The description first says that their secondary armament render then virtually immune to missile and small craft attack. It then goes on
"...while their bulk provides a tremendous ability to absorb damage and keep fighting."
Hans
The Compleat Battleship
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That obviously does not refer to damage from missiles and small craft since the secondary armament is supposed to prevent that in the first place. What other 'trememdous damage' does a battleship face in the line of battle? The meson guns of the opposing line of battle.
Hans
Riders are ment to be able to take on Battleships, that is their function. There is also Black Globe Generators, Force Fields, which protect against Meson Guns.
No it's all the same sentence, so the sentence is only about missiles and small attack craft, not meson guns. Further, it states that BB's have much the same main armament as CA's, which is an admission of a certain weakness.
Here is the sentence:
While battleships (or, as they are often called, dreadnaughts) generally have little
better in the way of primary armament than cruisers, their extensive secondary
batteries render them virtually immune to missile and small craft attack while their
bulk provides a tremendous ability to absorb damage and keep fighting.
It's not much to go on either way, being just one sentence. Cruisers are said to be able to take on "large armored ships" and also be up to 100,000 tons, which is the size of the Sylea, which is called a Battleship (Plankwells and Kokirraks are 200k tons only somewhat larger).
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To add another factor to the BB equation: in order to jump away from the fight the ship needs to be fueled. So how much fuel do these things carry anyway? If you have a BG and extra capacitors you can route the absorbed energy into the jump drives - provided you survive the fight. But L-Hyd takes up a lot of fuel and none of the BB's ever carry more than enough to make a single jump equal to their rating.
Naturally the strategic consequences of jump limits and gas giants are taken into account by High Command, but still...how stupid does the enemy have to be to leave gas giants unprotected when there is a war on, and it takes so long to fuel a fleet by skimming that that sort of operation alone deserves a lot of consideration.
If you take "oilers" with you then you might conduct refuel ops while moving from the entry jump point. Then disengage the oilers to advance the line of battle forward, while the oilers head to the gas giant, or other source of refueling away from the lines, to tank up again if possible.
So to be really survivable against a battle rider a jump -capable BB must be able to jump without having to refuel first while under fire or how can it be meeting the retreat requirements? The battle riders can pursue the BB to the bitter end otherwise - which for me has always been the problem with the whole battle riders vs. jump ship argument: the ability to escape has always hinged on fuel the BB might not have after entering the system to fight.
Naturally the strategic consequences of jump limits and gas giants are taken into account by High Command, but still...how stupid does the enemy have to be to leave gas giants unprotected when there is a war on, and it takes so long to fuel a fleet by skimming that that sort of operation alone deserves a lot of consideration.
If you take "oilers" with you then you might conduct refuel ops while moving from the entry jump point. Then disengage the oilers to advance the line of battle forward, while the oilers head to the gas giant, or other source of refueling away from the lines, to tank up again if possible.
So to be really survivable against a battle rider a jump -capable BB must be able to jump without having to refuel first while under fire or how can it be meeting the retreat requirements? The battle riders can pursue the BB to the bitter end otherwise - which for me has always been the problem with the whole battle riders vs. jump ship argument: the ability to escape has always hinged on fuel the BB might not have after entering the system to fight.
I suspect the real problem was that HG wasn't adequately play tested, or at least the testing suffered from a large factor of GIGO. My preferred solution is not to make big ships stronger, but small mesons less effective (the armour solution suggested here is a good one IMHO). If a J meson can no longer guarantee a kill, then you need to build the bigger ships to carry the bigger guns.
Riders are supposed to be more effective than ships of the same size. Ships are supposed to be less effective than riders, but not so much less that they're not a viable alternative. Under the HG rules, riders are so much better than ships that such is not the case.
IMO there's something wrong when a 25,000T vessel is able to go toe-to-toe with a 500,000T so-called battleship.
Hans
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I think you're looking at apples and oranges.
Yes the rider will always be significantly better than a ship. This is a byproduct of requiring the ship to dedicate 40%+ of it volume to jump fuel and then to have to provide armour and agility for it. Its going to be a problem in any rule set (though I'd imagine its not quite as bad when mass is taken into account as it has been in every set since HG).
BUT riders and ships are apples and oranges. They both have very different roles.
The rider (yes even when you use my favoured single rider tender) is essentially an offensive weapon with serious limitations on its use either in peacetime or on the defensive. Yes they're pretty much unbeatable if your launching an offensive, but other than that they can't really do much. Riders really aren't that good at routine patrol work or showing the flag. 90%+ of a capital ships life will be spent doing these. Its possibly a good thing they are damn cost effective, because they're so specialised you really can't afford to have too many of them.
The battleship on the other hand is a multirole vessel. They hold the line in war and in peace (and states spend far far far more time at peace than war) they are the workhorse capital ships. They need to be designed to a very different set of specs from the rider. First off, they don't need the same strategic mobility. Riders need to have J4-6, a ship can make do with J3. In war they stand on the defensive, so only need enough to fall back. And in peace J3 is sufficient for patrol work.
Most navies will build a mix of riders and battleships. The riders will be concentrated in central fleets, possibly even spending much of their lives actually in ordinary, only mobilised when war threatens. Battleships will be frontier, patrolling, showing the flag to reassure allies and deter enemies (showing the flag is a delicate business, too much flag and you end up intimidating allies and provoking enemies). In war they are intended only to slow down and weaken an enemy while you bring up your own riders to counter attack.
Riders more than likely spend most of their lives in ordinary, acting as giant SDBs guarding fixed points, or otherwise swinging around their anchors. Mostly you don't see them, there's just not that much for them to do in peacetime. Battleships on the other hand are the visible face of the navy. They patrol, children crawl all over them on navy days, they visit friends and foe alike. When you think navy, you think battleship.
Andrew
There are always L-Hyd drop tanks or strategically jumping in with enough fuel to only make a J1 out again if one needs to.
Look at the definition of Battleship in supp 8, it is talking of Riders in the same sentence. 25k ton vessel when hit with a T spinal meson automatically takes 7 criticals and 21 rolls on both the radiation and interior explosion table. The 500k ton ship doesn't take the criticals when hit with the same weapon, both would be dead in the water, but the Imperium never meets a 25k ton Rider with a T Meson Gun, except maybe from the Hivers. I'm not sure how possible a T Meson 25k ton Rider is. The terms cruiser and battleship overlap however.
There is more than big spinal slug fests I presume, and I doubt the Imperium ever goes in 1 to 1, plus it has other ships as well including Riders. A lot of this would actually have to be played out to be seen to be true or not, creating threat fleets, like Zhodani and Imperium and playing them out across the Spinward Marches. High Guard has a tendency to become dice rolling madness with fleets of capital ships.
This quote, and Andrew's last post, is illuminating.
Could the solution be as simple as tweaking the Meson Attack table? (No, I guess not; cruisers would benefit as well, keeping the field unchanged).
Hey - is there a reason that battleships aren't all dispersed structures?
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25Kton T gun rider? possible? very
Ship: FI0
Class: FI0
Type: Battlerider
Architect: Andrew Vallance
Tech Level: 15
USP
BR-L106FJ3-B99909-999T9-0 MCr 19,837.062 22 KTons
Bat Bear 6 3 11113 Crew: 262
Bat 6 3 11113 TL: 15
Cargo: 114 Fuel: 3,300.000 EP: 3,300 Agility: 6 Shipboard Security Detail: 22
Craft: 4 x 30T Boats
Fuel Treatment: Fuel Scoops and On Board Fuel Purification
Architects Fee: MCr 198.371 Cost in Quantity: MCr 15,869.650
Nice. Ok, so this represents an Imperial ship, iirc both the Zhodani and Solomani are still TL 14. How would it fare against a fleet of missile boats or fighters?
Even relatively small riders (about 25-30 kton range) may carry a T rated meson spinal, so it wouldn't work either...
Tweaking ith meson tables (making them harder to hit and penetrate) may perhaps work in HG, but not on MT, where the Tactics pool rule will give you +8 in any roll you make with your spinal.
The best solution I've readed for now seems to change 'Fuel tanks Shattered' to 'Fuel tank Shattered', with loss of a fixed (or I suggested rating deppendant) amount of fuel. As BBs carry quite more fuel than BRs, that would make them more thought in battle, and the fact that their size avoids criticals more so.
This would also make refuelling the first priority of any fleet even more than now.
Ahhh, but that's the rider vs ship problem. Very different from the capital vs cruiser problem. Also I don't actually think this is a problem.
Logically, a ship that doesn't have to armour or move huge extra amounts of fuel (something that has no combat value) will always be SIGNIFICANTLY better than one that does. Plus canon quite clearly states that the OTU navies all build the cutting edge of their fleets around riders. So no problem there. And I've laid out in a separate post the very different roles of ships and riders.
I don't think you want to tweak the to hit/penetrate rolls, you need to alter the damage end of the equation. Introduce a mechanism to reduce the number of extra hits and criticals of mesons and the J gun rapidly becomes little more effective than an A gun.
Their primary purpose is the same. To stand in the line of battle opposite the enemy line of battle and beat them. Secondary purposes and deployment tactics may differ, but essentially their purpose is to bring a spinal gun into range of the enemy and shoot at him.
Why is a rider/tender (especially your single rider tender) ill suited for peacetime deployment? What tasks can a battleship perform that the tender can't? I have to tell you that I'm not impressed with the psycological warfare suggestions.
This sounds like an unsupported and untested theory. Any way to substantiate it?
I don't see why riders need J4-6. But apart from that, what peacetime functions can a 300,000T battleship perform that a half-squadron of 75,000T cruisers can't?
No, they'd built a mixture of riders and heavy cruisers. And if they did build any 500,000T ships, they would be very reluctant to put them into the line of battle.
Hans
Wait, what? The sentence isn't about missiles and small craft, it's about battleships. Why would you say that battleships are virtually immune to one type of attack while they also can absorb tremendous amount of damage if you're only talking about the one type of attack? If they're virtually immune, why would you care that you can take a lot of damage from that type of attack and still function? Besides, if that was the case, 'and' would be more appropriate than 'while.'
"While" and "and" perform the same function grammatically, the real separator would be a semi-colon. Otherwise the sentence does seem redundant, but that is the way it is structured. Any other assumptions are merely those of the reader.
The Tigress class is the only one we know of (and there is somewhere between 160 and 225 of them, depending on how you interpret the information that they're generally assigned one squadron per sector). It's the biggest class deployed in the Marches, but some older battleships of greater displacement remain in service [FS:38].
I don't think a 75,000T cruiser is almost the same ship as a 300,000T battleship. Almost as effective, yes, but only one quarter the cost.
Hans
There are no 300,00 ton BB's afiak, Plankwell and Kokirrak are 200k ton each. Both CA's and BB's can be 100,000 tons, thus class distinction is by name only. Ship effectiveness has to be supported: in force, in fleets; representing various ideas about ships does not necessarily have relevance to the OTU IN.
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