Traveller warships are WWII navy, but without a major piece

[Garyius2003]

Traveller fleets of what ever system are the fleets from WWII. The Happy Fun Ball is the IJN hybrid carrier/battleship. The Fiery is the PT boat, cruisers, fighters...

However, there is not a torpedo, so the carriers and fighters and Gazelle does not make sense. I know Mongoose has torpedoes as a listed weapon, but in terms of effect they are 5" guns, not ship killers.

The IJN lost their superdreadnaughts to a ship killer, in fact both sides lost plenty to the torps. The IJN Long Lance was terrible against the US.

Without that piece, there is no reason for the close escort or for the destroyer. Hang some turrets on the supply ships and send a light cruiser along in case a commerce raider shows up at a fueling point, and be done with it. For policing, hang a PA turret on far trader and upgrade the MD to 4. Scouts are used for scouting.

 

[Matt123]

lol, you must be bored to poke this one.

The analogy to surface ship combat is tenuous at best and if you hadn't already pointed out the lack of small ship portable capital ship killers, I would have, as evidence of the poor analogy.

The OTU took a different design take on capital ship killing weapons; they belong on capital ships.

And FWIW, if they were available, there would be no capital ships in traveller worthy of combat aside from barely armed Carriers. If I wanted a Carrier game, I'd pull out Harpoon instead.

Cheers!

 

[McPerth]

The role of the close escort is not in major military actions, but in anti-piracy and convoy escort (against pirates, not against major fleet units).

Destroyers are escorts against fighters (while at TL 15 they are mostly useless, except against unarmored ships, not so at lower TLs) and landing support ships (ortillery, etc). Even at TL 15, should fighters be able to attack your carriers/tenders (that use to be config 7, and so unarmored) or unarmored auxiliaries (as tankers), they can wreack havoc there..

Off course, all may find in the main battlelines on occasion, despite not being its main role, as the US cruisers found on it in WWII due to the loss of its Battleship Fleet at Pearl harbour.

 

[Carlobrand]

Traveller fleets of what ever system are the fleets from WWII. ...However, there is not a torpedo, so the carriers and fighters and Gazelle does not make sense. ...

If the Traveller fleets lack a "ship-killer" small-ship weapon, then perhaps they are not in fact "the fleets from WWII." Traveller fighters - and therefore carriers - are pretty pathetic compared to the performance of their WWII counterparts because the most powerful weapon for something that small can be stopped by a nuclear damper. So, perhaps the WW-II paradigm is not the best paradigm for the fleets of Traveller.

Tactical naval combat is ultimately about being more successful in applying destructive energy to a chosen target than that target is in applying such energy to you. WW-I made the battleship queen in that role - big gun, well-armored. WW-II made the airplane queen in that role - vulnerable but plentiful and hard to stop, and packing a deadly punch.

In the high-tech Traveller universe, NEITHER end of the spectrum is very effective: small craft can't carry enough punch and can't deliver without becoming impractically expensive, and the biggest ships pack good punch but can be taken out of the fight by a single hard hit from a spinal meson. Instead, the queen is the mid-size ship or craft: big enough to carry that big punch, small enough to be expendable. I'm not exactly a naval history expert, but I don't know of an historical paradigm that fits that model.

Without that piece, there is no reason for the close escort or for the destroyer. Hang some turrets on the supply ships and send a light cruiser along in case a commerce raider shows up at a fueling point, and be done with it. For policing, hang a PA turret on far trader and upgrade the MD to 4. Scouts are used for scouting.

I am presuming by your mention of light cruisers that you're dealing with High Guard, not Book-2. A light cruiser costs in the rough vicinity of 15-20,000 megacredits. A commerce-raiding High-Guard-design 1000 dT destroyer escort with a model-9 costs about a twentieth of that. While it is no match for the light cruiser, you can put twenty of the things in twenty different places while the light cruiser is defending one. Unless your supply ship likewise has a high-end computer - or is blessed with very good armor - it is not going to fare well by itself when the raiding DE shows up.

As for Book-2, well, there's no Book-2 "light cruiser" for comparison, but the same basic idea applies - cheaper means you can cover more area. Your best bet for the mission is the least expensive ship that can knock down the transport itself, since that allows you to cover more ground and obligates the enemy to likewise get a lot of lower-cost ships to defend the same ground. There are no Book-2 rules that I know of to cover a Gazelle's PA guns, but between its 5G drives and its Model-6 computer's ability to run a very good array of combat-related programs, and if those PAs behave anything remotely like the High Guard PAs, it'd have to be a pretty large and well-equipped freighter with a good computer of its own to have a chance against a Gazelle.

 

[Dagrill]

If the Traveller fleets lack a "ship-killer" small-ship weapon, then perhaps they are not in fact "the fleets from WWII."

In the high-tech Traveller universe, NEITHER end of the spectrum is very effective: small craft can't carry enough punch and can't deliver without becoming impractically expensive, and the biggest ships pack good punch but can be taken out of the fight by a single hard hit from a spinal meson. Instead, the queen is the mid-size ship or craft: big enough to carry that big punch, small enough to be expendable. I'm not exactly a naval history expert, but I don't know of an historical paradigm that fits that model.
.

Hi,

excellent commentry, the only time I can think of when such a thing was possible would be mid 19th Century, with a steam powered Ironclad with a rifled cannon against sail powered wooden battleship and wooden cruiser/sloop, possibly steam assisted, but I have no idea on the relative costs of production.

Kind Regards

David

 

[TheDS]

In WW1&2, the majority of kills were done with torpedoes. Equivalent to today's missile craft. A small package capable of delivering a lot of punch, but not at very good range. Any ship or boat or plane could carry them and threaten much larger ships.

And yet, ships were not made obsolete. Big ships weren't either. Torpedoes couldn't reach inland targets; for that you needed big guns (and nowadays, missiles) or airplanes with bombs (and nowadays, missiles).

In Traveller, missiles just aren't that powerful. Nothing is. Well, guns are, but they're not used. The range is assumed to be too short. The only thing you can shoot someone with is a bigger gun. OT and MT give a definite size limit to big guns meaning a ship which is bigger than it needs to mount one is a waste. TNE and beyond allow you to build them as big as you want. Devote your whole budget to the Death Star if you want. But things got more complicated in TNE too.

WW2 is generally the basis upon which most space navies are based, but there are major gaps.

 

[HG_B]

In WW1&2, the majority of kills were done with torpedoes. Equivalent to today's missile craft. A small package capable of delivering a lot of punch, but not at very good range. Any ship or boat or plane could carry them and threaten much larger ships.

There is another MAJOR difference between sea going ships and trav space ships. Torpedoes were designed to hit armoured ships BELOW the armour belt.

If it were to hit the "belt" of a WW2 BB it would not really damage the ship. Same with anti-ship missiles carried by aircraft today. Trav space ships are armoured everywhere. NOT just a belt (design for basically a 2D environment).

 

[Antony]

Good discussion. This is partly why in my universes I restrict the tech to around TL11, possibly some 12 but the nuclear damper has not yet made an appearance. Since I mostly use TNE this means that the small craft ie fighters, gunboats etc. have more use.

 

[Garyius2003]

Exactly. Traveller, since Fighting Ships came out for sure, has always assumed fleets at TL14-15 looks like 1945/46. Right down the the 50-ton fighter/Skyraider, and on the other end of the scale the Tigress/IJN Ise class. Heck, they even put the flight deck of the Tigress at the same place.

However, with no real torpedo (Mongoose's version is more like a better turret weapon) there is no call for anything smaller than a light cruiser was a warship.

LE patrol duties can be done just as well with a converted Fat Trader upgraded to 4G engines and better sensors with a full turret loadout. Scouts can do scout duties.

 

[Carlobrand]

...LE patrol duties can be done just as well with a converted Fat Trader upgraded to 4G engines and better sensors with a full turret loadout. Scouts can do scout duties.

Forget the upgraded engines. It's a standard ship design - drop more engine in than it's designed for, you lose the standard design discount when they have to modify to accommodate the engines. Instead, use that cargo bay as a flight deck, use the staterooms as quarters for pilots. With 200 dTons available in that bay, you've got more room for fighters than you've got for pilots. I figure a dozen 10-dTonners, keep 4 out on patrol, 4 ready for flight with pilots on standby relaxing in the lounge, 4 reserved while their pilots catch some Z's. The 6g fighters can get anywhere you want more quickly, the improvised carrier can hover in low orbit and go to atmosphere if anyone goes after it, and 4 to 8 missile-launching fighters should be quite adequate for LE patrol. Upgraded engines just adds cost, and you'd rather lose the 18-million-credit fighters than the 100-million credit ship in a fight anyway.

 

[Garyius2003]

Even better.

So scouts, light fighters, off the shelf purchased far and fat traders, and light cruisers, heavy cruisers, and battleships. That is your fleet mix.

 

[Limburger59]

Thought provoking discussion. Between WW II and the Falklands War the few
naval battles involved missile boats; and High Guard came out three years before the Falklands.

Even the larger ships involved in the Falklands saw no surface action - the Argentinian cruiser was sunk by a submarine launched torpedo, and two days later the British destroyer HMS Sheffield was sunk by an aircraft launched Exocet missile. Neither action sounds like it would make for an exciting evening of Traveller. So personally, I'm glad High Guard came out before that single Exocet took out a destroyer.

Give me Leyte Gulf amongst the moons of a gas giant any day.

 

[Ishmael]

I don't think that Trav space combat is like ww2 at all.
I do think it is more like ww1 instead.

Space battles are more like Jutland and Dogger Bank.

 

[McPerth]

Once again I think this will depend on the TL you play at.

The main difference in naval combat among WWI and WWII was the aparition of the carriers and sensors. In this way, sensors are obvied in CT, and carriers are decisive (beause fighters are) at what MT calls Average Stellar TLs (11-13), while they lose imporetance at higher TLs.

 

[Ishmael]

ww2 aircraft and carriers operate in different environments ( sky vs water surface ) and have vastly differing performance characteristics and weapon systems.

Trav space ships, not so much. They just get bigger or smaller for the most part.

I'll stick to the ww1 analogy

 

[mike wightman]

There is no Traveller equivalent of the aircraft in space combat.

There is no Traveller equivalent of the torpedo in space combat.

HG models space combat between ships constructed over a period of thousands of years of technological development.

 

[Ishmael]

of course there is....
...just not for space battles and that's because missiles had already been defined as sort of an AIM-9 in spaaaaace ( size-wise ).

 

[Garyius2003]

I don't think that Trav space combat is like ww2 at all.
I do think it is more like ww1 instead.

Space battles are more like Jutland and Dogger Bank.

I agree (minus the submarine/mine/torpedo boat threat once the TL invents the damper), the issue is the fleets themselves are made up of official ships that copy late WWII fleets.

 

[rancke]

I agree (minus the submarine/mine/torpedo boat threat once the TL invents the damper), the issue is the fleets themselves are made up of official ships that copy late WWII fleets.

I always thought that the Age of Sail was a closer analogy. Battleships = Ships-of-the-Line, cruisers = frigates, and escorts = sloops and brigs.


Hans

 

[McPerth]

I always thought that the Age of Sail was a closer analogy. Battleships = Ships-of-the-Line, cruisers = frigates, and escorts = sloops and brigs.


Hans

And carriers/fighters?

They are quite decisive at some TLs...