Naval vessels

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.

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.

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... ;-)

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.

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).

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. Civilian ships
   usually makes do with a 1G manouver drive, so they wouldn't be
   affected, but a naval ship with a 4G drive would need 4 times the
   amount of compensators it needs today. My (still untested) rule
   would go something like this:

   The amount of inertial compensators needed by a ship varies with
   the capacity of it's manouver drive. The data shown is for a
   ship with a 1G drive. Multiply this by the G value of the ship
   manouver drive.

   Power  Volume  Weight  Price   Units
   0.020  0.010   0.020   250 Cr  per kiloliter of hull.

   Variant 1: Multiply by 1.25 the G value (the compensators need to be
              able to handle a switch from full ahead to 1/4 astern).

   Variant 2: Multiply by twice the G value (the compensators need to be
              able to handle a switch from full ahead to full astern).


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. Who can be sure that some freaks can't
   perform at longer ranges? In any case ships often engage at
   less than extreme orbit range (that's 5 million km, after all).
   Ships up against the Zhodanis will be shielded as a matter of
   course, but other ships will be too, even those up against the
   Imperium or the Solomani Confederation, regardless of the
   prevailing stance against psionics in both states. What is that
   to people who uses the word 'threat' about capability instead of
   intention? What military mind would trust an opponent to refrain
   from using psionic adepts, regardless of what line said opponent
   feeds his own civilians? Thus naval ships will be psionically
   shielded "just in case".

   I've tentatively put the cost of psionic shielding equivalent to
   that of electronic masking. Tech level is 12.

   Power  Volume  Weight  Price    Units
   0.001  0.020   0.010   5000 Cr  per kiloliter of hull.

   One question here is what the shielding actually shields against. A
   psionic shield helmet prevents thoughts being read by creating an elec-
   trical field that interferes with brainwave frequencies. Shielding a
   ship in the same way will be easy. 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.
   Talk about cost-efficiency!

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


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. Nor is it very good strategically, since it restricts
   the size of the fleet you can concentrate anywhere to the capacity
   of the local shipyards. I propose two things here: Firstly some
   maintenance tasks that the ship engineers can perform, that will keep
   the ship flying without negative DMs. Perhaps rolled quarterly and
   increasing one level in difficulty for each full year since last
   overhaul. 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. (No, this will not mean that ships can get away with
   only bi-yearly overhauls. For every year since the last overhaul a ship
   would need to spend two weeks on the next. Thus a ship could skip the
   overhaul one year in an emergency, but it would have to pay twice the
   amount next year).

   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. (The ship would still
   two weeks overhaul for each year since the last one, but a +25%
   ship could get spend 4 weeks every other year instead of 2 weeks
   every year (or should the ship get away with a two week overhaul?))

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


Well, what do you think?


      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