Spinal Weapons - January Update

[Nerhesi]

I'm making smaller spinals that do less damage as the bottom end of the paradigm which naturally allows them to go on smaller ships. What part of that is ironic or making it easier that they don't have to? There has to be a bottom end somewhere. Is there something wrong with suggesting about 7000 hull points in a 4000 ton ship should be the bottom line? Do you agree with this?

But they weren't doing less damage - You were putting really powerful spinals on smaller ships. You stated several times that a 7,000 ton spinal doing 10,000 damage sounds about right. That means a 15,000 ton battlerider or larger jump capable craft can easily mount a gun that will 3-shot a 50,000 tonner. That is why I revised to 3% per point armour reduction. If a 7,000 ton Spinal was doing 10000 after armour reduction then that would be a little crazy (no, not a little).

Yes well, and so demonstrates the entire reason I went to % weight left in the design ... please build your 50K ship with the 9000 tons yourself and see how you go and then let's come back to it.
Okay, in that case all I'm stating is that my suggested base line build is a tweak less than that. I could be wrong. But kindly build an actual ship and show me thank you.

I have - but i'll put it in a list. Take your design and choose some of the following modifications to free up 2000 tons.

a) Take out emissions grid (1000 tons)
b) Use double occupancy staterooms - I haven't calculated your crew requirements, but I doubt they are actually 1000 crew? (If so, then we have a huge other problem).
b) Drop Thrust to 7 or 8. (500 tons each)
c) Remove all most barbettes. (600 tons)
e) Drop armour to 14 (400 tons)
f) get rid of the heavy cutter and boarding craft (400+ tons)
g) Screen's and dampeners - remove some (variable, I would take off more than 800 tons worth though) - also you can make reduce their weight using improved technology here.
etc etc etc...

The problem with your design Chas is that you're trying to do too much with it, then saying if you can't fit the 3DD spinal on there, so spinals needs to be smaller. You are operating on the assumption that every ship needs Armour 15, Thrust 9, a good amount of particle weaponry, support items (craft). That assumption is based on personal opinion not Naval Cannon and is actually counter intuitive to balance (you're saying a lot of things are essentials, which reduces variety because you're now designing in such a way to make sure that naval ships must all have these "essentials"). So unfortunately, this is not the ship to have all your "essentials" - This is clearly a strike cruiser. So you gotta give up more to give it such a deadly weapon.

I think you disagree with this position - but it really doesn't seem to be a worth discussing. The more I discuss it, the more I disagree with you because it is really no different than me wanting my Free trader to be able to have thrust 9, Jump 2, Armour 15, 2 small weapon bays AND 50 tons of cargo left. It does make me want to jack up the tonnage to even higher than 3000 tons per DD (at TL15) because not only does that make sense from the established Naval paradigm (which we aren't deviating from very much at all), but it also makes sense from a balance perspective.

 

[Nerhesi]

But regardless of all that - I dropped it 7kis for 3DD anyways as you can see... for sake of moving on with a topic that's been open for waaay tooo long.

Basically, for particle we're at 4,000 tons per 1DD but that is at TL11. At TL15, it's down to 2,400 tons per 1DD.

 

[phavoc]

But regardless of all that - I dropped it 7kis for 3DD anyways as you can see... for sake of moving on with a topic that's been open for waaay tooo long.

It's not been open for too long at all. Things are still being discussed, points made, points countered.

The point of the thread is to come up with a well-thought out plan for the implementation of spinal weapons. Too often things get hurried through and we get crap. With digital print it's easier to get fixes put in than with print, but still, the idea is that the final version is as bug and error free as possible.

So I strongly disagree that it's been open too long.

 

[Nerhesi]

But regardless of all that - I dropped it 7kis for 3DD anyways as you can see... for sake of moving on with a topic that's been open for waaay tooo long.

It's not been open for too long at all. Things are still being discussed, points made, points countered.

The point of the thread is to come up with a well-thought out plan for the implementation of spinal weapons. Too often things get hurried through and we get crap. With digital print it's easier to get fixes put in than with print, but still, the idea is that the final version is as bug and error free as possible.

So I strongly disagree that it's been open too long.

There isn't any reason that a 3DD spinal should be 7,000 tons instead of 9,000 tons, apart from personal opinion. So no point other than to move on at this point - the choice is Matt's. That choice being:

Base size of a particle spinal as 1DD per 4,000 tons (Chas) or 1DD per 5,000 tons (Nerhesi). This is ofcourse at TL11.
At TL15, this translates into 1DD per 2,400 tons vs 3,000 tons. (7,200 tons vs 9,000 tons for a 3DD weapon).

 

[Chas]

I'm making smaller spinals that do less damage as the bottom end of the paradigm which naturally allows them to go on smaller ships. What part of that is ironic or making it easier that they don't have to? There has to be a bottom end somewhere. Is there something wrong with suggesting about 7000 hull points in a 4000 ton ship should be the bottom line? Do you agree with this?

But they weren't doing less damage - You were putting really powerful spinals on smaller ships. You stated several times that a 7,000 ton spinal doing 10,000 damage sounds about right. That means a 15,000 ton battlerider or larger jump capable craft can easily mount a gun that will 3-shot a 50,000 tonner. That is why I revised to 3% per point armour reduction. If a 7,000 ton Spinal was doing 10000 after armour reduction then that would be a little crazy (no, not a little).

:lol: Nerhesi, you've lost the plot with regards battle riders. The battle rider is SUPPOSED to be doing this damage. If they are not, if you are saying 7000 tons shouldn't do anything like 10000 hull points, then battle riders won't exist in your universe. There'll just be single mothers with one big baby.
Certainly we will have to take away the double weight rule.

There isn't any reason that a 3DD spinal should be 7,000 tons instead of 9,000 tons, apart from personal opinion. So no point other than to move on at this point - the choice is Matt's. That choice being:

Base size of a particle spinal as 1DD per 4,000 tons (Chas) or 1DD per 5,000 tons (Nerhesi). This is ofcourse at TL11.
At TL15, this translates into 1DD per 2,400 tons vs 3,000 tons. (7,200 tons vs 9,000 tons for a 3DD weapon).

This has a very material impact on how battle riders work. That's why I was still looking hard at the 6000 tons spinal = 10000 hull points, even better than what you've proposed.

 

[Chas]

b) Use double occupancy staterooms - I haven't calculated your crew requirements, but I doubt they are actually 1000 crew? (If so, then we have a huge other problem).

Do calculate the crew, and then you'll get a good idea of where I'm coming from, and won't have a proper understanding of the ship weight mix without it. I'm not wanting to get back into the pros and cons of the build and what should work. :lol: I just want to flag this for everybody's attention.

I've been reviewing the designs I put up and the more I look at it I can't skimp with the Virtual Gunner the bandwidth burn is just too high... and the crew weights really cut in if you don't get to use Virtual Gunner. This is very important on the bigger ships with regards the total weapon paradigm because it tips things back towards better smaller ships.

To revisit the 50K build, if you've got a 9000 ton spinal that's 90 gunners. At double occupancy you have 180 tons in staterooms for the spinal gunnery crew only. If you've got the rest of the hard points in turrets for a strike cruiser you've got 2 gunners, which at double occupancy/gunner = 4 tons each turret. There are 410 hard points left after the spinal from the total 500 hard points of the 50k cruiser. That's 410 hard points x 4 tons = 1640 tons of staterooms.

So for spinals and turrets we have 1640+180 = 1820 gunnery crew.

The drives, maintenance and admin also requires an additional 486 crew. These also go in double occupancy so another 972tons of state rooms

Officers et al come to 265. These get single occupancy so a straight 4x 265 in state rooms = 1060

= total stateroom tonnage 1820 + 972 + 1060
= 3852 tons in staterooms.
That's with nothing else in terms of labs, medical facilities, workshops, and in particular recreational facilities.

That's 7.7% of the ships' weight in staterooms. being able to reduce this number makes a huge difference as to what you can and cannot include as weaponry in the ship.

The issue becomes easier if you can run Virtual Gunner, but a 1 bandwidth / 10 gunners to remove the turret gunners (I'm always going to assume elite gunnery crew for the spinal and not virtual gunner that!) means 41 bandwidth on your Core 100 Computer here.

Now looking at the Core computer you have
Software Bandwidth 100
Screens Optimizer 10
Virtual Gunner 2 20.0
Electronic Warfare 3 40
Battle System 3 20
Advanced Fire Control 3 40

It's not easy. The bandwidth is getting chew up. To run Virtual Gunner for the turrets is 61 of your bandwidth total.

You'll note there is no PD software in that mix. You're always going to run Advanced Fire Control and Screens Optimizer = 50 bandwidth alone. The way I looked at it was you'd likely switch in and out your turrets as the system required and suck up not being able to use all your weapons.

But you can also see how this bandwidth gets burned very quickly and this crew weight pinch becomes significant as we go up in ship size... you can't run virtual gunner on a 100 k ton ship, which means the 100k ton ship has less % tonnage left after the base drives to put in weapons vs. the low build ships. Something we need to watch otherwise we get back to the point of having multiple smaller ships being better than one big one. It is an the issue with a flat linear weapon and weight gradient.

 

[Chas]

I'd also put in a suggestion here to tilt the equation to allow a sliding scale with the bigger spinals getting better relative to the small. This to be adjusted to taste, but a mechanism to allow the big spinal ships to have a superior weight/ damage ratio. So that equal ratio small ships don't equal one big ship. So that your 100,000 ton ship (if that wants to be the key ship size) does rule the skies vs 3 x 35K tonners. Right now we have purely linear scaling for everything pretty much (except the virtual gunner software as noted above, but that can be addressed in the software or crew rules) and the final builds need examining to see if the big ships aren't being made redundant, when the battle wagons are supposed to be the optimal build.

 

[AndrewW]

Officers et al come to 265. These get single occupancy so a straight 4x 265 in state rooms = 1060

Not all officers would typically have their own stateroom, just the upper ranks, the rest would be double occupancy.

 

[Nerhesi]

:lol: Nerhesi, you've lost the plot with regards battle riders. The battle rider is SUPPOSED to be doing this damage. If they are not, if you are saying 7000 tons shouldn't do anything like 10000 hull points, then battle riders won't exist in your universe. There'll just be single mothers with one big baby.
Certainly we will have to take away the double weight rule.

This has a very material impact on how battle riders work. That's why I was still looking hard at the 6000 tons spinal = 10000 hull points, even better than what you've proposed.

I believe your math may be slightly off, Battle-riders are already super powerful at 7000 = 10000 damage. Example forthcoming.

Do calculate the crew, and then you'll get a good idea of where I'm coming from, and won't have a proper understanding of the ship weight mix without it. I'm not wanting to get back into the pros and cons of the build and what should work. I just want to flag this for everybody's attention.

Oh wow. I see the problem. Seems the rules for Capital ship crews have been left out. But the rules you're using (not your fault obviously) are actually those for small-adventure class. I'll post the High Guard rules below, and I'll start at topic on it; because this inflates all the crews massively. Here are the relevant changes though:

Command:
5 per 10,000 tons of ship approximately - only they get a full stateroom.
Engineering:
1 per 100 tons of drives
Gunnery:
Turrets: 1 per BARRAGE
etc
Service:
3 per 1000 tons if ship has no troops. 2 per 1000 tons if it does have crew.

To give you an example of crew sizes (which havent changed from Classic from my understanding) - this excludes fighter-craft staff if they're there:
100k carrier - 700 crew. this is with around 800 hardpoints used.
50k strike cruiser - 400 crew - 350+ hardpoints used
30k light cruiser - 240 crew
75k Carrier - 400 crew - 700 hardpoints used
200k dreadnought - 1800 crew - nearly 2000 hardpoints used plus 8000 ton spinal weapon

I think engineering and particularly gunnery are the most important changes. We need to ensure the feel of a central fire-control rather than Joe and Mike being assigned to turret #376 out of 600!

 

[Nerhesi]

20,000 ton Battle-rider
No TL improvements either at the moment
Bonded super dense armour (15) 2400
9G Thrust (TL15) 1800
Powerplant 2000
Powerplant Fuel
Command bridge 80
Advanced Sensors 5
Military Countermeasures 15
Enhanced Signal Processing 2
4DD Particle spinal TL15 9,600
100 Triple Turrets for PD 100
4000 tons left over for cargo, staterooms, reinforced hull, and whatever else you want. Also, 3000 net extra power at the moment. Hell - I can add 5 thrust reaction booster that has 10-turns of 5G!

This ship does 4DD, which is 14,000 hull damage - or 7700 versus a 15 armour target. On average, it will 1-shot a 20,000 ton ship. This is a big, big, amazing, but crazy thing.
As indicated earlier, this is better than a 3:1 ratio for bay weapons in terms of damage-to-tons.
A battle-rider is on average, 1-shotting ships it's size. Very important here that we take note of "on-average". It may under-perform with a bad-roll or it may 1-shot something double it's size.

Right now - I think we're barely straddling the balance line. Remember, this is battle-rider performance against a fellow TL15 target that has maximum armour as well. So this is worst-case scenario damage.
I agree 3DD would be perhaps a little low - but I think 5DD is a more than a little high. We need to consider this is actually on the smaller-end of battle-rider (they're not just spinal platforms when they get bigger).nt

 

[Chas]

Interesting Nerhesi but ah... one small point, or rather not so small. What about the tender that is going to transport this 20k rider over Jump 4? If you are going to compare this rider you also need to build the riders and carrier together to match an equivalent weight of cruiser. Riders are going nowhere as a fleet without equivalent performance of the carrier and cruiser. What is shown there as a stand alone is a system defense boat. Not the same animal.

Have a look at that and then see where you are at. :thumb up:

As for the crews that's got its thread now and let's see how Matt comments. The inference I got previously was the small crew standards were staying. I hope not as it does get difficult. I'll quite happily keep my muttering to myself as I redo my ships. Heh.

 

[phavoc]

There isn't any reason that a 3DD spinal should be 7,000 tons instead of 9,000 tons, apart from personal opinion. So no point other than to move on at this point - the choice is Matt's. That choice being:

Base size of a particle spinal as 1DD per 4,000 tons (Chas) or 1DD per 5,000 tons (Nerhesi). This is ofcourse at TL11.
At TL15, this translates into 1DD per 2,400 tons vs 3,000 tons. (7,200 tons vs 9,000 tons for a 3DD weapon).

I'm not talking about any one particular type of spinal. Just the overall conversation ABOUT spinals.

 

[Nerhesi]

Interesting Nerhesi but ah... one small point, or rather not so small. What about the tender that is going to transport this 20k rider over Jump 4? If you are going to compare this rider you also need to build the riders and carrier together to match an equivalent weight of cruiser. Riders are going nowhere as a fleet without equivalent performance of the carrier and cruiser. What is shown there as a stand alone is a system defense boat. Not the same animal.

Non-sequitor. Eliminate spinals completely - and your questions is still valid! (and it is very good question - but a much much bigger one). For the same reason we wanted to avoid all the other periphery discussions about what to have as secondary armament, the value of spinals vs fusion bays, screens vs mesons, and so on - the point of this specific conversation is about the performance of a Spinal on X size versus what ship it is carried on.

Of course battle-riders have constraints such as "how do they get there" - it is the same as fighter and carrier constraint, or the constraint of ammunition for missiles and rail-guns and how do they get there... No one missed any point about that. It is just not directly relevant to this right now. We would get lost forever in strategic discussion about how many Cruisers are equivalent to Battle-riders and Tenders. Then we would argue about what is the limiting factor of the comparison, Credit Cost? TL? Construction ability?

Needless to say, ton-for-ton, Battle-riders are superior. Simply put because they dont waste space on jump-fuel and jump drive. When you add to that that tenders are dirt cheap you end up with the already well known conclusion that Battle-riders, Fighters, SDBs, etc - are all superior to jump-capable craft. Their weakness is such that they DO require ways to get where they are going - and again, this is not news.

We just need to make sure that when they do get where they are going, it is not a forgone conclusion for the enemy. This was the case with how MGT1 played out with fighters. We even did that indepth analysis to show that Fighters won every single time (thanks to reinforced hull craziness and Very Long Range barbettes). Also, from a historical fluff perspective - Battleriders worked well for the Third Imperium - right up until the 4th (or was it 5th) frontier war, where they realised the weakness was the fact you couldn't really jump out when the situation got hairy.

I guess in conclusion, yes Battleriders have to get there, that doesn't mean we let them clean-house when they get there. The fact that when they get there they usually have 35%-50% more space due to the lack of jump and fuel requirements, is enough for them to clear house - even without Spinals!

 

[Nerhesi]

There isn't any reason that a 3DD spinal should be 7,000 tons instead of 9,000 tons, apart from personal opinion. So no point other than to move on at this point - the choice is Matt's. That choice being:

Base size of a particle spinal as 1DD per 4,000 tons (Chas) or 1DD per 5,000 tons (Nerhesi). This is ofcourse at TL11.
At TL15, this translates into 1DD per 2,400 tons vs 3,000 tons. (7,200 tons vs 9,000 tons for a 3DD weapon).

I'm not talking about any one particular type of spinal. Just the overall conversation ABOUT spinals.

My bad

 

[phavoc]

Needless to say, ton-for-ton, Battle-riders are superior. Simply put because they dont waste space on jump-fuel and jump drive. When you add to that that tenders are dirt cheap you end up with the already well known conclusion that Battle-riders, Fighters, SDBs, etc - are all superior to jump-capable craft. Their weakness is such that they DO require ways to get where they are going - and again, this is not news.

We just need to make sure that when they do get where they are going, it is not a forgone conclusion for the enemy. This was the case with how MGT1 played out with fighters. We even did that indepth analysis to show that Fighters won every single time (thanks to reinforced hull craziness and Very Long Range barbettes). Also, from a historical fluff perspective - Battleriders worked well for the Third Imperium - right up until the 4th (or was it 5th) frontier war, where they realised the weakness was the fact you couldn't really jump out when the situation got hairy.

I guess in conclusion, yes Battleriders have to get there, that doesn't mean we let them clean-house when they get there. The fact that when they get there they usually have 35%-50% more space due to the lack of jump and fuel requirements, is enough for them to clear house - even without Spinals!

Yes, any ship that isn't burdened with jump drives or the fuel required for them has much more space to devote to weapons and defenses. They certainly have their place in the battle fleet. They work best on defense, I think, since they have quite the limitation on offense. Though I guess they would have their place as helping punch the enemy when needed. But like you point out, if plans change they have the highest risk of being caught behind enemy lines.

 

[Chas]

!!

We absolutely cannot sweep the battle rider+tender build and balance under the carpet. It is particularly pertinent to the spinal weapon design. We are discussing something as fundamental as whether battle riders or capital ships are the dominant fleet force of the Traveller universe. And it's not that difficult once it's looked at: the issues of firepower vs weight and cost aren't different. I think we can get to a reasonable balance point.

The basic issue is:
- if the spinal weapon is small with a high damage output then capital ships have no place on the battlefield. The carrier brings too much firepower to the battle field vs. the capital ship.
- if the spinal weapon is heavy with low damage then riders are made redundant. They leave too many hull points and hard points back on the carrier and the capital ship will blow them out of space with the turret weapons the riders don't have.

When comparing riders + carrier vs. capital ships I've been using weight as it's important to understand just what it takes to get tonnage across space. And I'm always a bit leery about using cost as a bottom line - the US air force doesn't care about the cost of the F-35 that much, what they want is an aircraft that will defeat any other aircraft it faces. Still for the carrier I'll allow performance/credit should be brought into the equation and we allow some leeway there as the carrier will generally be able to be built on a cheaper basis than the capital ship. We just need to get this approximately right in any case at this point, so we are avoiding any gross miss-matches and that one craft type is totally dominant.

Regards TL, let's build this at TL15 and it'll scale back without too much trouble. How the spinals scale is still a conversation that needs to be revisited in any case though, as phavoc said, we're not done with this topic.

As to the actual mechanisms involved, just as we saw with the cruiser build, it's easy enough to work out what % weight is available from a tender chassis from any particular design. To move tonnage at Jump 4 Maneuver 9 enabled tender from memory it's about 50%, if you've got a 100k ton tender you can move 50K tons of riders. I'll redo this and state the assumptions. If the assumptions change it's not so critical, at the moment all our build factors are pretty much linear in the gradation as we've seen, so we're not going to get into too much trouble I believe. If the carrier gets an extra 3% weight available because the crew design changes then so does the cruiser, if we build at jump 3 the tender gets to bring along another rider but the extra bays the capital ship gets will counter it, etc.

Anyway I'm going to suggest that the 6000 tons of spinal = 3DD = 10500 hull points does generally work. Scaling off this you can build cruisers and other capital ships that are feasible designs, and you can build battle riders + carriers that are neither negligible nor dominant.

 

[phavoc]

It might be better to start at 12 and work your way up the tech tree since that is the norm. It will also provide insight into increasing TL advantages.

 

[Nerhesi]

Please dont conflate issues Chas. We can conflate a ton of subjects here as well; we can always grab Subject B, then add Logistics X to conflate it and end up in analysis paralysis swimming in a sea of personal opinion. That in no way helps the argument. Otherwise we can start conflating things like Crew count for multiple battle-riders vs 1 cruiser; Costs associated with each; Level of Supporting SubSector infrastructure required; Fleet make up, etc etc etc

All these things, while valid questions strategically, are a complete non-sequitur. No more building ships or posing arguments with no direct relevance to the subject - we've exhausted both those options now

However, considering we're arguing the difference between whether a TL Particle Spinal should be 1DD per 2000 tons or 1DD per 3000 tons; we can avoid having Matt arbitrate and I'll agree on your figure. It is just personal preference at this point and we'll see how it plays out post-release and in discussions after the fact and so on. I'll post the table below with the updated numbers.

Do we have an opinion on having different maximum damage values (and therefore size) on different spinals? or do we just make our lives easier by saying they are all capped at 10DD?

 

[Chas]

It might be better to start at 12 and work your way up the tech tree since that is the norm. It will also provide insight into increasing TL advantages.

I understand where you're coming from phavoc and in many cases would be correct but I personally prefer to build at TL15 for 2 reasons:
1) Space is most constricted at this TL. If things work here you're generally not going to get into trouble going the other way to bigger ships.
2) The Imperial Navy is TL15 and the Imperial Navy is the dominant naval force in the setting. This needs to work as stated. And most of the extant material on ship concepts and fleet designs is based on the Imperial Navy which gives good reference.

 

[Nerhesi]

It might be better to start at 12 and work your way up the tech tree since that is the norm. It will also provide insight into increasing TL advantages.

I think in our shared opinion (maybe I should wait for Chas to pipe in, because in this post we wiiidely diverged unlike in other posts) - that if we balance at TL15, then nothing crazy can be created downstream (lower TLs).

But just for your info sir:

2000 per 1DD at TL15, is a TL+4, with 40% reduced weight, therefore:

TL11 Particle: 1DD per 3,500 tons.
TL12: -10%, so 3,150 tons.

Technically, that puts the 1DD at 3,500 tons at the basic-entry TL for Particle beams, which is TL11. So at TL15, it will be actually 2100 tons not 2000. But it is way cleaner to have a clean weight as the base weight, rather than a weird number (3,333.33333 tons repeating non terminating)