Not according to the rules. If you are taking from a place with a class B or C starport there is no star ships being built there anyways.
So, there ya go.
Traveller warships are WWII navy, but without a major piece
- Thread starter Garyius2003
- Start date
Not according to the rules. If you are taking from a place with a class B or C starport there is no star ships being built there anyways.
So, there ya go.
Depends on what you mean by not working that way. It doesn't work that way in TCS, but TCS got it wrong. HG expressly allows any world with the requisite tech level to build ships regardless of starport class. The implication is inescapable that starport class is unrelated to military shipbuilding capacity.
And that doesn't ever address the fact that it does work that way in Real Life.
IIRC TCS adjusts the budget by government type and peace/war status, but not the shipyard capacity. If it does, it is a silly rule. "Grand Panjandrum, we only have shipyard capacity for 800,000T of ship." "Check again. I just declared war on New Colchis, so now we have a capacity of 1,200,000T".
I thought that the standard shipyard capacity was enough to build and maintain the ships that the standard budget would pay for?
That would be true if the correlation between population and shipyard capacity was absolute. Which it is in TCS, but not in Real Life, nor any setting that aspires to any degree of verisimilitude.
TCS budgets are based on GWP, not promisory notes.
For game rules the TCS works well enough (Though personally I would prefer to merge them with the Striker rules for a little more realism). It's for world-building purposes that it sucks.
Hans
Except any military ships the governent wants to build. As per the aforementioned rule in HG.
Hans
Vladika
SOC-14 1K
I believe I clearly stated before that I use J2 ships and J4 Tenders/Battle Riders.
At any rate, how big is your J4 firetrap?
Vladika
SOC-14 1K
Well, since TCS was decanonized long ago, that's true enough in one sense. However, personally I prefer to make the stipulation that whatever I or others come up with either makes sense or is acknowledged not to make sense (for the sake of gamability).
It would be much more expensive and take a lot longer to get Nigeria to build one than to get a country with a preexisting shipyard industry to do it, but if you're willing to pour the money in to prove a point, eventually Nigeria's infrastructure would be improved to the point where it could build one with local resources.
However, when I said that the capacity would be built, I was thinking of a world upping its capacity by so-and-so many percent and not of a world starting from scratch.
Hans
all my line ships are riders.
it would take generations. the soviet union really wanted a carrier and tried for a decade to build one. they just couldn't do it. sorry. capability doesn't spring up just because you want it and money is available.
... which ... is what tcs says ....
in any case. in the spinward marches all planets of tech levels and populations capable of building space-going ships already have A yards. there seems to be no extra capacity available. hence the driving factor in naval construction is available shipyard space, not funding.
Utterly and TOTALLY irrelevant. You can recruit from worlds that aren't hi pop. :nonono:
Then the tech level isn't high enough. If it was high enough, it would be possible.
No, IIRC TCS says that the ratio of shipyard capacity to population size is invariant (1T per 1000 people). Which is not the case in real life. The current shipyard capacity of Denmark is, I believe, zero. It used to be higher. I'm also quite confident that the shipyard capacity of shipbuilding countries go up and down in response to demand.
High-population planets alone that does not have class A starports despite having star-faring tech levels (Tech level in parenthesis):
Imperial worlds:
Zivije (B)
Natoko (9)
Bevy (A)
Junidy (B)
Non-imperial worlds:
Forine (A)
Collace (D)
Narsil (A)
Sacnoth (C)
Arden (9)
Entrope (B)
Zamine (A)
I can't be bothered to go through the UWPs to find pop 7 and pop 8 worlds, but I'm fairly sure there are a few of those too.
Hans
Vladika
SOC-14 1K
I seriously doubt that if a patron was ready here and now to pay a now closed Danish shipyard vast sums of money that said shipyard could be in any position to begin work for several years. Said patron, needing ships now, would go elsewhere.
In the US we now have that issue. Our manufacturing capacity has shut down and moved overseas. It would take years to rebuild the infrastructure and train capable workers. (Our H1B immigration program provides us with the needed professionals we can no longer educate and train domestically.)
Newport News Shipbuilding is the only shipyard in the world capable of building a Super carrier. They take 4 years to build. If we wanted 5 more in the next decade we would be sore pressed to even increase yard capacity in that time frame.
We now have the Russians launching our spy satellites as we no longer have a space program. (10 years ago we'd never have dreamed of allowing them even cursory knowledge). We import our steel, and darned near everything else from Communist China (A natural enemy to be, at least in the Pacific Rim) We will go to war with them one day, but for now we pay 35% of our gross collected tax base to cover interest on loans they made to us!
It isn't so simple as to say "If we need it, it will be there." This wasn't intended as a political rant, just real world examples of issues under discussion.
But the proposition that I'm trying to disprove says that there are no other places elsewhere that has free capacity.
Yes, but if you didn't have the option of going overseas, you'd have your domestic shipyards. And if the demand for ships were greater than your shipyard capacity, you'd expand your shipyards. You wouldn't say "Our shipyard capacity is now 1T per 1000 people, so we can't expand it any further until we've bred some more. Until then it's impossible to expand any further, no matter how big the demand for ships are."
But my thesis is that if the shipyard capacity was the bottleneck for the Imperium, that expansion would already have happened. If you're working on 10,000,000T of ship every year (as Mora would be according to TCS), but wanted to build on, say, 12,000,000T of ship every year, do you think that having a population of only 10 billion people would preven Mora from expanding its shipyard capacity?
Not in the real world, no. At TCS' level of abstraction, I think it is. Oh, I agree that there would be some upper limit. But I don't think that the average and the upper limit will be the same.
Hans
Vladika
SOC-14 1K
Good points Hans.
And you may very well be right given the 3000 years of the Imperium. Shipbuilding would be what it needed to be. Maybe the 1t per 1000 population might have been right for new construction? (I haven't run any numbers.)
I think TCS was onto a good thing in the conversion of local Credits to build ships off planet. That would account nicely for your "capacity elsewhere" argument.
And you may very well be right given the 3000 years of the Imperium. Shipbuilding would be what it needed to be. Maybe the 1t per 1000 population might have been right for new construction? (I haven't run any numbers.)
I think TCS was onto a good thing in the conversion of local Credits to build ships off planet. That would account nicely for your "capacity elsewhere" argument.
Nice discussion about construction facilities. Inasmuch as canon seems to be contradicting itself in places on that subject, I'll elect to steer clear on that one.
And now you have a balanced force, which I think we both agree is superior to a force built solely for mobility or power. Doesn't consider battleriders, though. Hobelars FTW!
I loved this. Yes, it's hard to make a J4 ship with all the goodies. My dreadnoughts tended to be EITHER J3 and well-armored and well-gunned, or J4 and EITHER well-armored OR well-gunned. On the other hand, a T meson is overkill-a-mundo. I can build a reasonably solid, agility-6 DN around an N meson, a bit light in the punch and I wouldn't want to throw it even-odds against something with a T, but with adequate depth and effective scouting, it can use its strategic maneuverability to achieve local numerical superiority and offset that weakness. Box me into a TCS strategic map, there might be problems, but something on the scale of the Marches is not going to have trouble performing well.
Recall that the Imperial war plan called for bringing up reinforcements from deeper in the Marches and even further afield to respond to a Zhodani invasion; that is only a tenable plan if those reinforcements can be moved forward very quickly.
On the other, OTHER hand, there is the battlerider option. A J4 tender doesn't carry as much as a J2, but its rider is just as solid and well-armed as the rider of the J2 - and again, the J4 means strategic maneuverability to withdraw ahead of a thrust, draw in reinforcements, and then counter when you feel the odds are in your favor rather than his. This tactic requires very agile escorts able to survive the line briefly in a withdrawal, but those aren't a hard design even at J4.
And now you have a balanced force, which I think we both agree is superior to a force built solely for mobility or power. Doesn't consider battleriders, though. Hobelars FTW!
I loved this. Yes, it's hard to make a J4 ship with all the goodies. My dreadnoughts tended to be EITHER J3 and well-armored and well-gunned, or J4 and EITHER well-armored OR well-gunned. On the other hand, a T meson is overkill-a-mundo. I can build a reasonably solid, agility-6 DN around an N meson, a bit light in the punch and I wouldn't want to throw it even-odds against something with a T, but with adequate depth and effective scouting, it can use its strategic maneuverability to achieve local numerical superiority and offset that weakness. Box me into a TCS strategic map, there might be problems, but something on the scale of the Marches is not going to have trouble performing well.
Recall that the Imperial war plan called for bringing up reinforcements from deeper in the Marches and even further afield to respond to a Zhodani invasion; that is only a tenable plan if those reinforcements can be moved forward very quickly.
On the other, OTHER hand, there is the battlerider option. A J4 tender doesn't carry as much as a J2, but its rider is just as solid and well-armed as the rider of the J2 - and again, the J4 means strategic maneuverability to withdraw ahead of a thrust, draw in reinforcements, and then counter when you feel the odds are in your favor rather than his. This tactic requires very agile escorts able to survive the line briefly in a withdrawal, but those aren't a hard design even at J4.
Vladika
SOC-14 1K
A nice Missile escort at 1.8 or 1.9ktons comes to mind. It will pack a factor 9 missile bay and be more than capable of standing in the line of battle.
It continues to astound me at the number of people who argue that escorts have no place in a Traveller battle! Like you, I use them in this role as well as a few others. (Moping up, Preventing damaged ships from breaking of by acceleration, etc.)
My J4 fleet will be composed primarily of these and Tenders/Battle Riders.
BTW I agree completely on your J3 stance. At TL15 I do build J3 "Cruisers", Meson "N" and fully decked out (Is that a Cruiser, Battleship or a Dreadnaught? lol No idea given total lack of consensus here on CotI as to what each of those are! I do know they pack a wallop and survive as well as anything else).
Liking the TCS requirement for 20% of a fleet being one TL lower (or paid upgrades), a J2 arm is just about assured. (You can build, and upgrade, missile escorts from TL12 through TL15, Nice for "realism".)
Last edited:
Vladika
SOC-14 1K
This is one of many objections I have for the "J4 rule". It produces ridiculous ships and serves only to make running a battle at a CON easier. (The reason I believe it was introduced [that and the pilot limit]).