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Trade Empire-class Commercial Transport

Independence Games

Independence Games

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Some art from the upcoming Trade Empire-class Commercial Freighter which will be available at DTRPG and the Independence Games webstore on March 24.

This 4500-tonne superfreighter can be found in Earth Sector most often used by large shipping corporations. The vessel seen here is in the livery of the British Interstellar Company.

Art seen here by Ian Stead.

Iq9pItql.png
 
Wow, this is nice!
It’s funny, just the other day I was lookin for a ship just like this one! Saves me the trouble of designing one in my own :)

There’s one thing I can’t quite wrap my head around though: where do the 20 gunners have their duty stations? As specified on p.8 none of the turrets can be reached from within the ship, and while p.25 does show a “turret fire control” room (6) it doesn’t appear nearly large enough for all the gunners?

Oh and minor detail, but p.33 has the cargo hold labeled as “Aft hold, 2 decks” but it looks like this is “Main hold (aft), 3 decks”?

Great ship design, love it!
 
There is a gunnery station for gunners controlling batteries on deck 4 and of course the bridge also have centralised control.

I do not subscribe to the old Traveller trope of having a gunner each manually controlling a turret. Excepting of course for adventure class ships.

Page 33? Yeah. Agree, so will look into that.
 
OK, but isn’t that why the Auto Gunner software exists? Which the ship doesn’t have, though it does have Fire Control /1 which seems a bit odd for a ship like this..?

And why even include 20 gunners among the crew if they‘re not deemed necessary and don’t have any place to do their work from..?
 
Last edited:
madmike said:
I do not subscribe to the old Traveller trope of having a gunner each manually controlling a turret.
Click to expand...
It's a fuzzy thing.

My personal take is that putting someone physically IN the turrets to crew them is an outdated mid-70s idea (when CT was originally being written). There are going to be some cases where that kind of thing makes sense, so it should be an option ... but I wouldn't take it as far as making it mandatory.

A much more reasonable take is that you need a gunner commanding a battery of turrets from ... somewhere ... whether that be physically inside one (with the others slaved to match it for salvo fire) or from a fire control center remotely directing the fire of each battery. If you have multiple batteries of a weapon type, then there needs to be a commander (petty officer) who is the fire of each battery.
  • Battery 1! Shoot target A!
  • Battery 2! Shoot target B!
That kind of thing.
If you have 2 Fire Teams (of 4 people), you need a leader for those 2 Fire Teams in order to make a Squad (4+4+1=9 people).
If you have 2 Squads (of 9 people), you need a leader for those 2 Squads to make a Section (9+9+1=19 people).
Same basic idea.

Leadership of multiple batteries, so as to be able to direct fire at potentially multiple targets, requires additional people giving orders to the individual battery gunners.
But if you're the only one ... you don't need another layer in the chain of command above you to tell you what to do.

So there's a bit of a mixture and it kind of depends on scaling (how many weapons, how many types, how many batteries are they organized into, blah blah blah).

Or to put it another way, if you've got a 1000 ton ship armed with 10 triple laser turrets organized into a single battery ... you don't need 10 gunners (1 per turret) ... you need 1 gunner coordinating fire for that entire battery. Since there are no other weapons or batteries (in this example), you don't need an extra petty officer for the lasers and you don't need a gunnery chief on top of that. One person can control the entire battery of 30 lasers in 10 turrets from their workstation in the fire control center. They direct the battery and push the FIRE! button (hopefully when it's on target and will hit something).

It's not a "pure" interpretation of LBB2.81 nor of LBB5.80 ... but it's one of those things that starts making more sense when you really think about it from a crew perspective, rather than from a rules perspective.

The crew needs should dictate the "shape" the rules take ... not the reverse, where the rules needs should dictate the "shape" the crew must assume (or else!).

guidlines-pirates-of-the-caribbean.gif
 
Spinward Flow said:
It's a fuzzy thing.

My personal take is that putting someone physically IN the turrets to crew them is an outdated mid-70s idea (when CT was originally being written). There are going to be some cases where that kind of thing makes sense, so it should be an option ... but I wouldn't take it as far as making it mandatory.

A much more reasonable take is that you need a gunner commanding a battery of turrets from ... somewhere ... whether that be physically inside one (with the others slaved to match it for salvo fire) or from a fire control center remotely directing the fire of each battery. If you have multiple batteries of a weapon type, then there needs to be a commander (petty officer) who is the fire of each battery.
  • Battery 1! Shoot target A!
  • Battery 2! Shoot target B!
That kind of thing.
If you have 2 Fire Teams (of 4 people), you need a leader for those 2 Fire Teams in order to make a Squad (4+4+1=9 people).
If you have 2 Squads (of 9 people), you need a leader for those 2 Squads to make a Section (9+9+1=19 people).
Same basic idea.

Leadership of multiple batteries, so as to be able to direct fire at potentially multiple targets, requires additional people giving orders to the individual battery gunners.
But if you're the only one ... you don't need another layer in the chain of command above you to tell you what to do.

So there's a bit of a mixture and it kind of depends on scaling (how many weapons, how many types, how many batteries are they organized into, blah blah blah).

Or to put it another way, if you've got a 1000 ton ship armed with 10 triple laser turrets organized into a single battery ... you don't need 10 gunners (1 per turret) ... you need 1 gunner coordinating fire for that entire battery. Since there are no other weapons or batteries (in this example), you don't need an extra petty officer for the lasers and you don't need a gunnery chief on top of that. One person can control the entire battery of 30 lasers in 10 turrets from their workstation in the fire control center. They direct the battery and push the FIRE! button (hopefully when it's on target and will hit something).

It's not a "pure" interpretation of LBB2.81 nor of LBB5.80 ... but it's one of those things that starts making more sense when you really think about it from a crew perspective, rather than from a rules perspective.

The crew needs should dictate the "shape" the rules take ... not the reverse, where the rules needs should dictate the "shape" the crew must assume (or else!).

guidlines-pirates-of-the-caribbean.gif
Click to expand...
Completely agree. This applies equally to military vessels as well, though they have crew that sole specialty is gunnery. For a civilian ship the crew tends to have other duties to perform aside from manning a gunnery station.

I was hovering around having a similar arrangement for adventure class ships but it was opined to me that for a gaming group with some group members (the crew) not specialising in ship operations manning a turret would be more fun during a gaming session. I certainly agree with that approach and so include manned turrets in smaller ships, BUT the turrets can be controlled centrally as well. Flexibility is the key :)

All the Clement and Earth Sector ships are designed using Anderson and Felix Guide to Naval Architecture (which I also wrote) and that system certainly does have ancestral roots to LLB5.80 and MgT 1e SRD. Why? Because they work.

All good questions to ask!
 
madmike said:
I was hovering around having a similar arrangement for adventure class ships but it was opined to me that for a gaming group with some group members (the crew) not specialising in ship operations manning a turret would be more fun during a gaming session. I certainly agree with that approach and so include manned turrets in smaller ships, BUT the turrets can be controlled centrally as well. Flexibility is the key :)
Click to expand...

I feel that it should be noted that this is my position and I've imposed on it on all books written for Clement Sector and Earth Sector. So if anyone wants to throw blame at anyone, it should rest solely on me and not Michael.

Insisting that characters be able to use the turrets is a gaming decision that has very little to do with Traveller, other editions, or Star Wars (as is often thrown my way as well). It has everything to do with getting characters into a "hands-on" position where they are making a difference. It also gives the ability to have multiple characters playing gunners.

The game I ran for years (from the late 80s until the late 00s) from which the published versions of Clement Sector arise had player counts of 10+ and, on more than one occasion, 15+. Positions were needed that would give everyone something to do and this one was one of the decisions made. Until covid hit, I would run games at conventions with up to 12 players. Again, from a gaming standpoint, it's important to give everyone something to do. From a promotional standpoint (and that's why I run games at conventions), it is important to reach as many as possible and make sure they have fun playing the game.

Games which have fewer players should have the option of automating those systems (and any other system) to avoid the Referee playing several NPCs. So it remains an option in my books.

As for realism, I'm making a game and not a factual simulation of future life. I want people to have fun. In my opinion, almost all systems in a futuristic spacecraft will automated and the entire idea of having a human crew doing anything on board other than monitoring and maintenance is a bit silly. From that "realistic" standpoint, then not only should there only be one gunnery station controlling all turrets (and possibly be automated to make up for the speed at which things would be moving) but there should also be automated piloting, astrogation, etc. So, in my opinion, if you're making a "realistic" game, you're going to have a human crew doing almost nothing. While you might be able to make a game of that which you find entertaining, it is not a game I'd want to play nor is it a game I'd want to produce.
 
For the record, I wasn’t criticizing, I was just curious.

I agree that there should be no need to physically sit in the turret to fire it, and I’m fine with one gunners handling several turrets (though I’d prefer if that’s done with the aid of e.g the computer program specifically designed to handle turrets).

As far as I can see, while it isn’t stated as a requirement, your rulebook seems to recommend one gunner per turret, and it’s ship seems to follow that recommendation.

Naturally, on a civilian ship, gunner duty isn’t a 24/7 job, so they would have other duties to tend to as well, but if and when the ship comes under attack, I saw no obvious duty station for the majority of the gunnery crew, hence my question.

One thing I love about this book btw is the attention to little details, such as having access corridors so it’s possible to move between cargo holds without depressurizing the entire ship or having to open the huge cargo doors.
 
Independence Games said:
It has everything to do with getting characters into a "hands-on" position where they are making a difference.
Click to expand...
Commanding a battery of turrets with a "man in the loop" cycle of target designation and authorization to fire makes perfect sense.

Putting people IN turrets so they can B-17 ball gunner the bandits within visual range through the windows makes NO SENSE whatsoever in the context of space combat (where point blank ranges don't even begin until well past visual range!). When your engagement range is measured in LIGHT-SECONDS there's simply no way you're going to be able to use what amounts to iron sights and a "hands on" approach to aiming turrets at targets.

The model for operations you want to be using is a sensor fusion of targeting information that lets the gunner pick what to direct hatred at. It's that "choosing" that is the gunner's useful contribution to the process. After that, it's the computers and the servos that do all the work of actually executing the command action(s) as directed by the gunner using sensor data inputs. So in that respect, it's more submarine-ish in terms of fire control stations (away from the weapons), rather than needing to squeeze INTO a turret and do all the important decision work inside each turret individually. These aren't muzzle loader cannons we're dealing with here, nor are they "crew served weapons" like a machine gunner plus ammo specialist assisting the feed or a towed artillery piece manned by a crew of multiple gunners.

That said, having backup systems inside each turret so in the event of a casualty that damages communications between fire control and individual turrets, the individual turrets CAN be internally manned and still operated ... that makes sense. But sticking people into turrets as the First Resort? Nope, not buying that one (anymore). Computers and automation will take a tremendous amount of workload off the gunners, leaving them with the critical task of making decisions and issuing orders for the automated systems to carry out (shoot THIS not THAT being a high priority for sophont pattern recognition processors).

It's kind of like how I can build a fire in my house ... but I usually don't climb INTO the fireplace to do it.
I enjoy the warmth of the crackling fire from the couch, not inside the chimney flue.
I don't have to be IN the fire in order to take control of it ... that's what the hearthstones are for.



Not razzing on you John Watts specifically ... just pointing out that the context of space combat bears little resemblance to the Battle of Britain or the War in the Pacific, where visual range was the limit of the "sensors" used in 3D air combat in the 40s.
 
Spinward Flow said:
Commanding a battery of turrets with a "man in the loop" cycle of target designation and authorization to fire makes perfect sense.

Putting people IN turrets so they can B-17 ball gunner the bandits within visual range through the windows makes NO SENSE whatsoever in the context of space combat (where point blank ranges don't even begin until well past visual range!). When your engagement range is measured in LIGHT-SECONDS there's simply no way you're going to be able to use what amounts to iron sights and a "hands on" approach to aiming turrets at targets.

The model for operations you want to be using is a sensor fusion of targeting information that lets the gunner pick what to direct hatred at. It's that "choosing" that is the gunner's useful contribution to the process. After that, it's the computers and the servos that do all the work of actually executing the command action(s) as directed by the gunner using sensor data inputs. So in that respect, it's more submarine-ish in terms of fire control stations (away from the weapons), rather than needing to squeeze INTO a turret and do all the important decision work inside each turret individually. These aren't muzzle loader cannons we're dealing with here, nor are they "crew served weapons" like a machine gunner plus ammo specialist assisting the feed or a towed artillery piece manned by a crew of multiple gunners.

That said, having backup systems inside each turret so in the event of a casualty that damages communications between fire control and individual turrets, the individual turrets CAN be internally manned and still operated ... that makes sense. But sticking people into turrets as the First Resort? Nope, not buying that one (anymore). Computers and automation will take a tremendous amount of workload off the gunners, leaving them with the critical task of making decisions and issuing orders for the automated systems to carry out (shoot THIS not THAT being a high priority for sophont pattern recognition processors).

It's kind of like how I can build a fire in my house ... but I usually don't climb INTO the fireplace to do it.
I enjoy the warmth of the crackling fire from the couch, not inside the chimney flue.
I don't have to be IN the fire in order to take control of it ... that's what the hearthstones are for.



Not razzing on you John Watts specifically ... just pointing out that the context of space combat bears little resemblance to the Battle of Britain or the War in the Pacific, where visual range was the limit of the "sensors" used in 3D air combat in the 40s.
Click to expand...

Again, I'll point out that I agree with you on the reality of the situation. You're absolutely correct that in a real space combat scenario having a person climb into a turret to shoot at oncoming ships/missiles/vehicles/etc. makes no sense. Giving more examples of how it's true in reality isn't changing anything. I fully understand the reality of the situation. You aren't telling me anything that I don't already know. Please do not assume that I do not understand this.

Again, I'll point out that I'm not creating a game which is a simulation of how I think space combat will be in the future. You have very effectively pointed out that "real space combat" will not be as imagined in this game. You're quite right. It does seem odd to only include gunners as unrealistic while all of the other shipboard positions that will also be just as ludicrous do not get this scrutiny.

Honestly, I could sit here the rest of the day and point out all of the other places where reality and my game do not intersect. For instance, as Westerns are a huge influence on the game, most players are quick to pull a gun on someone with whom they have a disagreement and I don't think that's a viable strategy in reality either. It wasn't even a viable strategy in the real Old West.

Clement Sector and Earth Sector are space opera games. They operate within that framework. There's a LOT about them that will not be realistic. This is by design and not out of ignorance.
 
Spinward Flow said:
"Main phaser banks manned and ready, sir."
- Mr. Sulu (numerous times)

There certainly is an impulse in space opera towards wooden ships and iron men.
Click to expand...

The actual phaser banks are controlled from "Phaser Control" not the individual phasers. This is shown in S1E14 Episode "Balance of Terror", where we see Phaser Chief Tomlinson and his phaser crews working the various Phaser Banks (Batteries) from multiple crew stations.

Also the fact that when the Coolant Leak incapacitates the Phaser Fire Control Team, Spock has to enter the space and manually fire weapons, implies that each individual Phaser doesn't have a crew "in" the weapon that can fire the Phaser in "Local" Mode if needed.

So in Star Trek it can have a WWII Surface Action or Age Of Sail vide depending on needs of Plot.

:)
 
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