On the Taxonomy of Spaceships
- Thread starter AndrewW
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Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
When you wake up each morning, collect your Nespresso on the way to your bridge, stare at the consoles monitoring ship systems and surrounding environments, and just think, "This is my Junk!"
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
It's more about roles that the ships are designed for or expected to play.
If you term something a battlecruiser, the expectation is battleship armament but armoured cruiser protection.
If you term something a battlecruiser, the expectation is battleship armament but armoured cruiser protection.
F33D said:
I'd agree with this. The ship would be a function of a hull large enough to carry the weapons and other items you wanted to carry. Under High Guard, big ships have spinal mounts. You can differentiate light or heavy cruisers, or maybe a slower but more heavily defended battleship.
Practically, there are a handful of sweet spots under HG/TCS, which historically came down to:
- 1000-1200 ton escort, Agility 6 with a missile bay and some defensive armament. These carry a missile bay (the smallest weapon capable of damaging a capital ship) and were hard to take out due to their agility.
- <20000 t cruiser: Just smaller than a break that gave you an adverse hit DM. This would be as fast as you could carrying a spinal mount, which would be a particle accelerator or meson gun depending on the tech level. This design works from about TL 12-13 onwards but is a bit of a tight squeeze to do it without excessive compromise at TL 12. However, it's still cost effective to compromise on 1-2 points of agility to get it under the 20kt mark as you avoid the target size DM (which negates a point of your lost agility) and get to bring more spinal mounts to the party.
- Big battlecruiser: Whatever you need to carry the biggest spinal mount available at your tech level. Typically this would sit somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 tons depending on the tech level. In practice, ships like this would be fairly vulnerable but a big spinal meson gun is the only serious threat to a heavily armoured planetoid monitor.
- Planetoid Monitor: Buffered Planetoid hull with no jump drive, lots of extra armour and a big spinal mount. These are very, very tough.
- Carrier. A large carrier with a dispersed structure carrying the smallest 5-6G battle riders that could fit an effective spinal mount.
- Battle rider: Typically 10-15,000 tons, Agility 5-6, smallest decent spinal mount available at the tech level and whatever balance of secondary armament and defences the player sees fit.
Pretty much everything else is fluff in a TCS campaign, including all of the designs in Supplement 9: Fighting Ships. You can do smaller, 'adventurer' ships, but they are pretty much irrelevant in a trad TCS fleet.
I was thinking about this a while ago, and I had posted something on CotI about this. Basically it drew from the Age of Sail classifications somewhat in the terms, but was applied by specific ship ship size and capability. I have a bit of a IMTU rule where most ships don't go above 100,000 tons, and the ship sizes reflect the military using the smaller end of the scale for economic reasons.
Here's a brief rundown:
100-200 tons: Gunboat/Escort
200-1000 tons: Escort/Corvette
1200-5000 tons: Frigate
5000-10000 tons: Light Cruiser
4000-2000 tons: Heavy Cruiser
12000-50000 tons: Destroyer (not because of the wet navy version but because it is the ship powerful enough to Destroy other vessels).
Here's a brief rundown:
100-200 tons: Gunboat/Escort
200-1000 tons: Escort/Corvette
1200-5000 tons: Frigate
5000-10000 tons: Light Cruiser
4000-2000 tons: Heavy Cruiser
12000-50000 tons: Destroyer (not because of the wet navy version but because it is the ship powerful enough to Destroy other vessels).
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
You try to figure out what's technically feasible, and what optimizes results, like not needing manoeuvre drives, and utilizing that tonnage to add more armaments.
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