On the Taxonomy of Spaceships

[Ifandbut]

http://criticalshit.org/2015/05/15/on-the-taxonomy-of-spaceships/

I found this on Reddit today. Not directly Traveller related but more for general sci-fi, I still found this to be a really good read. I'v been trying to build capital class ships for my campaign recently and have been having issues coming up with names and classifications. This blog post gave me alot of direction, so I hope it is useful to other people as well.

 

[Condottiere]

By a strange coincidence, I did come to the conclusion, today, that I should term spacecraft that can accelerate one gee or less, or perhaps even two gee or less, with Age of Sail descriptive names.

But it's more complex than that, since modern warships, even man 'o' wars, experience size inflation, combined with a modern tendency to use terms specifically designed to further agendas, so that you have destroyers with the same tonnage as cruisers, carriers termed through deck cruisers.

Battlecruisers were an evolutionary dead end, and were superseded by fast battleships.

Terms can also have pejorative connotations, like pre-dreadnoughts Or coastal battleship. Or treaty cruiser.

Or heighten expectations, like pocket battleship.

 

[Timerover51]

Some of the designations were fairly hard and fast, although what was considered suitable for being part of the line-of-battle changed over the years.

A sloop could be either a single-masted small ship intended mainly for coastal work, or it could be a three-masted cruising ship, being the smallest ship rating a post-captain in the Royal Navy in command. The term was used for either type of ship at the same period.

As for pejorative, consider the term "sheer hulk", which some view as meaning a completely useless vessel. The Sheer Hulk was a large older ship equipped with a crane which was used to step the lower masts into new ships and remove and replace the lower masts when they were damaged, and therefore was a very important piece of any dockyard.

The term "tramp steamer" can mean a decrepit, dingy ancient just barely operational vessel to some, when all it means is that the ship does not have a regular route which it travels, but follows the cargo that it can carry. A "liner" is a vessel which travels a regular route, and can be a cargo liner, a passenger liner, or a cargo-passenger liner.

A "schooner" simple means a ship equipped with fore-and-aft sails, and could have anywhere from a single mast to a total of 7, that being the unsuccessful Thomas W. Lawson.

Then there are quite a few names which apply to essentially the same size ship but equipped with a different sail arrangement. Look up: Snow, Pink, Brigantine, Bark, and Barkentine.

 

[mike wightman]

That's a really useful article. It even gets the definition of cruiser right

 

[nyrath]

I have some notes on space warship classification here:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarship.php#id--Ship_Types

 

[Ifandbut]

I have some notes on space warship classification here:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarship.php#id--Ship_Types

I didn't realize Atomic Rockets had an article about that. Well...there goes the next 4 hrs. Thanks..I think.

 

[Condottiere]

One problem with trying to follow historical examples too closely, is that a great deal is wound up with prevailing technology.

In theory, a spaceship can only have one spinal mount. Since that represents the primary fire power, you'd want to maximize your bang for the buck. The other side of the coin is survivability, which means the larger the ship, the more damage it can absorb.

For the dreadnought era, you could always increase the calibre and/or number of your primary guns, you can't do that in Traveller, and that makes increasing the size of battleships beyond a certain point hard to justify.

Even in the dreadnought era, battleships can be classified as first, second and third class, and possibly, premier league.

 

[Timerover51]

One problem with trying to follow historical examples too closely, is that a great deal is wound up with prevailing technology.

In theory, a spaceship can only have one spinal mount. Since that represents the primary fire power, you'd want to maximize your bang for the buck. The other side of the coin is survivability, which means the larger the ship, the more damage it can absorb.

For the dreadnought era, you could always increase the calibre and/or number of your primary guns, you can't do that in Traveller, and that makes increasing the size of battleships beyond a certain point hard to justify.

Even in the dreadnought era, battleships can be classified as first, second and third class, and possibly, premier league.

Actually, increasing gun caliber and the number carried was not at all simple, but part of a very complicated equation. Norman Friedman, in his book Battleship Design and Development 1905-1945 has a full discussion on this. One major limiting factor was the infrastructure of the building country in terms of size of dry docks and depth of harbors in which the ship would be operating. Some of the proposed German super-battleship designs were so large that in order to build them, not only would new building docks have to be finished first, but an immense amount of harbor dredging would also have to be done in order to get them from the building dock to the sea. Their size also meant that the only place they could be dry-docked would be the building port, unless additional dry docks were built elsewhere. When the Bismarck was damaged in its fight with the Hood and Prince of Wales, there were only two possible dry docks on the French coast that could be used to repair the damage. A major restriction on US battleships and aircraft carriers was the requirement that they be able to pass through the Panama Canal.

A major problem that I have with the very large ships being built under High Guard is there seems to be no provision for the massive investment of infrastructure which would be required to build some of the monstrosities depicted in the Fighting Ships supplement. Very large ships are going to require very large numbers of people to build them, and if built in orbit, are going to take an immense amount of material in orbit to produce them.

 

[Condottiere]

Those size limitations don't really apply in space, as long as the industrial capacity exists.

As for the Kriegsmarine, it suffered from a series of questionable decisions regarding the doctrines and construction programmes it followed.

Personnel can't be a bottleneck in Traveller, considering the billions of sophonts inhabiting each sector of space.

What Traveller may not have, is the actual breakdown that shows how much military industrial complex infrastructure is available per planet, as compared to a generalized industrial capacity. That's one reason that governments allow some companies make work projects, in order to retain that industrial base and he requisite skilled workers.

Post Washington Naval Treaty, the British permitted their industrial capacity to decline to the point that they had to import armour for their battleships.

 

[nyrath]

Well, I'm waiting for the CotI readers to get to this part

http://www.projectrho.com/public_ht....php#id--Ship_Types--Traveller_RPG_Ship_Types

and start yelling at me about how wrong it is.

 

[aramis]

Well, I'm waiting for the CotI readers to get to this part

http://www.projectrho.com/public_ht....php#id--Ship_Types--Traveller_RPG_Ship_Types

and start yelling at me about how wrong it is.

Not that portion of the page, but...

Dreadnought was a class of battleship, HMS Dreadnought the class ship, and classes are types, Winchell. The term has been used as a historical reference to the early (late 19th C to pre-WW I) steam battleships, and was a contemporary term used for all battleships.

Plus, it's also the name for an entire era of battleships. The surviving Dreadnought-era ships, including the surviving Dreadnought Class Battleships, were used as superheavy cruisers and light battleships when the heavier interwar battleships arose. This also is the origin of superdreadnought battleships - battleships bigger than HMS Dreadnought by a significant tonnage.

 

[Timerover51]

Post Washington Naval Treaty, the British permitted their industrial capacity to decline to the point that they had to import armour for their battleships.

I would like to see a cite for that, considering that the British were allowed to build both the HMS Rodney and HMS Nelson, the first post-Washington Treaty battleships in the 1920s, along with considerably upgrading the side armor on the HMS Renown and HMS Repulse and rebuilding the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships.

The US Navy tested samples of the armor plate used on the King George V class of ships and determined that it was 15% better than the Krupp Armor carried by the German WW2 ships. If I remember correctly that is discussed in Battleships: Allied Battleships in World War II by Robert O. Dulin Jr. and William H. Garzke Jr. Having worked with Bill, I asked about that and he indicated that the US Navy was very impressed with the quality of the British Face-Hardened armor.

Personnel can't be a bottleneck in Traveller, considering the billions of sophonts inhabiting each sector of space.

What Traveller may not have, is the actual breakdown that shows how much military industrial complex infrastructure is available per planet, as compared to a generalized industrial capacity. That's one reason that governments allow some companies make work projects, in order to retain that industrial base and he requisite skilled workers.

How long would it take a Class A starport with a total planetary population of about 100,000 to build a 500,000 Traveller dTon battleship from scratch? See Farreach in the Jewell Sector, Firenzie in the Vilis sector, Binges in District 268 (population in the HUNDREDS), and Tenalphi and Pixie with population exponents of 1.

The rest of your comment is a matter of viewpoint.

 

[rancke]

How long would it take a Class A starport with a total planetary population of about 100,000 to build a 500,000 Traveller dTon battleship from scratch?

Per TCS rules it would never finish it. Or begin it, for that matter. You need a population of 500 million to work on 500,000T of starship simultaneously.

See Farreach in the Jewell Sector, Firenzie in the Vilis sector, Binges in District 268 (population in the HUNDREDS), and Tenalphi and Pixie with population exponents of 1.

Some of us believe that Class A starports on worlds with populations of less than a million to be extremely implausible and to require extraordinary explanations involving outsiders importing everything from the assembly infrastructure and workforce to most or all of the parts.

Mind you, TCS to the contrary notwithstanding, starport class is a civilian feature and has nothing to do with naval production. According to High Guard, any world with the requisite tech level can build ships for its own navy regardless of its starport class.


Hans

 

[Condottiere]

I asked my original informant, and he replied:

One source I found by a rather cursory google-search was Google Books' DK Brown Nelson to Vanguard (https://books.google.com/books?id=i...age&q=armor RN czechoslovakia roskill&f=false). The UK's "three manufacturers could produce about 18,000 tons per year against a forecast requirement of 44,000 tons in 1938-1939." Brown further notes that the USA, Germany (!!!!), Czechoslovakia, and Sweden were approached.

On my own:

British Naval Policy - 1920-1939

At the end of the First World War Britain had the largest navy in the world. In 1919, Lloyd George's cabinet placed stringent limits on defence expenditure on the planning assumptions that a major war involving UK forces would not occur within ten years. As it required the greatest industrial infrastructure, the ten-year rule hit the Royal Navy particularly hard. With orders for warships at a low level it had an impact on a wide variety of industries - shipbuilding, steel and engineering, as well as specialised manufacturers of guns, ammunition and naval equipment. The political decision to pursue a policy of disarmament by international agreement only made the problems faced by the armed forces, and especially the Navy, even worse.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/uk-rn-policy4.htm

and

Britain was also no longer self-sufficient in basic warship construction materials. Indeed, because the British had t import some of their armour from Czechoslovakia (whose Witkowitz Works earlier had provided armour plate for the Austro-Hungarian Navy), the Czech crisis of 1938 effected the construction of the carrier Indomitable.

Navies of Europe

https://books.google.ch/books?id=u1...rts armour plate from czechoslovakia&f=false

 

[Timerover51]

Thank you for the cites. I will trust the D. K. Brown one.

 

[Hal]

Well, I'm waiting for the CotI readers to get to this part

http://www.projectrho.com/public_ht....php#id--Ship_Types--Traveller_RPG_Ship_Types

and start yelling at me about how wrong it is.

I'm not going to yell at you for it - but I am going to point out that there was a third option for battle riders that you can add to your list...

Each battle rider has a jump 1 drive attached so it too can jump away if necessary.

Not my idea, but something that had been proposed elsewhere...

 

[Condottiere]

I've always suspected that SDB's can trace it back more to the tradition that submarines are called boats, inasmuch as boats are supposedly non-jump vessels.

In theory, monitors are the same as battleriders, even if their role is closer to coastal battleships, than the role they are associated with, slow, shallow draft, cheap platforms equipped with cruiser to battleship (spare) guns for shore bombardment.

 

[nyrath]

I'm not going to yell at you for it - but I am going to point out that there was a third option for battle riders that you can add to your list...

Each battle rider has a jump 1 drive attached so it too can jump away if necessary.

Not my idea, but something that had been proposed elsewhere...

I dunno, that looks suspiciously like the kind of design compromise that has the disadvantages of both options and the advantages of neither.

 

[Hal]

I dunno, that looks suspiciously like the kind of design compromise that has the disadvantages of both options and the advantages of neither.

About the only way to test that belief is to create three sets of fleets:

Jump Capable Fleet for a given amount.
Battle Rider Fleet without jump capability for the carried units.
Battle Rider Fleet with Jump 1 for the riders.

Might prove to be interesting to see how well it works for say, Trillion Credit Squadron rules and see how well those battles play out.

If you're interested in exploring this before writing it up for your web site, let me know and I'll see what I can do to set something in motion for exploring this. Perhaps a Pocket Empires style campaign might prove to be of value?

 

[Major B]

About the only way to test that belief is to create three sets of fleets:

Jump Capable Fleet for a given amount.
Battle Rider Fleet without jump capability for the carried units.
Battle Rider Fleet with Jump 1 for the riders.

Might prove to be interesting to see how well it works for say, Trillion Credit Squadron rules and see how well those battles play out.

That would be interesting to see and I would hope that any takers on the idea would post the results.

However, this idea will not be able to model the strategic disadvantage of riders. Your TCS matchup will be a (relatively) even fight but what happens when the rider force has to fight against uneven odds?

When faced with an overwhelming enemy force, the Jump-Capable fleet can break contact, and continue fighting - a strategic advantage when facing an unfavorable tactical situation. The J-1 riders only have the full benefit of this strategic advantage when a friendly system is 1 parsec away. Sure they can jump out to the far reaches of the system they are in but strategically they have still been taken out of the relative force equation since their odds of linking up and operating in concert with other friendly forces is minimal at best. And of course the J-0 riders have to fight or die unless they are separated in-system from the enemy forces by enough distance that they have time to dock with the tender. The only advantage they have is the consideration of posterity - their jump tender can always escape and relate how heroic they were.