Carrier Deck Crews
- Thread starter phavoc
- Start date
dragoner said:
Either could be easily accommodated within the list. Light carriers could be 120-250.
Strike carriers would require some more thinking. 'Strike' is a more explicit mission type, at least that's how I see it. A Strike carrier might have longer jump-range. I would expect most fleet-type vessels to have a minimum Jump-4, 4G acceleration.
Using that premise, strike carriers would/could have either a higher jump number, a higher acceleration number, or possibly a combination of both.
Does that fit into what you were thinking?
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
It comes down to semantics and historical perspective.
Through deck cruisers was a political sleight of hand to retain any form of fixed wing capability in the Royal Navy past a budget-conscientious tight-fisted Ministry of Defence. They had the air group of an escort carrier but the performance of a light carrier.
Ironically, carriers were originally seen as a scouting element, but I don't think you'd designate a carrier as such, more likely add a larger smallcraft element to a cruiser.
A strike carrier would devote most of it's air group to that mission, and because fuel becomes an important element in planning, probably is better protected since they would be deployed more forward so that the fighters have a faster turnaround.
An assault carrier implies an LHD with a mixed CAS and troop carrier air group. Probably has a decent ortillery and point defence.
Light carriers are fast enough to keep up with the battle squadrons, and should provide what necessary fighter coverage they would need, assuming it's not inherent.
On another forum, someone asked what's the difference between light and heavy fighters. I'd say it depends on capability and assigned function. Though once you add in a stateroom, you might as well make it a patrol craft and have four crew members, being the optimum number if anything goes wrong.
Through deck cruisers was a political sleight of hand to retain any form of fixed wing capability in the Royal Navy past a budget-conscientious tight-fisted Ministry of Defence. They had the air group of an escort carrier but the performance of a light carrier.
Ironically, carriers were originally seen as a scouting element, but I don't think you'd designate a carrier as such, more likely add a larger smallcraft element to a cruiser.
A strike carrier would devote most of it's air group to that mission, and because fuel becomes an important element in planning, probably is better protected since they would be deployed more forward so that the fighters have a faster turnaround.
An assault carrier implies an LHD with a mixed CAS and troop carrier air group. Probably has a decent ortillery and point defence.
Light carriers are fast enough to keep up with the battle squadrons, and should provide what necessary fighter coverage they would need, assuming it's not inherent.
On another forum, someone asked what's the difference between light and heavy fighters. I'd say it depends on capability and assigned function. Though once you add in a stateroom, you might as well make it a patrol craft and have four crew members, being the optimum number if anything goes wrong.
dragoner said:
Supplement 9 listed three carrier types - A 29k ton 'light' which had 80 fighters jump-4, 2G, a 75k ton 'strike' carrier which also carried 80 fighters, but had jump-3, 6G capabilities. And a 100k 'fleet' carrier that carried 300 fighters with jump-4, 2G ratings.
Both the the light and strike carriers had a single launch tube. The big difference between those two was the fact that the strike carrier also has a spinal mount, 32 50-ton missile bays, armor factor-6 hull and agility 6. The light carrier had 4 50-ton bays, agility 2 and armor factor-1.
The fleet carrier has no spinal mount, 3 100-ton bays, 65 50-ton bays, armor factor-2 and agility 2.
The strike carrier has a much greater offensive capability without it's fighters, though it should not be in the battle line (no true carrier should). The light and fleet carriers had strong armaments, but essentially are meant to be protected by escorts. For maximizing your offensive capabilities it might be better to have just turrets instead of bays, and with the reduced offensive tonnage allocating that to your fighter carrying capabilities. It's always a trade-off.
Condottiere said:
I agree with your on the strike carrier definition. It's a more offensive-oriented carrier, perhaps part of a fast-moving, hard-hitting strike force of lighter units that would either screen the main fleet, be tasked with hitting lighter defended targets, or deep commerce-raids. Most likely they'd be paired up with fast-moving ships, battlecruisers probably be their heaviest elements. Using the same ideas behind battlecruisers - what you can't outfight, you outrun. 'cepting for the British thoughts behind battlecruisers (i.e. cheaper ships of the line... Jutland..Doh!)
I would say assault carriers would still be armed with fighters, though the carrier itself would be stronger and tougher, and designed to be part of a hard-hitting task group. While you could embark troops, and even stay out of the range of planetary defenses and launch from safety, that type of work would be better placed with true heavily-protected planetary assault ships. Hybridization might not work very well here. The Azhanti High Lightning, nee Colonial Cruiser, was/is useful for some areas, but didn't do any one thing well. The supplements say it's only been kept around because it's jump-5 and can get to a hot spot quickly.
Light carriers really are just light by their carrying capacity. Other than that there's nothing to say that they can't be fast, slow, well-armed, or lightly armed.
One thing that might help with classification is the number of launch tubes a carrier has. Ships that are expected to have plenty of time to launch their craft don't need any, or no more than one. Ships that are expected to be able to flood the space around them with their fighters should be able to launch their entire complement in say 2-3 combat turns, otherwise if they have time to prepare, then 10 combat turns should be sufficient. In theory.... all carriers should have hours of warning before the enemy gets in range, or they get in range of the enemy. But rapid launch/recovery would be necessary if they also expect to need to get the hell out of dodge fast.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Delaying action with a gradual withdrawal, or at least that's why the Imperium started balancing out their preponderance of battle tender squadrons with battleship ones.
While I used to think that fleet carriers were supposed to fulfill the role I ascribed to light carriers, but from Sector Fleet I get the impression each sector has four fleet carriers, four strike carriers and eight light carriers organized into sixteen independent task groups. That's really too few to send along with destroyer flotillas.
What Fisher wanted was a scout that could force it's way through screening forces to see what's on the other side of the hill, a role that aircraft took over. The temptation to use ships with capital class armament in the line of battle can be overwhelming. Had Jellicoe managed to pull off another Trafalgar, no one would have said anything.
You then have the Merchant (Smallcraft) Carrier, which I suspect gets extra airlock/spacedocks and an expanded central hangar installed, and one or two dozen fighters.
And as an interim measure, merchants get assigned one, a couple or half a dozen fighters, if their hangars have the space, or they can dock/grapple the fighter on the hull, which is about as close as I can get to the concept of the Hurricat.
Then you have the Traveller analogue of the floatplane/flying boat, and their respective tenders.
While I used to think that fleet carriers were supposed to fulfill the role I ascribed to light carriers, but from Sector Fleet I get the impression each sector has four fleet carriers, four strike carriers and eight light carriers organized into sixteen independent task groups. That's really too few to send along with destroyer flotillas.
What Fisher wanted was a scout that could force it's way through screening forces to see what's on the other side of the hill, a role that aircraft took over. The temptation to use ships with capital class armament in the line of battle can be overwhelming. Had Jellicoe managed to pull off another Trafalgar, no one would have said anything.
You then have the Merchant (Smallcraft) Carrier, which I suspect gets extra airlock/spacedocks and an expanded central hangar installed, and one or two dozen fighters.
And as an interim measure, merchants get assigned one, a couple or half a dozen fighters, if their hangars have the space, or they can dock/grapple the fighter on the hull, which is about as close as I can get to the concept of the Hurricat.
Then you have the Traveller analogue of the floatplane/flying boat, and their respective tenders.
Condottiere said:
I've not studied Sector Fleet in depth, though I would assume that Sector Fleets are sized according to needs. Heavier units would not be as necessary deployed in coreward sectors as they would on the frontiers. Though I suppose that's open to interpretation and desire.
Condottiere said:
I recall the various navies (Japan, UK, Germany) and their differing views on BC's. The early action off the Falklands (where UK BC's sank German cruiser squadron) seemed to prove the concept. Though I do think the idea that the fleet would see the BC as too valuable to leave out of the battle line proved to be the undoing of England at Jutland. The Germans had it right with increasing the armor thickness, plus they actually had slightly better steel than the UK did.
Signing the Washington naval treaty seemed to put the kibosh on BC's. The UK still had theirs, as did Japan and Germany, but the airplane seemed to have taken out the possibility of surface combat for much of the war, except in a few instances.
Condottiere said:
Yah, it's easy enough to deploy auxillary carriers in Traveller. With no need for a flight deck, most any freighter can be modified to be a auxillary carrier - just as long as there is no need to rapidly launch or recover all your fighters. Then you'd need a distributed hull.
phavoc said:
Yes, I posted that at the top of the previous page; the point being that there should be continuity unless there is a real reason to change it.
IMTU, a usual formation is a Wind with two Ghalalks as a reinforced CruDiv; DD's and DE's added as needed. IMO what S:9 didn't have much of, and what I haven't seen as many designs of are the DD's, which are the workhorses; or maybe not.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
I just realized that there are sixteen subsectors, so it seems implied that you tend to get one carrier task group per subsector, probably roaming, and redirected to potential hotspots as they flare up.
The event of the fast battleship made a battlecruiser of near similar tonnage obsolete. Treaty limitations made battleships the more attractive option. By the second world war, I think most navies saw their role as cruiser killers and/or commerce raiders, in the Japanese case, carrier group fast escorts.
The event of the fast battleship made a battlecruiser of near similar tonnage obsolete. Treaty limitations made battleships the more attractive option. By the second world war, I think most navies saw their role as cruiser killers and/or commerce raiders, in the Japanese case, carrier group fast escorts.
In Traveller, fighters seem to be more scouts and ground attack craft than ship killers, so in that way the paradigm doesn't follow through. Unless maybe one wants to compare battle riders to fighters, which pound for pound are the best, not having to be giant hydrogen balloons.
Condottiere said:
It seems to me the BC was reigned in more by the Washington Naval treaty than anything else. You are right that technology increased the possible speed for BB's. So that meant you could, in theory at least, build a BB that was just as fast as a BC, and the BB would have more armor, and possibly bigger guns (depending on which navy was doing the building - the UK had BC's mounting BB armament, and the Japanese had 14" on some of theirs).
I think what did more than anything to kill the concept of the battlecruiser was the airplane. Until the end of the treaty, the upper limit on tonnage meant you still had the need for more hulls. With cruisers massing around 10k tons (at the time of the treaty at least), you could get 2 18k battlecruisers out of 1 35k ton hull. Still, it's a tradeoff, as everything is, between putting more in a single hull vs. putting less in two hulls.
Things got blurry though towards the run-up to WW2. The German Gneisenau and Scharnhorst were like 'light' battleships, as were the Japanese Kongō-class battlecruisers after their refits. The US Alaska class has always been a personal favorite of mine. It really was a well-balanced cruiser-killer design.
dragoner said:
Yeah. Fighters excel as screening elements for fleets, and enmasse can be deadly if armed with torpedoes. If they are properly armed and armored, like say with plasma weaponry, they can be quite deadly if they can get in close.
Depending on how you plan to attack, ton-for-ton battleriders will always defeat a similarly armed jump-capable warship since they can devote far more tonnage to armor and defenses without the huge burden of carrying jump fuel. The drawback is you better protect your tender.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
If you don't have reactionless drives, I don't see much point in fighting in (deep) space, but rather for the planets or other fuel sources, because you really can't afford to wait it out.
Condottiere said:
Yep. Why fight out in deep space when you know the enemy HAS to come to you? Since you can jump from anywhere, and come out of jump anywhere (jump rules still applying), there's no such thing as controlling sea lines or choke points.
Though you wouldn't need reactionless drives for these principles to occur. The regular boost/decelerate would make just as much sense. Just the orbital mechanics change.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
I'd park an asteroid in orbit, stick in a launch tube at one end, a dock at the other and then expand organically (or is that burrow?) as station gets upgraded.
Eventually, a particle accelerator gets emplaced.
Eventually, a particle accelerator gets emplaced.
Exactly. It's why I would see the early stages of a system invasion being fought around the gas giant; there's no good reason to fight in deep space, but an enemy fleet won't want to drop out of jump in a staggered, disordered formation right on your 100D sphere, where your SDF can respond quickly.
By comparison, a gas giant's 100D sphere is waaaaaaay to big to 'garrison' effectively, and even with mobile units the attacking fleet should have hours to dress its line before any meaningful counterattack can reach it, plus it can refuel immediately if it takes control of the gas giant's orbit.
Condottiere said:
Buffered planetoids make for cheap and heavily armed defense bases. Though they are kinda butt ugly.
Assuming your system has asteroids to tow into orbit, of course.locarno24 said:
Naval units have the ability to jump en-masse, so there wouldn't be an issue of not arriving together as a fleet. But yeah, you don't jump in at the 100D limit blind unless you need to make a lightning-swift attack before the defenders can get together to defend against you.
Systems with multiple gas giants can't really afford to have heavy forces at each one (back to the SDB issue again). If the invader has the time, it might be better to deploy a stealthed scout or merchantman to the target, let them observe the fleet, then transmit their information to the ships waiting in the oort belt (to refuel from cometary shell) and have them jump. Info is still old, but potentially useful if defenders are in a garrison-state.
Though I suspect all plans suffer from the same universal maxim - no plan survives contact with the enemy. So the best you can expect is to figure out if anybody is home, make your plans, hope for the best. Kind of like what the Japanese did with Pearl Harbor info (fortunately for the US they missed the carriers!)
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Without constant acceleration, interplanetary travel may be faster with a jump drive, as well as less fuel intensive.
While the mystic physics surrounding jump mechanics mean that any trip through that rabbit hole is one week give or take, I don't think it should consume ten percent/total tonnage fuel.
While the mystic physics surrounding jump mechanics mean that any trip through that rabbit hole is one week give or take, I don't think it should consume ten percent/total tonnage fuel.
The problems with that are:
1) That jump still takes a week, plus...what? A light-day or more for the "go" signal to make the one-way trip. So your positional data is still eight days dry, which is enough for military ships to have moved from gas giant to mainworld or vice-versa.
2) If you're close enough to the system to detect a radio signal that can be generated by a forward scout, you're probably close enough for the system to pick up your jump footprint - which means that realistically, you're going to have to drop out of jump even further out, and proceed in on gravetic M-Drive, taking even longer.
For strategic deployments, no. If you're intending to jump straight into the line of battle, however, even a squadron jump isn't good enough. See Sector Fleet:
Sector Fleet said:
So...yeah.
Drop in too far out, and you can take days to reach combat, even under maximum acceleration, and even with stealth systems there's a limit to how close you can get to the system (not very) before a ship accelerating under power would be spotted, meaning the enemy can concentrate to meet you.
Drop in too close, and you essentially appear directly in weapons range of the enemy, and feed them your units a handful at a time, in a random order, over two hours.
Something like half a day out at maximum acceleration is probably a good balance - enough time to dress formations but not enough for an enemy squadron to make a sublight transit to reinforce the defenders.
locarno24 said:
1) Yes, jump still takes a week. But the intel is as close to real-time as you can expect to get before jumping into an enemy system. It takes about 18hrs or so for a radio signal transmitted from Earth to Voyager 1. So assuming even a 24hr period, that's still far better than acting on scouting information a week or more old from a scout jumping back from the target system. That's about as real-time as you can get before committing your attack.
2) I would disagree there. If you were transmitting directionally, especially if nothing lies in that direction, there would be almost no chance of interception. For the more paranoid you could use a laser - and if you pointed out of the way of any planets/traffic (like above/below the orbital plane) then there would be nearly no chance. Though you could never eliminate dumb-luck chance.
locarno24 said:
I was including the 1hr limit within my assumption. Depends on what ships appeared when, and how much firepower the ships that arrived had when they got there. There's no way to know, no way to speculate. But you CAN plan on things NOT going your way, and hence you ensure the odds are in your favor by assigning as much tonnage and capability as you can afford. If you only had a handful of ships, then like Sector Fleet says, you are pretty much guaranteed to have everyone arrive at the same time. But 100s of ships might take an hour or more to fully arrive. Hopefully the attacker's plans don't revolve around just a handful of ships.
locarno24 said:
Yes, there are many variables to consider. Too much warning can be just as bad as too little. Though sometimes too much warning works well if you are trying to draw the defenders out. Plus with the vagaries of jump space, it would actually be possible to have reinforcements / other attack waves jump in behind/above/below/to the sides of the defender so that you could englobe him. Though Traveller space combat really doesn't take things like that into account, as far as exposing your vulnerable side, engines, etc. You can retreat and still have your entire offensive capabilities to bring to bear (batteries bearing of course).
