Okay folks, not quite there but I’ve been given my marching orders by the boss (aka wife) and it’ll have to do for now.
I’ll start this discussion by defining what I mean when I’m using the word battle rider and battle tender so there is no miss communication. In this context battle rider is a craft that when coupled with its tender is a fleet element that can travel through space with everything else in the fleet on equal terms. I don’t mean a short haul carrier that might be kept on a hot sector front for direct attack like a planetary assault ship, which is an effective design. Here battle riders are a unit that would travel with the rebels from the Spinward Marches to the Imperial Court and arrive there with the cruisers and battlewagons and everything else. So the capital ships and tenders are working on the same jump number and maneuver as a ‘pure’ fleet design. They can be both be Jump 3 Maneuver 5, it doesn’t matter so much as we can show, as long as they are both the same. Nobody gets left behind.
So, whenever we are discussing a battle rider as an effective fleet element there must be consideration of the tender that goes with it. Battle riders don’t arrive at the battle by a wave of a magic wand.
Now spinal weapons as the basis of a battle rider are the reason for its existence. Battle riders are there to get multiple spinal weapons to combat effectively.
To do that as a pure fleet element there are two key elements as to the rider’s effectiveness:
1) The weight of the rider to determine how it can be carried on a tender – which in turn is determined by the weight of the spinal weapon
2) The damage the spinal does for that weight
The first point is straight forward. The rider is heavy and the carrier has to be proportionally heavier to accommodate it. Critical is that battle riders need to be as small as possible to bring multiple spinals to fight for the same sized tender. Nothing difficult in that in concept, if you can put 4 spinals riders on a tender rather than 3 same size spinals you’re winning. A bit trickier in practice but in general terms of a reasonable build manageable.
The second point needs to be carefully analyzed in terms of rider viability as an effective, or imbalanced unit, and I’ll return to this. Obviously there is a tie in with the first point. You can put a single high powered spinal on to a rider that’s so heavy that your tender can only carry 1 – but that’s meaningless, you’re better off just building a capital ship (usually
).
So what is the reason for existence of riders? Its basis is in the rule that you can only fit 1 spinal weapon on a capital ship. While by building riders you can get multiple spinals into combat for the same effective “value” as that capital ship. And that by doing so you have more fire power. That when these battle riders meet the capital ship they will be able to at least do combat on an equal footing and better.
How we define the relative “value” of the capital ship vs.the battle rider+tender could be argued back and forth. I’ll present this as weights for this discussion. Cost per credit may well be a better parameter and we should examine this further but I only need to establish ball park figures to provide the necessary understanding of the topic to assist drive the rules forward.
But let’s not forget we are discussing relative value of two units here. The two units being the capital ship vs. the battle rider + tender. We have to get our head around what is the actual value of the tender and its implications on the riders, or we can't get past first base.
Firepower vs the spinal weapon tonnage
The crux of the issue for the riders.
- High fire power for a low spinal weight means more effective battle riders.
- Low fire power for high weight and the rider is losing vs. the capital ship.
So how do we determine this balance point between firepower and the spinal weapon weight?
Let’s look at some actual examples so we can understand what is out of spec first.
Example 1 - Underkill
Taking the matrix that Nerhesi last put up.
Note : that wasn’t my direct recommendation by the way, that has kept the 3% reduction/armour point
Note: this is not the proper application of the minimum rider weight of 2x the spinal weight, but we’ll keep this in for now because it helps illustrate the point
For this matrix at TL 15 we have for an example:
4DD minus 3 x 15% armor reduction= 3500 tons minus 40% TL advantage
Which is
7,700 hull points = 8,400 tons of spinal
(as a useful mental reference here note how we have a spinal doing lower hull points than its weight)
At a minimum rider weight of 2x the spinal we have
7,700 hull points from a rider of 16,800 tons.
Now, what do we need to get this rider across parsecs of space?
If we take 3 of these riders in combo, that’s 3x 16,800 tons = 50,400 tons of total riders.
For TL15 Jump 4 Manuever 9 carrier (and remember these figures are not so important as long as it is reflected in the capital ship) you need a tender that is approximately 150,000 tons in size to carry these riders. See below for full details of the tender.
So using weight as a comparative “value” we have150,000 tons give or take. This will at least get us out the door.
Let’s compare that against an equal weight capital ship of 150,000 tons.
A 150,000 ton battleship is a major fleet element. It will have a top level spinal and plenty of secondary armament and has a base 60,000 hull points.
The 3 riders in question are doing 7,700 hull points for each spinal. That means there are 23,100 hull points of damage / turn if all hit.
The riders themselves, giving them double reinforced hulls and close design are 10,080 hull points. Add more to that if you like.
I’ll make the assumption safely I believe that the battle ship will have something a bit better than the spinal that the riders have, which in the same matrix a 7DD particle doing 13, 475 hull points a shot for a 14,700 ton spinal. The secondary weaponry of this battleship is going to be considerable, at least 10,000 tons. Let’s put in 10,000 tons of torp bays. That’s doing 20 x 30 torps = 600 torps x 1DD = 21,000 hull points on a rider that has only 77 hardpoints left for PD. The secondary armament is going to destroy a rider a turn. Or thereabouts. There’ll be different mixes of weapons, but any big ship like this will have a likely minimum of 1000 missiles a turn heading the riders’ way also.
The 150,000 ton battleship is destroying 2 riders a turn. The 3 riders need at best 3 turns to destroy the battleship – assuming no battle riders are destroyed over this time. No contest.
Let’s say the value paradigm is more generous examining cost and/or other considerations and allow the riders to pack an extra vessel on the tender. Even vs. 4 riders the battleship wins reasonably comfortably. Allowing the 4 riders to all hit first, they do about half the hull point damage. Battle ship hits kills 2 leaving 2. They can’t finish the battleship off and they get creamed. Even in a best case situation the riders struggle to win.
Ergo, that rule set as presented doesn’t work for riders. Especially considering the other weaknesses – their vulnerability to fighters and missiles/torps - that capital ships don’t have.
Example 2 - Overkill
For the next example let’s have a look at what is happening with the Particle E spinal in the Jan edition of the rule set.
6DD – 30% for Armour = 6000tons -30% spinal
14700 hull points = 4200 tons
(note here we have hull points per spinal ton running at >3:1 ratio)
Let’s keep the 2x rider size for continuity and that means:
14,700 hull points = 8,400 ton rider
3 riders = 25200 tons. Which implies with a tender a total fighting weight of around 75,000 tons.
Putting these 3 riders against one 75,000 ton heavy cruiser is:
3 x 14,700 hulls points of fire power fighting a 30,000 hull point vessel, that could be able to destroy 2 of the riders a turn.
The capital ship is out classed here. 2 tender+ battle riders can take out 3 capital ships of equal weight. Let us also not forget in this fight the capital ship’s spinal is at -4 to hit the riders! If the value paradigm gives us one more rider / tender then the capital class vessel is made totally redundant: the battle rider + tender firepower is so strong.
The Tender
So as we’ve seen the likely workable balance of the rider spinal and size is between these two examples. However before discussing a workable spinal matrix let’s come back to the critical issue of the tender. If we are building the tender incorrectly, or making an incorrect assumption about the tender, any work we do on the spinals will be irrelevant. I was asked to put up a ship. This is it. Where I’ve made a tender at Jump 4 Maneuver 9 in what I think is close to a realistic build: no armor, a skeleton crew, only missile turret weapons (attack being the best defence against the biggest threat, high thrust fighters/riders that break through a battle line), standard stealth, no EAG etc etc. You could argue that you can drop the maneuver and let the riders get themselves to a fight from a jump, but there are many counter-arguments about that and I’ll leave that for another discussion.
{image to go here - nothing tricky, everybody is capable of gutting a ship}
Now if we move the tender movement parameters, say jump 3 or maneuver 5, this frees up a lot of lifting capacity. But similarly it frees up corresponding space on the capital ship. The rule mechanics are robust at this stage with checks and balances in place. Freeing up space to lift a tender means freeing up an equivalent space on the capital ship to allow enough weaponry to destroy the extra tender as a roughly correct. We’re reasonably safe looking at the rider / capital ship balance at almost any equal movement parameters, though will need review, especially at low tech levels.
More important to our discussion is how we adjudge the “value” of the tender vs. capital ship. Do we just compare the tender’s weight on a ton/ton ratio? Its cost at a credit/credit ratio? Cost is likely good as the tendency will be to allow the carrier to be built on more of a budget than the capital ship.
Regardless we need to be well aware of just how big the carrier needs to be to move riders. As a rule of thumb for a Jump 4 Maneuver 9 ship a carrier can lift the equivalent of 33% of its stated displacement. That is, a 100,000 tender can lift 33% of that as riders – a combined rider weight of 33,000 tons. It will go up from there for lower techs with lower jump and maneuver values.
The Ideal Spinal for the Rider + Tender vs. Capital Ship Balance
This is not difficult to work out a single damage/ spinal weight depending on people’s tastes. But it is complex to design the full matrix of DD / weight spread and tech level modification, you can’t just throw in any scaling you choose or you start moving the relative effectiveness of the spinal on different weights of vessels. And there are other factors in the total build that need to be taken into consideration. This is the most important part of the remaining ship equation because it will determine how every fleet is designed and care is needed.
I had proposed 3DD = 6000 tons of spinal = 10,500 hull points effective (no reductions for armor on this) as a kick off point.
This has a damage ratio of <2:1. It is about mid-point of the two scenarios described above.
This creates a rider at 12,000 tons doing 10,500 hull points keeping the 2x rule.
3 x 12,000 tons of riders = 36,000 = 109,000 tons of total weight.
So fighting an equivalent weight capital ship, it will have 44,000 hull points.
Here, the 3 riders can’t quite take out the battleship in one turn. The battle ship can likely take out the riders at 2 a turn. It can fit a 4DD spinal and have the secondary weapons to do this. This isn’t a perfectly completed example, but it makes the point, now we have a reasonably equal fight.
Points for Consideration in Making the Spinal Weapon Matrix and Technology Scaling
There is a problem with the constant linear scaling of the damage matrix, especially when the spread of the spinal power is wide, like from 1DD to 10DD. And this easily compounded if you differentiate the particles vs. mesons widely without care.
The issue lies in the way the current ship design is perfectly linear in scaling the weight available for weapons per size. There is some non-linear gradation of effective firepower as the small capital ship gets bays instead of turrets, but after that everything becomes straight line. There is a point in the smaller capital ship (I haven’t worked the weight out exactly) where you get a spinal, a bunch of secondary weapons, and thereafter the relative proportions are fixed if the spinal scales in a linear fashion. You can move the deck chairs about in the secondary weapons but that’s not doing too much relative to the spinals.
Now if the spinal’s damage scaling is linear there gets a point where the ultra big spinal is over kill on the small spinal ship, it’s doing more than enough damage to take the small spinal ship in one hit. 10DD = 35,000 hull points. The superdreadnought is fighting at lower efficiency ton per ton because a chunk of its spinal firepower is burning nothing but already destroyed spacecraft dust. A 1DD spinal will fit into a ship lower than this size, especially if it is designed as a strike cruiser. So what happens? The ultra big spinal has no place. You can’t build an ultra big spinal or the ship around it because the 160,000 ton battle ship now loses against an equivalent weight of 8 x 20,000 ton ships.
So for a start I would recommend
1) the 1st spinals is at 2DD and review where the top one wants to cut out or otherwise managed
2) The 2x weight rule be reviewed. I still like the principle of it but it might good at 2x for the 2DD weapon and be fine at 1.5x there after.
3) There is a deliberate non-linear curve favouring larger vessels. The spinals are about the only nonfixed item in the ship’s design that can still be tweaked to provide a desired ship curve. What is the point of a 100,000 ton vessel when three 33,000 ton vessels are doing exactly the same job? Which is what happens when everything is a perfectly linear scaling. This is your preserve Matt as to just what you’re looking for. If you can state a preference in what you are wanting for this can be presented for consideration. However this non-linear curve doesn’t need to be in spinals, you could make hull reinforcement cheaper and lighter at higher tonnages for example to break the straight linear scaling of ships. What we do need to see is a reason to build a superdreadnought (other than the fact it’s just coooooool by the mad baron).
I’d be tempted to always give battle riders a slight edge once people are happy with the relative comparative value of the rider + tender vs. the capital sip and feel they have combat under control. They have vulnerabilities to ships smaller than them and missile/torps and the specialist big ship killers should. But this is just personal taste and needs to be carefully applied.
I’ll get the actual riders up next for what I’ve stated above to go with the tender. I will try to do this at both TL15 and 12 to give an appropriate look at technology balance.
Then I’ll ponder this more and review Matts and everybody’s comments before actually putting for a spinal matrix myself. The damage / weight point I suggested above is only a first point and how to best move this, or whatever final balance is preferred, across weights, types and TLs does needs further thought followed by actual ship builds to see the result.
