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Traveller, The Rise of Empire: A Naval Design, Procurement and Command Quest

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Magnificate said:
What's the advantage of a carrier against a proper warship in your view?
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Mainly in the difficulty to hit and ordinance delivery. Traveller as a system caps 'Ships' (anything 101+ tons) at thrust rating 6. Small-craft can get up to, if I remember right, 16. They can still carry torpedoes and missiles, and all that thrust can allow them to both close and jink shots. That said, 4WheelSword could implement them in other ways.
 
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WallFly said:
Mainly in the difficulty to hit and ordinance delivery. Traveller as a system caps 'Ships' (anything 101+ tons) at thrust rating 6. Small-craft can get up to, if I remember right, 16-18. They can still carry torpedoes and missiles, and all that thrust can allow them to both close and jink shots. That said, 4WheelSword could implement them in other ways.
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Could definitely see a tender with a bunch of like... 50-75 ton attack boats being effective, if that's the case.
 
Coyote Niff said:
We need small vessels that can shoot long enough for the Scouts and DSS'es to escape.
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Ehhh... That makes the Bodkin a sacrificial lamb. Even if it engages smaller craft, there could be multiple craft. Besides, to defend the scout, the Bodkin would need to be close, which risks both ships being destroyed. The current system, with two scouts further apart is safer.
WallFly said:
Mainly in the difficulty to hit and ordinance delivery. Traveller as a system caps 'Ships' (anything 101+ tons) at thrust rating 6. Small-craft can get up to, if I remember right, 16-18.
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Interesting! OK, I can see us build one of those alongside the Lancer after our Monitor is finished.
 
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We should do Jump Drives, they're the most complex thing on our ships and our jump range and jump capacity is the major thing we argue on in every single proposed ship design other than the embassy ship.
 
Also partially depends on if those small attack craft need Pilots (capital "P") or not, which might limit us a bit, but could certainly be a worthwhile investment if only to experiment with it and see if it's worth pursuing further.
 
Sort of a double post but I'm kind of envisioning the MMVs as "group leaders" for the ICs if and when it comes to larger scale engagements (and when the MMVs aren't doing longer range missions); I feel like one MMV for every two or three ICs might be worthwhile, depending on what balance we want to go with and what refits we end up making to the ICs.

As is, a revised MMV + three ICs is a pretty punchy little wing of craft. Would also let us naturally create two separate "wings" at our current numbers and can be expanded on relatively easily.

The other alternative would be to group the MMVs in a wolf-pack for particle exchanges and then torpedo attacks and dedicate the ICs to doing their own thing but I'm not sure we have a set doctrine yet.

I'd also like to invest in a point defense vessel at some point or at least design one.

This is just me thinking out loud, really, about future wants and/or ideas so feel free to ignore. :V
 
What exactly IS the mmv at this point? Is it still slow and armed with handfuls of torpedoes + marines?

I still believe torpedoes are a bad idea. They're dangerous if they hit, but if they can't get through point defence...

What if we build a... call it an Adaptive Heavy Cruiser, something like 3k tonnes, fuel for two jumps, and a whole shittonne of modular payload space. Like, all of it. Modularity appears to be expensive, but our main issue is 1. yard space and 2. actual experience.

Engine thrust should be "fast but not impractically so" - like 5 or 6 or idk. Ideally that's modular too. Armour limited - 2 or 4 or smth. This isn't meant for fighting, though we'll probably end up refitting it into a funny Lancer once we're done with it.

And what we do with it is to use it as a testbed for asymmetrical tactics.

1. Load up with shitloads of missiles and point defence, do wargames to see how effective a fast ship juking around at long range and flinging missiles in is against our current fleets.
2. As above but with torpedoes, to find out if standoff doctrine works, how many torpedoes it takes to get through how much point defence, and whether the big bang is worth the disadvantage.
3. Loading up with hangars and gun-shuttles, the above two doctrines but with even more standoff - sending high-speed small craft in to deliver missile or torpedo strikes. Or actual guns, particle barbettes or mass drivers or whatever else to test whether they can survive getting in and knife-fighting. Finding out if strike craft work. Since these are exercises and not live battles, we don't need to develop expensive combat drones to save casualties.

And of course all of this gives us experience countering these tactics as well.

It doesn't strictly need to be 3k tonnes but I figure we have a use for hull of that size that we might not for a bunch of lighter ships. Though we could modify some ICs or use the DSS hull maybe. I figure torpedoes and strike craft might be a case of needing bulk to work.

And once we're done with it we can set it to whatever configuration we like best, fill however much payload with fuel, or just keep it as a general testbed.

Unless maybe this is something better done in sims? But then we should actually run the sims and find out instead of guessing...
 
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The revised MMV has an m-4 engine, six armor, four torpedo barbettes and eight particle bays and eight each of sandcasters and twin laser turrets. So fast as the rest of our stuff with a big increase in firepower and not much less armor.

Not sure we have an m-5 engine available.
 
So not Jackie Fisher's Revenge then.

Those torpedoes should definitely be missiles then, unless a handful of torpedoes is effective.

The Interstellar Surveyor is M6. Unless that's a different system.
 
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Rat King said:
Sort of a double post but I'm kind of envisioning the MMVs as "group leaders" for the ICs if and when it comes to larger scale engagements (and when the MMVs aren't doing longer range missions); I feel like one MMV for every two or three ICs might be worthwhile, depending on what balance we want to go with and what refits we end up making to the ICs.
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That's sort of how I see it as well, except that the task group contains an FFS to allow the ICs to keep up with the MMV. It could be that we wouldn't build enough FFSs to facilitate far-off deployments of ICs, but then MMVs could still detach and operate alone, perhaps bypassing the `frontlines`.
Rat King said:
The revised MMV has an m-4 engine, six armor, four torpedo barbettes and eight particle bays and eight each of sandcasters and twin laser turrets. So fast as the rest of our stuff with a big increase in firepower and not much less armor.
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Yup, it's better than before, but I still opt for up-scaling. No reason not to, now that we've yard space to spare. Plus, it would be more surviveable, since bigger ships can take more damage and still limp back.
Pyrelight said:
And what we do with it is to use it as a testbed for asymmetrical tactics.
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The problem with that is, we don't have a way to test these solutions. Other than wargames. We would need to have an opponent that is peer enough to be challenging, but weak enough so that we could afford to experiment.
Pyrelight said:
The Interstellar Surveyor is M6.
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But Interstellar Cruises and Interstellar Monitor is M-4. This is our combat speed. Granted, with new drives we might want to seek to upgrade our baseline combat vessels to M-5, but the idea is to have our vessels capable of the same acceletation, so no vessel has to slow down in combat to allow others to keep up with it.
 
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Yes the wargames are the idea unless we can do it in sims. Unless we're on Maximum Pentagon where the sims are gamed to always support whatever we want to spend money on.

Yes but part of the idea is to see how bad it is to fight faster enemies, and whether speed really can be armour.

Also it looks like part of how the system works is that if you have extra speed you can spend it on evasion. And also something about having extra power in your reactor even if you aren't fast in a straight line? Not sure.
 
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Maxin_inc said:
We should do Jump Drives, they're the most complex thing on our ships and our jump range and jump capacity is the major thing we argue on in every single proposed ship design other than the embassy ship.
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I find it vanishingly unlikely that the Drive option, which doesn't even specify if it's M-Drive or J-Drive, will get us the absolute game-changer of J2 multiple tech levels ahead of schedule. At which point the best possible outcome would be money/space savings for our J1 drives and fuel, which isn't nothing, but also doesn't really wow me compared to something actually qualitatively new.
 
Magnificate said:
Hmmm... Now that you mention it, being able to operate on less fuel or lesser quality fuel would actually be quite impactful.
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Less fuel would be nice but I'm operating under the assumption that all the options are basically balanced against each other, at which point "weight savings on all our ships" is sufficiently general/widespread that it's likely to be relatively small in magnitude. I suppose it would provide most benefit on ships with large fuel tanks, so it'd advantage longer-range vessels at least somewhat?

Don't think lesser quality is really a thing given IIUC it's all just hydrogen already, which is pretty easy to come by.
 
Magnificate said:
Yup, it's better than before, but I still opt for up-scaling. No reason not to, now that we've yard space to spare. Plus, it would be more surviveable, since bigger ships can take more damage and still limp back.
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I just don't see a reason to add another 1,000 tons onto it when it's already a good design. Feels like bloat, to me.
 
Magnificate said:
Hmmm... Now that you mention it, being able to operate on less fuel or lesser quality fuel would actually be quite impactful.
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Apparently you can actually, by base rules, use unrefined garbage scooped out of a gas giant to run your jumpdrive.

There is a +2 to misjump chance. Apparently you can counter that by being more careful and taking longer when spooling up your drive, or doing more calculations or navigation math. Probably nothing terrible will happen, unless you rush it. Probably best to save a jump worth of the good stuff for emergencies.

Seems to be at least partly a boonies thing, field refuelling or getting fuel from low-tech spaceports that can't refine the good fuel.

So it's probably not TOO unsafe. But this is also a setting where economy-class passengers ride in cryopods with literally Russian-Roulette odds of turning you into a corpsicle, so...
 
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A double post, but if we want a heavier variant on the Lancer then we can talk about that but I think for the moment getting a couple out in vacuum at current specs is more desirable.
 
Edit: moving the Bodkin to missile rotary for sake of logistics.
 
Artificial Girl said:
A double post, but if we want a heavier variant on the Lancer then we can talk about that but I think for the moment getting a couple out in vacuum at current specs is more desirable.
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If it is built at 3K, then it'll stay that way for the forseeable future because of construction bonuses for established designs. Besides, the difference in construction time is not so signicant, given that we're not on the clock. We don't lack for yard space as well. We couldn't construct more of them either, since 8K+4K still leaves room for just three 3K ships being constructed.

Besides that discussion, a second FFS is going to be more useful at the moment, since we would be getting two far-reaching exploration missions instead of just one, so I'd recommend Plan Logistics. ;)
 
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