Question regarding missile bays.

[DeadMike]

A 50 Dton missile bay takes up 51 Dtons of space. One ton for fire control. 12 missiles take up 1 Dton of space. A 50 Dton bay fires 12 missiles a turn, or one dTn of missiles a turn. Does the machinery to grab a new volley of missiles every turn take up 49 tons of room or are some missiles stored in the bay?

Railgun Barbette's and bays state they store ammo in the Barbette or bay. Ortillery Railgun holds ammo in the bay per High Guard. It does not say about missiles though. 49 displacement tons to grab 1 ton of missiles and ready them to fire seems a bit large to me personally.

I just can't picture this as accurate. Seems to me that there should be some storage area in the bay for missiles. Even more storage area as the bays advance technologically as well, to a point.

What do you think? What about in YTU? Do the bays store missiles, or do you need storage for any addition missiles over the 12 ready to fire?

Thank you for your input in this.
Mike

 

[phavoc]

This is where its not really clear about weapon bays. Bays can be either internal or external. The fire control does take up one Dt, and there is machinerey for loading the missiles, maintenance and crew access, etc. Exactly how much space that is remaining is not specified. Many of the MGT capital ship designs show magazine space in the ship itself, though nothing says anything about how much available space is set aside for ready-rounds for the bay.

I'd say as a rule of thumb you could say there is 50% of the turret set aside as magazine space. So in a 50ton bay, you'd have 25 battery rounds readily available. Any remaining shots would need to come from a magazine.

Of course, you may want to alter this for your play.

 

[BP]

The examples in HG do not have any tonnage allocated for missiles within the bays.

For missiles, I allow one load-out (1/12/24 flight) in the weapon itself. Of course, this might not be the safest or generally 'friendliest' thing to do.

While one can easily argue the concept of 50 tons for 12 missiles vs. 1 ton for 1 missile turret is silly - the mechanics are there none-the-less.

The 'problem', fundamentally is that missiles are too powerful as the design system scales - as Traveller ships lack tech to balance good old kinetic energy weapons...

 

[phavoc]

The examples in HG do not have any tonnage allocated for missiles within the bays.

For missiles, I allow one load-out (1/12/24 flight) in the weapon itself. Of course, this might not be the safest or generally 'friendliest' thing to do.

While one can easily argue the concept of 50 tons for 12 missiles vs. 1 ton for 1 missile turret is silly - the mechanics are there none-the-less.

The 'problem', fundamentally is that missiles are too powerful as the design system scales - as Traveller ships lack tech to balance good old kinetic energy weapons...

The problem with kinetic weapons and space battles is one of the speed of the projectile. Starships maneuvering at long range are difficult to hit, since your sensors are light-speed based and weapons that are not light-speed based (or at least tracking) are at a severe disadvantage.

Now at point-blank range, kinetic energy weapons are, IMO, just as effective as energy, perhaps even more so since its possible to really put a lot of metal downrange at your target in a very short period of time.

 

[Fedmahn Kassad]

Kinetic weapons in space are scary...

Imagine a 1 dton shotgun firing coke-can sized darts of depleted uranium with muzzle velocities of 5000+fps that will never shed momentum... set a spread pattern to be 1/20sq feet at X range and you have a nasty cloud of potentially hazardous objects that the ships will have to fly through (if your predict software is doing it's job).

For an unarmored ship I beleive it would be very dangerous.

 

[BP]

Or, simply fly your ship around a solar body (i.e. planet) for a length of time using gravitics to not match the orbital speed of all the bitty bodies of matter that the local gravity well has attracted over the eons of its formation and existence! Zip-zap, your ship is ripped to shreds...

 

[locarno24]

While one can easily argue the concept of 50 tons for 12 missiles vs. 1 ton for 1 missile turret is silly - the mechanics are there none-the-less

4.17 dT per missile instead of 1 dT per missile because you're flinging 12 (or even 24) through more or less the same amount of surface area (because you're still only taking up 1 hardpoint). Seems fair to me.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

The idea that you have to account for the 1 ton of fire control is STUPID in a 50 or 100 ton bay.

You don't have to include it in the Turret (the size of the turret includes the fire control), so I think the size of the bay should also include the fire control.

You can RESERVE 1 ton for fire control if you don't put a turret or bay on a hardpoint, but once the turret or bay is installed, that 1 ton gets absorbed into the weapon system.

Only the example designs don't use this, they make the bays 51 tons but still allow the turrets to be 1 ton (turret + fire control)

/rant mode off

 

[Fedmahn Kassad]

IMTU the fire control ton is a firing and control station that is usually (for civilian ships) on/beside the bridge or (for military ships) in the command/fire control center.

This ton includes wiring, back up systems, independant control systems, targeting systems etc. and a workstation for the operator. But IMTU there is only 1 station per battery, no matter how many turrets are in the battery. I envision all the weapons in a battery slaved together.

For a 50 or 100 ton bay, think of all the components, moving parts, and sub-systems that have to be monitored/online to keep the bay firing while in combat. IRL think of a large field artilley howizer and all the folks/systems needed to keep it firing...

 

[phavoc]

IMTU the fire control ton is a firing and control station that is usually (for civilian ships) on/beside the bridge or (for military ships) in the command/fire control center.

This ton includes wiring, back up systems, independant control systems, targeting systems etc. and a workstation for the operator. But IMTU there is only 1 station per battery, no matter how many turrets are in the battery. I envision all the weapons in a battery slaved together.

For a 50 or 100 ton bay, think of all the components, moving parts, and sub-systems that have to be monitored/online to keep the bay firing while in combat. IRL think of a large field artilley howizer and all the folks/systems needed to keep it firing...

The Traveller system is quite simplified as far as fire control goes. There's a lot of 'but....' involved in the design sequence I think. But that's mostly because the game is oriented around role-playing and not pure space combat.

If we were to use the equivalent naval targetting technology, the fire control systems would be broken up into targeting/acquisition fire control, then guidance / control systems to control the missiles (no need to do anything with energy beams once you have a firing solution) and then the gunnery station itself. On larger ships with batteries of weapons you would probably break up the fire control into offensive/defensive groups. The design sequence talks about ECM/ECCM as computer applications, but for most ships I assume it just comes as part of the avionics and not separate systems... though we all know that in today's technology jamming and counter-jamming gear are entire different than target acquisition and tracking.

As far as artillery batteries go... you have the battery itself (tubes usually, rockets are treated differently), a FDC vehicle, a survey vehicle, and maybe a counter-battery radar, though that's not a given. And lets not forget about the other support vehicles involved in artillery battery...

 

[AndrewW]

You don't have to include it in the Turret (the size of the turret includes the fire control), so I think the size of the bay should also include the fire control.

I consider the turret to not take up much internal space (though missile turrets would need more for feed mechanisms and such but the design system isn't that detailed) and the one ton to be the fire control. Fire control would be needed for the bays as well and those do take up more internal space.

 

[phavoc]

I consider the turret to not take up much internal space (though missile turrets would need more for feed mechanisms and such but the design system isn't that detailed) and the one ton to be the fire control. Fire control would be needed for the bays as well and those do take up more internal space.

One thing that I disliked about the deckplans for the warships thus far released don't take into account any sort of feed mechanisms or movement of ammunition from the magazine to the launchers. Especially on the larger ships it seems like they just put the hull space on the diagram with no concept of having a magazine, I dunno, like NEAR the weapons it is feeding?

With the designs put out there has to be a helluva lot of ammunition feed systems hidden in the designs... Maybe to foil Solomani and Zhodani spies?

Civilian ships probably won't have any sort of magazine capabilities, just a cargo storage area adjacent to the missile or sandcasters. But I would expect proper military vessels to have seperate magazines to prevent one hit from knocking out all your ammo or worse, causing a cascade explosion that vaporizes your ship from a lucky hit. The Brits figured out the fallacy of having lightly-armored battlecruisers in the line of battle at Jutland. I think it was the Queen Mary who took like 1-2 hits and then 'kablooey!'.

 

[AndrewW]

One thing that I disliked about the deckplans for the warships thus far released don't take into account any sort of feed mechanisms or movement of ammunition from the magazine to the launchers. Especially on the larger ships it seems like they just put the hull space on the diagram with no concept of having a magazine, I dunno, like NEAR the weapons it is feeding?

With the designs put out there has to be a helluva lot of ammunition feed systems hidden in the designs... Maybe to foil Solomani and Zhodani spies?

Have you taken a look at the Reign of Discordia deckplans? The missile storage is located near the missile bays, and the sandcaster barrel store is located near the sandcaster turrets.

 

[phavoc]

No, I haven't bought the Reigh of Discordia book.

 

[AndrewW]

No, I haven't bought the Reigh of Discordia book.

The deckplans are available in a preview if you wanted to take a look.

 

[phavoc]

The deckplans are available in a preview if you wanted to take a look.

ZOMG! I hope those deck plans have not escaped the editors hands yet! "HANGER"..... WTH? Is there a giant in space somewhere that's missing his clothes HANGER?

Last time I checked small craft docked occassionally in a HANGAR... I understand typo's, and we all do them. But a publishing firm is supposed to be better than that.

Yeah, sure, they are deckplans.... but when I'm buying a professionally published product I expect to have a little bit more effort put forth in making it look professional. The deckplans are horrendously bad. They would be fine for sketching out, but jeez, these suck at bad as the plans from T4 Starships... Okay sketches, crappily done deckplans.

Do we need to take up a fund and buy MGT a copy of Cosmographer?

Sorry for the rant, but damn... I was hoping Mongoose had fixed some of their problems.

 

[AndrewW]

The deckplans are available in a preview if you wanted to take a look.

ZOMG! I hope those deck plans have not escaped the editors hands yet! "HANGER"..... WTH? Is there a giant in space somewhere that's missing his clothes HANGER?

Last time I checked small craft docked occassionally in a HANGAR... I understand typo's, and we all do them. But a publishing firm is supposed to be better than that.

Yeah, sure, they are deckplans.... but when I'm buying a professionally published product I expect to have a little bit more effort put forth in making it look professional. The deckplans are horrendously bad. They would be fine for sketching out, but jeez, these suck at bad as the plans from T4 Starships... Okay sketches, crappily done deckplans.

Do we need to take up a fund and buy MGT a copy of Cosmographer?

Sorry for the rant, but damn... I was hoping Mongoose had fixed some of their problems.

Reign of Discordia wasn't done by MGT, just published by them. The Fast Freighter and the Assault Fighter didn't come out to bad there, and the Hauler but the rest didn't turn out too well in the PDF. All but the Assault Fighter and the Fast Freighter are considerably larger so they get more squished.

 

[DeadMike]

The deckplans are available in a preview if you wanted to take a look.

ZOMG! I hope those deck plans have not escaped the editors hands yet! "HANGER"..... WTH? Is there a giant in space somewhere that's missing his clothes HANGER?

Last time I checked small craft docked occassionally in a HANGAR... I understand typo's, and we all do them. But a publishing firm is supposed to be better than that.

Yeah, sure, they are deckplans.... but when I'm buying a professionally published product I expect to have a little bit more effort put forth in making it look professional. The deckplans are horrendously bad. They would be fine for sketching out, but jeez, these suck at bad as the plans from T4 Starships... Okay sketches, crappily done deckplans.

Do we need to take up a fund and buy MGT a copy of Cosmographer?

Sorry for the rant, but damn... I was hoping Mongoose had fixed some of their problems.

If the deckplans bothered you that much, stay away from the rest of the book. Typo's and errors abound. As far as first printing goes, Merchant Prince is the best so far, although it does have typo's in it as well. Not as many as usual though.