Should maned small combat crafts be deleted from chartered space?

[Sigtrygg]

I can think of lots of uses for manned small craft.

Space to space combat vs peer opposition is not one of them.

The rules allow me to mount a bay weapon that can destroy a small craft in a single hit at ranges beyond the small craft return fire range. Since I can maintain that distance then any squadron of fighters will be shot out of the sky before they can close.

 

[Elder_Basilisk]

I can think of lots of uses for manned small craft.

Space to space combat vs peer opposition is not one of them.

The rules allow me to mount a bay weapon that can destroy a small craft in a single hit at ranges beyond the small craft return fire range. Since I can maintain that distance then any squadron of fighters will be shot out of the sky before they can close.

Out of curiosity, what is the TL where you do that and how many MCr does it cost?

 

[swordtart]

I can think of lots of uses for manned small craft.

Space to space combat vs peer opposition is not one of them.

The rules allow me to mount a bay weapon that can destroy a small craft in a single hit at ranges beyond the small craft return fire range. Since I can maintain that distance then any squadron of fighters will be shot out of the sky before they can close.

Fighter vs. a ship with a bay weapon isn't really peer opposition though is it

Even so it is not necessarily a guaranteed win.

Let's take a Midu Agasham destroyer. It has a small particle bay, 6x Triple Missile Turrets, 8x triple Pulse Laser Turrets, 6x triple sand casters and 2 point defence batteries. It costs over MCr1800.

Lets fight it with Ultralight Fighters. In default configuration they cannot hurt you so they won't try it. To make them effective though you only need swap the pulse laser for a missile launcher loaded with 4 advanced missiles. It will cost you less than MCr7, so I can field over 260 of them.

We both have thrust 6 so I can stay at whatever range I want and so I can stay out of your pulse laser range. I can afford to expend quite a lot of thrust on evasive manoeuvres before you can close the range enough to start to threaten me with the pulse lasers. That assumes you do not expend any thrust of your own to evade. I might drift close enough that you can target with your particle bay after you have expended a total of 25 additional thrust. Even if I remain stationary that is 4 rounds. Since the basic space combat rules abstract the movement we can ignore the fact that I could choose to break into wings and attack from different vectors meaning that closing on one wing would distance you from another.

In round 1, you can only target 6 of the fighters. We will assume you also have advanced missiles If you fire a volley of 3 we can safely assume you will hit with at least one and can eliminate a fighter with every volley. You expend 18 missiles to do so. If you fire less missiles there is a good chance that you won't hit all 6, but you could extend the endurance of your turrets as otherwise you only have 20 rounds before your magazine is exhausted. The missiles do not arrive instantly though (7 rounds for Advanced missiles at Distant Range).

In round the fighters launch 260+ single missile salvos at the Destroyer.

At the end of the round each sensor op on the Destroyer gets a chance to destroy 1 salvo. It is not guaranteed, but with good sensor ops you can stack the deck. But how many good sensor ops and sensor stations does the ship have The default is 3.

Rinse and repeat for the next 3 rounds.

The fighters can now concentrate on not getting hit as they are now unarmed, they likely disperse so they cannot be hunted down en-masse but will remain close enough to monitor the situation.

In turn 7 the missiles arrive. The fighters can try sensor ops but it isn't their primary job so they will be unlikely to succeed so let's say you kill 6 fighters.
Lets say every Sensor Op on the Destroyer has a successful EW action every turn for the previous 6 turns and the Destroyer eliminated 18 salvos. Your point defence batteries eliminate another 2 and the pulse gunners might kill another 6. We'll even allow the pinnaces to take out another 2. That is still 230+ attacks to resolve. Any that succeed do 5d-4 damage. I can't see anything other than armour on the Destroyer that defeats missiles. These are conventional missiles so the nuclear dampers are irrelevant (you don't need nukes).

Rinse and repeat for the next 3 rounds.

At most 24 fighters have been destroyed (less than 10% attrition and pilots could probably eject just before the missile hits). The rest disperse and head for their various bases to re-arm and maybe have another go.
I can't see the destroyer surviving.

Now I haven't ever used the fleet action rules so I might be missing something there, but the above is my reasoning why I think fighters can be effective, are not automatically suicide ships and can afford and even benefit from human pilots.

I am sure there are those that will argue that the Destroyer isn't the last word in capital ships, but then neither is the ultra light fighter particularly optimised.

You might argue that 288 fighters is ridiculous, but you could probably achieve the same effect with 50. You can get 30+ Heavy Fighters for the same cost as the Destroyer. It has a missile launcher by default and has a pulse laser as well so it could have a shot at point defence, and definitely EW. It also has impressive armour and a deeper magazine. With Thrust 9 it can afford to evade and still maintain distance. It is less likely that a single salvo of 3 missiles would be a guaranteed kill. Each kill would be a greater impact on the squadron though.

 

[Vormaerin]

The last time Traveller attempted to have any kind of "Naval campaign" rules, pilots were a resource that had to be managed. You needed pilots for your ships and for your small craft and they were not infinite.

 

[swordtart]

The last time Traveller attempted to have any kind of "Naval campaign" rules, pilots were a resource that had to be managed. You needed pilots for your ships and for your small craft and they were not infinite.

In MGT2 every Naval recruit regardless of branch that completes basic training gets Pilot-0, even if they fail to survive their first term*

Good pilots may be in short supply, there will be those who have rubbish DEX for example, but none of them will be untrained. A pilot to drive a stand-off weapons platform towards some coordinates in space, fire off a few self-guiding missiles and then fly back home in time for tea and medals is not a high bar. They are at more risk docking. Once out in space, as long as they can identify their target there isn't much that can go wrong. They will not be able to evade so they absolutely will not be taking on other fighters, where evasion it might make a difference (if you are doing dogfighting).

The Navy is more constrained by life support than any lack of skilled personnel. You cannot have 200 spare pilots just knocking around a capital ship on spec. (though frozen watch is a possibility). These are more likely in the depots and bases. Junior pilots fresh out of training facing the elephant for the first time. After that mission they will be pilots not just playing dress-up.

There is also the vas numbers of space van drivers that are par and parcel of a space-faring society. They might get drafted and if the odds are that they have a 90% chance of survival then recruiting them as militia wouldn't be too hard (especially of they are defending their home system)

*Per chargen - the Imperial Navy source book implies you are rated Able, and in theory you could have only got a subset of the basic skills before flunking out. Characters might be special.

 

[Vormaerin]

My point is that inventing scenarios is useless because we, the gamers, have absolutely no information about what is feasible to actually have. Because we are not constrained by the need for resources or by politics or the personalities of procurement officers or the fiction of the setting we are using. We can look at the rules and concoct anything we feel like.

No player is likely to actually design the Littoral Combat Ship because they'll just read the rules and use them to best advantage. Unlike people in the real world, who do not get to deal with simple black & white game rules, much less be free of all constraints.

All we actually know is that High Guard is a not-suited-for-purpose rules set. It does not reflect the fiction the setting books expound. It does not lead to the ships that are actually in use in the setting being any good. It has never done this. Not in CT, not in MT, not in MgT.

As long as this remains true, there is no resolution to any discussion about "Should such and such a thing be in Charted Space?" Because the way Charted Space is said to work and the way the Fleet Combat rules actually work do not align. And we do not know anything about the resources available.

Further, neither the single ship combat rules nor the fleet combat rules even pretend to work for squadron level fights. The choices of abstractions in each set don't suit that scale.

Trillion Credit Squadron said that pilots were limited. You could pull more but that would f your economy. Does that make sense? Who knows? We don't know anything about the economies or the cultures or the recruitment practices of any of these far future empires. High Guard says Spinal mounts decide battles, but that is manifestly not true in the rules.

Advanced Brains literally can't make high difficulty task checks. What does that even mean in terms of practical limits? What does it reflect about how they perform? Clearly, a human pilot can do things that even a Very Advanced Brain can't. But why? How are they limited? Does a -6 from evasion make a shot "Very Hard" or is it still Normal, but with a -6 to the rolls?

The question posed by the original poster cannot be answered by the rules. The rules are incomplete and don't address the things we'd need to know to have an answer other than "this is how I want it to be".

 

[Condottiere]

In the short term, it's the standing military, and existing infrastructure, plus reserves.

In the long term, it's what the economy can support, or be cannibalized from.

The number of pilots depends on how many candidates that the training infrastructure can cycle through, and then deploy in frontline units

And, of course, how many smallcraft that can be manufactured in that period, and deployed forward.

For drones, how many computer brains can be manufactured.

Quality for either depends on how much money, time and resources, in general, are invested.

 

[Vormaerin]

And we know the answers to none of those questions. Nor do we have any way to get those answers, because it's fiction not simulation.

 

[swordtart]

My point is that inventing scenarios is useless because we, the gamers, have absolutely no information about what is feasible to actually have. Because we are not constrained by the need for resources or by politics or the personalities of procurement officers or the fiction of the setting we are using. We can look at the rules and concoct anything we feel like.

As a non-fictional military equipment procurement officer I have some skin in this game.

I am quite happy that these are not merely technical questions, but it irks me when it is claimed that the rules do not support a particular style of play when you can absolutely demonstrate that they do. The fiction might not support a specific style of play, but the fiction is setting and whilst HG is "charted space"-ish, it is not wholly consistent with that in every section.

Charted Space and the TI is struggling against nonsensical constraints with space magic hand waving things away to try to give the setting plausible deniability but the rules trying to put some sort of game balance and in the process contradicting the space magic. Traveller is not a LBB beer and pretzels game anymore, there has been a lot of work put in (some of it misguided in my opinion) by hundreds of authors of setting material, with not much quality control in the early years.

I do not feel constrained to follow what was written 30 years ago by one of the amateur publishers with potentially no relevant background in the area they were setting into canon, just because they thought it would be cool, or reflected some random SF novel they particularly liked.

Having invested hundreds of pounds over the years I do feel I am owed something by the present rule books though. If they make it possible to do a particular thing then I will consider that a possibility and resist anyone telling me I am doing it wrong.

It may surprise people to know that when we buy military equipment we do not just go by the sales pitch. The capability required is determined by a threat analysis and modelled use cases. Different solutions are weighed for the most economically advantageous tender. The most likely candidates go through an extensive trials process to ensure they meet the criteria promised and field trials to ensure that the capability can be realised. The only difference in doing this in real-life vs in an RPG is that the probabilistic analysis in RL is based on military intelligence and sometimes the probabilities have large error bars. In games there don't tend to be error bars probabilities are fixed in the rules.

Yes we get random requirements thrown in because a senior stakeholder was "got at" by a salesman. Yes we sometimes find that a minister has made a statement and that is now policy even though it completely invalidates the selection process. Yes we have bought white elephants because the threat envisaged never materialised or obsolescence cannot be managed on the budgets provided and equipment capability falls off. Yes we have bought off-the-shelf "Mostly capable" equipment to meet an urgent operational requirement that would have an unsupportable logistics tail if brought into core support. Yes sometimes industry is "overconfident" in their ability to deliver. Yes we get budget cuts imposed from outside and might have to stop development of a key capability when we are 90% to delivery. Yes all of these errors get published in newspapers and Civil Servants are castigated as incompetent.

What doesn't get published is the sensitive intelligence that guides those decisions. The white elephant that was never designed to counter that published threat but was a stepping stone to a secret capability that we cannot make public but the money spent needs to go "on the books" (foreign intelligence service look at public accounts as much as annoyed opposition leaders). Sometimes that political announcement that subverts the tender activity ends up with exactly the tender we would have ended up with anyway. Sometimes "pet" requirements fall off the chart during development or are traded for cost. Military procurement can takes decades to gestate, sometimes we just wait until the advocate moves on. Sometimes the news is plain wrong, but we don't want to advertise our capability or vulnerability (or the incompetence or political expediency of senior stakeholders) by correcting it. Sometimes newsmen just don't care about the truth anyway.

What we don't do is keep equipment in service because it is "traditional" with the exception of ceremonial use. Some people question the value of the bayonet on what is often a ball pup rifle. Originally they were used on long weapons to fend of horses while muskets were reloaded or used like spears. They have limited military capability in modern warfare and there is no doctrine to use bayonet charges in most armies battle plans. They still have a place and are bought because a knife is always a useful tool (and modern bayonets incorporate wire cutters, bottle openers etc). Making it fit on a barrel is a very low cost additional requirement. Fixed bayonets are used as spears in training aggression. Many regiments are protective of their privileges and history. One of the tenets of the "Freedom of the City" is often the ability to march through the streets with bayonets fixed as a demonstration the town trusts and honours their soldiers. Every once in a while in an actual battle someone runs out of ammunition or is outnumbered or surrounded and a bayonet charge seems a better option than running at the enemy unarmed. Sometimes such a display of unhinged aggression has broken an enemy unit or at startled them enough to allow escape of the trapped men (Michael Caine has a specific anecdote when he was a soldier, but there are plenty of other examples). People have won medals for those sorts of things but mission commanders do not plan them in and we don't buy equipment for that. It doesn't mean that they will not be used (or abused) in extremis.

 

[Vormaerin]

I do not feel constrained to follow what was written 30 years ago by one of the amateur publishers with potentially no relevant background in the area they were setting into canon, just because they thought it would be cool, or reflected some random SF novel they particularly liked.

Having invested hundreds of pounds over the years I do feel I am owed something by the present rule books though. If they make it possible to do a particular thing then I will consider that a possibility and resist anyone telling me I am doing it wrong.

You shouldn't feel so constrained. No one should feel constrained by anything that is contrary to what makes the game fun for them. The existence of something being in the rules does not make it required to be used. The existence of fiction that contradicts the rules does not prohibit them from being used.

I feel like the publisher should align the rules and the setting if they are intended to be the same thing, but I do not think that any particular setting has an obligation to incorporate all the rules. Or that the rules should not add useful content just because the best selling setting doesn't need them or actively doesn't work with them in use. If it were up to me, they would have a charted space book that laid out the tech assumptions used by the authors, just like 2300 has a set of tech assumptions. But I don't think anyone should be bound by those decisions except the authors.

I do think the rules should have a discussion of how Task difficulties should be determined and whether these determinations assume that tech bonuses are normally available or if those are supposed to be rare. If the designers are determining something is 8+ or 10+ and they think a normal character is rolling +0 or +1 for a stat and +1 or +2 for a skill, that's quite a different statement than if they are thinking that +3 is getting another +3 from software and toolkits and routinely "taking more time" for another +2, so that the character's skill is actually the relatively unimportant part of the die roll modifier.

But when you have a discussion topic that specifically calls out whether something should happen IN CHARTED SPACE, the discussion isn't about the rules. The discussion is about the fiction of the setting. The topic was not "what do the rules say", the topic was "should the fiction be changed to align with the rules that didn't exist when the fiction was established."

No amount of scenario devising or rules quoting is going to resolve that, on either side of the equation.

As an aside, I actually think fleet combat rules are a fools' gold. I can't imagine ever resolving a fleet battle in a campaign using the High Guard rules. There's no role for the players in such a thing. Even if they were admirals, the way the rules are structured doesn't give them any role in the outcome. Might as well make a solid wargame instead and spend your RPG spaces on making ship & squadron combat where characters can make a difference more interesting, with more fun decisions for players to make.

 

[collins355]

As an aside, I actually think fleet combat rules are a fools' gold. I can't imagine ever resolving a fleet battle in a campaign using the High Guard rules. There's no role for the players in such a thing. Even if they were admirals, the way the rules are structured doesn't give them any role in the outcome. Might as well make a solid wargame instead and spend your RPG spaces on making ship & squadron combat where characters can make a difference more interesting, with more fun decisions for players to make.

I agree with your second sentence regarding the existing MGT HG 2022 update rules, which have a flawed and broken fleet combat system.

However, if you've ever played through PoD I think you'd agree there is a place for squadron/fleet combat rules even for mainstream RPG-focused Traveller players in what is the best-selling Mongoose adventure. It is just that Mongoose has not managed to produce them yet.

 

[Vormaerin]

Sure, if you can make the rules about the actions of the players. If the players' decisions and their characters' abilities are not playing a role in the outcome, it isn't worth playing out in an RPG context. Also, even POD doesn't have fleet combats of the sort High Guard is talking about. There are very very few ships in the campaign that actually count as frontline combatants on the scale High Guard is designed around.

 

[swordtart]

But when you have a discussion topic that specifically calls out whether something should happen IN CHARTED SPACE, the discussion isn't about the rules. The discussion is about the fiction of the setting. The topic was not "what do the rules say", the topic was "should the fiction be changed to align with the rules that didn't exist when the fiction was established."

I don't disagree with you in any particular regard, but if the question is "the setting says this, but it doesn't work and I think it is time to change it" then we are no longer talking about something that can be argued from a setting standpoint as you are already departing from it. The answer to that cannot be a dogmatic "NO because the setting cannot be changed" as there is no discussion to be had. The only standpoint to argue the merit of changing the setting that is not just unsupported opinion is whether the rules support that change or whether other documented setting information is compatible.

I also have some trouble identifying exactly what constitutes Charted Space. It can't be just the TI as that doesn't exist in a vacuum, there are the Zhodani and Vargr, Aslan etc. They don't adhere to the same robo-phobia, but there are also pocket empires and isolated single system polities etc. I have tended to assume it is everything on Travellermap, but that isn't consistent and different milieu and editions have completely up ended many of the previous assumptions, what are we arguing compatibility with? I play in Charted Space (i.e. District 268), where I can use canon material (like Tarsus) I will as it saves me time. Where I can't I'll have to make it up like everyone else. Is that still Charted Space, since it will be different to everyone elses' Charted Space, or does Charted Space only cover the relatively few fully documented systems?

The setting does not exist independently of the rule set and the rule set does not exist independently of the setting as you have pointed out. The setting is pretty disjointed already and many of the rules would not result in the situation laid out in the setting.

So it's either a non-question or a "whatever you want" answer.

 

[Vormaerin]

So it's either a non-question or a "whatever you want" answer.

Yes, that is my opinion. There is no possible answer other than "what do you want to have the outcome be so you have fun?" And fun is not a universal constant, so there's no single solution.

It is a game. It abstracts a vast amount of stuff. We are not going to agree on the degree of abstraction. In almost 50 years of running Traveller games, I have never once used the actual stats of a capital ship in a game. And I've only used the deckplans in Azhanti High Lightning style heists & dungeon crawls. I assume there are people who have done so. And they will have different answers than I do and the game should support them. There were bunches of people who played Trillion Credit Squadron, while the only thing I ever used out of that book was the Islands Subsector as the basis for my play area. That's fine.

From the mechanics, I do not think that Traveller small craft are a good use of human personnel in actual fleet battles. The mechanics do not give them the impact that Vipers, X-Wings, or Star Furies have in those franchises. And the thing they are good at don't require a human pilot. You could use 2300 style missile launching drones. However, "space fighter pilot" is absolutely a super popular trope and at the scale where players matter they should exist and be fun. And, imho, there should be rules for "fighters matter" and "fighters don't matter" at the fleet level.

I am very firmly in the 'Charted Space is A way to play Traveller' camp and that the rules should absolutely be more expansive than just what Charted Space allows for. But I am well aware that there was only a 5 or 10 yr period early in the CT era where the game's publishers ever thought that. Mongoose does seem to be trending that way, but they don't commit to it by distinguishing the game world's specific paradigm from the kitchen sink of rules. Only non-Charted Space settings are going to get that.

Which results in these unanswerable discussions.