Frankymole
SOC-12
I thought the limit was 1 million displacement tonnes?
Small Ship Universe
- Thread starter JustinInOz
- Start date
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Nope - hull USP code Z reserved, anything over 1m tons.
Another thing is the drive table in LBB2 can be extrapolated to 12kt hulls easy enough.
Another thing is the drive table in LBB2 can be extrapolated to 12kt hulls easy enough.
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The HG system is a bit more abstract. The benefit is that you can fight larger battles more easily (and let's face it: a dreadnought is not likely to be a player character's personal touring ship).
Steve Osmanski and Mike Wightman did some houseruling to manage this as well. How to manage large numbers of weapons has been a common problem in Traveller.
Yah. I know they did, and I helped a bit as well. We also ported some of the MT tables back to CT.
Well, when I gamed out the last war IMTU I let one of the players have a warship and run his own squadron from the deck of a light cruiser. It just became part of a "high level" campaign setting where the player would receive his orders from the admiral at the depot and go out cruising for trouble and to fight to evacuate colonists. Sort of a "Master and Commander" in space.
As he successfully completed missions and helped the war effort he was promoted until the final battle which was the "Last Stand" at a critical jump nexus and naval depot from the deck of one of the 300kt battleships. It was a lot of fun, he even survived the experience though his ship had been disabled "breaking the line" and he participated in staving off the boarding the enemy was attempting.
Good fun, worth trying at least once, but it'll be a while before I do it again on that scale.
It's not so much the number of rolls for the weapons I wanted to change when I house ruled the CT LBB2 combat - it was the relative effectiveness of the weapons and numbers of them per mount to reflect. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to say that three beam lasers firing out of a single mount at the target will hit three (possibly widely) dispersed areas on the target. I think it makes more sense that either those 3 weapons will increase the chance of having 1 hit, or increase the damage done to the spot they hit.
Since computers programs, agility, and skill already effect accuracy enough, I went with the idea that they do more damage to the part they hit. Missiles are the exception unless they are HEAP warheads. This also had the effect of making the SSU warships more formidable, all other things considered, than before because they are the ones who tend to carry the triple weapon turrets that have more than just sandcasters and a beam laser for defense.
While this is certainly a reasonable -- and popular -- approach, it should be noted that there is a significant counter-tradition that high Jump numbers ought to be considered naturally scarce in a SSU, and this is another distinguishing -- and welcome, to some -- characteristic of such TUs.
I'm just sayin'; YMMVIYTU and so on, et cetera...
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Something I've toyed with is to re-designate turret weapons as follows:
1 weapon = light mount - normal to hit
2 weapons = medium mount - +1 to hit
3 weapons = heavy mount - +2 to hit
1 weapon = light mount - normal to hit
2 weapons = medium mount - +1 to hit
3 weapons = heavy mount - +2 to hit
That's more or less the T5 approach, although the triple turret is the "normal"; it also groups the weapons in a mount into a small battery, so one shot per turret (perhaps with an exception for mixed turrets...).
tbeard1999
SOC-14 1K
Yeah, I agree. As noted, my own Commonwealth Campaign uses this as a background point -- the Commonwealth Navy is transitioning to a "4+4" capability (M-4, Jump-4). The problem is that the battleline is comprised of 5000 ton "2+2" battleships. The replacement ships are (a) fairly scarce, as shipyard capacity is turning out carriers and assault ships; and (b) only about 60% as powerful, since they are based on 3000 ton hulls. The last attempt to build a J-4/M-4 5000 ton battleship was an expensive and divisive boondoggle.
So, to avoid a "battleship gap", the Commonwealth has hastily recomissioned the 5000 ton battlewagons. This is supposedly a temporary solution until enough 3000 ton fast battleships come online.
Current (i.e., hastily revised) Commonwealth Naval Doctrine is to use fast (Jump-4) carrier task forces to screen the frontier and hold the slow Jump-2 battleships in reserve for the decisive fleet battle. This is somewhat analogous to US Pacific naval doctrine in the 1930s.
This has the effect of keeping the really heavy stuff off-stage in the campaign. The most common naval encounters on the Rim will be escorts, fighters, obsolescent (yet colorful) Rim Fleet gunboats and light carriers, and Vindicator gunships.
I tried that before, but the problem was still that it just treated the extra weapons as a trade-off for computer programs. I preferred a system that allowed for more flexibility in the weapon damage and increasing the relative firepower of warships without having to resort to the HG model.
As I run it you can add armor to a LBB2 ship using the same rules as HG. 1 armor point protects against 1 point of weapon damage. Each weapon does x amount of damage per hit (beam lasers do 1 point, pulse does 2, etc.). Each canister of sand fired that round reduces laser fire on a one for one point basis as well.
So a triple beam turret with the potential of doing 3 points of damage to a single hit location is a formidable weapon now. But it has to get through layers of defense, too, just like a modern ship trying to saturate the layered ECM/anti-missile missiles/rapid fire directed cannon/point-defense weapons -so for Trav it's -DM's to hit, sand, armor. So it might not even scorch the paint by the time it burns through the defenses.
Each turret mount is treated individually for the purposes of getting though all that, too. A pirate with a couple of triple beam turrets isn't going to have an easy time of it when up against a lightly armored corvette armed with 4 triple turrets with pulse lasers and missiles.
The bigger warships (1000-5000) can carry things like bay weapons, PAWs and missiles mainly. Those do tremendous damage and can easily overwhelm opposing ships of similar class, but even with just 5 points of armor and a few sandcasters its highly unlikely anything smaller than another battlecruiser or a huge swarm of torpedo (bay-size missiles) fighter/bombers can hurt them badly. Barbettes and high energy weapon turrets can be fitted to smaller ships, but need to use HG to manage the energy so those are not common.
Also, I limit anti-missile fire that is coming from lasers that have already engaged another target to beams only. Pulse weapons do more damage but take to long to effectively shift fire. Warships accordingly will carry a couple bay weapons (Big Damn Turrets per tbeard1999), then a few pulse laser turrets or PAW barbettes for mid-range weapons, then some beam and sand turrets for anti-missile (anti-small craft) defense. They even have armored "citadel" style battle bridges, but some admirals won't use them considering it cowardly.
So if a warship (like a revenue cutter or some such) puts a laser across your bow and orders you to heave to and prepare for boarding you know that if they wanted to they could fire up all the lasers in their turrets and blow out your maneuver drive in one hit. Or if you're a commerce raider and don't want to shoot the prize up too much you can just dial back the lasers and use one or two to pick off turrets or slow them down to board.
Mind you, this is all the "primitive" stuff found on the frontiers and relegated to the Colonial Fleet. They operate as part of the Scout Service IMTU and are not considered The Real Navy by the Imperial Fleet (who gets all the HG behemoths and spend a lot of time polishing the pretty white paint and brass on thier ships). The Colonial Fleet is what the OTU might call a subsector navy and is paid for by the colonies on the frontier just outside Imperial space. So they use mainly off the shelf LBB2 stuff (except the newest big cruisers) since out on the edge the average TL is only 11-12 and the mail packets can take a long time to deliver that fancy drive part from a custom designed HG power plant. Refits also mean there can be a lot of, uh "personality" to some of the individual ships of the same class as the crews have made field modifications in a can-do sort of spirit.
Ultimately all of this is just to show how with some creativity and thinking out side the box you can have both a small ship universe and a big ship one at the same time. I just have always preferred the LBB2 systems, but also have always liked the idea of the big monster battleships for when things got really serious or somebody wanted to play out a war IMTU. The trick was just how to integrate the two so the players wouldn't lose out. And not have to give up some of my older universe's flavor and history.
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