Other military personnel is crew on a naval ship.
Military ships and crew
- Thread starter tytalan
- Start date
I think this is more of the legacy we can’t seem to get away from. Mongoose seem perfectly willing to claim that things will change under them they even give the tools but they in many ways are unwilling to actually change things. It’s weird they will do things like singularity which at best steps outside of lore at worse breaks it but they are unwilling to take the common sense leap.
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
I can quote the rule again:
It's explicitly 1 Dt/passenger, not per crew.
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
Sure you can do it that way, but then you have to add mess halls, rec areas, corridors, and freshers manually, all with their own costs and life support. See T5. You still have to have a lot more than 1 Dt/crew if you want the ship to actually function.
It's sooo much easier to allocate 2-5 Dt per person, and then draw the deck plans as you wish...
Do you really want to have to specify all of this for a small tramp freighter, like in T5?
Just to house a small crew, some troops, and some passengers:
Except that the word Passenger is not used rigorously in HG2022 (or across the other documents). On that basis High and Luxury staterooms can also only be used for Passengers. Cabin space talks about crew but also defines the cost and space requirements in terms of passenger. Passenger can mean a paying passenger in some specific contexts, but is often just a unit of accommodation.
The definition of Crew is also no straightforward. For example "marines, ship’s troops" are not crew by the "passengers only" argument for barracks? What about gunners? Are they ship's troops? How about Technician Rimmer who only refills the snack machines?
I am happy that not all crew can be cramped into barracks. For example those in command positions are not necessarily every really off-duty as most ships don't carry 3 captains to cover every shift. Trailing hand Belenkinsop however likely does as he is told what to do and only needs somewhere to rest his head when off duty and the lower ranks mess for leisure activity. If he doesn't like it he can be easily replaced.
I'd leave it up to referees and players to come up with a common view (or the source books if you are wedded to a specific setting). I am quite happy using barracks for enlisted crew. In my smaller ships however even a fairly low ranking crewman might get "acting" section head and get a bump to a shared stateroom. Such are the perks of rank.
My personal experience is that even officer's quarters are pretty small and the extra space rank might attract tends to be in the messing areas instead (which are shared and double as meeting/work spaces). The exception might be air force personnel as "we don't dig in, we check in".
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AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
Who said they are only allowed for passengers?
They are just "better" staterooms, also giving a bonus to seeking passengers, similar to T5 Demand.
Cabin Space is not long term living space. Not needed for crew.
They do allow extra space allowing crew and passengers to move around in the craft, as opposed to sitting strapped down in an acceleration couch.
Yes, that is the old convention in Traveller, going back to the USP in LBB5.
45 crew, plus an extra 35 troops.
They even have different hit locations in the combat system...
Gunners are crew, hence:
If you man the ship and its equipment, you are crew.
Of course you can house rule anything you like.
The 57th century Imperial Navy isn't the 20th century USNavy...
I wouldn't use accommodations aboard an ancient galley as a guideline to current warships, nor would I use current wet navy ships as a guideline for spacecraft in the far future.
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Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
Say you have 4 staterooms - the typical scout - that is 32 deck plan squares.
If each stateroom is a 2x2 box that leaves 16 squares. 4 for a corridor, 12 for a common area. Can you live in a 10' by 10' room that can reconfigure itself to be a bedroom, sitting room, and has built in fresher and entertainment, while the common area provides for more social activities. Note the deck plans area assuming all the life support gubbins is included in the underfloor and overhead "void spaces" since you don't need to allocate an area as a life support system plant room.
If each stateroom is a 2x2 box that leaves 16 squares. 4 for a corridor, 12 for a common area. Can you live in a 10' by 10' room that can reconfigure itself to be a bedroom, sitting room, and has built in fresher and entertainment, while the common area provides for more social activities. Note the deck plans area assuming all the life support gubbins is included in the underfloor and overhead "void spaces" since you don't need to allocate an area as a life support system plant room.
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
Quite, and that is the standard one stateroom (4 Dt) per person.
Double occupancy is half of that.
"Barracks" would be a quarter of that...
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
Many a 10' by 10' room can do double occupancy, especially when you have so much common area to move around in too. More deck plan could be used for a larger stateroom, but that would reduce common area floor area, or corridor, or both.
For a barracks you maximise the bunk space, remove the corridor and make it open plan, but you are still allocating 2 displacement tons per person as a minimum , just describing it differently.
For a barracks you maximise the bunk space, remove the corridor and make it open plan, but you are still allocating 2 displacement tons per person as a minimum , just describing it differently.
Umm, not really. "Life support" is a mix of things - its the air scrubbers to make air breathable again, remove humidity, smells, et. al. It's a water and waste processing system that circulates your liquids throughout the ship. It's basically an amorphous concept. As the book tells us, life support is at the cabin level - literally and figuratively. EACH cabin has it's own air, liquid and waste filtration system. That's a silly idea - at least as far as we understand engineering today.
The rules promulgate that you have a single fusion plant rather than multiple - but if the engineering present for one system (life support) works better as a single system, then such logic should be applied to all other systems as well to obtain the same efficiencies. If that is not true, well, then its just another Traveller rule that falls back on itself.
A "life support" section is simply where you have your equipment for this - nothing more and nothing less. A ship has a pre-defined support level based upon how many staterooms it has. So regardless of its cubeage or allocation of such things, it has the nominal life support capabilities of X based on staterooms.
That's actually a rather silly concept since this thread is already talking about multiple sizes of rooms - which means your life support concept is also scalable. And a scalable system means that you can decouple it from stateroom cubeage. The rules are already pretty amorphous when it comes to this as you correctly pointed out, corridors and other required ship rooms are (sometimes) built into the calculations. Which makes sense if you are trying to keep things at the level of 1d6 matrices.
So if you have a Noble yacht, and like most yachts, the size of the rooms for the guests tend to be far larger than what crew get - but based on the rule the life support is essentially the same. Suites on a liner, large apartments on stations, etc, etc. So rather than tie this to specific cubeage, life support should be more formulaic - you need X dtons for Y people. How much space a person gets is irrelevant. A rule like that sidesteps all of the restrictions placed on rooms or accommodations. It allows you to stack people 4 high in say a prison barge, or 1 person for a 10Dton suite.
For small ships the equipment footprint is small and may not be reflected on the ships deckplan (like say a scout or a free trader) - it's merely a line item on the design sheet. For those who like the details because their game play is based around specificity rather than generality, then they can draw off some space and be happy. A good example of this is the deckplan conundrum. The original LBB deckplans had blank rooms, today we have things like the Geomorphs (i.e. autocad-like) deckplans showing the placement of bunks, freshers, tables, etc). SOME people like one way, others could care less.
Ultimately if you design the system at the onset to accommodate either method you've done a good job on design. Game systems that spend the time and effort to do the right thing up front are my personal preference. And, as we know from the decades of gamers invested in Traveller, your vision and my vision are rarely the same vision - which is why we come to places like here to share those visions (and, sometimes, the reasons behind the visions).
There are no benefits to non-passengers so crew use is contra-indicated (if it provides no benefit and costs more the military generally don't do it).
Why is it not needed for crew? Small Craft p29 for the transporter has:
"the only concession to pilot comfort is a small area of cabin space designed for sleep during longer ferrying trips" This is a single crew vessel with no passengers."
The same logic is applied to several small craft in that section including exclusively military ones e.g. the Strike Boat (p61) and the System Defence Rock (p62).
This is not the way MGT2 does it. Refer to the Gazelle Close escort HG2022 p181. This has only 5 staterooms plus 12 barracks. The crew complement is listed as 20. That indicates 2 single occupancy stateroom, 3 double occupancy stateroom and everyone else in barracks. My money is on the gunners being in barracks (since they are less frequently called to duty), who the other 4 are is open to question - maybe the Maintenance, and three of the Engineers are enlisted?
Marines are listed in the crew section of the ship description in HG2022. I normally wouldn't attribute too much to this but if you are requiring us to be bound by when a word appears in any context as law then Marines are Crew.
Sometimes marines are in barracks, sometimes they are in regular staterooms.
Since my interpretation is from a published design then it isn't a house rule.
I wouldn't know having never been part of either. HG however does not just apply to the Imperial Navy.
Neither would I. I am just using my experience of military procurement. Cost without benefit is rarely acceptable.
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Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
As it is for Marines, they are technically passengers on a military ship.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
There's always hotbunking.
I'd suppose, in extreme cases, three shifts, and sharing.
I'd suppose, in extreme cases, three shifts, and sharing.
Marines do damage control, operate Turrets and other weapon systems. So it is okay for Marines who do other things on a ship to be in barracks but sailors who are also military and the same rank as these grunts get to ignore rank and get privileged housing. You’re spitting hairs and apparently know nothing about how military and navies work. I was in the Army and have friends in the Navy and guess what marines and sailors get the same housing barracks. Your not being very realistic with your argument
You do anyway what do you think “Common Areas” are
I’d say the difference as i pointed out in my original posts is military vs civilian, the scouts are a civilian organization yea they have uniforms and some military like aspect but they would be closer to police or firefighters not military. It takes discipline to live in tight barracks type situations but than that’s the military they never said you’d get luxury
Actually no barracks are listed as 1dt per person in HG 2022
Not really marines do damage control run turrets and other weapons systems. Most naval vessels have a marine component even if they are not an invasion craft and no one on a military vessel does nothing. Like I’ve said before I have friends that are or were in the navy including a friend that spent the better part of 8 years on an aircraft carrier. The carrier wasn’t designed for troop landing but they had marines and they had jobs on ship. There are reasons why Star Marines have both Gunner and Electronics among their possible skills
No ones talked about Hot bunking that’s misleadingThere's always hotbunking.
I'd suppose, in extreme cases, three shifts, and sharing.
Than remove Star Marines from the game because they are not passengers but use barracks
