Spinal Mounts

[mike wightman]

For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to adapt HG/T20 ship design to produce TNE/T4 type ships. Has anyone else thought through/produced rules for higher TLs building lower TL spinal mounts i.e. TL15 type A spinal meson etc? Also what about factors lower than A as spinal mounts rather than bays?

I have graphed and extrapolated what I think are reasonable stats. Here is a sample for TL12:

type C meson 2000t 600EP
type B meson 1000t 500EP
type A meson 500t 400EP
factor9 meson 375t 300EP
factor8 meson 250t 200EP
factor7 meson 120t 100EP
factor6 meson 60t 50EP

The list is longer but you get the point. I have similar stats for higher TLs and PA spinal mounts as well.
My reason for doing this is I like the HG/T20 ship design system because of its' simplicity but I want to be able to produce the RCES Clipper class USP and the other ships unique to TNE and the #6 meson spinal mount above just about fits the bill.
Just wondered what you all think of the idea?

 

[Traveller]

I'm not a big fan of spinal mount weapons at all. In that case I'm rather heavily influenced by an old Dragon Magazine article which recommended dumping them, because then the pace of the combat would be a bit more like a WWII sea hunt.

If you're trying to convert the TNE ships, this is a good effort at conversion. I personally do not bother though. Sorry.

 

[marginaleye]

I would love to have rules for "high-tech, low-power" spinal mounts (like a Factor-A particle accelerator, built at Tech Level 15). Would you mind explaining your method for extrapolating from the canonical "High Guard" spinal mount table in greater detail?

The "low-end" of the naval vessel spectrum (between, roughly, 5K- and 30K-dtons) always looked a little... sparse ...to me. Adding rules for "high-tech, low-power" spinal mounts should make it possible to design a wider variety of vessels in that general size range.

For goodness sake, if you can build a grav tank around a meson gun (battlefield meson accelerators -- a canonical indirect fire weapon), there's no reason you shouldn't be able to do likewise with a 10K-dton "pocket cruiser." This sort of thing would make "small navies" (those of client states, low-ranking Aslan clans, particularly powerful Vargr corsair bands, the private fleets of Imperial megacorporations and high-ranking nobles, and so forth) more interesting.

 

[mike wightman]

The method I used was to graph spinal mount tonnage (from HG2/T20)[y-axis] against EP required[x-axis] for each TL (i.e only A and B meson at TL11) and joined the dots.
Repeat for each TL ( on the same set of axes) in order to see the progression from TL to TL. Then extend the progression backwards at each TL and hey presto stats (sans costs, I'll do that later) for higher TL, lower tonnage/power spinal mounts.
I then selected the EP for factors below A and read off their tonnage.

 

[Richard Saunders]

Hello.
You do realize that this makes fighters (if you continue back to 100 ton fighters) very effective.
At the moment fighters are a joke, they can't carry weapons that will hurt warships, so they are basicaly anti piracy, and the first pirate that armors there ship will kill all those expensive fighters and take the prize.
Meson guns (spinal or bay) are ship killers (i'm assuming that meson screens work the same as armor though only on mesons) so basicaly any meson hit is going to severly damage any ship regardless of size (all damage of SI and at least one critical internal), and with 1 in 4 hits being a critical hit, yes you do have to hit twice but needing a 15 for the first roll is a joke and the critical nulifing the meson screen your ship disappears in a puff of radiation.
Basicaly the Imperial navy would be stupid to build ships bigger than 10,000 tons with the biggest spinal meson, max armor, max agility and maneuver 6.
You send four of these against a 100,000 ton battleship, you get 4 mesons he gets 1, yes you will loose 1 ship every time he hits but he won't last to long either.
You loose 40,000 tons maybe he looses 100,000 tons definatley.
Bye.

 

[mike wightman]

I have mostly used HG2 combat in the past and according to the penetration table for meson guns anything less than #A requires 12(+) to get through. They would get +6 on the damage chart also.
If you use the T20 damage chart don't use the +40 modifier for spinal mounts less than A.
I realise this varient would make smaller ships a bit more effective

but heavy, multi-screened battlewagons still wouldn't have to worry too much

.