Hi,
Discussions in the "Speaking of Commerce Raiding; Keith Ships" thread recently got me thinking about Traveller ship weapon systems. The first version of Traveller that I had had very few images and as such me and my friends had to guess alot about what we thought different items in the rules looked like. Since I don't really know if my interpretation is what was meant by the original authors, I thought I'd post my ideas here for discussion, and hopefully others will post their ideas as well.
With respect to ship weapons, my first thoughts on Book 2 turrets were since spaceships had to operate in 3D, maybe something like the belly turret on the US Army Air Forces B-17 from WWII might be a possiblity, where the barrels could rotate and elevate over a wide range.
However, this would require the turret to partially intrude into the ship's hull. I guess that you could assume that the 1dton of fire control might partially cover this, but on some of the earliest deck plans that I saw (like from Snapshot! or Traders and Gunboats) sometimes there was internal space allocated near the turrets and other times there wasn't.
http://www.sperryflight.com/i/ball_turretlg.jpg
As such, later I began to think of turrets more like maybe the chin turret on the B-17, or other similar craft. This way there would be controls somewhere in the ship (which could be near the turret or which could be located elsewhere) but the main part of the weapon itself would be for the most part mounted exterrnally, which seemed closer to the rules to me. The problem with this though was that I never really understood how turrets that fired sand or missiles were supposed to be reloaded.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/B17_chin_turret.jpg
When it came to Book 5 stuff, as I noted in the "Speaking of Commerce Raiding; Keith Ships" post, I never really understood what a barbette was meant be.
With respect to Bays, book 5 describes them as "large areas near the skin of the ship's hull". At first I thought that maybe they were then just areas of the hull where large numbers of similar weapons might be clustered together to operate as a group/unit, similar maybe to this image of some of the anti-aircraft weapons on a WWII battleship.
Later though when I picked up a copy of "Azhanti Highlightning" initially the bays just appeared to be larger turrets. Much later though after looking closer at the Azhanti Highlightning deck plans I began to notice something. (I posted about this in a previous discussion a long while age, but I can't specifically remember where.) In general, if you look closely at the deck plans, as shown in the figure below, inboard of the large turrets (shown in white) is a large area (shown in blue), separated from the rest of the area of the deck by heavy bulkheads.
As such, I began to wonder if maybe the intent was that weapon bays might instead be kind of like modern era naval weapon systems especially like the MEKO and STANFLEX ships, as shown below (along the lines that Rigel Stardin suggested in the "Speaking of Commerce Raiding; Keith Ships" thread).
http://www.amiinter.com/samples/denmark/images/stanflex_oto76mm .jpg
http://sistemadearmas.sites.uol.com.br/aam/aim7ssmk48b.jpg
http://www.thyssenkrupp-marinesystems.de/bilder/produkte/Meko_rechts_1a_gr.jpg
Here in these images you can see that these weapon type systems are large spaces near the surface of the ship where you can mount different type weapon modules or maybe even leave it empty as a storage space, which seems like it could be along the lines of the original definition in High Guard. Here are some images that I drew up to demonstrate what I think a 50dton bay like this might look like in Traveller terms. In the first view you can see how the bay is dropped into an opening near the surface of the hull so that only the rotating weapon mount is shown above/external to the hull but the rest of the unit (in blue) is shown within the hull. In the second view I show the module extracted so that you can see how the unit extends down several decks (shown in red and grey).
With respect to spinal mounts, I guess that I've always envisioned them similar to what is shown on the Azhanti Highlightning though I never really understood why they ar only avaialble in certain sizes and why you can only have one per ship (instead of say a twin barrel unit), though those are the rules so I don't really ahve any problems with them.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, and I'd be interested to see what others think.
Regards
PF
PS. I started a new post here because I didn't want to further take the other thread off track.
Discussions in the "Speaking of Commerce Raiding; Keith Ships" thread recently got me thinking about Traveller ship weapon systems. The first version of Traveller that I had had very few images and as such me and my friends had to guess alot about what we thought different items in the rules looked like. Since I don't really know if my interpretation is what was meant by the original authors, I thought I'd post my ideas here for discussion, and hopefully others will post their ideas as well.
With respect to ship weapons, my first thoughts on Book 2 turrets were since spaceships had to operate in 3D, maybe something like the belly turret on the US Army Air Forces B-17 from WWII might be a possiblity, where the barrels could rotate and elevate over a wide range.
However, this would require the turret to partially intrude into the ship's hull. I guess that you could assume that the 1dton of fire control might partially cover this, but on some of the earliest deck plans that I saw (like from Snapshot! or Traders and Gunboats) sometimes there was internal space allocated near the turrets and other times there wasn't.
http://www.sperryflight.com/i/ball_turretlg.jpg
As such, later I began to think of turrets more like maybe the chin turret on the B-17, or other similar craft. This way there would be controls somewhere in the ship (which could be near the turret or which could be located elsewhere) but the main part of the weapon itself would be for the most part mounted exterrnally, which seemed closer to the rules to me. The problem with this though was that I never really understood how turrets that fired sand or missiles were supposed to be reloaded.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/B17_chin_turret.jpg
When it came to Book 5 stuff, as I noted in the "Speaking of Commerce Raiding; Keith Ships" post, I never really understood what a barbette was meant be.
With respect to Bays, book 5 describes them as "large areas near the skin of the ship's hull". At first I thought that maybe they were then just areas of the hull where large numbers of similar weapons might be clustered together to operate as a group/unit, similar maybe to this image of some of the anti-aircraft weapons on a WWII battleship.
![Deck%20Weapons.jpg](/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fmembers.cox.net%2Fpsjn%2FDeck%2520Weapons.jpg&hash=4b7790cb671657b8fdb7acb2cd9077e6)
Later though when I picked up a copy of "Azhanti Highlightning" initially the bays just appeared to be larger turrets. Much later though after looking closer at the Azhanti Highlightning deck plans I began to notice something. (I posted about this in a previous discussion a long while age, but I can't specifically remember where.) In general, if you look closely at the deck plans, as shown in the figure below, inboard of the large turrets (shown in white) is a large area (shown in blue), separated from the rest of the area of the deck by heavy bulkheads.
![AHLBays.jpg](/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fmembers.cox.net%2Fpsjn%2FAHLBays.jpg&hash=76faff33ebef4e5d86250d84a4a9c73f)
As such, I began to wonder if maybe the intent was that weapon bays might instead be kind of like modern era naval weapon systems especially like the MEKO and STANFLEX ships, as shown below (along the lines that Rigel Stardin suggested in the "Speaking of Commerce Raiding; Keith Ships" thread).
http://www.amiinter.com/samples/denmark/images/stanflex_oto76mm .jpg
http://sistemadearmas.sites.uol.com.br/aam/aim7ssmk48b.jpg
http://www.thyssenkrupp-marinesystems.de/bilder/produkte/Meko_rechts_1a_gr.jpg
Here in these images you can see that these weapon type systems are large spaces near the surface of the ship where you can mount different type weapon modules or maybe even leave it empty as a storage space, which seems like it could be along the lines of the original definition in High Guard. Here are some images that I drew up to demonstrate what I think a 50dton bay like this might look like in Traveller terms. In the first view you can see how the bay is dropped into an opening near the surface of the hull so that only the rotating weapon mount is shown above/external to the hull but the rest of the unit (in blue) is shown within the hull. In the second view I show the module extracted so that you can see how the unit extends down several decks (shown in red and grey).
![Bay2.jpg](/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fmembers.cox.net%2Fpsjn%2FBay2.jpg&hash=be222ffad0687f7f28b1ac7ee0d80ef5)
![Bay.jpg](/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fmembers.cox.net%2Fpsjn%2FBay.jpg&hash=37830ae321c3689b9c37a3c3d8565083)
With respect to spinal mounts, I guess that I've always envisioned them similar to what is shown on the Azhanti Highlightning though I never really understood why they ar only avaialble in certain sizes and why you can only have one per ship (instead of say a twin barrel unit), though those are the rules so I don't really ahve any problems with them.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, and I'd be interested to see what others think.
Regards
PF
PS. I started a new post here because I didn't want to further take the other thread off track.
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