Repairs, Maintenance, and Construction

Moppy said:
phavoc said:
Then again the men and women asking for the F-22 and F-35 forces only want the newest toys and try very hard not to live within their budgets. And they also do their damndest to eliminate competitors to their missions, such as trying very hard for many years to kill the A-10 because it's not a fighter aircraft and it's "only" mission is ground support - a mission the USAF does not want but also refuses to allow the Army to handle. Silly politics between services remains a problem, and would, I suspect, be present in the Traveller universe as well.

Remember when the air force wanted to sell the A-10s to the army, and the army said no?

Yep. The Army wanted the USAF to pay to re-wing and operate them. And they had/have the cover of Congress to make it come out of USAF budget instead of Army budget. Now, if the USAF proposed to hand over the budge, infrastructure and people to do the job.... which will never happen... the Army would most likely take them.
 

I fear it's a mistake to include maneuver hits as a "mission kill". (1) It's still fully armed! (2) It's -agility to hit, and not -relative agility. It probably SHOULD be relative agility for spinals and fixed mounts, but sadly, it's not. (3) Damage is not applied until end of turn.

Armor-15, bridge, model-9, agility-6, turret should fit in a close to maxed small craft if you don't add staterooms and 4 weeks fuel, and you don't use a fib computer, and you trust the armor to stop computer hits. When I was mentioning "95-200 dt heavy fighter", that's for crit protection: those 2 crits the armored fighter takes, a 200-dt is the smallest size that wouldn't take crits.

I agree with you that you need to choose in a 50-ton - bridge or armor. The cost & size is about the same because the majority cost is the computer.
 
AnotherDilbert said:
You were probably testing house rules to make TL15 fun?

We played TCR at 12 and 14. I don't remember what the TL 15 was.
 
phavoc said:
Moppy said:
Remember when the air force wanted to sell the A-10s to the army, and the army said no?

Yep. The Army wanted the USAF to pay to re-wing and operate them. And they had/have the cover of Congress to make it come out of USAF budget instead of Army budget. Now, if the USAF proposed to hand over the budge, infrastructure and people to do the job.... which will never happen... the Army would most likely take them.

I think we refer to different deals? The one I remember was around Desert Storm time. The re-winging seems more recent. Have they've been re-winged once before or is my memory deficient?
 
Moppy said:
I fear it's a mistake to include maneuver hits as a "mission kill". (1) It's still fully armed! (2) It's -agility to hit, and not -relative agility.
No manoeuvre drive, no agility => trivial to hit, so dead next round.
LBB5 said:
Agility is the ability of a ship to make violent maneuvers and take evasive action while engaging hostile targets. A ship's agility rating may never exceed its maneuver drive rating.
LBB5 said:
Maneuver Drive Disabled: The USP maneuver factor is reduced to zero.



Moppy said:
Armor-15, bridge, model-9, agility-6, turret should fit in a close to maxed small craft if you don't add ... 4 weeks fuel,
Sadly not optional:
LBB5 said:
Fuel: Fuel tankage required equals one percent of the ship tonnage times the power plant number.

So, "Armor-15, bridge, model-9, agility-6, " is not happening under 100 Dt.

Percentages: Armour: 16%, Bridge: 20%, Agility-6: 17%(man)+6%(power)+6%(fuel) = 65%.
Tonnages: Computer: 13(comp)+12(power)+12(fuel), Turret: 1 = 47 Dton.
Minimum size: 47 / ( 1 - 65% ) ≈ 134.3 Dton.
 
AnotherDilbert said:
Moppy said:
I fear it's a mistake to include maneuver hits as a "mission kill". (1) It's still fully armed! (2) It's -agility to hit, and not -relative agility.
No manoeuvre drive, no agility => trivial to hit, so dead next round.

I'm sorry, but I'm not having this. If the gun's still active at full +DM, you ain't neutralised it.

What if you miss next turn? What if it kills you next turn?

AnotherDilbert said:
Moppy said:
Armor-15, bridge, model-9, agility-6, turret should fit in a close to maxed small craft if you don't add ... 4 weeks fuel,
Sadly not optional:

Technically you're right about 4 weeks, but short fuel on a fighter seems reasonable.

Also x-boats somehow work without a powerplant.

I have no problem if you want to enforce 4 weeks. In the lore it's probably a safety regulation which makes it one of those inconvenient things the military can ignore.
 
Moppy said:
I'm sorry, but I'm not having this. If the gun's still active at full +DM, you ain't neutralised it.
Sure, but what are you going to hit? A fighter can't hit fighters, and can't penetrate dampers (everything else).

The point of fighters is that they are very difficult to hit?


Moppy said:
Technically you're right about 4 weeks, but short fuel on a fighter seems reasonable.
It may be reasonable, but it is still a house rule. It also makes battle riders much more compact (which is not needed)?

Edit:
I we want to go down that particular rabbit-hole, it can be considered reasonable to power riders and fighters entirely by capacitors, charged by the power plant on the tenders. This makes for remarkably compact craft, I seem to remember something like 2 kDt riders with meson spinals...


Moppy said:
Also x-boats somehow work without a powerplant.
Unfortunately that is true, but not in the LBB5 system:
LBB5 said:
All ships require power plants.
 
AnotherDilbert said:
So, "Armor-15, bridge, model-9, agility-6, " is not happening under 100 Dt.

Percentages: Armour: 16%, Bridge: 20%, Agility-6: 17%(man)+6%(power)+6%(fuel) = 65%.
Tonnages: Computer: 13(comp)+12(power)+12(fuel), Turret: 1 = 47 Dton.
Minimum size: 47 / ( 1 - 65% ) ≈ 134.3 Dton.
This is of course only correct if we ban Emergency Agility. It seems we are both using house rules...

With an agility of 0 and an emergency agility of 6 (that we always use) we can build such a fighter at about 80 Dt.
 
I think this started when I said the heavy fighter is actually OK in a supplement 9 universe. Outside of that, fleets actuallty work :)

I'm happy with 1 week fuel for fighters, and don't feel it's abusive. TCS strategic game works in 1-week turns and some actions can take the full week. With less than a week of fuel you wouldn't be able to do these. I don't remember the exact rules.
 
1. The Lightning Toothless is an endless series of engineering samples; the only hope that programme has is when the japanese and the Israelis get hold of their allocations, and pragmatic changes are then implemented.

2. Way over budget, and with a desperate scramble to reallocate money from other programmes to keep production and refurbishing lines open, I hope the real reason is that the money is being siphoned off to a slush fund that finances the black budget.

3. Jack of all trade fighters rarely work; you have to let the airframe specialize, and then adapt it to other roles.

4. At best, the Lightning Toothless was an aspirational design; at worst a military industrial complex money grab and flag officer retirement plan.

5. The primary mistake was retiring the Raptor production line, instead of maintaining it and slowly evolving each batch into whatever they wanted the F-35 to be (the end results certainly couldn't be more expensive); of course, Lockheed eecutives wanted to export some form of fiftish generation fighter, and Congressional sanctions weren't doing their stock options any favours.

6. The other issue would be the retirement of the Tomcat; true, the immediate air threat to carrier groups had disappeared, and the Hornet did everything okay, so why not simplify logistics and stop the Iranians from constantly trying to steal spare parts by just destroying it.

7. Stratofortresses are still flying; their successors are retiring or just too expensive to commit without some strategic goal.

8. The United States Air Force somehow concocted the right hi low mix in the Seventies and Eighties, probably by accident or external pressure; they certainly didn't want either the Viper or the Warthog.

9. If the Eagles are being ordered again, and Congress does have to decide before the production lines close, it's because actual strategic gaps in air capability have developed that the United States Air Force can not paper over nor hide anymore.
 
Just a minor comment:

In the Spinward Marches, only four worlds have been TL 15. Since GDW did not create a chronological timeline of when any given world achieved TL 15, for all we know, only one such world attained TL 15 100 years ago, while the other three may not have attained their current tech level until recently. Or, all four could have been TL 15 about the same time.

In the United States, there are those areas where people turn their back on modern technology and live as though they came from per-civil war era times to an extent. So, there isn't really a uniformity to "tech" as might otherwise be expected.

As mentioned earlier elsewhere, I've wondered why parts and items can't be transported from one world to another. TL 15 power plants would be an example of how that might work. A TL 13 world might be stuck with a manufacturing infrastructure that makes power plants, but at twice the weight. Who knows? HOW set in motion the structure they did 40 years ago, and that structure remains to this day, replicated in MgT.

Part of the issue is trying to decide what they meant when they set it up, and part of it is a function of common sense over-ruling rules as written.

Original rules: repairs and manufacturing are limited to world TL base. MgT allows for TL independent of main world, with average cost of the starport assembly increasing the more disparate the TLs are between main world and starport technology. All that remained was the question of whether maintenance fell into the same pattern as repairs and manufacturing.

My take on it? If CT allowed ship crews to handle their own annual maintenance with parts stored in their cargo holds, then maintenance can be done with parts within their warehouses.
 
You can transport equipment to lower TL worlds, but they won't have the infrastructure to support it and would end up having to go to another system with appropriate TL facilities in order to do major repair work.

There is also the possibility for a higher TL enclave on a world, but would need to be pretty close to a supply world.
 
baithammer said:
You can transport equipment to lower TL worlds, but they won't have the infrastructure to support it and would end up having to go to another system with appropriate TL facilities in order to do major repair work.

There is also the possibility for a higher TL enclave on a world, but would need to be pretty close to a supply world.

Agreed. The issue with TL (in Traveller at least) is the industrial infrastructure supporting it. There's no reason why you cannot have TL15 on a TL9 world. However the TL15 equipment and materials would have to be imported, unless you import manufacturing equipment to make things locally. But if something breaks you may or may not be able to fix it using local sources.

Today we have locations that can maintain high tech gear using spares imported to the location. But somethings get sent back to the factory/origin point for repair if it's more complicated than can be handled locally or it's just cheaper/faster to do so because the factory has all the brains and know-how to do it.

In Traveller there's nothing stopping a TL5 world from purchasing all the underlying science to build a TL9 fusion plant. However to make that a reality they would need to build the infrastructure and get the understanding of how everything works before they could make their own fusion plant locally. It would be cheaper and faster to simply import the fusion plant from offworld and learn how to maintain it. What we've seen from China's rapid rise is that over the span of a few decades there is nothing to stop a planet from bootstrapping itself up 1-2 TLs. Keep in mind though there are some major gaps they have. For example they have been trying to replicate technology obtained from the west and in some instances it's simply understanding how to build a widget. In other instances they are finding that there is art to the science (case in point - when the navy aircraft landed in China for an emergency they were able to get a better understanding of antenna placements which they didn't understand and were struggling with on their own. Having the plane and being able to look at it up close helped them with their problem, though I don't know if it was truly enough for them to fully bridge the gap).

Which is why some of the TL setups for worlds make no sense. However I chalk that up to the planets simply being randomly generated with no real thought process to how the spread of people to planets and their accompanying tech would make sense.
 
Another factor in this is population. It’s easy to justify a high-tech Pop 0 or 1 (maybe even Pop 2) world, even though their ability to manufacture high-tech products may be very limited (or not, depending on your view of 3D printing). At higher Pop levels the question of what can be made locally vs imported gets more important.
 
phavoc said:
Which is why some of the TL setups for worlds make no sense. However I chalk that up to the planets simply being randomly generated with no real thought process to how the spread of people to planets and their accompanying tech would make sense.

Also need to take into consideration the number of Empires that have come before the 3rd Imperium, which included higher TL.
 
There were no human empires that preceded the Third Imperium that had a higher TL.

The First Imperium deliberately capped itself at TL11 (although Vilani explorers did encounter worlds with TLs much higher than TL11, some were definitely in the 20s but lacked jump technology)

The 'second' Imperium began at TL12, or at least the Terran TL had advanced to that point. T4 material indicates that RoM researchers may have had up to TL14 mapped out.

The Third Imperium began as the TL12 Sylean Federation
 
The darrian's problem seems to be an inability to maintain that technological level sixteen industrial base, and apparently they're leaning on the Imperium for technological level fifteen starwarships.

Maybe Darrian had cottage industries.
 
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