Small Ship 3i
- Thread starter Mithras
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Do a search of the boards for "Prototraveller"...
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
IMTU High Guard doesn't exist - LBB2 all the way (well sort of - the weapons and screens have been included on military ships - my holy grail is to find an armour rule for LBB2 ships I'm happy with).
No, but it defeats any purpose I've heard for having a small ship universe (basically, to give PC ships a shot at either not being bothered by the Navy or having a decent chance to defy the odd Navy patrol vessel). With thousand ships replacing each megaton ship, patrols become squadrons of 1000T ships rather than the drips and draps left over once the big battleships have been paid for. (Mind you, IMTU patrols are already usually at least half a squadron of ships that are individually a match for the usual PC-owned tramp freighter, but that's IMTU).
Note that I'm not saying thet there can't be other reasons to prefer a small ship universe; I may even have heard some of them, but if I have, I've forgotten all about them.
Hans
That presumes that worlds will have space naval presences comparable with the wet naval presences on earth in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I honestly doubt that they will. I suspect the percentage of persons will drop much faster... US Navy has about 318,000 persons (+101,000 reservists), and Merchant fleet has about 100,000 persons... for about 500,000 persons of the 320,000,000 or so people... for about 1:1000 in the navy and 1:3000 in the merchants. And the Navy has about a 2:1 shore:sea ratio (approximately 100,000 sailors are needed to man the fleet).
If we assume the same rates for spacers...
Then total manpower in space should be Pop-3 and PM÷3, and the merchants should be about the same. So, given Pop Multiple 1:
Pop A = 3,000,000 men
Pop 9 = 300,000 men
Pop 8 = 30,000 men
Pop 7 = 3,000 men
Pop 6 = 300 men
Pop 5 = 30 men
That would be roughly 3 Type Ts per pop 5 world, and 3 type Rs or 4 type As per system... but ignore the idea that a larger pop will be more on-world focussed...
And 1/3 of the ships should be imperial...
I think I just figured out my navy sizes.
And you can figure 2x as many spuds on the ground
And probably about as many marines as afloat navy (US is 2x, but most are functioning as army...)
So, IMNextSSTU...
Gutting the rates a bit, presuming much lower rates as the population reaches self-trade sizes, and type Ts as the core ship, and again, per pop multiple
Pop A = 5,000 men = 500 ships
Pop 9 = 1,500 men = 150 ships
Pop 8 = 500 men = 50 ships
Pop 7 = 150 men = 15 ships
Pop 6 = 50 men = 5 ships
Pop 5 = 15 men = 1.5 ship
Pop 4 = 5 men = 1/2 ship
Pop 3 = 2 men – no type T
Pop A's will likely patrol a J3 away with lots - 36 hexes, and probably half have systems, so 20 ships each...
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No, it assumes that worlds will have space naval presences comparable with the space naval presences in large ship universes. That is, the sort of space navies we see in the OTU.
(And those are, as you know, on the low side for what worlds can afford according to what the rules says about what ships cost. High-population worlds have BIG gross products and we know from Real Life the sort of percentages of gross products that populations can afford to spend on their militaries, always provided that they are motivated to do so by the existence of hostile and unfriendly neighboring star nations of comparable size.)
Hans
'Decent change to defy' is defined by more comparable ships in terms of firepower - that is the advantage a small ship TU gives. The 1000 to 1 example deals with the atypical extreme of a megaton ship (how many are there in the OTU?) with 1000 dton (instead of 5000?). Suspect, more realistically, for the entire TU is 20x to maybe 50x. And this assumes a linear scaling of cost/funding.
As to patrols becoming squadrons - in number maybe, but in practice it surely doesn't have to be. In fact, given the vastness of space in any system, large numbers of vessels would be needed for patrolling (probably more so than any canon references provide for) - and, yet, players would still have a good chance of evading patrols (and a more realistic chance of encountering patrols in line with the actual game mechanics). Point is, when they do encounter them, things are more evenly matched (till assistance arrives!).
And those are based upon extrapolations from current naval policies via relative cost to build vs the GDP.
But a navy has TWO very important limits: the number of people willing to go, and the funding to get them on things that can go. (Armies, however, have stayed pretty much the same size range per capita without regard to the actual population size... varying between peacetime lows of about 0.1% and wartime highs of up to 5%.)
The people, historically, have become less and less willing to ship out as the countries got bigger. The USN, while it has fewer ships and more warm bodies than in WWII, has a lower percentage of the US population. So does the merchant marine.
Further, the bigger the pop, the less people need offworld trade (which is at a severe disadvantage to onworld in terms of time, let alone shipping costs)... The absolute numbers of trade off-world should go up with Population, but down as a function of per-capita trade, as on-world trade becomes more and more viable.
And remember: if you can build a J1 1G streamlined freighter for outsystem use, you can build a 1G streamlined freighter for onworld use as a transatmospheric, and get something anywhere on-world in 5 hours, for a fraction of the cost per ton.
Which is several fundamental changes in thought that support the smaller fleets of the small ship universes of many people. Yes, a Pop A world should have thousands of Type Ts, several cruiser designs, and a few 5000Td battleships, and support thousands of Type R and large freighter designs. (2000Td is about optimal, BTW, for return on investment vs flexibility, and the start of the very nearly flat spot in costs to operate per ton under Bk2 and MGT..)
Funding we've already covered. Manpower is just a question of either paying enough to make the job attractive enough, draft the people you need, or rely on patriotism to produce volunteers (More about the third option below). It helps that the manpower requirements for Traveller warships are one to two orders of magnitude lower than those of 21st Century wet navies (Based on crew required relative to cost of ships).
Does the US navy actually have too few people to man all the ships Congress is willing to fund? That sounds very unlikely to me.
I don't see why the size of the merchant marine is relevant to the size of the national navy.
That will last just until your unreasonable, warmongering neighbor builds a dozen battle ships and the corresponding number of cruisers and escorts. Then you'll build a dozen battleships yourself -- or perhaps two dozens. Then your neighbor will build fifty battleships, and before you can say "Arms Race", you'll both be maintaining the biggest navy you can afford. (And the threat to your life, liberty, and way of life will help you get volunteers to man your ships).
Hans
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They've been refusing to let people out, so obviously, yes, they do. Not by much, but several key fields have been having mandatory reenlistments. Plus, the Navy has much better bonuses than the Army.
I'm not certain why, but it's pretty much been parallel the whole of the 20th century. I have guesses, but the two scale consistently that the number of men afloat in each is about the same since the USMM was formalized.
And a look at the arms races of the past really doesn't show lots of new ships as much as a few new ships and pulling smaller ones. Budgets being what they are, navies with big budgets still can't staff fleets of BB's without both the lead time to train the men, and the lead time to build the ships, and usually, the big ships come at the cost of as many crew's worth of little ones, rather than by fleet expansion.
The technical, ie. Economic details here are getting too complex for me, but I can see that there are easily two arguments here, both sounding viable. The question then is, what kind of game do I want. In a world where High Guard was not published, you have to recognize the small ship universe. It would be a fact that all other suppositions and arguments derive from. Would billion plus worlds have lots of 2000 ton cruisers? Probably! How many multimillion dollar destroyers are floating in our oceans today, what would a global naval fleet look like?? Big!
I don't suppose it makes any difference that i think having lots of pop 9 and 10 worlds in the Spinward Marches is a mistake... Being a frontier? But that i suppose is irrelevant
Going beyond viability then ranke, the consideration of a Book 2 on a universe hinges on the question, what would an imperial fleet look like? And how many ships would there be?
I don't suppose it makes any difference that i think having lots of pop 9 and 10 worlds in the Spinward Marches is a mistake... Being a frontier? But that i suppose is irrelevant
Going beyond viability then ranke, the consideration of a Book 2 on a universe hinges on the question, what would an imperial fleet look like? And how many ships would there be?
The cost isn't really the issue (the USAF and USN have more money in planes than the USN has in ships).
It's the scant few who can make it through the training for aircraft that limits them. The navy has more men in subs alone than the USAF has in aircrews, and the subbies, job for job, are higher failure rates in training due to stresses of aboard-sub life.
Wet-Navy really is the best model for figuring space forces suitable people... And that's really the issue. Its not how much can be spent, as who can be sent without going nutters. And the USN found that to be a very limited resource.
But assuming for purposes of argument that you are right about the cause of this manpower shortage, it's not really a lack of suitable people, is it? It's a lack of suitable people who are willing to join the Navy. It's nothing a draft (or a press gang!!) couldn't deal with. For historical reasons, the US isn't practicing the draft at the moment, but in a pinch it could.
Now, the hypothetical worlds in our examples might not practice the draft either and thus have similar problems (though as I pointed out, in Traveller the manpower requirement of a space navy is one to two orders of magnitude smaller than that of the US Navy), so let me shift my ground a little: I'll stipulate that it's possible to come up with conditions that would result in a "small navy setting". But such conditions would a) not be an inherent part of the human condition but purely a result of local factors, and b) apply equally to small ship and large ship universes. Indeed, a 'small navy' navy in a large ship universe would be less well able to patrol the backwaters than its small ship universe counterpart, since so many of its limited manpower would be tied up in large ships.
There really is nothing to gain by a small ship universe. Any limit you can apply to navy size in a small ship universe would apply equally to a large ship universe and is more of a limitation in a large ship universe (because of the many large resource-gobbling cruisers and battleships stuck guarding the big mainworlds) to boot.
Hans
I gain the chance to use Book 2 only. I dislike Book 5 enough that I've had it for 25 years and not once created a ship with it. I don't the the USP and can't read it and combat is far too nebulous with batteries and USP weapon factors.
EDIT: IMHO of course! Others love it
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I agree with you, aside from my having made a few Bk 5 ships.
Though I should say that if there were a way for Book 2 to make ships as large as 20,000 tons, I'd like that. That'd be cool to have ships as large as that.
(Not that it would be cool to have ships as large as "tahat." "Tahat" is a misspelling.)
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