Re: Naval vessels

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