PDA

View Full Version : Homebrew traveller ships



golentan
2009-09-18, 10:40 PM
We're doing some miniatures fleet combat with Mongoose Traveller (high guard rules), and I've been brewing up a storm trying to build a custom fleet. Fleets have 1000 points, each representing a billion credits of assets.

So here you have it: the Storm Class Assault Frigate


Hull: Tech 15 Type L (300 MCr) (2000 tons)
Hull: 57
Structure: 57
Armour: 12.5% Bonded Superdense (375 MCr) (250 Tons) (AR 15)
Stealthed: (20 MCr)
Bridge: 40 Tons (Hardened, Holographic Controls, and Command) (10 MCr) +2 to initiative and +1 tactics naval.
Computer: Model 5 (20 MCr)
Software: Fire Control/5 (10 MCr)
Electronics: Mil- Countermeasures Suite (20 Tons) (25 MCr)
Drives: M Drive DD (63 Tons) (128 MCr) (Thrust 6)
Stealth J Drive R (85 tons) (320 MCr) (Jump 3)
P-Plant DD (97 tons) (254 MCr)
Fuel: 56 tons (2 weeks endurance)
Drop mount attachments for 600 tons of fuel (1x Jump 3) (24 tons) (12 MCr)
(drop tanks) (1.2 MCr)
Weapons: 12 Long, Variable Range Large Railgun Bays (1200 Tons) (720 MCr)
33 spare tons of Railgun Ammunition
Screens: Tech 15 Nuclear Damper (30 Tons) (100 MCr)
Tech 15 Meson Screen (30 Tons) (120 MCr)
Crew: Staterooms: 18 (72 Tons) (9 MCr)
Full complement: 36

Total: 1967/2000 Tons; 2,414.2 MCr (2 points)

Before anyone comments, the Railguns have been ruled to have their maximum range extended by range tech upgrades, but for games where that isn't an option I have a torpedo boat variant, the Typhoon. I also have a Meson flicker variant, the Plague Wind, which I'm thinking of fielding in a small group if I can work out the radiation barrage rules...

The Assault frigate is meant to serve as the backbone of the custom fleet I'm building. It's meant to be fielded in groups of 20 (costing 50 points apiece). I realize it has tactical weaknesses (drop tanks are tricky, it lacks sustained fire ability without resupply, and it isn't much protected against the major weapons of it's era), but I believe it's damage output to cost compares favorably with that of, say, a Tigress. It's stealth ability, EW, ECM, and high speed also make it a versatile tactical weapon, and it's fairly highly armored and possesses sturdy hull and structure. The plan is to give the battle groups a support fighter screen to make up for the ship's lack of screens, and a support carrier to provide the fighters and drop tanks.

I submit it so any traveller players may critique unaddressed weaknesses before I am humiliated on the field of dishonor. I'll be following sometime within the next week with the support units, and I'd like to open the floor to any custom designed vessels anyone else cares to submit.

golentan
2009-09-19, 11:43 PM
Piece 2 in the fleet: The Shamal class Picket carrier.


Shamal Class Picket Carrier.

Hull: Tech 15 Type L (300 MCr) (2000 tons)
Hull: 57
Structure: 57
Armour: 12.5% Bonded Superdense (375 MCr) (250 Tons) (AR 15)
Stealthed: (20 MCr)
Bridge: 40 Tons (Hardened, Holographic Controls, and Command) (10 MCr) +2 to initiative and +1 tactics naval.
Computer: Model 5 (20 MCr)
Electronics: Mil- Countermeasures Suite (20 Tons) (25 MCr)
Drives: M Drive DD (63 Tons) (128 MCr) (Thrust 6)
J Drive R (85 tons) (160 MCr) (Jump 3)
P-Plant DD (97 tons) (254 MCr)
Fuel: 56 tons (2 weeks endurance)
Drop mount attachments for 600 tons of fuel (1x Jump 3) (24 tons) (12 MCr)
(drop tanks) (1.2 MCr)
Weapons: 20 triple turret beam lasers (Very high yield, Long Range) (20 tons) (40 MCr)
Vehicles: Launch tubes for Haboob drones (250 tons) (125 MCr)
80 Haboob Drones (~1,500 MCr) (800 tons)
Screens: 3 Tech 15 Nuclear Dampers (90 Tons) (300 MCr)
3 Tech 15 Meson Screens (90 Tons) (360 MCr)
Crew: 17 staterooms (68 Tons) (8.5 MCr)

Totals: 1953/2000 tons;

Haboob Class fighter drone
(standard fighter drone w/ triple sandcasters in place of laser)

Sirocco Class fighter drone: Can be substituted for the haboob, employs a VHY LR laser.

The Hurricane defense boat is almost complete, and will serve as a screen projector (mostly vs. meson). I'm just working out the smallest size I can fit maximum screen capacity into while still keeping pace with the main formation. I believe (having carefully read the relevant rules) that by RAW having a large number of active screen defenses on escorts rather than concentrated on board the defended ship or flight should yield a superior result, a belief on which the entire fleet is based.

I see the force mix in the fleet being 8 Storms to 4 Hurricanes to 2 Shamals, with variant units mixed in and a single jump capable base serving all of them and arriving as a post battle support unit. This is a significantly pricier unit (despite being built on the same frame and with many similar components) because of the cost of the Haboobs. I'm thinking it may not be essential, as the high armor value of the units and their flight status makes laser weaponry less than potentially lethal (-18 net effect to barrage total before anything factoring in gunnery and dodging and...). Still, the launching of 90+ mobile turrets and kamikaze craft might be handy, and I'm considering going with a missile fighter with multiple warhead triple turrets. This would turn the Shamal from a missile and laser defense system into another offensive system with an output of 240d6 barrage damage each round assuming joint force ECM can keep point defense occupied. I need to hit some cost/benefit analysis to determine usability, though. Haboobs are fragile, and not particularly cheap, and I have an inkling that it may be best to simply scrap this portion of the mix and transfer over some responsibilities to other units.

Also, I see there have been some lurkers but no posts. If you read this please give advice. That's the reason I'm posting here in the first place.

Yakk
2009-09-21, 10:20 AM
This is interesting, but without knowing the rules of Traveller ship building and combat (which you seem to be using to eak out extra performance), it would be hard to make an intelligent comment. :)

So I'll make some dumb ones!

So the idea is that you have a mixed force squad of 20 ships. Each member of the 20 ship force has 2 weeks of conventional fuel, and drop tanks allowing a single "Jump 3".

The backbone of your fleet is some (extremely long range?) railgun craft. The Storm is basically a huge array of railguns, wrapped in reasonably thick armor, with a small amount of drives, command and control, and other sundry. It holds only 2 weeks of operational fuel, and can make a single jump without refueling.

I note you didn't use up 33 tonnes of space in your craft. Is there a reason? You could double your ammunition store using that space.

The carrier is a similar arrangement. It is mainly a storage and launching device for drones, with similarly thick armor (presumably because who is hit is relatively random in the combat system?). However, it has a bunch of extra 'screens' against a few attack types you are worried about.

An interesting difference is one has a stealthed J drive, and the other doesn't. Wouldn't that make combined arms stealth impossible?

golentan
2009-09-21, 02:14 PM
Whoops, all of them are supposed to have stealth drives. Also, the final tonnage and sort is unladen, so I should probably remove the comment about railgun ammunition.

Yes, Jump 3 takes the ships 3 parsecs in a week. This is half the possible range of a vessel of the era, but I'm not going for a long range strike force. The entirety of the fleet is based around questioning some default traveller assumptions, which seem to employ larger ships (such as the Tigress, half-million ton behemoth affectionately referred to as pocket deathstars by some) fielding almost entirely energy weapons and travelling at 6 parsecs a week to secure strategic targets rapidly. My fleet uses drop tanks to increase their weapon capacity immensely (fuel space for a jump is 10% of the ship's volume times the number of parsecs), and breaks various ship functions between multiple significantly smaller and cheaper vessels for redundancy.

Energy weapons are the rulers of the era, particularly meson weapons. They're basically unstable neutrino beams: they don't interact with anything, pass through armor, and then decay with the force of a nuke (or more) inside the target if the gunner did his job right. But they don't do as much bombard damage as railguns, and are less effective against smaller ships because they have to hit a smaller cross section to do damage. So my hope is that by breaking everything into small ships and putting up enough screens and electronic interference there will be no target worth shooting at. Then, employing railguns becomes a massive damage source (each bay has enough ammo by itself for 10 rounds of sustained fire), as there are no shields that stop a massive hunk of depleted uranium and the damage is better than any possible armor (maximum armor is 15 in this system, railguns do 18 bombard damage, which gives a positive modifier to resolving attacks before everything else). If this pans out, the moderate range of the craft can be compensated for by the fact that they can hold off far more costly fleets, and once they secure something it will stay secure. That's the hope.

I appreciate the comment, by the way. I do appreciate it much more than just having the view counter tick upwards with nothing. And at this point I think having a crunch analysis will need to wait until I can field a fleet.

Yakk
2009-09-21, 03:22 PM
If you are going for a "set piece battle" style game, your strategy seems smart.

But in a 'simulate the world', unless your ships utterly destroy a Tigress (like 5:1 in terms of cost), your ships don't look like a good idea.

Your ships are short range, need constant resupply, and are slow. Faced with that, if I was armed with Tigresses and escorts, I'd use scouts to find out where you are not, and then pound that to pieces. I'd engage when I'd have a tactical advantage, and destroy your supply lines.

Your only option in response to this is to keep your forces concentrated, and try to pin down a faster, longer-ranged enemy. Unless, of course, your ships are ridiculously more efficient than mine -- in which case, a zone defence would work (if I'm 10 times more efficient than you, and I have 10 times your fleet, I can defend 8 zones against your attack while having a fleet capable of stomping your entire force flat attacking).

This is only possible because your fleet is slow and short ranged. Range can be fixed by bringing along enough fuel ships (can you drop and pick up fuel tanks in space quickly?). Speed, I suspect, would require higher Jump ratings.

How hard would it to be to make your ships compete with the Jump ratings of capital ships?

...

Are you using some kind of bog-standard drop-tank transport?

...

How fatal is 10 rounds of bombardment going to be?

golentan
2009-09-21, 04:49 PM
The fleet is actually quite maneuverable on the battlefield, pulling 6 Gs of sustained acceleration for 2 weeks before needing fuel. It is only in Jump, where no combat can take place, that they are slower, which allows for island hopping against them (jump behind the line of defense to hit). The hope is their relative strength and cost can let them hold targets against such attacks without fear. I could potentially trim down a bay to fit Jump 6, but I'm not sure it's worth it except for a small number of rapid response units.

A battlegroup of 20 Storms can fire at long range, meaning the only weapons that outpace them for range are missiles (for which the ECM and armor is handy), spinal mounts which can only destroy a single target and have difficulty with that because of aiming, and some long range particle beams which are rendered useless against their armor and hardened systems. In a round of bombardment, assuming full evasive maneuvers on both sides, we get an expected result of (I can't believe I'm actually plugging this out. I thought I wouldn't bother doing the calcs).

7 (average roll) + 3 (average skill) + 18 (weapon damage) + 5 (fire control) - 15 (armor) - 12 (dodging) = an average effect of 6 (75% damage, 3240 total). That will be a kill in two rounds, breaking the ship in half, even if the tigress spends their full acceleration dodging. If they catch it unawares or in the middle of maneuvering for something else, they will do enough damage to destroy all parts of it in a single volley.

When the tigress gets to retaliate, getting a barrage and a spinal shot, for an effect of
7 (average roll) + 3 (average skill) + Weapon Damage (varies) + 5 Fire Control - 15 armor - 12 dodging - 2 (firing meson weapons) - 2 (screens vs. nuclear or meson weapons) - 4 for firing on a flight of small ships (though any damage is tripled after working everything out).
By weapon system that breaks down to:
(Weapon; Effect; Damage; an X denotes 0 chance of damage)
Missiles; -15; x
Fusion Guns; -9; x
Particle Beams; -6, 0 (concentrated fire on a single ship has a one in 36 chance of hitting a single vessel, slagging it instantly)
Meson Guns; -9; x
Torpedos; -9; x
Laser Turrets; -14; x
Particle Turrets; -12; x

And Spinal Attack:
7 (average roll) + 3 skill + 5 fire control + 2 pilot alignment - 1 size of target vessel - 12 dodging = 4, which may hit on good rolls. It would do ~1500 damage to a single vessel, which would make it very, very dead.

This has a decent chance of taking out one or two ships in each formation every round. But when one formation has a group of 20 and the other only has a single ship, that's a disparity. And when the one ship costs seven times the entire opposing force (I think you mentioned 5 as a threshold? We're past that), it has a big influence. This is before including escorts and auxiliaries on either side. All this assumes all weapons are firing at optimum range at the same time which would never occur.

Yakk
2009-09-22, 09:06 AM
*nod*, so that is pretty good.

Is there a way that medium-sized ships could out perform your ship, or a way that small-sized ships could tear your fleet apart?

Second, can jump drives be used to 'flee' a combat? Your ship (in combat trim with tanks discarded) is incapable of jumping.

Can you target a particular ship in a battlegroup? I'd expect a tigress to have a large number of escorts (that is pretty bog-standard naval doctrine -- don't send a high value unit out alone).

How would your flight of 20 do against a swarm of fighters? A swarm of relatively light gunships with long-range spinal-mount cannons? (note that the problem with the spinal mount on the tigress is that it is overkill, not that it is ineffective: ships with longer range than you and a gun that is less overkill might cause you some serious issues).

golentan
2009-09-22, 03:21 PM
*nod*, so that is pretty good.

Is there a way that medium-sized ships could out perform your ship, or a way that small-sized ships could tear your fleet apart?

Second, can jump drives be used to 'flee' a combat? Your ship (in combat trim with tanks discarded) is incapable of jumping.

Can you target a particular ship in a battlegroup? I'd expect a tigress to have a large number of escorts (that is pretty bog-standard naval doctrine -- don't send a high value unit out alone).

How would your flight of 20 do against a swarm of fighters? A swarm of relatively light gunships with long-range spinal-mount cannons? (note that the problem with the spinal mount on the tigress is that it is overkill, not that it is ineffective: ships with longer range than you and a gun that is less overkill might cause you some serious issues).

Yes. Smaller capital ships could mount a thousand ton spinal mount which would have the same hit chance but be cheaper and more of them. And yes, it's possible to target a specific ship, which was why the particle beams where listed as 0 (by focusing fire they had a shot at hitting). This is why I'm working feverishly on completing the defense boat: because they (when using an escort action) can loan their screens to another vessel, and can increase the shield strength to the point where after hitting they only have a small chance of doing damage. This is my single largest concern, though, and I don't want to minimize that.

As for fighters, a large enough swarm of torpedo or railgun barbette bombers might pose a threat. But the main problem with that is that fighter craft can't mount bays, and so have the same problem penetrating armor as most of the smaller weapons above. I'm not that worried about any weapon system that weighs less than 100 tons, the exception being maybe bomb pumped torpedoes.

As for jumping away from combat, yes it's possible. But it takes at least 2 turns (10 to 60 minutes) to jump. And almost all ships have that problem, the issue is that jump fuel takes up so much space that unless you're jumping at less than half of capacity you're as committed as it's possible to be once you throw that switch.

Yakk
2009-09-24, 02:33 PM
So what would a ship on the same scale, with a spinal mount gun, look like? (design-wise)

How would it fair against a storm (n on n)? 20+ of them against a tigress?

sebsmith
2009-09-24, 07:44 PM
While looking for something else from our conversation, found this gem: Annual budget for a navy (Cr) = [(500 * pop)* Govt Multiplier] (http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:ey_3EyK_ORgJ:www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php%3Ft%3D3370+site:http://www.travellerrpg.com/%3Fp%3Dcoti+sdb&hl=en&lr=lang_en&client=safari&gl=us&strip=1)

Which implies you are supporting one of these fleets per (roughly) 2 million people in your empire. Given that your star empire is tech 15, it requires a total population (including trading partners) of at least 10^15 (or 1,000,000,000,000,000) to support that. Google calculator says that gives you 500,000,000 fleets. But those numbers also give you a large enough empire to prohibit actual expansionist drives given Traveller communication tech (speed of fastest ship).

If we instead assumed your a nation one hundredth that size leaching your tech level off your much larger neighbor(s), you'd still have 5 million fleets. This still feels like an unreasonable number of task forces.

But lets not get to sidetracked by that right now, the classic Traveller doctrine to a fleet made mostly of jump-3 would be to use drop tanks to ignore anything you've left on your border by going at least 12 parsecs deep into your empire. This would hopefully be enough to achieve supremacy above the local sector capital government, which will still be on planet if the surprise attack is pulled off, to force it to terms.

As to the Tigress, it also certainly was made before Mongoose Traveller, and probably didn't even have stats that worked with the rules back then. It would also not be designed to take on the type of enemy you are presenting.

To give the modern naval equivalency, I think you are supposing a major power would only (or at least primarily) field guys on speed boats with rocket launchers and pitting a modern destroyer's cost worth of them against just a Ford class carrier. Except in Traveller, high end fleets use battleships, not Carriers, so the Tigress can't just launch fighters to deal with you, and the rocket launcher equivalent doesn't work the way you house ruled it to work since the line "Rail-guns can only be used at Short range or less" seems pretty clear to me. Also, I don't remember rail-guns even existing in previous versions of the game. Even then, this is the closest Traveller gets to sneaking a ship under the firing arc of the enemy.

Also, Repulsors which don't seem to exist in Mongoose Traveller would be used to counter the torpedo boat variant in other versions of the game. While a light vessel built around a meson gun or two is probably keeping within the constraints of classic Traveller Doctrine.

sebsmith
2009-09-26, 11:20 PM
It appears I need to trademark my thread killing powers, since this one seems dead now.

If anyone still cares, other info I found shows the main power in Traveller used Jump-4, Maneuver-6 vessels, even if the vessels don't have the fuel to achieve Jump-4. However, for this we need to know what your vessels are required to have to be fielded?