Rob Dean:
>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?
A fleet should have enough ships to patrol the volume of space which is
their responsibility. The FFW game includes enough ships to do that if
we assume 5-15 ships per squadron. It is still enough to make piracy an
awfully iffy proposition - too much chance of the Navy being aroud to
spoil the fun.
Personally, I like the idea of producing a treaty of perpetual
friendship with the Consulate, and starting a second Solomani Rim War.
This will suck most of the ships to the far side of the Imperium, and
KEEP THEM THERE! The Navy ceases to be a problem unless you are in the
Solomani Rim. Of course, if your campaign is over there, reverse the
process: peace there, war in the Marches, the ships leave anyway.
Bertil writes:
> 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.
But how about against a 10000ton 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?
Nice goal... Not very likely that your warships will be that small,
though. In the Real World, battleships and Carriers are smaller than
supertankers, but are larger than everything else afloat. If a
"supertanker" is a million tonner, then a battleship or carrier would be
about 200,000 tons.
> 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.
That is not why military equipment costs so much. It has more to do
with short production runs and high research costs. Unfortunately, in
the Imperium, the research was all done 100-10000 years ago, and the
production runs are quite large (thousands of copies of each ship?).
> (This is BTW the reason why we don't see any supertankers
>mounting 10 127mm naval guns today).
Actually, we see few supertankers with 10 127mm naval guns because it is
against the law in most countries to put weapons like that on privately
owned ships. Note that in WW2,we DID see merchants mounting heavy guns.
> 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.
I doubt it. If we do that, the ships will just look more like my
Sikkintar (one BIG gun). the price change won't affect anything except
Naval design doctrine.
> 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.
Again, unlikely. If you do that, then civilian ships will armor
themselves to be "pirate-proof", and pirates will arm themselves with
bay weapons. In any case it will have little effect on Naval vessels.
If bays cost too much, they'll use a cheaper alternative, or just raise
taxes to pay the difference.
Remember, the Military is in the business of wasting money.
Later...
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I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
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