The Compleat Battleship

[sabredog]

Uh...under HG there is no mechanism for different kinds of fighters relative to task. Only in size and/or type of armament, and those are all pretty minimal if you stick with fighters under 100 tons.

As for the Tigress I think it's pretty obvious that it was an exercise in Death Star construction to see how far you can push the practical limits of HG and probably shouldn't be considered a realistic weapons platform. I could see one or two being built by some mad emperor and then kept as show pieces more than as something you'd risk using in action very often. There's your dreadnought similarity if your looking for one.

But since a significantly smaller, more agile, and cheaper ship can carry the same ship-killing meson gun a Tigress can - and kill a Tigress with it - then the case can be made that there is probably a certain plateau reached in BB design. Otherwise why the debate on BB vs. BR?

I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of BB's a way to exert power projection over the Imperium, but I doubt the ships would be going it alone any more than a carrier group does today so they don't have to be these gigantic monsters unless you really want them to. Wet navy ships operating in a very different environment - weaponry and armor-wise, too - and while making those elegant old ships and tactics a model for your own space navies is tempting it blinds one to the limits of the HG weapon and defensive systems.

While a Dreadnought (or BB) had all those centrally-controlled big guns, it also had locally-controlled smaller ones for anti-torpedo boat/destroyer/whatever fire. It could engage multiple targets and even its main guns could fire on two different opponents if need be. Its armor kept out anything smaller than the ships itself carried as a main weapon.

An HG BB can't do all that. The spinal gun can only fire at one target at a time, and it ignores armor. A meson screen might help you, as does agility, a high end computer, and configuration - but even those all point to a major argument against having giant battlewagons: a smaller hull with the same, or larger spinal gun can have all those same advantages at a significantly lower price and can kill the bigger ship in one shot.

The same argument can be made to endorse smaller, purpose-built transports, carriers, and such to perform different duties around the Imperium or as part of a single strategic group. It also enhance survivability in combat since you don't have all your eggs in one basket like you would with a Tigress. Why waste the space inside your BB hull with planetary assault troops if you can use a smaller hull and get a higher armor and screen rating for greater survivability (read: ability to win) in combat?

 

[robject]

Holy crap!

How long can you be frozen? In Legacy of Heorot they have brain damage from being frozen too long: "ice on the mind."

You know, I don't believe that question has ever been adequately answered. I'll start a new thread for that.

Thanks!

 

[robject]

So the way I understood it was that with a Tigress you don't need supply lines. That's a generalization and a sloppy statement but understand the intent is to allow TL 15 ships a base of operations without requiring a high tech world nearby.

As for insanity, I would suggest that many aspects of high guard are lacking in reason. But even so, we have the Loeskalth as our reductio ad absurdum -- a planetoid starship, serving primarily as a colony and carrier platform for interstellar raiding. And, it's fifty BILLION tons. How long do you have to skim fuel to run that bad boy?

High Guard, and even TCS, don't address the strategic and logistical needs of fleet combat. But that's okay, because HG can be extended, or Pocket Empires can be dumbed down, or etc.

 

[robject]

Uh...under HG there is no mechanism for different kinds of fighters relative to task.

[...]

[A dreadnought] could engage multiple targets and even its main guns could fire on two different opponents if need be. Its armor kept out anything smaller than the ships itself carried as a main weapon.

An HG BB can't do all that. The spinal gun can only fire at one target at a time, and it ignores armor. A meson screen might help you, as does agility, a high end computer, and configuration - but even those all point to a major argument against having giant battlewagons: a smaller hull with the same, or larger spinal gun can have all those same advantages at a significantly lower price and can kill the bigger ship in one shot.

The same argument can be made to endorse smaller, purpose-built transports, carriers, and such to perform different duties around the Imperium or as part of a single strategic group. It also enhance survivability in combat since you don't have all your eggs in one basket like you would with a Tigress. Why waste the space inside your BB hull with planetary assault troops if you can use a smaller hull and get a higher armor and screen rating for greater survivability (read: ability to win) in combat?

You've stated the problem very well. There are battleships, but we don't know why. Operational/logistics concerns are largely missing from Traveller - at least, classic Traveller - and may provide part of the answer.

At any rate, the role of battleships in Traveller needs to be defined well, and I'm not the one to do it. However, I do want to think about the problem.

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

well, taking a step outside the traveller reality for a second, the reason the Tigress is built the way it has been is because someone sat down and, form the start, designed a "500,000 Dton warship".

that is a very different way of building ships to "reality", where the essentail compnents and requirements are set out, (X guns of Y caliber, armour able to stop Z calibre guns, a speed of N Knots, etc), and the ships size is a result of those factors, rather than those factors being a result of that size.

in effect, the RL designer of the Tigress slapped on his jump drives, P plant and M drives, the biggest spinal and as many bays\turrets as he could, fuel, etc.... and realised he still had thousands, even tens of thouands, of Dtons still left to "play" with. So, rather than reducing the size of the ship, as you would in "reality", he added extra features to fill the space.


it's basically an artifact of the traveller design process, where a ships end tonnage is decided at the start of design, that can lead to this sort of weird feature creep.

I mean, really, the MgT Tigress has a magazine capacity of 500,000 missles. can you imagine the armount of industy needed to keep a full BatRon of Tigress suppiled? Hell, can you imagine the amount of weapons grade radioactives needed to make that many nukes?

stepping back into the traveller universe, you can explain the Tigress as "white elephants" built to showcase the overwhelming power of the Imperium, rather than as serious combat units. the IN knows that a Tigress is not signifcantly more surviveable than smaller "line" BBs, and keeps them away form the frontlines.

 

[robject]

Setting aside an implicit criticism of High Guard design (here is not the place), I would go a step further and suggest that your Tigress example would be more convincing if other battleships were worth their cost.

But they aren't.

So the problem is not the designer of the Tigress, but rather a deficit within High Guard itself, as well as something missing in Traveller that explains the value of battleships.

 

[Dragoner]

The Fleet is the Imperium, so showing the flag with large ships is very logical. It is also logical for the Imperium to build all sorts of ships, economically it needs to build ships, not just to inject liquidity into local economies, but to keep the shipyards functioning so as to not lose the capability. Some doctrine can be forensically figured from seeing what ships are there, and I suspect that some things; like the fact battles can happen when a enemy fleet instantly appears, that BB's can then quickly jump away that make them very advantageous over BR's. Rather than a tender having to jump away without most of it's BR's, leaving them to whatever their fate may be.

 

[robject]

That's a good point, Dragoner. However, why not build cruisers, which give you more bang for your buck?

In High Guard, Spine is King. The more spines you can field, the better -- within certain parameters. The spine has to be effective against the enemy of course, but nothing else is as effective as a spine.

Now, if there are ship-killer torpedos, then perhaps there is something as effective as a spine. You get concepts like salvos and minefields, which were in HG version 1 but abandoned in v2. Potentially, those can level a playing field a bit.

 

[Dragoner]

The Imperium does build cruisers, so if you can build them all, why not? The cruiser seems less multi-role, I have used the Ghalak in more campaigns than any other ship though.

An easy fix to the rules (but not ships as they are designed), would be to allow one spinal mount per 100k tons. Then the Tigeress with 5 spinals really becomes a monster.

 

[travlar]

The problem with multiple spinal mounts on a ship is that, IMO, it seems rather stupid. A bigger one, maybe, but how are you going to get all five to hit the same target? It'd be hard enough with one. Maybe bigger spinal mounts should be allowed, or maybe they shouldn't be so comparatively powerful, or maybe just less accurate, so that they aren't the only thing that matters. And, of course, there need to be fewer one-hit-kills that ignore the size of the target.

 

[Dragoner]

With Meson Guns, the term spinal doesn't even make as much sense, as it shoots though objects, thus it could be on a gimbal mount inside the ship. C-PaWS yes (and the A-PaWS from JTAS) yes, because they have to shoot a direct line of particles at another ship. I suppose you could mount them in large enough armored spheres externally, of course we are talking 200k+ ton BB's.

 

[The Oz]

As far as putting multiple spinals on a single ship, I used the analogy that a regular turret (1 dton) is one percent of the smallest ship (100 dtons), so if one percent is the size of a "traversable weapon" then you could say that spinal mounts can be made into "turrets" if the spinal is one percent (or less) of the ship's total tonnage.

This allows me to create my Tigress-X class, with a single f-T spinal meson gun and 4 factor-R meson guns as "secondary" armament. She's still got 400 missile bays, and the 300 50-ton fighters, too.

Add in the rules Mike and I thought up to make big ships more durable in HG combat and this is a Dreadnought!

 

[rancke]

So the problem is not the designer of the Tigress, but rather a deficit within High Guard itself, as well as something missing in Traveller that explains the value of battleships.

I don't believe this new idea does, though. I think it represents a complete (probably unintentional) paradigm shift.

Yes, you get a reason to buy big expensive ships even though their combat value isn't much bigger than that of a heavy cruiser. But the problem that your big expensive ships don't have a combat value much bigger than that of a heavy cruiser remains. These big ships wouldn't be organized in squadrons. Each of them would be the nucleus of a squadron of heavy cruisers. And if the squadron became engaged with the enemy, the cruisers would do their best to keep their big mobile logistical support ship out of line of fire. They wouldn't be line-of-battle ships, they'd be mobile bases[*].

[*] And I have to ask, isn't logistical support what you have navy bases for?​

The discrepancy between the setting description of cruisers and battleships and the optimal ship design according to HG (and other ship design systems) remains the same: Cruisers are described a heavily armed but lightly armored and battleships as armored enough to take a licking and keep on ticking. But HG allows cruisers to be as well armored as battleships (which isn't very well against a meson-T spinal).

I'd suggest a) tinkering with the combat result table to make bigger ships less vulnerable and b) tinkering with meson screens to make them relatively more expensive (in money and/or tonnage) for cruisers than for battleships.

Off the top of my head, the critical hit table might look something like this:

(2D)

  0      Ship vaporized.
  1      Ship vaporized.
  2      Ship vaporized.
3-11   {Assorted nasty results.}
 12     Roll on Interior Explosion Damage Table
 13     Roll on Interior Explosion Damage Table
 14     Roll on Interior Explosion Damage Table

DMs: Escort -2, light cruiser -1, heavy cruiser 0, small battleship +1, big battleship +2

As for meson screens, allow screen factors above 9, make the per unit cost (in money and tonnage) much bigger (a factor 10, perhaps?), and make the power requirements for a given factor bigger for smaller ships and less for bigger ships.

Oh, and change that "Fuel Tanks Shattered" on the Interior Explosion Damage Table to "Fuel Tank Shattered".


Hans

 

[rancke]

The problem with multiple spinal mounts on a ship is that, IMO, it seems rather stupid. A bigger one, maybe, but how are you going to get all five to hit the same target? It'd be hard enough with one. Maybe bigger spinal mounts should be allowed, or maybe they shouldn't be so comparatively powerful, or maybe just less accurate, so that they aren't the only thing that matters. And, of course, there need to be fewer one-hit-kills that ignore the size of the target.

For a while I had the idea that bigger spinals had longer ranges, allowing a battleship one or more free shots as the poor cruisers strove valiantly to close the gap and get into firing range. But that idea went up in smoke when it was pointed out to me that you could put a factor-T meson spinal in a 25,000T rider or a heavy cruiser. And the description of cruisers does imply that they can be as well armed as battleships; the big difference is (supposedly) that cruisers can't stand up to those spinals while battleships can (for a while).


Hans

 

[Starviking]

For a while I had the idea that bigger spinals had longer ranges, allowing a battleship one or more free shots as the poor cruisers strove valiantly to close the gap and get into firing range. But that idea went up in smoke when it was pointed out to me that you could put a factor-T meson spinal in a 25,000T rider or a heavy cruiser. And the description of cruisers does imply that they can be as well armed as battleships; the big difference is (supposedly) that cruisers can't stand up to those spinals while battleships can (for a while).


Hans

But then that's just a reflection of the ship design system - it's hard to believe that the Imperium's weapons design teams can't design a longer-ranged meson gun. Indeed it can be done in FFS and FFS2.

 

[rancke]

But then that's just a reflection of the ship design system - it's hard to believe that the Imperium's weapons design teams can't design a longer-ranged meson gun. Indeed it can be done in FFS and FFS2.

Yes, and one could justify giving bigger ships longer ranges (e.g. Range depends on the length of the gun and ship size imposes a practical limit to the length of its spinal). This wouldn't even require any change of the design system; simply assume that if a ship has a higher size class, it gets to shoot first and for every full Y size classes a ship is bigger, it gets one free shot. The rider and the battleship may both have factor-T spinals, but the battleship gets to shoot three or four times before the rider gets a chance (In fact, if the battleship is as fast as the rider, it might be able to keep the same distance indefinitely, provided it was tactically possible to retreat).

But it still wouldn't make battleships better able to stand the opponent's fire, so a retcon of the flavor text would still be required. Not that that isn't an option.


Hans

 

[Dragoner]

As far as putting multiple spinals on a single ship, I used the analogy that a regular turret (1 dton) is one percent of the smallest ship (100 dtons), so if one percent is the size of a "traversable weapon" then you could say that spinal mounts can be made into "turrets" if the spinal is one percent (or less) of the ship's total tonnage.

This allows me to create my Tigress-X class, with a single f-T spinal meson gun and 4 factor-R meson guns as "secondary" armament. She's still got 400 missile bays, and the 300 50-ton fighters, too.

Add in the rules Mike and I thought up to make big ships more durable in HG combat and this is a Dreadnought!

Just add the one simple rule, no need to get too complex, and it makes BB's work, esp. if they get initiative and get five shots first.

 

[robject]

Just add the one simple rule, no need to get too complex, and it makes BB's work, esp. if they get initiative and get five shots first.

Allow a compound-barrel spine, which gives them a correspondingly greater rate of fire.

So a T2 meson spine is two T meson spines, together, both bearing. Silimarly T3, T4, T5...

 

[Dragoner]

Allow a compound-barrel spine, which gives them a correspondingly greater rate of fire.

So a T2 meson spine is two T meson spines, together, both bearing. Silimarly T3, T4, T5...

The only real effect would be on already designed BB's like the Tigress or Plankwell (and could be the reason for the Korriak's obsolesence), a couple of ships, which could be fixed in a T5 supplement.

 

[The Oz]

I do think that the real problems with OTU battleships is not a lack of firepower (430 missile bays on a Tigress is =plenty= of firepower!) but a lack of staying power. Battleships are just as easy to kill in straight HG rules as much smaller vessels, and that's what really needs to be fixed.

Indeed, adding more firepower without adding more staying power makes a BB a more lucrative target; you get to wipe out 5 enemy spinal mounts with one lucky critical hit.