Re: How long can your fleet endure?

One solution to the problem of re-supplying warships is the use of supply
ships which hide at some secret location.  In WW2, the German commerce
raiders did this.  Their supply ships were fast, armed tankers.  They
would be at a pre-arranged point, at a pre-arranged time.  One such point,
code-named "Andalusia", was used regularly.  The supply ships brought
ammo, foodstuffs and spare parts, and sometimes took away prisoners of war.

In a Traveller campaign, suitable places could include systems whose main
world is too low tech to be able to scan the whole system for intruders;
systems with no population; or empty hexes.  The last of these would, of
course, require two additional jumps to use, and would only really be of
use for transferring large quantities of ammo or spare parts.  Refuelling
really is only practical with tankers which accompany the fleet (as in the
board game "Fifth Frontier War"), from captured territory, or from gas
giants.  The boardgame says the system must contain no hostile, active
ships if you are to use the gas giant.  High Guard says that refuelling
while enemy ships are around is risky, which is why some ships stay outside
the gas giant to cover those ships refuelling - they are the High Guard.

Another source is raided enemy shipping.  One German warship, the "pocket
battleship" Admiral Scheer, captured a British refridgerator ship named
Duquesa.  The Scheer never went short of fresh food, especially eggs, for
the rest of the voyage!

Has anyone else considered making an adventure campaign out of the exploits
of a commerce raider?  I did so once, using FASA's Chameleon class raider.
The players came unstuck - they kept using the ship's missiles when they
could have just used its secondary weapons, lasers and particle accelerators.
When they ran into serious trouble, they were just about out of missiles!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

 "Keyboard? How quaint!" - M. Scott

 Adrian Hurt			     |	JANET:  [email removed]
 UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian     |  ARPA:   [email removed]

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