Spinal Weapons and Minimum Ship Size

[Garnfellow]

I am working on conversions on some T20 and TNE ships that have meson gun spinal mounts. They are relatively small (>=5,000 and =<10,000 tons). If it makes a difference, they are non-jump capable.

Is there any way using the High Guard 2e rules as written to get a meson gun spinal into these ships? And if not, should there be?

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Is there any way using the High Guard 2e rules as written to get a meson gun spinal into these ships?

No.

Note that weapons can be shrunk with higher TL.

And if not, should there be?

The rules explicitly ban such ships, presumably for a reason; Perhaps to prevent the situation in CT, where battle riders made battleships unviable.

 

[Sigtrygg]

The problem is that a couple of iterations of Traveller do allow spinal mount weapons to be installed on any size of ship. TNE actually has a few options in addition to spinal, parallel mounts and Janus mounts for example.

The most iconic ship of TNE was the RCES Clipper which had a spinal, which was perfectly possible under TNE,

When I designed the Clipper for T20 it was necessary to postulate that in a ship the size of the Clipper a bay weapon was mounted as a spinal

 

[Geir]

I've found that a viable starship design can allocate as much as 25% for the spinal mount. A non-starship might be able to go has high as 50%. That said, you can't get a spinal less than 6000 tons, so I don't see how it will fit in a 10,000 ship that could have any decent maneuver or armor capability. A particle accelerator or railgun, though, that would fit. Barely.

 

[Condottiere]

Maximum fifty percent of hull volume.

The real issue is multiples, since there's actually no reason not to have them, unless artificially restricted.

 

[Garnfellow]

Thanks to everyone who responded. I've posted a MGT conversion of T5's Main Mount Weapons. These are bigger than bays but smaller (and less powerful) than Spinals:

https://greatdungeonnorth.blogspot.com/2021/01/main-mount-weapons.html

 

[Ursus Maior]

There are super-sized turrets, similar to bays but able to be rotated and trained, in one of the Deepnight books. You might want to take a look at these for further inspiration.

 

[Condottiere]

That sounds interesting.

 

[Ursus Maior]

Looked it up again and it's in expansion No. 4 "Far Side of Nowhere" of the DNR campaign.

They are called "capital turrets" and work like bays (which they are rulewise) but need to have a turret ring and barbette (the naval design element, not the HG rule) installed into the ship's hull by design. The capital turret itself than mounts the bay proper, making it a trainable super gun. This reduces greatly the negative DM for hitting smaller ships at an increased cost in tonnage, credits and power (the latter almost negligible). An additional bonus are the included armoured bulkheads around the whole contraption.

For obvious reasons missiles and torpedoes do not need that, but in combination with the Highguard chapter "High Technology" we get to have meson gun turrets. Of course other bays are attractive, too, such as particle bays that will give you very long range radiation weapons. Though some very advanced meson bays could reach out that far at TL13, too.

The book also adds mass driver cannons and railgun barbettes. The first, aptly abbreviated MDCs are mass driver weapons built for naval combat instead of orbital bombardment. The have good AP for TL10 armament and work best in capital turrets and up to ranges of medium. Outside that design bracket negative DMs make MDCs mostly useless, but hey, TL10 finally gets to have other weapons than missiles and lasers. Railgun barbettes are basically high rate of fire weapons based upon mass driver technology. They shoot either in point-defence or offensive mode and do few damage, but should be sufficient to intercept missiles and light fighters.

Several other additions to Highguard are made as well, so this book should be a trove for ship designers.

 

[Condottiere]

That sounds really interesting.

I always thought there was a possibility for really heavy turrets, but you'd need to loophole it by placing it on a secondary hull on a turntable.

As regards missiles, it seems a little ambiguous, because I think that fix mounted ones are limited to a ninety degree arc, which would limit fixed bay variants to the same ninety degrees; though we know that missiles can change direction after launch.