Rules Only: The Advantages of Low Tech Starships

[atpollard]

For my High-G Courier Ships Under 200 Tons ... in the TL=9-12 range it's a cost reduction of MCr59.4 when billing per EP rather than per ton.
That's a reduction in the final cost of those TL=9-12 ships of 33.7-38% ... which is ridonkulously huge when it comes to cost savings on construction.

It will have a cost comparable to the TL 15 ship … hey, just like LBB2 where TL does not change the cost.
It also places the cost and volume of a LBB2 and LBB5 ship within spitting distance of each other.

What a crazy idea! Why would anybody want that?

(Oohh, a shiny object … [wanders off] )

 

[atpollard]

More tonnage without greater cost on power plants for lower tech levels does really radical things to the cost of starships under LBB5.80.

Only the ships that are NOT being built.
It makes them viable.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Only the ships that are NOT being built.
It makes them viable.

Problem is ... it still feels like cheating the rules (because it kind of really is).

 

[Grav_Moped]

Problem is ... it still feels like cheating the rules (because it kind of really is).

Doesn't mean it's not a viable house rule.

 

[Condottiere]

1. Now that's an interesting exercise, how many hundred tonne Scouts, what I assume is the most ubiquitous and standardized of starships, does the Imperium manufacture per year.

2. If jumping requires figuring out a complex formula to instruct the computer exactly how to jump, and then executing it, using astrogation and engineering skills, then it could be skill locked if circumstances make either check increasingly harder.

 

[Spinward Flow]

2. If jumping requires figuring out a complex formula to instruct the computer exactly how to jump, and then executing it, using astrogation and engineering skills, then it could be skill locked if circumstances make either check increasingly harder.

This actually happened one time during a campaign I was playing in.

Our PCs had been hired to hijack a ship (by force) and take it to a secret base by jump.
One of the PCs had Intelligence F and Education F, so he was going to be the one assigned to the bridge to program the coordinates for the jump.

The plan was that we would be armed with RAM grenades(!) to keep the other passengers confined to the passenger section while our "smart guy" took over the bridge and programmed the jump. I think there were like 4 of us in the PC group.

We successfully hijacked the ship ... and then found out (the hard way) that the other passengers were like a squad of space marines who all had battledress(!) and weapons to go with it. However, our RAM grenades were able to hold a chokepoint (a vertical iris valve between decks) where any marines who tried to get through the choke point would get one shotted by RAM grenades, so we figured we had the situation under control.

Up on the bridge our smart guy needed to roll for success to program the jump coordinates and before he rolled it, the Player wondered out loud what would happen if he rolled a 2 on 2D. So the Referee dutifully checked to see if a 2 would still yield a success, to which the answer was yes (just barely). So the Player rolls the dice ... and sure enough, wouldn't you know it ... a 2!

EVERYBODY groaned around the table!

So the Referee dove into the rules (I think this was MT at this point) and found that the task was successful but exceptionally complex, fiddly and difficult (because, of course it was for computing the astrogation to the rebel base!) ... so it was going to take like 90+ minutes to complete.

As hijackers, we needed to hold out for more than AN HOUR before we could jump!
Talk about your best laid plans and all that.

However, we held the choke point passenger access to the crew decks and figured we could make it work because the space marines were essentially sitting ducks if they tried to get through it (we had already killed a few who had tried it by then, so the space marines had retreated to regroup).

Time passed and the marines made no further attempts to get past the choke point kill zone we had set up, so we figured we had them pretty safely bottled up behind bulkheads.

Over an hour into the hijacking, we found out that somehow the space marines had gotten OUTSIDE THE SHIP and had managed to EVA their way around to the external hatch that led to the bridge. Our PCs were placed in an arrangement where we couldn't effectively respond to this unexpected flanking maneuver. Two space marines were able to access the bridge deck and because we had left the iris valve access to the bridge open, the marines simply walked in and the Referee told us that they "took over the bridge" because our smart guy was so head down preoccupied with programming the coordinates into the computer that he never saw or heard them coming and was taken completely by surprise (they didn't need to shoot the unarmed smart guy, he wasn't armed).

After that, all the PCs were captured (and immediately turned state's evidence) and we all got shipped off to LBB A8 Prison Planet for our crimes (which included murder for hire since we had killed some space marines in our hijacking attempt). We also found out that the whole thing had been a sting operation setup for the rebels who had hired us for this hijacking (and who had a mole informant among their ranks), which was why the other passengers weren't civilians like we had been told they would be by our contact.

If we had been able to jump faster, denying the space marines the opportunity to flank us by going outside the ship, we would have captured them and they would have been forced to surrender to us, rather than them capturing us and foiling the hijacking attempt before we could jump ... all because our smart guy rolled a 2.

Oh and they got the coordinates to the rebel base out of us too.

 

[Spinward Flow]

1. Now that's an interesting exercise, how many hundred tonne Scouts, what I assume is the most ubiquitous and standardized of starships, does the Imperium manufacture per year.

Think of it this way.
Every century, ships with a 40 year operational lifespan need to have replacements built 2.5 times per century for attrition replacement.

The Express Network got built out from 624 to 718, so by 1105 it has been in operation for ~400 years almost everywhere.
Worlds off the XBoat routes need to have communications delivered to them by Scout/Courier.
There are MULTIPLE HUNDREDS of worlds per sector that are off the XBoat routes.

So if you assume that there needs to be 4 Scout/Couriers assigned to communication duties to and from the XBoat route systems out to every star system off the XBoat route so as to keep the interstellar communications circulating/flowing ... just to keep the math simple, let's assume a nice round number of needing 800 Scout/Couriers per sector just for Communication Office duties (it's probably higher than this, but I'm just doing napkin math here).

800 Scout/Couriers per sector in continuous service means needing to build 2000 Scout/Couriers per century per sector, just for the Communications Office ... multiply by 4 centuries and we're already at 8000 Scout/Couriers per sector needed for the past ~400 years.

Now figure that the Exploration and Survey Offices combined will need a comparable number of Scout/Couriers as well for exploration and survey duties ... so that makes it 16,000 Scout/Couriers per sector needed for the past ~400 years, just for Exploration, Survey and Communications office duties. Add in some more for additional Detached Duty and other sundry runabout needs (including clandestine intelligence gathering and support duties) and we're probably talking about 20,000 Scout/Couriers per sector needed for the past ~400 years.

The 1105 borders of the Third Imperium encompass roughly 22 sectors (or so) ... meaning a demand for some 440,000 Scout/Couriers needed for the past ~400 years alone.

But the Scout/Courier standard design is older than the currently constituted IISS and over the past 1100 years there could easily have been a million of them constructed throughout Imperial controlled space. Extend the timeline back to the Rule of Man days (-2204 to -1776) and you're looking at something like 3000 years by the time of 1105 Imperial, so even if the production rate for them was lower "a long time ago" there is a LOT of "long time ago" during which they could have been produced, meaning the legacy Scout/Courier design could have easily been constructed as many as TEN MILLION times (or more!) throughout the history of Humaniti.



So, a bit of napkin math and the entire salt shaker of dubious assumptions and extrapolations, but that's how I did my calculations for the number of Scout/Couriers that must have been constructed and came to the inevitable conclusion of millions of copies.

 

[McPerth]

They could. (...)

I'm not so sure... Building a galion means working wood, that is not malleable as the metal (or carbon fiber) current shipyards are used (ant tooled) to work with. So, I guess most work should be costumized and hand-made just for this ,as each timber piece is unique nad different fro manother one, unlike metal ingonts.

So, no matter how may are to be built my guess is each of them would have to be hand-made, not lowering the price, neither for "mass production" nor for TL difference.

Of course, space shipyards of higher TL would not find this specific problems, but I guess the wa y (and tools) to work cristalion or bonded superdense materials are not the same than for strainless steel, and they eithre had to retool and, to a point, make every piece as unique too, or made it in higher TL materials (so making the ship effectively of its own TL, and forfeiting the maintenance advantage in a lower TL environment that justifies its very building).

Note that such a low tech luxury from high tech nuance has some interesting implications for the luxury Yacht market.
A TL=9 rated Yacht in volume production constructed at a TL=15 shipyard would be rather extravagantly opulent in its appointments, fit and finish ... wouldn't you say? Essentially a "modern day antique" kind of thing.

That would, again, be i nfact a TL 15 ship imitating a TL9 design, and probably unable to be maintained in a TL9 facility. And by its very nature, it's more likely to be built in a costum (artisan) shypyard than in acommercial one...

 

[McPerth]

So if you assume that there needs to be 4 Scout/Couriers assigned to communication duties to and from the XBoat route systems out to every star system off the XBoat route so as to keep the interstellar communications circulating/flowing ...

I have serious doubts about Scout/courriers being used for that , at least for mail, as a mai l contract is for 5 tons of cargo and typs S cargo capacity (according TTB) is only 3 tons... I guess they rely in tramp freighters for that...

But this does not take you main point. No doubt there are millions of type S built along OTU history, but shure not all of them were low TL , with improvements installed as they were available.

 

[Condottiere]

1. Communications - scouts would be used in their courier mission for the last mile or parsec, at least to the boonies; whether that would average to four per stop, who knows?

2. Exploration - suspect that they'd mostly use more capable vessels, at least by the Sixth Millennium.

3. Scouting - implies forward reconnaissance for the fleet, though considering the short legs, low thrust, and lack of stealth, seems suicidal.

4. Sell by date - forty years, recycled as pension perquisites or prospecting vessels.

5. Numbers - let's say fifty per subsector, eight hundred per sector, seventeen thousand six hundred Imperium wide, let's round it off to twenty thousand.

6. Manufacture - twenty thousand divided by forty year lifespan, five hundred per year.

 

[Grav_Moped]

I'm not so sure... Building a galion means working wood, that is not malleable as the metal (or carbon fiber) current shipyards are used (ant tooled) to work with. So, I guess most work should be costumized and hand-made just for this ,as each timber piece is unique nad different fro manother one, unlike metal ingonts.

So, no matter how may are to be built my guess is each of them would have to be hand-made, not lowering the price, neither for "mass production" nor for TL difference.

As a one-off, sure.
If someone wanted a fleet of them (why?), it might be worth standardizing and automating the process as much as possible (that is, having a sawmill/factory create a "kit" with precisely-cut and -machined pieces). Not worth it for maybe up to half a dozen examples, though.

 

[kilemall]

A few reaction thoughts…

I always figured letter drives were less a specific part design and more an industrial spec. So they could handle different design choices or locally available mixes of exotic alloys but retain plug compatibility everywhere. VERY desirable for maintaining a basic level of transport at the subsector level at least.

Limiting repair by TL to letter drive limits per the LBB3 tech table seems like common sense to me.

Cheaper ships might work for bulk freight and yield profitability but should be considered akin to steerage for medium/high passage. Higher TL higher passenger revenue IMO, along the lines of luxury pluses…

If you went whole hog down the route of variable TL cost, need to consider what set of changes to the milieu with far more ships and people in the star lanes.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Limiting repair by TL to letter drive limits per the LBB3 tech table seems like common sense to me.

One of those things where it isn't explicitly stated ... but when you stop to think about it, makes you go ... hmmmm.

If you went whole hog down the route of variable TL cost, need to consider what set of changes to the milieu with far more ships and people in the star lanes.

As far as I'm concerned, the biggest advantage (from a gameplay perspective) is that you mitigate a sense of "same old, same old" along with the notion of "if you've seen one, you've seen them all" that happens without that variable being involved.

Familiarity breeds contempt and all that.
I think it's fair to say that for a lot of us (not everyone, granted, but still plenty) we have a certain feeling of contempt for the original LBB2 starship designs ... because they are so familiar. It's kind of like street racers looking down their noses at cars which are still in a stock condition, rather than having been tricked out with custom mods ("rice it baby!").

As gamers, we've got remarkably little respect for stock build starships a lot of the time ... which is why we inevitably want to try our hands at coming up with something BETTER than the common stock builds. And when you do come up with something better, it's YOURS and unique, not something ubiquitous and boring like the stock builds.

Insert signature airhorn musical phrase here.



But if TL of construction can be an additional variable for starships beyond the "you must be this high to build this build" minimum threshold, suddenly you open up a whole range of extra possibilities, uniqueness and (dare I say it) ... charm ... to the notion that your starship is YOUR starship, rather than being a stock copy of everyone else's (because TL of construction simply doesn't matter once you meet the minimum required).

Additionally, having the TL of construction relative to the TL of the design be a sliding scale modifier (of some kind) means that MAPS and the context of the setting start becoming important. Some regions of space (even in the Spinward Marches) can have wildly disparate industrial support bases for different tech levels (see: Jewell, Vilis, Regina, Lanth, Aramis and Rhylanor subsectors in the Spinward Marches). Consequently, the answer to the question of "what's the best TL for MY ship in THIS region of space?" will actually VARY depending on the context of where you want to operate.



One Size Fits All™ answers are nice in that they are consistent, which makes it hard to "game" them for Munchkin™ advantage.
However, those One Size Fits All™ answers can also wind up being rather humdrum and bland, reducing a particular richness of flavor in a particular setting (OTU or otherwise). Figuring out how to "balance" the factors of want to "go low" on tech level while at the same time "go high" then becomes a kind of challenge to find a Sweet Spot that may work best "over here" but not necessarily be as advantageous "over there" in quite the same way.

Adding that kind of detail to a setting can make all kinds of things far more interesting, both for the Players and for the Referee ... mainly because it prevents the "get TL=15 everything and you WIN!" kind of mentality that Players will default to (I know I certainly did when I played!) without a cross-current advantage to going low(er) tech as a counterbalance to the "TL=15 or bust" imperative.

And when you're dealing with a campaign set along the fringes and frontier of allied space, not being dependent on TL=15 for EVERYTHING can wind up being an advantage ... even if that advantage isn't an immediately obvious one up front.

After all ... you can only keep (in working order) what you can maintain, so maintenance is the key to longevity.

 

[Condottiere]

One thing that seems to be missing in Traveller spacecraft construction are research and development costs, especially of rather complex machinery.

Besides that incurred for moving up the tech tree, there's also that required for developing new models.

How much does Detroit and Rolls Royce spend on developing new engines, eking out a few more percentages of efficiency or performance? Millions, hundreds of millions?

The alphabet drives represent a known quantity, proven to work and plenty of available spare parts; probably only the interstellar Navies can afford customized engines, and even then, likely to buy off the shelf parts.

 

[HanleyTucks]

In LBB2 and HG (which re-uses LBB2 on this for the most part), neither pilot skill nor navigation skill has any effect on Jump whatsoever (though both are required in larger ships, skill levels beyond skill-1 do not affect the necessary rolls for Jump).

On perusal, you are indeed correct. For years we've played it that way, though - just one of those things. Or we let you do it, but at a malus for the misjump. Likewise, being short with the M-Drive, so that movements at (for example) 6G when you only have Pilot-2 will carry a DM-4. Fly within your capabilities, or it may have... consequences.

Thinking back, we've also played it that way with skills like Engineer and Medic.

 

[Grav_Moped]

On perusal, you are indeed correct. For years we've played it that way, though - just one of those things. Or we let you do it, but at a malus for the misjump. Likewise, being short with the M-Drive, so that movements at (for example) 6G when you only have Pilot-2 will carry a DM-4. Fly within your capabilities, or it may have... consequences.

Thinking back, we've also played it that way with skills like Engineer and Medic.

That would have some interesting effects on game play, if nothing else.

 

[McPerth]

On perusal, you are indeed correct. For years we've played it that way, though - just one of those things. Or we let you do it, but at a malus for the misjump. Likewise, being short with the M-Drive, so that movements at (for example) 6G when you only have Pilot-2 will carry a DM-4. Fly within your capabilities, or it may have... consequences.

We also gave some limitations due to skills. A navigator could only plan safely a jump up to double his skill level, and a Pilot could only govern a ship up to (skill level + 2) digits tonnage (so, Pilot 1 could pilot up to 999 tons ship, while a pilot 5 could pilot a million tons ship.

But thsoe were house rules....

BTW, limit acceleration (not tonnage as we did) due to pilot skill seems also a good idea, probably better than ours...

 

[Spinward Flow]

Likewise, being short with the M-Drive, so that movements at (for example) 6G when you only have Pilot-2 will carry a DM-4.

A navigator could only plan safely a jump up to double his skill level

Navigator-1 being able to navigate 2 parsec jumps bumps up against the OTU "wild navigators" of the historic Solomani being able to plot 2-3 parsec jumps when the Vilani could not (due to their reliance on jump tapes). Something as simple as a difference between Navigator-1 and Navigator-2 skill levels can easily represent that difference in basic minimum requirements, while also giving the Navigator crew position a reason to exist (beyond wasting stateroom tonnage, life support and crew salary).

Counter-proposal:
Navigator-1 = up to 1 parsec (1)
Navigator-2 = up to 3 parsecs (1+2)
Navigator-3 = up to 6 parsecs (1+2+3)
Navigator-4 = up to 10 parsecs (1+2+3+4)
Navigator-5 = up to 15 parsecs (1+2+3+4+5)
Navigator-6 = up to 21 parsecs (1+2+3+4+5+6)
... etc.

Point being that by the time you start getting into the Hop drive (10x parsecs) range, you start needing expert systems (robot brains) with sufficient skill levels of programming to be able to execute the task reliably.

Note that this also means that Pilot/Navigators operating at -1 skill level because they're occupying two roles would need to have Pilot-2/Navigator-2 skill at the minimum and would need to "not be actively piloting" their ship (ie. not in combat, on autopilot) in order to devote their full time attention to a Navigator-2 skill threshold for a 2-3 parsec jump plot. Under combat conditions (meaning increased workload from needing to pilot simultaneously) that same crew member would be effectively Navigator-1 and thus could only make a 1 parsec jump plot.

All of a sudden, doubling up crew roles on crew members like your Pilot/Navigator doesn't sound like such a great idea anymore ... unless you just really like using jump tapes (that only work from pre-programmed points of departure, which evasive maneuvers in combat will tend to muck up.

Me likey.

a Pilot could only govern a ship up to (skill level + 2) digits tonnage (so, Pilot 1 could pilot up to 999 tons ship, while a pilot 5 could pilot a million tons ship).

Acceleration/agility should NOT be a limiting factor for pilot skills.
I do like the idea that ship hulls require a minimum pilot skill just like they require a minimum computer model number (LBB5).
That is a good idea.

 

[mike wightman]

I'll stick with the generate program - no navigation skill required other than to carry the program cassette from storage to the computer.
CT made jump travel safe and routine unless you deliberately took risks. It appears later versions of the game are happy for the majority of ships to missjump a few times during their 40 years or more of operation. Wonder what that would do to the setting...

note this is based on simple probability - if you require a dice roll that has the potential to fail it will, if you require several chained dice rolls then you are actually increasing the chance of failure.

 

[McPerth]

Navigator-1 being able to navigate 2 parsec jumps bumps up against the OTU "wild navigators" of the historic Solomani being able to plot 2-3 parsec jumps when the Vilani could not (due to their reliance on jump tapes). Something as simple as a difference between Navigator-1 and Navigator-2 skill levels can easily represent that difference in basic minimum requirements, while also giving the Navigator crew position a reason to exist (beyond wasting stateroom tonnage, life support and crew salary).

Navigators was not what allowed the Solomani to outjump the Vilani. It was the Solomani reaching TL12 (while Vilani were Tl11) that allowed them to.

Allowing navigator 1 only to safely plan a jump 1 is too los, IMHO, for CT, where skills were not plentiful. This ould mean you need a naviagaotr 2 to operat a Scout or a Far Trader, just to give two fairly common ships...