Recent content by phavoc

Ships fought in a line for reasons. During the age of sail cannons were direct-fire and you had almost zero ability to shoot at anything other than next to you. Once turrets and ballistics became a thing, ships still tended to fight in a line for gunnery purposes. But in this era being able to...

Insofar as USN designs went, I think it's safe to say the South Dakota and Iowa classes are true battleships, while the Alaska class was the never-to- be-called battlecruiser class, similar to Scharnorst class. Generally speaking the design's for various navies battlecruisers varied. They were...

Depends in the era. The US built 'light' South Dakota class battleships, and then built the follow-on Iowa class. South Dakota class was notably inferior in armor protection, but had same guns and speed as Iowa. Historically light battleships were built for various reasons - cost and speed...

You want to talk about being sold a fake bill of Dreadnought goods... I bought Massie's Dreadnought thinking it was going to be over 1,000 pages on the ship itself. Nerp... I got a CHAPTER on the ship itself. The rest was all about the tow-headed cousins in Europe who were playing the Game...

Ya beat me to it... For those interested in NOT doing their own research on this... HMS Dreadnaught, when launched, immediately rendered all previous classes of battleships obsolete for a few reasons - the biggest being that Fisher and the Royal Navy finally acknowledged that having multiple...

The books don't lend a lot of layered sophistication to orbital infrastructure. Grav technology fundamentally changes everything about space access. A busy planet, especially one that combines a large, industrialized and high-tech population, is going to have a massive space infrastructure...

Other sci-fi series or settings follows what's been mentioned by a few above. First you have battleships as a class, then dreadnoughts, then super-dreadnoughts as the scale of the ship goes up. In some cases a monitor class come afterwards, but that's sending mixed messages, as a classic...

Unless the highport is totally unarmed and without any protection whatsoever, the PC's will fail if trying to do it with a ship. Now, if they were able to smuggle either a nuclear weapon or else a lot of very powerful conventional explosives (or even, possibly, using something like LOX to mix...

Yeah, I can see the conversation between us is going nowhere. There's no point in continuing to discuss this topic as you are stating things I didn't say. If I'm misinterpreting that, please provide the specific quotes to where I said those things because I don't believe I did. Now, how you...

I think dropping to a lower orbit requires you to slow down, not speed up. Once you hit a lower orbit you start encountering the atmosphere, which slows you down further. Gravity does the rest and pulls you into the bosom of it's grasp. Gravitics should be able to make you go faster or...

Barracks are suitable as temporary berthing space. A marine assigned to a ship for a 6 month deployment of said ship would be considered a passenger, albeit a longer-term one. I have no issue with them being assigned barracks. If a Marine is assigned as crew (not temporary) then they should...

We know that you can use anti-grav belts to move and not just levitate. And air/rafts and other grav vehicles are able to both lift and thrust using grav propulsion. It also may be a question of mass, though some of the grav vehicles are capable of much greater flight speeds than a ship...

You do realize that you made my point? Troops traveling for a year in barracks-style accommodations while crew get cabins? Mercenary troops relegated to being stacked like cordwood as their living quarters while other ships crew get 2 man cabins? Even for volunteers this will engender poor...

Here is where I think the rule goes off the rails: HG'22, p50: BARRACKS Ships designed to carry large numbers of troops tend to use barracks instead of staterooms. A barracks may only be used to carry soldiers, basic passengers or other personnel who will put up with cramped conditions. This...

Size of them would be variable, depending upon need and people carried. And also how they work (rack-em and stack-em and turn the lights off while they wait, or provide them actual seats and food/water/fresher facilities while they are awake the whole time). As they are escape craft making...