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500 ton Light Raider

Jame

SOC-14 5K
LR-51335C1-000000-50003-0 TL 13. MCr 410.05 500 tons.
500 ton wedge. Manuever-3, Jump-3. Plant 5. 175 tons fuel. Model/3fib. 5 Hardpoints (2 triple beam lasers, 2 triple missile racks, 1 triple pulse laser). 20 staterooms. Ship's Boat, GCarrier. 79 tons cargo. 13 crew, 12 troops. Streamlined. 410.05 MCr.

The Shortsword-class Light Raider is designed to fill the gap between the Type-T patrol cruiser and the Broadsword-class mercenary cruiser.
 
Interesting ship, especially in a small ship universe. It isn't a super ship, fills an identifiable niche, and would be something a gamer group could find useful. It belongs in a TA in the future, for use by all gamers.
 
The author of that TA can buy it from me for $20.00. I'll even think up some more background for it.

Though it's constructed in High Guard, so it can be used in a big ship universe.
 
Jame,

What is the ship used for? Saying it 'fits' between the Type-T and Broadsword confuses me as those ships are two very different animals.

The Type-T is a patroller for law enforcement organizations. It's a customs, traffic control, and paramilitary design. The Type-T is 'SWAT in Space'. In ship-to-ship battles it can barely stand up to canonical corsair and ECM designs. It's good for pushing most PCs' vessels around and little else.

Broadsword is an interstellar battle taxi and not a warship. It delivers a couple of light platoons and a bit of their associated equipment to hotspots and then provides orbital fire support. In ship-to-ship battles, it's weak battery factors give it a rather small punch for it's size. Handled correctly, even a Type-T could spell trouble for a Broadsword.

So, what is your light raider? The name led me to believe it was for commerce raiding and protection, but the lack of armor, small computer, and odd battery selections mean it isn't a warship.

The troops aboard then led me believe something else; i.e. its a 'battle taxi', but the boat is rather small and slow to deliver the troops anywhere 'hot'. Ditto the g-carrier.

The 79 dTons of cargo just threw me for a loop.

It can't fight other warships its size, it can't get troops to the 'hot zone', and it's too big and/or expensive for 'SWAT in Space', so what is it for?

Other than a PCs' dream ship that is! :)


Have fun,
Bill

P.S. I want one!
 
Fine, I suppose I could go back and put in a 4-G engine. It's supposed to be a "SWAT in Space" with greater (non-fuel) endurance.

Rats, I forgot to put in the fuel processor!
 
It occurs to me that when I go back and do that upgrade (frigate, I'll add a better computer too)is that it'll be an excellent Travellerized IPV-1 Corvette from the computer game Escape Velocity...

Now I gots to make a Kestrel!
 
Here's my second go at it:
500 ton needle-wedge. Manuever-4, Jump-3. Plant 5. 175 tons fuel. Model/4fib. 5 hardpoints (2 triple beam lasers, 2 triple missile racks, 1 dual missile and a beam laser turret). 20 staterooms. Ship's boat, GCarrier. 59 tons cargo. 3-ton fuel processor. 13 crew, 12 troops. Agility-3. 15 EP remaining (25 total). Streamlined. 482.70 MCr.

The Shortsword-class patrol vessel is meant as a larger customs vessel or a commerce raider. In either case it is expected to be able to handle at least some cargo confiscation duties, hence the cargo capacity (something the Type-T doesn't have).

Oh, Bill, note that it's equipped with the 6-g Ship's Boat, not the 3-g Slow Boat.
 
Originally posted by Jame:
Here's my second go at it: (snip of nifty design)
Jame,

Do you have a copy of Andrew Moffat-Vallance's excellent High Guard Shipyard program?

The Shortsword-class patrol vessel is meant as a larger customs vessel or a commerce raider.
Customs yes, commerce raiding no. It still isn't enough of a warship for that duty.

You don't need troops for commerce raiding, boarding and seizing enemy vessels went out with the American Civil War. Because of the technology involved, not to mention the time it takes to match vectors with and board even a disabled vessel in space (try it in Mayday sometimes and that's only 2D), commerce raiding is going to be similar to the World Wars model; destroy or damage your enemy's merchant shipping with extremely rare vessel seizures.

For commerce raiding, drop the m-drive rating to 3 gees, cut cargo capacity to 10Dtons or so for reloads, take off the troops and their g-carrier, add crew, add low berths, add armor, add a bigger computer, change your weapons mix to one triple b-laser turret (battery factor 4), two triple missile turrets (one battery factor 4), and two fusion gun turrets (one battery factor 5). The missile battery is your merchant buster; you prang a merchie at long range damage it, forcing repairs, then move on to the next. The laser battery is your swing man switching between offense and defense as required. The fusion battery is your AM defense and your close-in punch. (If you don't like fusion guns you can have two more factor 4 b-laser batteries.)

In either case it is expected to be able to handle at least some cargo confiscation duties, hence the cargo capacity (something the Type-T doesn't have).
Good idea. Shifting naughty cargos from the smuggler's ship to your own means you needn't leave troops aboard the smuggler's ship where they can become hostages. PCs can be devious.

Oh, Bill, note that it's equipped with the 6-g Ship's Boat, not the 3-g Slow Boat.
D'oh! Let's see... You can mount one laser with either missiles or sand filling the rest of the weapons' mount. 13.7dTons of free space too, you may be able to shift the g-carrier and all the troops at once.

I want one!


Have fun,
Bill
 
I tend to go with a laser and two missiles for the S-B. And my perception of the GCarrier is that it allows the troops to be "spacelifted" inside, if so inclined...

How's about it being used for diversionary raids on lightly-defended areas?
 
Originally posted by Jame:
How's about it being used for diversionary raids on lightly-defended areas?
Jame,

That's an extremely interesting topic and one that I have prodded people about for years to no avail. With regards to 'lightly defended' areas, instead of 'lightly defended' systems in a subsector what about 'lightly defended' points within a system?

How much of a typical Hi-Pop world's economy is off the mainworld but still in the same system? How much of what Trin or Mora or Regina requires to do what it does is out in a planetoid belt? Orbiting a gas giant? Built on an inner system rockball? How many Ploestis, Schweinfurts, and others are there in a Hi-Pop system?

How closely will they be defended?

GURPS Transhuman Space setting uses a certain rare helium isotope for fusion power; He-3. (This is very 'real world' of the setting, it is pretty much agreed that the type of fusion that uses that isotope is our best bet to develop first.) The isotope is primarily located in two regions in the Sol system; Luna where it is refined from strip-mined regolith and Saturn's atmosphere where it is refined from the gas mix.

THS doesn't have FTL and the setting's maneuver drives are pitifully weak when compared to those in Traveller. This means that the He-3 operations at Saturn are easy to defend, you can see anyone approaching for a long, long, long time.

Now throw jump and m-drives into the equation.

A raider or raiders can jump in 100D from Saturn, thrust in at multiples of gee for long periods, fire lasers with an effective range over a light-second, and deploy all sorts of other nastiness. Defending our He-3 operation just got really, really hairy.

And that's just one operation out of how many? How many other critical and near critical off-world locations will a typical Hi-Pop world have? How closely can they be defended? Can they all even be defended?

And what about those smaller worlds? They'll have critical off-world facilities too and they'll be even less able to defend them.

The Rebellion's final 'Black War' phase answers all of my questions, I believe.

Imagine a flotilla of your Light Raiders arriving off a distant gas giant or section of a planetoid belt. They quickly move against the facilities they find there. The few SDBs already on the spot are ganged up on and mission killed. With those space-based defenders gone, the raiders run riot while keeping an eye out for the inevitable 6gee reaction force. Troops are shuttled about acting as forward obeservers and demolition teams. All sorts of industrial equipment is damaged beyond repair. Big distant targets get missiles, smaller closer ones get lasers. The operation finally ceases when there are either no more targets worth smashing or the defender's reaction force begins to draw near.

And the raiders jump away.


Have fun,
Bill
 
Ooo, I'm going to adapt that idea into a campaign that I'm writing (very slowly and with the help of people from whom I haven't heard in a while - poke to those concerned!), for when one gov't meets another and goes to war...
 
Originally posted by Jame:
Ooo, I'm going to adapt that idea into a campaign that I'm writing (very slowly and with the help of people from whom I haven't heard in a while - poke to those concerned!), for when one gov't meets another and goes to war...
Jame,

Please, please, please do just that! And then please post what you and the folks you're poking come up with. I would very much like to see what other grognards/wargamers come up with.

Strategic warfare - the catagory that commerce raiding falls into - is a sadly overlooked part of Our Olde Game. I suspect this is because strategic warfare is so hard to model in a wargame. That's a shame because strategic warfare operations are a place where PCs can fight in a big war and not get lost in all the brouhaha.

Strategic warfare does play a role in the OTU's history. The Terrans kept the Ziru Sirka off balance more through the economic dislocations caused by raiding and trading than anything their battle fleets did before jump3 and the meson gun. The nascent Julian Protectorate used a risky, massive strategic raid and stopped the Third Imperium cold in its drive to reabsorb the First Imperium territories beyond Antares. The Rebellion's Black War phase is pure strategic warfare (besides being bad PR!).

Goin off on a tangent here: The Spinward Marches have always been puzzling to me. The Imperium was on Mora by 60 and had settled Regina by 75, but the Marches are woefully underdeveloped once you consider the fact that the Imperium has been there for over one thousand years.

Naturally the real reason for the Marches backwardness is game play. It makes for a much better RPG setting than a fully developed sector as there are plenty of 'frontier' spaces for the PCs to get frisky in.

An 'in-game' reason for the Marches' troubles is a little harder to ferret out, but it is staring us right in the face. It's those five Frontier Wars with the massive population shifts and strategic warfare campaigns involved.

During the first two Wars, the Zhos evicted and/or absorbed Imperial colonies in the subsectors (and sectors!) beyond Jewell. The continued influx of refugees from the worlds ceded to the Zhos must have been terribly unsettling on economic, social, and political levels for the Marches. That influx may have goen for for nearly a century as the Zhos allowed the unassimilated to emigrate rather than make the effort to absorb them.

The Third War beginning in 979 is the Marches' back breaker IMHO. Imperial territory has had a little over three centuries(1) to sort out all the social problems left over from the first two wars, then war strikes. It isn't a 'normal' war either. According to canon, it was; "... less characterized by the planetary seiges of previous wars wars, and more by commerce raiding (emphasis mine), deep thrusts by cruiser squadrons to disrupt shipping, and by harrassment of civilian shipping."

In other words, the Zhos imposed Long Night conditions on the Marches while slagging as many facilities off of the mainworlds as they could. Adding to the injury, the aftermath of the war saw more territory lost by the Imperium, more evictions by the Zhos, and more refugees for the Marches to deal with.

Is it any wonder why the Marches are still a mess in 1100s?

Anyway, commerce raiding - real commerce raiding mind you and not 'Yo-ho-ho, board the Beowulf!' nonsense - is made to order for your PCs. They won't get lost in the huge armies and fleets of the 'real' campaigns. They can make a real difference.

I'm sure MJD & Co. are planning commerce raiding adventures for their TAs set in 1000 Gateway. There are many hints of this in the earlier ones, especially the presence of mid-sized Sollie cruisers just over the border who could act as flotilla leaders and/or bases of support for the actions of smaller raiders.


Have fun,
Bill

1 - Surely three hundred years is enough time to get their stuff together you ask. Look at Germany, I counter. Most of that region's troubles and subsequent worldwide unpleasentness up to 1945 can be laid to the Thirty Years War which ended in 1648. Instead of slowly growing into a nation during that period like so many other European states, Germany's progress was stillborn. Germany, and the world, later paid the price for it. The Marches can best be described, IMHO, as the 'Stillborn Sector' or Sector, Interrupted'.
 
Just a quick question - what's the purpose of the single pulse laser?

EDIT: Oh, I see it's a single beam laser, must've got confused between version 1 and 2.
 
Commerce raiding and surgical strikes are best performed by light, nearly expendable forces with better than average capabilities. They rely almost entirely on intelligence and surprise to ensure they are as unopposed as possible. They do their damage (i.e. mission kill) then escape quickly.

IMTU, one star nation has developed a 100t missile boat (using some homerules on internal missile racks and fire&forget weapons). They aren't fast but they are stealthy. A couple of dozen drop in system (as close to the target as able), fire their compliment of fusion torpedos/decoys, then jump out. Not all torps are expected to hit, but enough are fired to ensure the desired damage to the target. Small, expendable, yet they pack a decent punch.
 
Originally posted by Ran Targas:
Commerce raiding and surgical strikes are best performed by light, nearly expendable forces with better than average capabilities. They rely almost entirely on intelligence and surprise to ensure they are as unopposed as possible. They do their damage (i.e. mission kill) then escape quickly.
Ran,

Using the official Mayday/HG2 fusion (plus a few homebrew rules), my groups gamed this repeatedly. We were wargamers long before we were role-players after all!

The sticking point in these operations is intelligence. Like the Real World, you never have as much as you want and, unlike the Real World, most of what you do have is hours or weeks out of date. This lack of intelligence precludes the use of 'expendable' light units of the kind you suggest. 'Preclude' if you can't run dozens of suicide missions that is. The platforms used in strategic warfare must be able to survive long enough to either 1) develop their own operational intelligence or B) jump out if such intelligence is bad.

Three intelligence models for such operations exist; Two-Jump, Short-Jump, and Real Time Spook.

Two Jump - In this model, intelligence regarding target locations and defenses is jumped out of the traget system and delivered to waiting raider forces. Those forces then jump back into the target system to begin operations. Because in this model intelligence is 2+ weeks out of date, the raiding force can run into a great deal of trouble and should be ready to jump back out of the system within as soon as possible. (One or two HG2 twenty minute combat turns.)

Short Jump - In this model, the raiding forces jump 'short', arriving at a deep space rendezvous outside the target system with prepositioned intelligence platform(s). Those platforms; think Denisov scout cruisers, have been keeping the target system under surveillance and share that information with the raiding force. The raiders then jump again to attack their targets. In this model, intelligence is 1+ week old; the 168 hour jump PLUS the light-hour(s) delay between inner system target(s) and deep space sensor platform(s). Again, this lag means that conditions will have changed and the raider force must be ready to 'bug out' when conditions don't meet expectations.

Real Time Spook - Like the Short Jump method, deep space sensor platforms have been watching the target system before the raiding force arrives. The raiders arrive within the system and immediately attempt to establish comms with the deep space 'spooks'. Whether such comms are 2-way; raiders message 'out' and recieve info from the 'spooks' back, or 1-way; the 'spooks' beam messages to the regions where the raiders a due to arrive, the intelligence is still light-hours old. Again, conditions will have changed.

Because the operational intelligence available to raiding forces is always 'stale', raiders must be able to develop it on their own and survive long enough to develop it on their own. The survival part of that equation usually requires a platform able to survive. However, if high casulties and large attrition percentages are acceptable, you can ignore the 'survival' portion of the equation.

If 57th Century kaitens are not your style, raiding platforms and raiding forces should include as many sensors as possible; to develop operational intelligence as rapidly as possible, a modicum of defensive capabilities; to live long enough to develop the required intelligence, long range and potent weapons; to act upon the developed intelligence as soon as possible, and fuel capacity that allows a rapid retreat; to live to fight another day.

All of that adds up to 1) missiles, 2) fighters, and 3) making arrival jumps at less than full rated jump capacity.

As always, the details will depend on the tech level your forces are operating at.


Have fun,
Bill
 
Bill:

Strategic warfare is really just onerous to model well. It's SO much easier to just say everything depends on the fighting units fighting each other, and the worlds just fall to whoever occupies them.

The only game I can say does a good job of modeling SW - and not an excellent job - is Europa Universalis (EU2). I have found that, quite often, I cannot defeat a large opposing unless I send my troops ranging about enemy territory, pillaging. Even against what appears to be a computer player that has unlimited access to money for troop-building purposes (those one-province nations build some BIG friggin armies!), I have seen that if I can send some troops through the belly of my enemy, it reduces the number of troops he can build. Additionally, if you send your troops deep into the heart of enemy territory for siege purposes, and you don't have a safe line of communication back to your territory, your force will melt away about 5-10 times faster than normal. But as you surely know, EU2 is a very complicated game, and I sure wouldn't want to play even the original EU boardgame after seeing EU2. It would take forever to take a single turn!

In my own works, I usually try to allow for the possibility of SW, and finding a way to keep it simple is not easy. That being said, many games could probably be retrofitted to have like a marker representing a looted province/world, which produces half/nothing for a turn after capture, or until the new owner pays to rebuild it.
 
Originally posted by TheDS:
Strategic warfare is really just onerous to model well. It's SO much easier to just say everything depends on the fighting units fighting each other, and the worlds just fall to whoever occupies them.
DS,

That's the problem in a nutshell. Strategic warfare is a bugger to model in a wargame. Many games either ignore it or, if they bother to acknowledge SW's existence, reduce the campaign to offboard markers each side spends a relative pittance to control to recieve less than a pittance of effect in return; i.e. AH's Third Reich with its all but ignored submarine warfare and strategic bombing tracks.

However, the various activities that occur during a strategic warfare operation are made to order for PC adventures in a role playing game.

Dropping you PCs into Gettysburg as anything other than observers is a bitch, dropping them as active participants into something involving Merrill's Marauders is much easier. Giving your PCs an active role at Midway is nearly impossible, placing them aboard a USN submarine stalking Japanese merchantmen is simple. The dichotomy same holds true in the 57th Century.

We all know how the Fifth Frontier War turns out. Stick your PCs at the Seige of Jewell or in the Lanth Abyss Campaign and they'll be little more than witnesses to history, very bored witnesses. Put them aboard a commerce raider, let them crew a deep space 'spook', stick them with defending belt smelter and the PCs can make history.

Keeping SW in mind let's the GM use those wars that occur in his campaigns to very good effect.


Have fun,
Bill
 
It could be an interesting campaign opener to have the PCs as the crew on a merchantman in soon to be enemy territory.

Once hostilities begin I imagine all foreign shipping would be locked down - interned for the duration or destroyed - to prevent it being used as a RTS.

If the PCs, or their patron, know that the war is coming then they can stay a step ahead of the hunters, until the friendly forces arrive or...
toast.gif


They may even be captured and "persuaded" to switch sides...
 
For a stand off raid perhaps the tender/rider concept could be modified by having the riders equiped with jump 1 drives and enough fuel for two jumps.
The tender could sit in the far outer system or in an adjacent (empty?)hex.
 
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