Re: 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

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