Naval vessels

> From: Hans Rancke-Madsen [email removed]
> Subject: (3585) Naval vessels
>
> There's two ways to attack this problem: You can reduce the money each
> world contributes to the navy, and you can reduce the amount of ship the
> navy gets for each credit. I'm working on something wrt the first approach,
> but in this posting I'd like to present some of my ideas for the second and
> would like to hear your comments.

  I'd favour the second approach: Finding ways of increasing the cost of
military ships without increasing the cost of civilian ships.

  This will, if done right, also cure another problem: The dilemma of
30kt freighters and 30kt light cruisers. We all know that the Imperium need
a lot of 30kt freighters for the commerce to work. We also know that if it
is that easy to build 30kt ships we will get too many cruisers for the
pirates to handle. We also know that each one of those 30kt freighters can
mount a horrifying fire-power compared to a 400t corsair.

*********
  What I'd like the Traveller universe to be is a place where traders on up
to 200kt, and fleet tankers of even larger tonnages are common, but where
these ships have at most a handful of turrets and where a 'battleship' is
somewhere on the order 20-30kt (destroyers: around 1 to 3kt, cruisers around
10kt, carriers around 30kt, but lightly armed).

  What do people think about this goal?
*********

> 1) SALARIES: _Trillion Credit Squadron_ instructs us to ignore crew salaries.

  Fortunately I didn't know this when I did the Naasakiira defences. IMHO this
is ludicrous. If we look at realworld examples, salaries is among the biggest
single expence posts for a military force. In the Naasakiira example, half
their defence budget went to salaries. I've forgotten what I computed an
average salary to be, but it was more on the order of 10 to 20kCr than your
20-25k. So had I've been using your cost-levels Naasakiira would have fallen
with or without TL15 help.

> 2) INERTIAL COMPENSATORS: I'd like to increase the size and power

> 3) PSIONIC SHIELDING: Despite the known limits of psionic powers

>    But will such a field stop tele-
>    portation too? If not, will anything shield against teleportation? IMO
>    a naval ship _must_ be either be teleport-shielded or have a large
>    number of internal security troops. Imagine the trouble a squad of
>    battle-suited marines could do after teleporting aboard a battleship.

  Imagine the trouble of 4 Zhos teleporting aboard a Chrysantemum DE. I know,
Exactly that thing happened in one of my campaigns. The end result was a
negotiated settlement where the Zhos got a free ride back to the Consulate.
Both sides thought they had won on the deal:)

>    My own inclination is to say that a brainwave shield will interfere
>    with the targeting aspect of teleportation and will thus protect
>    against it.

  Spoilsport:)

  But there are some troubles with teleporting to a ship in combat. The
source and the destination ships must match vectors to prevent the teleportees
from becomming kinetic energy warheads, they must have a clear destination,
they will show up on all security sensors and they will have trouble
naviating the ship when all hatches are closed and locked (since there is a
limit on the number of teleports in full combat armour and with weapons one
can do per day, even if one is the 'munchkin zhodani thought police commando
from hell')

> 4) DURABILITY: Tactically this reliance on annual maintenance is not a

  5) MILITARY SPENDING COST INCREASE: If the Imperium has gigacreds to waste
on a navy, the manufacturers will see to it that the price on military ships
skyrocket. So the Navy will pay more for a given ships than a civilian would.
This will probably be blamed on mil-specing, MCr4 coffemachines and so on.

  6) MORE EXPENSIVE HARDPOINTS: This will also cure the problem with 30kt
freighters who have a missile turret on every hardpoint "since they are
practically free compared to the cost of the ship". Each hardpoint should
cause a noticable percentage increase in hull cost and weight due to
reinforcements (This is BTW the reason why we don't see any supertankers
mounting 10 127mm naval guns today). A spinal mount should lead to such
extreme increases in hull weight and cost that it would be impossible to
make a spinal-mount armed vessel above, say 40kt, unthinkably expensive
between 30 and 40kt, and very expensive between 20 and 30kt.

  7) FIRECONTROL: If we make the cost of the firecontrol highly dependent on
the number of turrets or bays we can inflate the costs of large ships mounting
more turrets than the referee care for, and inflate the cost of military ships
in one fell swoop.

  9) MILITARY WEAPONS: Turrets and bays are more or less equal today. If the
effectiveness of turrets upon military vessels is lowered (due to armour?),
all military ships will be forced to have bays or spinals to be usable against
other military vessels. Then we let the prices for bay weapons and spinal
mounts skyrocket to such levels that no civilian will afford them.
  Turret defences should not work very well against bay weapons and we should
probably introduce a series of bay lasers and sandcasters for military vessels.
  There will still be some turret weapons on military vessels, but their
purpose would be to keep the civilian ships in line.

>       Hans Rancke

- -bertil-
- --
"It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or
 strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an
 exercise for your kill-file."

Hans Rancke writes:

> IMO a game like Traveller needs both rich, secure, civilized places with
> an economy that makes it possible for player characters to acquire a
> starship and lonely, wild places where the thug and the privateer roam
> and the only law is the one in your laser cannon.

I tend to agree with Hans on this one...it's good to have some sort of frontier
region, unless you want to run the entire game with conmen and terrorists and
the like as the bad guys.  Not that it couldn't be done...

<Hans' description of the "Fleet Too Big!!" problem deleted>

> 1) SALARIES: _Trillion Credit Squadron_ instructs us to ignore crew salaries.
>    I'd rather regard it as a legitimate drain on the naval budget. After all,
>    money spent on salaries can't be spent on ships too. Civilian crew sala-
>    ries runs from 6000 Cr/year to 40.000/year or more, so an average salary
>    of 20-25.000 Crimp/year dosen't seem excessive. If we furthermore look on
>    each shipboard crew position as representing two or three or perhaps even
>    four persons  -  the rest being trainees, trainers, planetside staff
>    etc.  -  and also include the cost and maintenance of all planetside
>    installations, then it won't be too much to say that each shipboard crew
>    position cost 100.000 Crimp/year. This will increase the effective cost of
>    each ship by 1 MCrimp per crew position (including marines). (Each credit
>    cut out of the yearly budget will mean 10 credits less to the initial
>    investment).

This idea isn't too bad in theory, but I have two objections.  The first is
that it is my understanding that crew salaries and so forth are part of the
reason why military vessels in TCS take 10% of the initial cost per year to
maintain, when the annual maintenance rules for frieghters have always been
that the actual maintenance cost is 0.1% per year. The second is that the
adjustment isn't big enough.  A quick look through my TL15 Glisten Navy
designs shows that Crew Size * MCr1 is around 1-3% of the purchase price on
all major warships.  Thus, this rule would only trim down the fleet size by
1-3%, which isn't enough to do any good.

Maybe we should approach this problem backwards:  How many ships do we think a
fleet should have, and what kind of taxation rate does that give us?  How
many of the folks involved in this discussion have a copy of Fifth Frontier
War?  What do you think of the fleet levels there, in terms of effect on play
of the role-playing game?  Still too big?

We have to approach these things systematically, and this discussion is getting
too scattered for me to follow well right now.  Would someone like to post
another proposed solution, and the rationale for it?

(Hopefully incorporating the better parts of all the arguments...)

Rob Dean

Hans Rancke-Madsen writes:

>IMO a game like Traveller needs both rich, secure, civilized places
with
>an economy that makes it possible for player characters to acquire a
>starship and lonely, wild places where the thug and the privateer roam
>and the only law is the one in your laser cannon.

I agree.

>Also IMO you'll be a bit short of the second type of place in a
universe
>where a single high-population world can finance enough naval vessels
to
>put a squadron of Azhantis in every starsystem in a subsector  -  at
least
>not when you have two or three high-pop worlds per subsector on the
average.

Likewise.

>You can of course make the pirates tough enough to deal with Azhantis,
but
>that rather defeats the purpose. A pirate should be a threat to player
>characters, true, but it should be a survivable threat.
>
>(You can of course give the player characters a ship that is equal to a
>pirate that is tough enough to deal with Azhantis. That will give them
a
>crew of several hundred NPCs to deal with... ;-)

Not necessarily.  He who fights and runs away, lives to run away another
day.
Look at the 18th century.  Very few private yachts (which is what a 200
ton free trader is in a universe of 60000 ton cruisers) could defeat a
pirate ship in a fight.  The Navy (then British) protected what they
could, but...
You could make the PCs commanding officers of a Tigris, and play like
Star Trek (five year mission, and all that.)

>There's two ways to attack this problem: You can reduce the money each
>world contributes to the navy, and you can reduce the amount of ship
>the navy gets for each credit. I'm working on something wrt the first
>approach, but in this posting I'd like to present some of my ideas for
>the second and would like to hear your comments.

A third way:  increase the size of each ship.  Under standard rules, a
5000 ton free trader would require a crew of four.  If all ships were
built to the limit of their controls, each ship would be much bigger,
and there would be both fewer ships, and less disparity between small
ships and large ones.

>1) SALARIES: _Trillion Credit Squadron_ instructs us to ignore crew
>salaries.
>   I'd rather regard it as a legitimate drain on the naval budget.

TCS ignores crew salaries by making maintenance costs 100 times as high
as standard MT.  The extra 99x represents the costs of crews, bases,
training centers, recruiting posters, etc.

>2) INERTIAL COMPENSATORS: I'd like to increase the size and power
>   requirements of inertial compensators to be proportional to the
>   acceleration they are supposed to compensate for.

Not totally unreasonable.  Not in accord with MT definition of Inertial
compensators, either...  Even so, it is a trivial addition to the cost
of a ship.  For example, a 100,000 ton TL15 cruiser (snatched at random
from "shattered ships..") would cost an extra MCr337.5 (to as much as
MCr 1687.5 for a six-G ship) out of a total cost of MCr397,217.  An
increase of 0.085% to total cost.  Who cares?

>3) PSIONIC SHIELDING: Despite the known limits of psionic powers
>   (maximum range extreme orbit), no naval commander would like
>   to bet his ship on that.

Especially since combat range will not exceed Far Orbit, much less
Extreme Orbit.

>   a naval ship _must_ be either be teleport-shielded or have a large
>   number of internal security troops. Imagine the trouble a squad of
>   battle-suited marines could do after teleporting aboard a
>   battleship.  Talk about cost-efficiency!

Unlikely in the extreme.  The normal evasive maneuvering should keep the
ship's PE threshold far enough from the launching ship's to cook any
teleporter who tried to do something like that.

>4) DURABILITY: Tactically this reliance on annual maintenance is not a
>   good thing. If a war is just 5 jumps away from a naval vessel's
>   base, it will be travelling to a from annual maintenance 3 months
>   out of every year.

Nonetheless, this is MT's picture.  Try FFW (Fifth Frontier War)
sometime.  Imperial ships DON'T fight that far from their bases.
Besides, improvements such as you suggest would make those annoying
Naval vessels only about half as numerous, and twice as ubiquitous.  If
they could cruise that far from their bases, they.d be EVERYWHERE!

>  A good engineer should be able to keep a ship flying for two
>  or three years before the negative DMs for missed overhauls actually
>  began to apply.

Agreed.  But how to implement?  Notice the rules in Starship Operator's
Manual on Annual Maintenance.  Carry the spare parts, and the job is
simple with the crew doing it's own maintenance continuously.

>   Secondly allow a ship to be build with more durable materials and
>   higher system redundancies, if one is willing to pay. Perhaps one
>   extra year for each 25% extra money spent.

Sure.  Install a second jump drive, maneuver drive, sensor platform,
computer, etc.  Why be arbitrary about the price?  You want redundancy,
buy it from the standard rules.  See Leviathan for details.

>  Naval vessels would routinely be build for 5 year missions ;-), so
>   they would cost double the price of an equivalent civilian ship.

That would still leave 100,000 + naval vessels out there cluttering up
the Imperium, and getting in everyone else's way.

My own notions for cutting number of ships:
{ note that these assume that there are a certain high number of "doves"
in the Imperial senate.}

1) Warships will all be large, general purpose ships (like the
Enterprise).

2) High pop worlds will all be unconquerable, and even unassailable by
ANY number of warships.  The planetary defences are mind-boggling in
their size and variety.

3) The Imperial Navy will exist more as a police force (the Patrol?)
than a military venture.

So cut the Naval budget down to trivial levels, since the High Pop
worlds don't need them anyway, and won't pay for one to protect their
neighbors.

Problems:  The Imperium would cease to exist, probably.  The High Pop
worlds have no use for it, so 97+% of the Imperial population would tell
it to bug off and leave them alone.  Maybe the small worlds would get
together in local defense polities, but these would break up as soon as
the leading members reached that point of invulnerability that the High
Pop worlds have.

If High Pop worlds are "invulnerable", then someone, somewhere, is going
to build a fleet big enough to prove that contention wrong.  Then the
original problem reappears , but worse than before.  (check out the
"Lensman" series by E.E. Smith)

Advantages:   No-one needs the Imperium cluttering things up anyway.
Let the High Pop worlds play with themselves, and keep the PCs out in
the frontiers where they belong.
You can always keep any NPC from upsetting the applecart.  Keep your PCs
away from more than a billion credits or so, and THEY sure can't build a
"doomsday fleet", so the second problem can be ignored.

Later...

- -- Via DLG Pro v0.985b

[email removed]

I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
                                    --W. von Braun

Robert S. Dean writes:

>>1) SALARIES: _Trillion Credit Squadron_ instructs us to ignore crew
>>   salaries. I'd rather regard it as a legitimate drain on the naval budget.
>
>This idea isn't too bad in theory, but I have two objections.  The first is
>that it is my understanding that crew salaries and so forth are part of the
>reason why military vessels in TCS take 10% of the initial cost per year to
>maintain,

I've always assumed that naval ships had an average lifetime of 10 years
(or rather some combination of yearly repairs+maintenance and average
lifetime that comes to 10% per year, for example average 5%/year on
repairs/maintenance and average 20 years lifetime). I'd overlooked that
once you've established the initial fleet, you both pay 10% maintenance
per year _and_ explicitly for repair and replacements. Frankly, since what
I'm concerned about is the initial investment I suggest that we keep the
"10 times yearly budget" rule for initial investments and drop the "10%
per year on maintenance" rule. In a real campaign the money spent on
repairs and replacements will use up your budget fast enough anyway :-)

>                                                The second is that the
>adjustment isn't big enough.  A quick look through my TL15 Glisten Navy
>designs shows that Crew Size * MCr1 is around 1-3% of the purchase price on
>all major warships.  Thus, this rule would only trim down the fleet size by
>1-3%, which isn't enough to do any good.

It's not enough in itself, but every bit helps. Furthermore, I'd suggest
that naval vessels routinely incorporates extra crew positions (as "spares",
you can't just hire a replacement if you loose one during a battle).

And Bertil writes:

>  I'd favour the second approach: Finding ways of increasing the cost of
>military ships without increasing the cost of civilian ships.

No need to choose one or the other. I favour using both. It's just that I
haven't organized my ideas for reducing fleet revenues yet.


>  This will, if done right, also cure another problem: The dilemma of
>30kt freighters and 30kt light cruisers. We all know that the Imperium need
>a lot of 30kt freighters for the commerce to work. We also know that if it
>is that easy to build 30kt ships we will get too many cruisers for the
>pirates to handle. We also know that each one of those 30kt freighters can
>mount a horrifying fire-power compared to a 400t corsair.

How very true.

>*********
>  What I'd like the Traveller universe to be is a place where traders on up
>to 200kt, and fleet tankers of even larger tonnages are common, but where
>these ships have at most a handful of turrets and where a 'battleship' is
>somewhere on the order 20-30kt (destroyers: around 1 to 3kt, cruisers around
>10kt, carriers around 30kt, but lightly armed).
>
>  What do people think about this goal?
>*********

I vote aye! ;-)

>>3) PSIONIC SHIELDING: Despite the known limits of psionic powers
>
>>   But will such a field stop tele-
>>   portation too? If not, will anything shield against teleportation? IMO
>>   a naval ship _must_ be either be teleport-shielded or have a large
>>   number of internal security troops. Imagine the trouble a squad of
>>   battle-suited marines could do after teleporting aboard a battleship.
>
>  Imagine the trouble of 4 Zhos teleporting aboard a Chrysantemum DE. I know,
>Exactly that thing happened in one of my campaigns. The end result was a
>negotiated settlement where the Zhos got a free ride back to the Consulate.
>Both sides thought they had won on the deal:)

>>   My own inclination is to say that a brainwave shield will interfere
>>   with the targeting aspect of teleportation and will thus protect
>>   against it.

>  Spoilsport:)

Well, fortunately we don't have to agree with each other on this. You will
agree, won't you,  that a psionic shield will be what a naval captain
longs for, even if it "only" protects him from having his thoughts read?

>  But there are some troubles with teleporting to a ship in combat. The
>source and the destination ships must match vectors to prevent the
>teleportees from becomming kinetic energy warheads.

Teleporters, you mean. Teleporters teleport themselves, teleportees gets
teleported by others. You're right, an routine avoidance of matching
vectors with enemy ships will protect against teleport attacks. I'd still
like an anti-teleport shield for when my ship is in port though ;-)
 (And then there's the threat of special psionics. A projecting teleporter
could destroy a hostile ship by teleporting a lump of iron from a ship with
a radically _different_ vector. Ouch!)

>  5) MILITARY SPENDING COST INCREASE: If the Imperium has gigacreds to
>waste on a navy, the manufacturers will see to it that the price on military
>ships skyrocket. So the Navy will pay more for a given ships than a civilian
>would. This will probably be blamed on mil-specing, MCr4 coffemachines
>and so on.

This is a very good idea. I'd suggest tying the waste percentage to the size
of the interstellar community in question (so the Imperium wastes more than
the Darrian Confederation which wastes more than a single planet).

>  6) MORE EXPENSIVE HARDPOINTS: This will also cure the problem with 30kt
>freighters who have a missile turret on every hardpoint "since they are
>practically free compared to the cost of the ship". Each hardpoint should
>cause a noticable percentage increase in hull cost and weight due to
>reinforcements (This is BTW the reason why we don't see any supertankers
>mounting 10 127mm naval guns today). A spinal mount should lead to such
>extreme increases in hull weight and cost that it would be impossible to
>make a spinal-mount armed vessel above, say 40kt, unthinkably expensive
>between 30 and 40kt, and very expensive between 20 and 30kt.

Well and good, but could one justify allowing a small hull to mount hardpoints
at the present cost and then increase the per hardpoint cost as the hull size
increases? I don't want to increase the price of the kind of ships that player
characters usually gets.

>  7) FIRECONTROL: If we make the cost of the firecontrol highly dependent on
>the number of turrets or bays we can inflate the costs of large ships
>mounting more turrets than the referee care for, and inflate the cost of
>military ships in one fell swoop.
>
>  9) MILITARY WEAPONS: Turrets and bays are more or less equal today. If the
>effectiveness of turrets upon military vessels is lowered (due to armour?),
>all military ships will be forced to have bays or spinals to be usable
>against other military vessels. Then we let the prices for bay weapons and
>spinal mounts skyrocket to such levels that no civilian will afford them.
>  Turret defences should not work very well against bay weapons and we
>should probably introduce a series of bay lasers and sandcasters for
>military vessels.
>  There will still be some turret weapons on military vessels, but their
>purpose would be to keep the civilian ships in line.

Two more good ideas. Do you think you could work a bit on them?


      Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
     [email removed]
- ------------
        "A  subsector  official  pompously states that the
        subsector  armed  forces  have  four Kinunir class
        ships in service,  each with enough troop strength
        to put down any military operations that threathen
        the peace of the Imperium."

                        ---Adventure 1, The Kinunir

Bertil writes:

> >  6) MORE EXPENSIVE HARDPOINTS: This will also cure the problem with 30kt
> >freighters who have a missile turret on every hardpoint "since they are
> >practically free compared to the cost of the ship". Each hardpoint should
> >cause a noticable percentage increase in hull cost and weight due to
> >reinforcements (This is BTW the reason why we don't see any supertankers
> >mounting 10 127mm naval guns today). A spinal mount should lead to such
> >extreme increases in hull weight and cost that it would be impossible to
> >make a spinal-mount armed vessel above, say 40kt, unthinkably expensive
> >between 30 and 40kt, and very expensive between 20 and 30kt.

A better way is to consider the price of missiles.  At Cr50000 each, a bay
shoots off MCr1.25 with each volley.  As to supertankers and guns, I must
point out that missile racks and lasers are recoilless weapons, and would
not require structural reinforcement.

Rob Dean

> From: Robert S. Dean  [email removed]
> Subject: (3590)  Re:  (3585) Naval vessels
>
> The second is that the
> adjustment isn't big enough.  A quick look through my TL15 Glisten Navy
> designs shows that Crew Size * MCr1 is around 1-3% of the purchase price on
> all major warships.  Thus, this rule would only trim down the fleet size by
> 1-3%, which isn't enough to do any good.

  Purchase price? I didn't think the purchase price had to be payed at all,
just the 10% of purchase price cost which pays the purchase (but spread out
during several years) and maintainance. So you should compare the salary to
10% of the purchase price and not 100% of it. This would make the fleed shrink
by 10 to 30% for TL15 and more at lower TL's where larger crews are needed.

> Rob Dean

- -bertil-
- --
"It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or
 strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an
 exercise for your kill-file."

> > >  6) MORE EXPENSIVE HARDPOINTS: This will also cure the problem with 30kt
> > >freighters who have a missile turret on every hardpoint "since they are
> > >practically free compared to the cost of the ship". Each hardpoint should
> > >cause a noticable percentage increase in hull cost and weight due to
> > >reinforcements (This is BTW the reason why we don't see any supertankers
> > >mounting 10 127mm naval guns today). A spinal mount should lead to such
> > >extreme increases in hull weight and cost that it would be impossible to
> > >make a spinal-mount armed vessel above, say 40kt, unthinkably expensive
> > >between 30 and 40kt, and very expensive between 20 and 30kt.
>
> A better way is to consider the price of missiles.  At Cr50000 each, a bay
> shoots off MCr1.25 with each volley.  As to supertankers and guns, I must
> point out that missile racks and lasers are recoilless weapons, and would
> not require structural reinforcement.

  This would affect the PC's capability of popping off missiles like pop-corn
too so it has it's disadvantages.

  Why keep all missiles equal: Striker assumes that bay missiles are 25cm
diameter while turret missiles are just 15cm diameter. It would be easy to
increase the size of the missiles. A cubical 50ton bay should be 8.7 meters
in each axis, so bay missiles could easily be as big as modern-day torpedoes
(even the type 65 650mm:) and carry warheads of up to 500kg.

> Rob Dean

- -bertil-
- --
"It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or
 strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an
 exercise for your kill-file."

Steve Higginbotham writes:
>
>Hans Rancke-Madsen writes:
>
>>There's two ways to attack this problem: You can reduce the money each
>>world contributes to the navy, and you can reduce the amount of ship
>>the navy gets for each credit. I'm working on something wrt the first
>>approach, but in this posting I'd like to present some of my ideas for
>>the second and would like to hear your comments.
>
>A third way:  increase the size of each ship.  Under standard rules, a
>5000 ton free trader would require a crew of four.  If all ships were
>built to the limit of their controls, each ship would be much bigger,
>and there would be both fewer ships, and less disparity between small
>ships and large ones.

Don't you think that player-sized starships are expensive
enough already?

>
>>1) SALARIES: _Trillion Credit Squadron_ instructs us to ignore crew
>>salaries.
>>  I'd rather regard it as a legitimate drain on the naval budget.
>
>TCS ignores crew salaries by making maintenance costs 100 times as high
>as standard MT.  The extra 99x represents the costs of crews, bases,
>training centers, recruiting posters, etc.

There's something wrong with the economy then. If it cost your entire
naval budget just to run the fleet you have, how do you pay for repairs
and replacements?

>>2) INERTIAL COMPENSATORS: I'd like to increase the size and power
>>  requirements of inertial compensators to be proportional to the
>>  acceleration they are supposed to compensate for.
>
>Not totally unreasonable.  Not in accord with MT definition of Inertial
>compensators, either...  Even so, it is a trivial addition to the cost
>of a ship.  For example, a 100,000 ton TL15 cruiser (snatched at random
>from "shattered ships..") would cost an extra MCr337.5 (to as much as
>MCr 1687.5 for a six-G ship) out of a total cost of MCr397,217.  An
>increase of 0.085% to total cost.  Who cares?

You're looking at it the wrong way round. By making that ship
MCrimp 1687.5 more expensive I've just cost the navy 10 patrol
cruisers  -  20 if we also use my extra durability rule. Still,
you're right that's it's not enough in itself. Which is why I
asked for help. Bertil's already come up with some good stuff.
But as for trivial, every little bit helps :-)

>>4) DURABILITY: Tactically this reliance on annual maintenance is not a
>>  good thing. If a war is just 5 jumps away from a naval vessel's
>>  base, it will be travelling to a from annual maintenance 3 months
>>  out of every year.

>Nonetheless, this is MT's picture.  Try FFW (Fifth Frontier War)
>sometime.  Imperial ships DON'T fight that far from their bases.

Except when GDW conviniently forgets that and lets Terran Confederation
fleets penetrate to Vland and Aslan ihatei attack Aki. Naval ships don't
_like_ to fight far from a base  -  who would  -  but it's not unreasonable
to suppose that the various admiralties would plan for it.

>Besides, improvements such as you suggest would make those annoying
>Naval vessels only about half as numerous, and twice as ubiquitous.  If
>they could cruise that far from their bases, they.d be EVERYWHERE!

Not true. Ordinary patrols don't go on 5 year patrols under the present
system, true. But they don't go on 1 year patrols either. They move about
in a 2-3 month circuit ending up where they started out. So at the moment
they're only out of the running 2 weeks in every 52. The same would apply
if they had a potential 5 year cruising range. But there would only be
half as many.

>> A good engineer should be able to keep a ship flying for two
>> or three years before the negative DMs for missed overhauls actually
>> began to apply.
>
>Agreed.  But how to implement?  Notice the rules in Starship Operator's
>Manual on Annual Maintenance.  Carry the spare parts, and the job is
>simple with the crew doing it's own maintenance continuously.

I'll have a look through SOM and see if I can come up with a suggestion.

>>  Secondly allow a ship to be build with more durable materials and
>>  higher system redundancies, if one is willing to pay. Perhaps one
>>  extra year for each 25% extra money spent.
>
>Sure.  Install a second jump drive, maneuver drive, sensor platform,
>computer, etc.  Why be arbitrary about the price?  You want redundancy,
>buy it from the standard rules.  See Leviathan for details.

Well, for one thing my rule is wonderfully simple. Just add umpteen
percent to the price. And easy to implement: Just extend the time
allowed between overhauls by one year per 25% extra paid and
make the overhaul last two weeks per year since the last one.

>> Naval vessels would routinely be build for 5 year missions ;-), so
>>  they would cost double the price of an equivalent civilian ship.

>That would still leave 100,000 + naval vessels out there cluttering up
>the Imperium, and getting in everyone else's way.

Right, so we need something more. Why does everybody seem to assume that
we can only use one fix on this very serious problem?

      Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
     [email removed]
- ------------
        "A  subsector  official  pompously states that the
        subsector  armed  forces  have  four Kinunir class
        ships in service,  each with enough troop strength
        to put down any military operations that threathen
        the peace of the Imperium."

                        ---Adventure 1, The Kinunir

Hans Rancke-Madsen writes:

>>Nonetheless, this is MT's picture.  Try FFW (Fifth Frontier War)
>>sometime.  Imperial ships DON'T fight that far from their bases.

>Except when GDW conviniently forgets that and lets Terran Confederation
>fleets penetrate to Vland and Aslan ihatei attack Aki. Naval ships don't
>_like_ to fight far from a base  -  who would  -  but it's not unreasonable
>to suppose that the various admiralties would plan for it.

Why not bring you base along with you?  It wouldn't be too hard to design
a large hull with a jump drive and lots of storage space.

As a first attempt how is the following:


CraftID: Fleet Tender, Type TF  TL=F (High Stellar), MCr213018
Hull:     900000/2250000, Disp=1000000, Config=7US, Armour=40G,
	  Unloaded=3001570, Loaded=3296788 (fuel only)
Power:    8667/17334, Fusion=2340000Mw, Duration=30/90
Loco:     18000/36000, Maneuver=1 (anti-grav), 45000/90000, Jump=4,
	  NOE=190, Cruise=900, Top=1200kph (vacuum only),
	  Agility=0
Commo:    Meson=System(x3), Radio=System(x3), Maser=System(x3)
Sensors:  PassiveEMS=Interstellar(x3), ActiveEMS=Far Orbit(x3),
	  Neutrino=10kw(x3), Densitometer=HighPen/1km(x3)
	  ActObjScan=Routine, ActObjPin=Routine,
	  PasObjScan=Routine, PasObjPin=Routine,
	  PasEngScan=Simple, PasEngPin=Routine
Def:      DefDM=7
Control:  Computer=9x3, Panel=Holographic Linked(x140000),
	  Special=Large Holodisplay(x3), Heads-up Holodisplay(x300)
	  Environ=basic env, basic ls, extended ls, grav plates, inertial comp
Accom:    Crew=822, Staterooms=425 (doubles)
Other:    Cargo=7872200kL, Fuel=842400kL (power plant)  3375000kL (jump drive),
	  ObjSize=Large, EmLevel=Strong

The ship is capable of carrying a 500000 Ton ship as cargo when the carge hold
is close to empty.  However during normal operations, a ship such as this
will carry replacement parts and tools necessary for the maintainence and minor
repairs of combat ships.

Anybody care to suggest how many tons of ship this tender would be able to
field supply?  My personal feel is not much (2 Megatons or less).  This
type of ship would be a nice juicy target in combat since without it the
entire dependent fleet is going to have troubles.

This doesn't solve the problem of where to maintain the tender.  Maybe they
could be sent forward and then effectively left in a know location never to
move again (well not quite never but not for a while).  It could exist as
a mobile supply centre of sorts.





        						Pauli

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