Should maned small combat crafts be deleted from chartered space?

[Condottiere]

I'd go for an anti smallcraft frigate, which would be as large as a destroyer.

 

[swordtart]

Since you got to upgrade your ultralight fighters, can I upgrade the destroyer into something actually designed to take out fighters? You have to admit, most of the book designs are NOT optimized for the firepower in the roles they are supposed to fill.

That wasn't really the point, just to show that you don't have to make close in attacks with fighters (and if you do they will probably die).

I have no doubt that you could design a custom ship that was optimised to deal with fighters, just as you could build an ever better fighter. Refitting a Destroyer is much more involved that swapping out the fixed mount weapon.

If it bothers you run the same scenario with the stock Heavy Fighter.

 

[Endie]

It's laughably easy to design a fairly cheap ship that can rapidly murderzone large numbers of fighters.

 

[swordtart]

It's laughably easy to design a fairly cheap ship that can rapidly murderzone large numbers of fighters.

You would probably better served dealing with the weapon threat than the platform. Missile spamming can be effective via fighter but it is not the only method. If the missile fighter cannot effectively engage then the fighter becomes irrelevant.

I would have thought the best way of dealing with swarms of cheap fighters equipped with missiles is another swarm of cheap fighters equipped with missiles.

EDIT.
For reference in the Small Craft Catalogue, the Homeshield Mini Fighter is under MCr1.5 and is a missile platform and well within the technological capability of the majority of systems. It is hardly the last word in capability, but since over half the cost is the weapon, there is only so much you can do at that budget. It has plenty of unused space for extra fuel and the dual cockpit is probably unnecessary and could be dispensed with to allow a deeper magazine. I probably would have dispensed with the separate thruster and simply made the main drive Thrust 3. An M-Drive for such a small ship would not have added much to the cost. There is also no need to make it that ugly

It can be launched from any convenient planetary body, asteroid or from an ertsatz carrier, so the limited duration range is not really relevant.

I also designed a 3DTon Planetoid sleeper craft. At MCr1.2 it had 4 Advanced Missiles, a low berth and over a years fuel. The idea would be that it could be seeded in the hundreds in the asteroid belt with the pilots in stasis for up to a year. When required the pilot could be awakened, engage as necessary and then disengage and disperse returning to statis to await recovery and replenishment.

 

[Condottiere]

Intercepting, with the sun against their backs.

 

[MarcusIII]

I don't even use fighters IMTU. The fighter concept is from terrestrial environment where they are 20X faster than the targets they are attacking (except dogfighting their opposite number). In Trav they are no faster than battlewagons AND have less armor. They really wouldn't exist for the most part.

 

[tytalan]

I don't even use fighters IMTU. The fighter concept is from terrestrial environment where they are 20X faster than the targets they are attacking (except dogfighting their opposite number). In Trav that are no faster than battlewagons AND have less armor. They really wouldn't exist for the most part.

Most capital ships run M6 J4 thats about the best they can do and still have a decent amount of weapons and armor. Fighters run M9 and are hard to impossible to target with anything larger than a turret. So yes Fighter are generally faster than battle wagons. Any ship lacking a jump drive is going to generally be faster than a jump ship of the same tech level, that’s the basics of fighters. At TL 15 you can have a 10 dt two seat fighter with M9 and ECM and enough armor to have a good chance to survive a turret hit. But to be honest I never seen the need for a fighter larger than 35dt so that the size of my heavy fighters.

The equation changes a little if you use Hop drive but not entirely

 

[Sigtrygg]

There is no reason you can not put M-9 into a capital ship, the grandfathered designs are not an indication of what the rules allow. if you want to stick to the setting than the fighters are 6g and the capital ships are 6g.

If the fighters are going to be redesigned in light of the new rules then the capital ships should also be redesigned using the new rules.

 

[StellarVenture]

I do in general like fighters having access to r-drives to augment their available speed even if their primary thrust is still from M-drives. That short term boost can be all you need to gain the advantage.

 

[tytalan]

There is no reason you can not put M-9 into a capital ship, the grandfathered designs are not an indication of what the rules allow. if you want to stick to the setting than the fighters are 6g and the capital ships are 6g.

If the fighters are going to be redesigned in light of the new rules then the capital ships should also be redesigned using the new rules.

It’s called space that’s the factor. Capital ships with J4 M6 are already under gunned and light on defense you want to make them even weaker? Yea you can make a capital ship with M9 but what are you sacrificing to get that? Defenses? Weapons? Jump? It has nothing to do with legacy and everything to do with space costs?

 

[Condottiere]

With smallcraft, it depends on what aspect you leverage for an advantage, however minuscule.

 

[rinku]

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.

That was very much an artificial limit put in place for tournament purposes, and in another era.

CT ships ended up with a large amount of hull space that was unusable for weapons... aside from carried craft (although spinals mollified that a bit). Current Mongoose rules have modified things a lot in relation to bay allocation so that you can use all your spare tonnage on them.

 

[tytalan]

I think another point needs to be made. There’s been a big push by some people to robotize everything in Traveller, robot crews that do everything, robot troops, robots stewards. Can you do this sure but it’s not Traveller it’s Robots in Space and if that’s the game you want to play have at it but my players actually like having to do things instead of sitting back and letting the Robots do it. There comes a point when you have to say this is a RPG and having things that are not quite optimized is a good thing because in Traveller it’s possible to optimize your PCs out of the game.

 

[Vormaerin]

Sure, but that's not actually relevant. The point was that any scenario that does not have any constraints besides "theoretically possible in the rules" is a dead end for discussion. Because the "how it actually works in the setting" would have all sorts of constraints of access, of politics, of budget, and of culture. As well as other factors. You can easily imagine a scenario that proves whatever point you want when you are only limited by the rules theory.

And this is because the rules are designed to be flexible and to let you do a wide range of things. Because the constraints the Aslan are under are not the same as the ones the Third Imperium are under. And Charted Space is under different contraints than someone's homebrew campaign.