Re: (3585) Naval vessels

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