Bardicheart said:
Apologies if any of this has already been asked and answered but I hadn't seen it and while playing around with the rules and various components I came across some bits I wasn't clear on.
p. 17 states that Command Bridges can only be put on ships of 5,000 dT or larger? Why is this?
Sorry, coming late to the conversation. Flag bridges should be sized around what their purpose is (e.g. what size elements are they meant to control). Plus there is more to it than just a bridge. So let' start with where you might see them.
You should never see one on a ship under the size of a light cruiser. Destroyers flotillas operate as a pack, or at the discretion of, typically, a capital ship like a light cruiser. You could, I suppose, have a heavy destroyer variant, or even a command variant. But keep in mind that your destroyer is typically going to be too small to really be able to devote excess tonnage for command facilities. So a light cruiser would be proper to command destroyer flotilla's and below. A heavy cruiser would be proper for a cruiser squadron and below. Fleets, or true capital ships, such as battlecruisers and larger, would be on either dedicated command ships, or battlecruisers/battleships/dreadnoughts/monitors. A dedicated command ship would probably never be found in a battlefleet since it's neither defensively nor offensively strong enough to survive. Plus it's a target since it would be a unique design.
That brings up another point - flag bridges should be typically emplaced on standard class of ships so that an enemy cannot easily identify where the command structure is. Killing the fleet commander is a good way to cause disarray in the enemy, so these ships would be hidden among normal ships. Which means the command variants will typically give up something that is not easily determined externally in order to free up the tonnage necessary for the command facilities. So you may have a CA Blah class, and a command variant called a CC Blah-Blah class (CC being command cruiser).
And flag bridges are more than just a room. The size of the flag bridge is predicated upon how big of a fleet needs to be commanded - which also drives the size of the flag bridge crew. It's the fleet commander and his staff (officers and enlisted). The ship carrying the flag bridge needs additional communication and potentially sensors in order to communicate with the fleet and control the various aspects of it. And then there's the more banal aspect - fleet commanders are of higher rank. Which means some of them will outrank the ship's captain, thus their quarters will be at least as nice and large as the ship's senior staff. The larger the commander (e.g. commodore and up), the bigger the quarters. And there will also be the idea that the flag bridge staff will have their own mess and other separate areas from the ship's crew.
Here's what I had created for flag bridges (pardon the messiness, working from my written notes):
Three sizes (Small, Medium, Large). Flag bridges have 1 workstation per 2 dton displacement. The space inside a flag bridge is filled with large holo displays and repeater systems showing information from all ships in the fleet. Flag bridges cost 2Mcr per dton. They are required in order for multiple ships to engage in activities above squadron levels.
Example - Small - 24 dtons (4 tons reserved for systems). Used for 10 - 24 ship flotilla's. Typically found on DD/ CL / CVL's. 10 workstations (2 command, 8 standard), 2 large holo-displays. Crew is 1 commander, 1 XO, 3 command staff, 10 operators. Requires minimum 10 staterooms plus 10 dtons for briefing rooms and other spaces set aside for command activities.
Using all the blah-blah from above, we have a command variant of the CL Valiant. To accommodate a small flag bridge as the command ship of a destroyer flotilla (10 destroyers, 1 CL):
Flag bridge (small) - 34 dtons 68 MCr
Staterooms(10) - 40 dtons 5 MCr (I forget off top of my head how a stateroom is, so using .5Mcr ea)
Additional crew - Commodore (fleet commander), Lieutenant (XO), 1xLT, 2 Ensigns (command staff), 10 operators (various enlisted ranks).
When I've come up with my house rules for things I've tried to tie costs to size, and make them expandable rather than fixed. So if you wanted to increase the size of your small flag bridge, in the case of Bardicheat's wanting each of his various groups to be different, you could size up (or down) to give each ship a more unique flavor based on race, polity, etc. For some it's more detail than they might want, but others (like me) might find it more palatable to design ships that way.