Steve Higginbotham writes:
>
>Hans Rancke-Madsen writes:
>
>>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.
>
>A third way: increase the size of each ship. Under standard rules, a
>5000 ton free trader would require a crew of four. If all ships were
>built to the limit of their controls, each ship would be much bigger,
>and there would be both fewer ships, and less disparity between small
>ships and large ones.
Don't you think that player-sized starships are expensive
enough already?
>
>>1) SALARIES: _Trillion Credit Squadron_ instructs us to ignore crew
>>salaries.
>> I'd rather regard it as a legitimate drain on the naval budget.
>
>TCS ignores crew salaries by making maintenance costs 100 times as high
>as standard MT. The extra 99x represents the costs of crews, bases,
>training centers, recruiting posters, etc.
There's something wrong with the economy then. If it cost your entire
naval budget just to run the fleet you have, how do you pay for repairs
and replacements?
>>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.
>
>Not totally unreasonable. Not in accord with MT definition of Inertial
>compensators, either... Even so, it is a trivial addition to the cost
>of a ship. For example, a 100,000 ton TL15 cruiser (snatched at random
>from "shattered ships..") would cost an extra MCr337.5 (to as much as
>MCr 1687.5 for a six-G ship) out of a total cost of MCr397,217. An
>increase of 0.085% to total cost. Who cares?
You're looking at it the wrong way round. By making that ship
MCrimp 1687.5 more expensive I've just cost the navy 10 patrol
cruisers - 20 if we also use my extra durability rule. Still,
you're right that's it's not enough in itself. Which is why I
asked for help. Bertil's already come up with some good stuff.
But as for trivial, every little bit helps :-)
>>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.
>Nonetheless, this is MT's picture. Try FFW (Fifth Frontier War)
>sometime. Imperial ships DON'T fight that far from their bases.
Except when GDW conviniently forgets that and lets Terran Confederation
fleets penetrate to Vland and Aslan ihatei attack Aki. Naval ships don't
_like_ to fight far from a base - who would - but it's not unreasonable
to suppose that the various admiralties would plan for it.
>Besides, improvements such as you suggest would make those annoying
>Naval vessels only about half as numerous, and twice as ubiquitous. If
>they could cruise that far from their bases, they.d be EVERYWHERE!
Not true. Ordinary patrols don't go on 5 year patrols under the present
system, true. But they don't go on 1 year patrols either. They move about
in a 2-3 month circuit ending up where they started out. So at the moment
they're only out of the running 2 weeks in every 52. The same would apply
if they had a potential 5 year cruising range. But there would only be
half as many.
>> 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.
>
>Agreed. But how to implement? Notice the rules in Starship Operator's
>Manual on Annual Maintenance. Carry the spare parts, and the job is
>simple with the crew doing it's own maintenance continuously.
I'll have a look through SOM and see if I can come up with a suggestion.
>> 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.
>
>Sure. Install a second jump drive, maneuver drive, sensor platform,
>computer, etc. Why be arbitrary about the price? You want redundancy,
>buy it from the standard rules. See Leviathan for details.
Well, for one thing my rule is wonderfully simple. Just add umpteen
percent to the price. And easy to implement: Just extend the time
allowed between overhauls by one year per 25% extra paid and
make the overhaul last two weeks per year since the last one.
>> Naval vessels would routinely be build for 5 year missions ;-), so
>> they would cost double the price of an equivalent civilian ship.
>That would still leave 100,000 + naval vessels out there cluttering up
>the Imperium, and getting in everyone else's way.
Right, so we need something more. Why does everybody seem to assume that
we can only use one fix on this very serious problem?
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