Ship Sizes

[vegascat]

IMTU I use HG. The cruisers, 10K to 50K were the work horses mounting a mix of spinal mounts and missile bays. With 6G and high agility, you can pick your range for best effect. Add two fleet carriers in the 100K range with max numbers of light fighters you can strip the escorts easily. Light fighters mount Fusion guns, not missiles or lasers, need to get punch to kill ships. Anything over 100K was meat for the table, too expensive a resource to risk, Not enough punch to matter. In fleet battles, cruisers would take losses, but battleships died.

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In teh end, Murphy will rule

 

[jawillroy]

I'm really very fond of High Guard and TCS as a game on their own, and had fun developing everything from battlecruisers to sky-darkening fleets of destroyers - but I've decided that I enjoy a small ship setting much more, and so IMTU i've gone with LBB2 all the way, with few interstellar powers capable of fielding large fleets. Most worlds can't afford a navy at all, which makes things more interesting when ships come to call - are they trading or raiding? It makes interstellar merchanting a little more like the 17th century spice trade and a little less like UPS. And it provides a wonderful setting for MTU's Independent Scout Service...

Now if I can just get a few reliable players in this town... and someone to referee my game for me, so I can play too!

 

[aramis]

I'm not happy with either. Bk2 doesn't go big enough, and Bk5 goes WAY too far for me.

I like a cap around 20KTd.

Easiest way to get that is to alter the required computer table and use Bk5.
I've been thinking that 250Td*ComputerModel is a good fit, and allow bis models to add 150Td... making he 400Td the biggest a 1/bis can handle.

I've used, in the past,
0=≤100
1=≤300
2=≤600
3=≤1200
4=≤2500
5=≤5000
6=≤10000
7=≤20000
8=≤40000
9=≤80000

But that gets a bit biger than I like.

 

[Bob Weaver]

I'm not happy with either. Bk2 doesn't go big enough, and Bk5 goes WAY too far for me.

I like a cap around 20KTd.

Aramis,

Have you checked out Ken Pick's article at Freelance Traveller, "Beyond Book 2"? http://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/shipyard/book2plus.html His rules variants allow for ships up to 12,000 tn while preserving the 'small ship universe' feel of Bk2.

Personally, I usually keep High Guard designs and PC ships separate. The big ships are fun for macro-level interstellar wars, but are not usually seen by the PCs.

Cheers,

Bob W.

 

[aramis]

Yes. I don't like the drive stacking, and prefer the smaller Bk5 JDrives.

And given the nature of some of my prior games, Cruisers have been PC's ships.

 

[R_Chance]

I'm not happy with either. Bk2 doesn't go big enough, and Bk5 goes WAY too far for me.

I like a cap around 20KTd.

Yet another reason I keep my escorts 1000 td and under, my cruisers 2-10,000 td and my capitol ships generally under 100,000 td (I use MT btw). Players generally use what's available and I can't imagine them able to afford anything too large anyway, so the rules can go as big as they want (and come in handy for large space stations etc.). I don't have to build them that large. The PCs facing a 50,000 td battleship find it every bit as intimidating as a 500,000 td one in any event.

 

[Plankowner]

High Guard addresses this... it seems that in the Fifth Frontier War, the Zhodani capitalized on one crucial weakness of the battle rider... the jump tenders! The Zhos would skirt the line of battle, smash the jump tenders, and then jump out system to the next objective leaving the very effective but now stranded battle riders behind.

Either way, if you have battle riders, then you must also have the massive jump tenders with which to carry them.

Now, if you can mount Factor T SPMG's on sub 100kT warships, you can pretty much smash just about anything... unless it has a VERY large MESON SCREEN... in which case the ships get larger again to offset the extra mass.

I could see the size of naval ships doing the yo-yo as the differing technologies shift in dominance. IMTU this is not a static thing at all.

I think designing a battle rider without Jump-1 is a poor design. It costs you 14% of your ship and you have an "out". The Jump Tender stays as long as it can, then jumps to the Oort Cloud and waits for the Riders to come to it.

The Riders can fight until they are severly damaged, then jump out of danger and back to the tender.

A Battle Rider without a Jump Drive is space debris...

 

[pendragonman]

A "Battle Rider" with it's own J-1 drive then violates the strict definition of "Battle Rider".

Perhaps in YTU a jump capable ship can be caried by another?

 

[far-trader]

It's quite allowable for a starship to be carried on/within another starship in the rules. Explicitly stated in fact, in CT at least that I'm sure of and pretty sure it isn't ruled out in any other set.

So, while I can agree that the purest definition of "Battle Rider" would be one without a jump drive, a starship carrying another starship is fine in the OTU and there's no need for a YTU rule for it

 

[jawillroy]

Like far-trader says, I don't think anything prevents a ship with sufficient tonnage from carrying a jump-capable ship, but I don't see why anyone would bother. Carrying a jump drive and the associated fuel defeats the whole purpose (and sole benefit) of the jump rider strategy. As long as your riders, ton for ton, can consistently overpower the opposition's jump-ships of similar class, then they can be battle winners. If you're going to hassle them with a jump drive of their own, you might as well do it right and give them full jump capability, dispensing with the tender completely, no?

 

[Brillig]

LBB2 = Civilian sector / conventional ships

Very pleasant thread.

I LIKE the LBB2 system 'Starship Design, but add the word, 'Civilian' - LBB2 applies to the Civilian Sector. Yards can and do make MILSPEC equipment for the G'ment, but it would be a considerable breach to let a MILSPEC vessel get into Player (civilian) hands - which does happen, sometimes, of course (Kinunir the classic CT example of this indiscretion)

MILITARY/GOVERNMENTS do not have the same constraints, nor economics, as Civilian ships must, which are constrained by profitability.

I use what amounts to His Excellency 'Aramis' system, 20ktons being an upper limit on military construction, which is 4 times the largest commercial hull.

The following is humbly presented as IMTU:

... those large drives take much extra maintenance to work reliably, and replacement parts are more expensive. Systems are large, bulky, and fault tolerant (multiply redundant).

Mil. ships are not cost effective (they are always cutting edge, bleeding edge, for their tech level).

Weapons have greater punch, etc. You would not consider using one to jump from system to system to make a credit. You'll lose your shirt.

Auxiliaries ('pressed' civilian ships) are used whenever possible to carry fuel etc. NOT as line of battle units, they break too easily.

'Everybody knows' that Military stuff is bigger, tougher, etc. Just make it so.

It is not really necessary to 'spec it out' for the players, I do for my own amusement, but just use a scaling factor for MIL grade vs Civilian grade. This leaves more time for the Role Playing aspects of the game, the Space War Game is (for me) a separate beastie, entirely.

The above are presented as opinions, my own unique fantasy space, I rather respect the Differing opinions and ideas I have seen presented, and look forward to discussion of the above thoughts, mad as they seem on the surface.

 

[Jame]

Yes. I don't like the drive stacking, and prefer the smaller Bk5 JDrives.

And given the nature of some of my prior games, Cruisers have been PC's ships.

This is what happened to my tastes once I got a copy of Bk5; I started finding that the Bk2 drives were too large. Bk5's percent-of-hull system for drives makes a bit more sense, although IMNHO the percents are a bit too high (especially at higher TLs). Seems to me that the percents should be about 15-20 percent, tops.

However, I do like the concept of a smaller-ship TU, with the maximum superdreadnought/superduperfreighter being 100,000 tons. Space stations, especially shipyards, ought to be bigger, primarily to be able to handle 100kton vessels. A cruiser would be 20,000 tons for me as well, though I'd never give one to my players unless it were a naval campaign.

 

[rancke]

Like far-trader says, I don't think anything prevents a ship with sufficient tonnage from carrying a jump-capable ship, but I don't see why anyone would bother. Carrying a jump drive and the associated fuel defeats the whole purpose (and sole benefit) of the jump rider strategy. As long as your riders, ton for ton, can consistently overpower the opposition's jump-ships of similar class, then they can be battle winners.

That's a fallacy that's been part of the discussion of battleriders from the earliest mention of the concept. It's not ton for ton they have to be able to overpower battleships, it's credit for credit -- not forgetting to include the cost of the tender. And since batleships of the same tonnage are 40 or 50% fuel tanks that costs very little whereas battleriders include lots of expensive armor, the comparison becomes problematical. It becomes even more problematical when you realize that there must be something wrong with the CT combat system. If battleships didn't have some significant advantage over cruisers and battleriders, it would be sheer insanity for a nation to build them, since they cost a lot more. Yet the background clearly shows that the Imperium and its peers all build lots and lots of battleships.

Another peculiarity to keep in mind is that the one battlerider squadron that we have a detailed description of (the 158th) isn't really a BatRon, it's a CruRon. It consists of one tender and seven 20,000 T riders, cheaper than most CruRons. If something like that really was the equivalent of eight (or even four) 200,000 T battleships, then why build any cruisers at all, let alone batleships?

If you're going to hassle them with a jump drive of their own, you might as well do it right and give them full jump capability, dispensing with the tender completely, no?

No. The concept is that instead of having a rider with, say, 50% armor battlling a ship with 40% fuel and 10% armor, you have a rider with 38% armor and the ability to escape if the situation goes south. Not as good as 50% armor (isn't the cap on armor at TL 15 45%, BTW?) but still better than 10%.

If you design your tender to utilize the jump drives aboard its riders when they're being carried, the riders' jump drives won't even be redundant.



Hans

 

[jawillroy]

"... Yet the background clearly shows that the Imperium and its peers all build lots and lots of battleships.

Another peculiarity to keep in mind is that the one battlerider squadron that we have a detailed description of (the 158th) isn't really a BatRon, it's a CruRon. It consists of one tender and seven 20,000 T riders, cheaper than most CruRons. If something like that really was the equivalent of eight (or even four) 200,000 T battleships, then why build any cruisers at all, let alone batleships?"

I'll have to bow to your depth of knowledge in terms of OTU fleet dispositions - though I suspect that most of them were determined independently of any kind of intensive playtesting.

 

[rancke]

I'll have to bow to your depth of knowledge in terms of OTU fleet dispositions - though I suspect that most of them were determined independently of any kind of intensive playtesting.

Many, if not most, of the details of the OTU were determined independently of any kind of intensive playtesting[*]. Coming up with ways to rationalize them is one of the fun parts of working with it. Unless there's an unsolvable discrepancy, in which case the reluctance of TPTB to retcon details can become really, really frustrating .


[*] Though a lot of the information about squadrons in the Spinward Marches comes from FFW, a board game that I presume did get a lot of playtesting.



Hans

 

[Blue Ghost]

Wile FSotSI is one of the worst products ever released. it has nothing to do with the aspects you put forth. The original Fighting Ships (supp 9) was very useful in my games. Not as player ships, but to remind players WHY they can't get away with certain tyes of action.

Even before we found HG, the GM I was playing under had 50KTd ships.

I haven't read the whole thread, but I'll second Aramis' post. I always understood that the player oriented stuff was for player oriented action and story. The really huge ships were there as background filler, and not meant to be tangible to players in any real gaming sense. You might run across a Battleship, but there's no way that the players are going to mess with it, much less take any kind of control.

 

[Antony]

IMTU as opposed to the OTU I took an early 20th century view of ships. This means that the biggest ships were actually the civilian liners. Think vessels like the Mauritania, Titanic etc with battleships being about half this displacement and other types progressively smaller. Even here though most of the civilian ships would be under 10,000dt.

 

[Whipsnade]

[*] Though a lot of the information about squadrons in the Spinward Marches comes from FFW, a board game that I presume did get a lot of playtesting.

Hans,

I'm sure FFW was playtested extensively, it just wasn't playtested in the way we'd presume.

FFW was most certainly playtested as a wargame and only as a wargame.

From the point of view of canon, FFW was most certainly not playtested in the slightest. At that time, GDW - or any other RPG publisher - didn't view canon in the way we view it now. They weren't interested in presenting a seemless or near-seemless canonical whole, they were interested in publishing gaming materials and they published a lot of them in a lot of other lines than Traveller. Just as long as the "big ideas" were touched upon, the "pesky details" were of little or no consequence.

If someone had told them that 30 years later people would be seriously debating Imperial Navy force levels while citing a few Library Data snippets, wargame counters, and supplement descriptions the GDW staff would have been first incredulous and then laughed themselves sick.

Considering how and when the vast majority of Traveller's canon was written, I'm continually surprised it isn't more self-contradictory!


Have fun,
Bill

 

[jawillroy]

"the GDW staff would have been first incredulous and then laughed themselves sick."

Oh, I can just BET.

 

[Jame]

"the GDW staff would have been first incredulous and then laughed themselves sick."

Oh, I can just BET.

Of course, we can always ask a couple of them...

Back to ships. It looks like a lot of us prefer smaller ships, albiet bigger than Bk2 allows; how relevant is that attempt someone made at expanding the LBB2 hull sizes?