Capital Ship Weaponry

[phavoc]

Is anyone else interested in coming up with a set of guidelines for creating capital ship weapons? I understand that most people don't play Traveller to fight capital ships, but it just seems to be a glaring hole in the design structure.

And yeah, I know that anyone can come up with their own local rules for things, but I'd like to think that more than just one person could benefit from a collaboration.

So would anyone be interested in working together and sharing the fruits of our labor?

 

[BP]

Is anyone else interested in coming up with a set of guidelines for creating capital ship weapons? I understand that most people don't play Traveller to fight capital ships, but it just seems to be a glaring hole in the design structure.

And yeah, I know that anyone can come up with their own local rules for things, but I'd like to think that more than just one person could benefit from a collaboration.

So would anyone be interested in working together and sharing the fruits of our labor?

Not sure where the 'glaring hole' is - spinal weapons are almost exclusively the domain of capital ships. And bay weapons are rather economically and practically limited on sub-capital ships.

Captial ships just have mo' bigger guns. Though, the railgun might be extended to a spinal version

Any captial ship 'technology' - unless it has to be massive - is going to exist at all scales. This is a pretty consistent design principle.

 

[phavoc]

Is anyone else interested in coming up with a set of guidelines for creating capital ship weapons? I understand that most people don't play Traveller to fight capital ships, but it just seems to be a glaring hole in the design structure.

And yeah, I know that anyone can come up with their own local rules for things, but I'd like to think that more than just one person could benefit from a collaboration.

So would anyone be interested in working together and sharing the fruits of our labor?

Not sure where the 'glaring hole' is - spinal weapons are almost exclusively the domain of capital ships. And bay weapons are rather economically and practically limited on sub-capital ships.

Captial ships just have mo' bigger guns. Though, the railgun might be extended to a spinal version

Any captial ship 'technology' - unless it has to be massive - is going to exist at all scales. This is a pretty consistent design principle.

True, there are spinal mounts, but basically 400,000 battleship has the same weaponry as a 25,000 cruiser. There isn't any scaling, its just a bigger hull. And 'ganging' a bunch of pulse lasers into a bay mount is not the same as having a single laser do the same amount of damage but coming from 1 larger weapon instead of 10 smaller ones.

Small turreted weapons do belong on smaller ships. But there should be, in my opinion, a scaling up of the energy weapons as well. If you use past naval design, you had 3" guns on escorts, 5" guns on DD's, 8" and 10" guns on cruisers, 12" and 14" guns on battle cruisers, 15", 16" & 18" on battleships. The ships were bigger to mount more armor and bigger guns, not to mount lots and lots of smaller guns.

GURPS Starships went a little further in the weapons tree by having more powerful lasers, but they never got very far into things.

 

[BP]

Ok, get more where you're coming from.

Unfortunately, not sure the 'expanded combat system' really supports scaling weapons, like bigger spinal weapons, well (honestly, not sure it supports the existing well).

I could see larger scale bays as an option - instead of the ridiculous number of turrents/bays we see in current designs (though that is mostly poor design - overkill without thought to allocation of resources).

Again, this is also tied to the way battery combat is 'defined'. Larger bays probably, easily, become as good or better than spinal weapons - without a reasonable cost/mass difference.

Making new weapons options, first might require making up a new combat system... one that supports this concept. (And maybe is playable as well! :roll: )

 

[apoc527]

I have rules for "mega-bays.". They are 500 and 1000 dton bays that do a scaled amount of damage compared to 50 and 100 dton bays.

Spinal mounted p-beams currently suck, but meson guns are brutal. The combat system isn't bad--it's nearly impossible to create a good space combat system for large ships. Most games fail horribly in some way-usually playability.

That said, HG isn't far from being quite good. I think a bit of tweaking would help, but the barrage rules are essential for the number of weapons on these ships.

 

[phavoc]

I have rules for "mega-bays.". They are 500 and 1000 dton bays that do a scaled amount of damage compared to 50 and 100 dton bays.

Spinal mounted p-beams currently suck, but meson guns are brutal. The combat system isn't bad--it's nearly impossible to create a good space combat system for large ships. Most games fail horribly in some way-usually playability.

That said, HG isn't far from being quite good. I think a bit of tweaking would help, but the barrage rules are essential for the number of weapons on these ships.

I'm thinking less bay weapons and more larger turreted weapons. Right now bays seem over simplistic to me. Instead of actually scaling up a laser, the original design just threw more of the same weapon in and said "lets call it a bay!".

I'd like to see much larger turreted weapons (lasers, particle beams, etc) with the turrets able to hold 1 to 2 (or 3 or 4?) large energy weapons that would smash smaller ships to bits. Spinal mounts are ship killers for sure, but they can only shoot at one target, and you won't waste a spinal mount on a light cruiser, but you might use your main guns, or maybe your secondaries on it.

Think more like WW2 combat, with the main guns engaging the other large ships and the secondary batteries engaging smaller targets.

I've given some thought to this, and for it to work first the weapons would have to be designed, then come up with tonnages/displacement values, ranges, and then the secondary things like damage per beam, how much energy does it take (limits your # of weapons based on your power), how much space does the turret take up, and then things like crewing, and damage charts.

I was thinking that you would have classes of the weapons (like 1-5), and each type was bigger, more expensive and more damaging than the previous.

I know it isn't quite Traveller canon, but still seems like something that should have been part of the capital ship design charts.

 

[apoc527]

Ummm. Bay weapons ARE massive turreted weapons. They are NOT just a collection of small weapons. A 50 dton bay is a big honkin gun half the size of a scoutship! This seemed evident from the deckplans of ships with bay weapons.

Now if you want multiple-mounted bay sized weapons, that could be interesting. Something you might want to look at for inspiration:

http://alternityrpg.net/downloads/sourcebooks/Warships.pdf

That's a sourcebook for the old TSR Alternity SF RPG for designing large warships and fighting with them. (Don't worry, it's always been a free giveaway.) There are some things to like about it...actually a lot of things, as I've been using that book for several years to generate all the ships in my various Alternity games. However, now that I've found MGT, there are something that I do NOT like about Warships. First, the scaling is really whacked. Everything is done in totally abstract "hull points," which have no relationship to any kind of useful measurement (contrast this with the dton). The smallest fighter as "10 hull points" while the largest 4 kilometer long "fortress ships" have about 18,000. Compare this to the difference between a 10 dton fighter and a 500 kton dreadnaught. 1800 times more usable space in Warships compared to 50,000 times more usable space in Traveller. It gets worse with cargo bays in Warships.

However, the reason I'm showing it to you is that it has rules for mounting large beam weapons in multiple mounts. The inspiration is clearly WWI and WWII naval design. Frankly, I see no reason why that design paradigm would apply to space weapons, but YMMV. At any rate, if you want a quad-mounted fusion beam, there you go. The problem with it is that nothing is standardized and all the weapons are different sizes. It's not as elegant as Traveller in a lot of ways.

 

[barnest2]

I agree with the orignal theory, that weapons could perhaps scale a lot better than they already do. However, the addition of high guard, giving us larger bays and the barbettes means some of this need is abated, dont you think?
I agree though, that a better scaling system would be useful, as just saying everything is a turret (varying size and armament), would be much clearer than saying turrets, barbettes, bays, larger bays etc...
anyway, I'd be very interested in helping with this. I've always thought the weapons were lacking something.

 

[phavoc]

Ummm. Bay weapons ARE massive turreted weapons. They are NOT just a collection of small weapons. A 50 dton bay is a big honkin gun half the size of a scoutship! This seemed evident from the deckplans of ships with bay weapons.

I didn't go back to my original Traveller books where bay weapons were first introduced, but I scanned through the core rulebook and high guard and I could not find a description of bay weapons being turreted weapons. I did find in High Guard, pg 49, a description of the railgun bay - " A 50-ton ralgun bay consists of multipole linked railguns."

 

[apoc527]

Look at the deckplans in High Guard. They display bays as massive turrets. The railguns are the exception and that's why they get Autofire. Personally, I changed that in my games.

I'm not sure how bays were described in CT but in MGT they are clearly big guns, of exactly the sort you want. This also is born out in the rules. A bay does far more damage than a collection of smaller weapons against armored foes.

 

[BP]

Mechanics wise, bays are simply bigger guns. Wether turret mounted, or fixed in the hull (mine are typically big 'turrets' mounted in an inset 'bay') - the result is the same.

Actually, when only two spaceships are involved, it really shouldn't matter given the 6 minute combat round. Niether should bearing - as 6 minutes is plenty of time for even the largest MGT spaceship to spin around axis... bearing should really only come into play with multiple combatants being fired upon.

The CT analogy of spaceships to surface ships has always been rather 'quaint'

 

[ColHut]

Oh I don't know - you would still fire on the roll...

 

[mrfingle]

Look at the deckplans in High Guard. They display bays as massive turrets.

Am I looking at the wrong place? All I see are lots of smaller turrets clustered together in the deck plans

 

[phavoc]

I agree with the orignal theory, that weapons could perhaps scale a lot better than they already do. However, the addition of high guard, giving us larger bays and the barbettes means some of this need is abated, dont you think?
I agree though, that a better scaling system would be useful, as just saying everything is a turret (varying size and armament), would be much clearer than saying turrets, barbettes, bays, larger bays etc...
anyway, I'd be very interested in helping with this. I've always thought the weapons were lacking something.

Thanks for the offer Barnest. I have some stuff written up I'll try to post in the next few days.

 

[DeadMike]

True, there are spinal mounts, but basically 400,000 battleship has the same weaponry as a 25,000 cruiser. There isn't any scaling, its just a bigger hull. And 'ganging' a bunch of pulse lasers into a bay mount is not the same as having a single laser do the same amount of damage but coming from 1 larger weapon instead of 10 smaller ones.

Personally, when it comes to pulse lasers I would rather have 10 smaller ones than 1 larger one that does the damage of 10. Point defence. Take out 10 missiles rather than 1. The other weapons systems I can see where you are going, but not the pulse lasers.

 

[phavoc]

So I was going through my old GURPS Starships book and I found some references to bay weaponry that shed some light on the descriptions. I've not yet found similar references in my MGT books, but I'm still looking.

GURPS defines weapon bays as either internal, or external (aka a turret of some sort). GURPS further states that external bays take up their tonndage in surface area, something that is not calculated in MGT.

Internal bays can be used to store cargo at 50% of their displacement, while external bays cannot. Which makes some sense.

Under GURPS rules a bay may only be installed for every 10 turrets that are not installed. Which means bays would never be seen on a ship of less than 1,000 tons.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

The latest edition of the HG Errata says that bays are External targets on the hit tables (they were internal before) so it looks like Mongoose is going with the "very big turret" description.

 

[locarno24]

Someone mentioned superheavy bays. I do think that some rules for 'really ridiculously honking great turret' would be nice.

The thing is, One spinal mount is all well and good, but when you look at proper battleship-grade warships, they're not actually that big.

Using a historical example (dangerous, I know), Yamato's primary turrets massed about 2,500 tonnes (about the same as a TL13 spinal particle cannon). These were traversing turrets, not fixed mounts, and it carried three of them. This is on a 65,000 tonne ship, which only just makes it onto the second half of High Guard's capital ships displacement table (CN, if anyone cares).

Besides which, whilst a 1,000 missile barrage is satisfying, there's also a lot to be said for having half a dozen 'main guns', especially when each section of a big capital ship can be an order of magnitude larger than a smaller capship still perfectly entitled to a spinal mount.

 

[rust]

This is on a 65,000 tonne ship, which only just makes it onto the second half of High Guard's capital ships displacement table (CN, if anyone cares).

In fact, if I did not fumble my mathematics roll once again, the historical
Yamato would only have about 5,000 dtons, a rather small battleship in
a Traveller universe.

 

[cbrunish]

According to Wikipedia it states that Yamota displaces approx 72,800 tons with full armament. Not an expert of naval terms but I would assume this means that this would be displacement tons as Traveller.