first step, any ships can opt not to fire and just protect one other ship with defenses...a single ship may have up to one protector per 5 full Tech Levels (these Tech Levels determined from the average of the possible defenders computer Tech Levels).

Feel free to tear into this ruling's possible failings; it was created as I typed this...

Gats'

 

[StrikerFan]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Gatsby:
Which brings to mind one of my more vigorous complaints about High Guard combat...I KNOW it is primaraily a fleet action game with generalized systems for smmoth play - but one ship's defenses do not protect another ship. There can be no Aegis sheild system in space. But, then, it WAS the 70's....

A possible rule- During first step, any ships can opt not to fire and just protect one other ship with defenses...a single ship may have up to one protector per 5 full Tech Levels (these Tech Levels determined from the average of the possible defenders computer Tech Levels).

Feel free to tear into this ruling's possible failings; it was created as I typed this...<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

The most effective weapons in fleet vs fleet combat are the spinal mounts, which there's no way another ship could help protect the target against.

StrikerFan

 

[rtartis]

Spinal Mounts as Primary weapons? Maybe in CT Or MT, Once TNE comes along this isn't true any more. Consider this, Like Starfire. If I use an External Ordinance (XO)Rack for a 5o ton missile pod And Each missile LAUNCHER can launch ten missiles per turn I need only place ten launchers in a bay to get 100 misiles per turn, So Ten 100-ton bays at 100 missile each equals 1000 missile time one squadron of what evers equals 8000 internal missiles plus XO Rack with 40 missile each.
Get the point. I'll fire tens of thousands of missiles in one turn.( Providing I have MFD control and not FIM missiles).
CAN you survive?

 

[StrikerFan]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by rtartis:
Spinal Mounts as Primary weapons? Maybe in CT Or MT, Once TNE comes along this isn't true any more. Consider this, Like Starfire. If I use an External Ordinance (XO)Rack for a 5o ton missile pod And Each missile LAUNCHER can launch ten missiles per turn I need only place ten launchers in a bay to get 100 misiles per turn, So Ten 100-ton bays at 100 missile each equals 1000 missile time one squadron of what evers equals 8000 internal missiles plus XO Rack with 40 missile each.
Get the point. I'll fire tens of thousands of missiles in one turn.( Providing I have MFD control and not FIM missiles).
CAN you survive? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

When I wrote what I wrote, I was replying to a High Guard issue. TNE wasn't mentioned, and since I don't have any of the TNE rules, I can't comment.

StrikerFan

 

[Christopher Jennings]

Unfortunatly, even though I liked some of the ideas-such as the modular clippers, TNE ship designs are so incompatable with anything else to almost useless. The boxed games did come with some usefull pieces though.

9-11-01 May we never forget.

 

[StrikerFan]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Christopher Jennings:
Unfortunatly, even though I liked some of the ideas-such as the modular clippers, TNE ship designs are so incompatable with anything else to almost useless. The boxed games did come with some usefull pieces though.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Heh, the original desire of GDW was to use stutterwarp in TNE, just like they'd used it in 2300. That would have made things TOTALLY incompatible. But your comments fit with what else I've heard, that TNE, as a system, basically was unrelated to the rest of Traveller, even if the history was compatible.

StrikerFan

 

[rtartis]

This May be the one good point about TNE's Ship design rules. I can design whatever I like and what ever fits my own doctrine.
I don't have to use "boxed" or "stock" weapons. NO Factor-J Spinal mounts. Etc.
If I want a 10Gj spinal mount I design it. If I want a 25Gj weapon I design it. The possiblilties are endless. This leads to "disccussions" about doctrine, use, etc. But much of these are subjective.

 

[Uncle Bob]

Sorry, Rtartis, that is exactly what I didn't like about FF&S. The design systems are entirely arbitrary, so the more abstracted High Guard designs are just as real. If I want a 10 Gj spinal mount I'll pick a "D" and if I want a 25 Gj I'll pick a "J". I will be close enough, without having to spend an hour designing it. It's not like the combat rules suffer from not being able to make a 11 Gj instead of a 10 Gj.

And if there is "discussion" about my design we'll break out Mayday, High Guard or Trillion Credit Squadron and get an objective answer. Redesign to correct any weaknesses is fairly painless, and we can test them again.

(Wait a second, the USAF Airborne Laser is a TL7 1-3 GW continuous laser with a dwell time of 2-3 seconds, so that is 2-9 Gj per target. A 10-25 Mj weapon at higher TL should be no bigger than a bay mount, not a spine. This is the other problem with FF&S: why give so much detail and have so much more work if it can be proved wrong so easily?)

[This message has been edited by Uncle Bob (edited 06 October 2001).]

 

[phydaux]

sorry for my ignorance, but:

what does MFD and FIM stand for?

 

[DaveShayne]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by phydaux:
sorry for my ignorance, but:

what does MFD and FIM stand for?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

MFD is Master Fire Director. It gives bonuses to hit in space combat in TNE and T4.

FIM doesn't ring a bell with me.

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I am increasingly of the opinion that RPGs are by the nature of their creation subjective phenomenon. due to the interaction between game designers, game masters, and game players all definitions, rules, settings, and adventures are mutable in acordance with the uncertainty principle as expounded by Heisenburg. This is of course merely my point of view.

David Shayne

 

[rtartis]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Uncle Bob:
Sorry, Rtartis, that is exactly what I didn't like about FF&S. The design systems are entirely arbitrary, so the more abstracted High Guard designs are just as real. If I want a 10 Gj spinal mount I'll pick a "D" and if I want a 25 Gj I'll pick a "J". I will be close enough, without having to spend an hour designing it. It's not like the combat rules suffer from not being able to make a 11 Gj instead of a 10 Gj.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I Agree totally, But only partially (confusing isn't it). Heres an example.
Yesterday I designed a 290 meter 80GJ Paws.
On ANY ship over 290 meters I use this weapon. on any ship over 360 meters I use this weapon as a parallel mount. So in effect it's a factor "*" (insert whatever mount you like.)Likewise I designed one TL-12 20Gj Meson gun Spinal or Parallel, used on every TL 12 light cruiser I design.

Some people like to design new weapons for every ship they build, others like off the shelf piece it together designs. Classic traveller gaze us "boxed" designs, All light cruiser had spinal mounts A-J, Medium Cruisers K-N, Battleships O-T (as a general rule of thumb), MegaTraveller let us customize commo and sensor packages, but it gave us one weapons system for shipboard weapons and another for vehicles, but ships armor is vehicle armor (which we need to convert to a "factor"1-15, In CT maximum armor was equal to TL, in MT minimum armor was 40, but maximum armor was TL*5 (max 75) Referees Manual Page 58, But combat armor rating is figured as ArmorValue-40/3 {75-40=35, 35/3=11.6 Maximum armor value is 11, at TL 15, Referees ManualPage 94}.
My personal feeling was that the designers of MT wanted a striker type weapons system where weapons and armor were integrated (like TNE)
But they settled for a hybrid system that really combined the worst of both not the best.

The strength of the TNE system is that everything is integrated, Whether it's a Grunt with a 7mm ACR or a 20Gj PAWS the effect resolution is the same. Of course I miss the variety of weapons available in CT/MT, No Energy weapons no bay paws or meson gun, no repulsors, tractor, etc.BUT if you want a bay PAWS your free to design one, If you want to use energy weapons in space combat you can. If you want to design low tech (7-9), 1.3g max acceleration, 3000km hex combat range, Railgun armed warships, that creep acrost the map compared to "Imperial" tech ships YOU CAN, ITS YOUR GAME.

Ultimately it's all about having fun playing a game. If you don't like someones ideas about how things should work, don't go to their house and play, find someone you agree with and ENJOY. If you like designing new weapons for every ship you build ENJOY, If you like arguing abou "how it works" ENJOY.
But please remember, it's a Game, The rules are not written in Mile high letters of Fire or Stone, If someone doesn't like a rule, change it or ignore it BUT ENJOY IT. It's just a game.

 

[Gatsby]

AS to such, I think there is a desire to stay within canon (within each system, per se). But once you agree to a system, it is up to you to determine the level of canon (which, by the way, is a self-defeating term....canon is, by definition, 100%). So, if you want CT with armor of 30, go ahead!

Two notes:

Armor maximum in CT is, actually, above fifteen, but only for planetoids, who add a factor to the potential maximum of fifteen.

I beleive that Energy weapons where deleted in MT and later, because, due to the Striker-like system- Energy Weapons had a range of '1/2 diddley' - or ranges below the standard one unit of range. If so, they were like a carronade - only good if you get too close.

Gats'