More fleet action...

Hans Rancke_Madsen:

>                                                   Even so, you'd have
>a much harder time persuading me to lend you MCrimp 3000 than MCrimp
>30.

Actually, you'd have a hard time persuading me to lend MCr30 to a
footloose adventurer.  But then, no-one with 6MCr in his pocket really
fits that description.  I personally could live comfortably off the
interest of that amount.

>Note that "if it will pay". The price of the ship affects the
>feasiblility of running a Free Trader enourmously. Up the yearly
>payments to the bank and the whole thing comes tumbling down.

It sure will.  But if the ship's income climbs as much as the outgo
climbs, no problem.

>And then the PCs has to come up with 1/5th of the purchase price up
>front.  Say that there are 6 equal partners in the group who's just
>acquired MCrimp 600. That's 100 million credits per adventurer. I don't
>know about your players, but mine would start wondering why their fool
>characters didn't just buy an annuity apiece. Even if they buy really
>conservative blue chip bonds they should be able to get 1% per year.
>That's a million credits per year. That's a lot of high passages. Who'd
>be a free-trader?

So who would do it if they had only 6MCr?  At the kind of return a 30
year T-bill pays, those same six guys could settle down to a life of
luxury on most worlds.  Note that your standard of living only costs
Cr30,000 per annum unless you are a noble.



>Agreed, but I don't want the average pirate to be as small as the PCs
>ship, just the occational one. On the contrary, I want the average
>pirate to be so tough that the navy will be unable to station a
>squadron adequate to deal with the average pirate in all frontier
>starsystems. I want the navy to have to settle for keeping the
>important planets inviolable (and I do mean inviolable; no Vargr
>corsairs or Aslan ihatei need apply) and just patrol the frontier
>systems from time to time.

I like the idea.  But interstellar trade will evaporate except to the
protected systems, in that case.  And pirates like that are more like
Boskone: foreign warships masquerading as pirates.


>Reread TCS. I agree that it says what you say above. But it also says
>the opposite. Start a campaign. If someone keeps the peace and dosen't
>get attacked for a century, how many ships does he have then? As many
>as he started with. Will they be the same ships? Ostensibly, yes, but
>they can't be, can they? So the 10% maintenance figure must include
>peacetime replacement of the ships. I suspect that glitch snuck past
>the TCS authors because nobody in a game campaign ever manages to spend
>any time at peace.

No.  TCS assumes that if you want to build new ships, you decommission
old ones:  put them in ordinary, mothball them, whatever you prefer.
Then use the extra money saved from maintenance to build new ones.  And
the situation you describe is exactly what happened in the USA between
wars last century:  the ships got older and more decrepit until the
shooting started, then they were replaced by modern ships.


>You've got that one turned around. The pre-WW2 powers had Treaty Bases
>scattered all over the world, because their ships _couldn't_ operate
>far from a base (fuel was a major problem, for one thing). I believe
>that the ships were build to stay away from bases a long as was
>practically possible (of course, this was just one more design
>tradeoff).
>The Napoleonic Wars showed clearly that the longer a ship can stay away
>from a home base, the more effective it was in tying down enemy ships
>protecting potential targets. That's why the English ships blockaded
>the French harbours so assiduously.

I concede the point, though part of the effect you describe is a
function of technological possiblity, rather than Naval Doctrine.


>That _can't_ be true!! Let me check that... Egad! You're right!
>
>Well, all I can say is that that's just plain ridiculous. As soon as I
>get a little time (unfortunately I'm as busy as a one-armed paperhanger
>with the hives at the moment) I'm going to sit down and make some rules
>that will allow naval bases to maintain ships. Not build and only field
>repair, but standard annual maintenance at least. Tying the Navy to the

:-)  We agree.  When I pointed that out to Cynthia, she said almost
exactly the same thing.


>Btw. The Trojan Reach fleets could refit at Tobia. And don't tell me
>that Tobia has fallen to the Aslan, because I won't believe you ;-)

Tobia fallen to Aslan?  You've been reading Fairy Tales again, haven't
you?  Or having a bad dream, perhaps?


>>Do you want your PCs doing this too?  Never allow an element into a
>>game unless you prepared to let your PCs acquire (read:steal) it.
>
>Certainly. If the PCs are willing to pay twice the normal price for the
>ability to pay for ten weeks of maintenance every 5 years instead of
>two weeks every year, then let them. But don't forget that if the ship
>is twice as expensive then the maintenance will cost twice as much per
>week too.

Fine.  I like it, as I said earlier.  It fits my needs quite well.
Notice that it helps pirates operate farther from their bases as well,
which makes piracy slightly more feasible.


>five year duration and cost twice as much (You will agree that cutting
>the size of the fleet by 50% is a good start, won't you?)

A good start, but just a start:-)


>PS. Your other posting about the government just raking in more taxes
>or printing more money was a joke, right? I don't have to refute that,
>do I?

I hope not.  But governments DO do things like that.  How do you think
inflation happens?  And keep in mind that the USA's fraction of the GNP
spent on the military is almost ten times as high as the one ascribed to
Imperial worlds.  There is a lot of room for increasing the fleet size
in the Imperium.

Later...

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