All Things Vargr

[JimCook]

Challenges do not have to be and probably will seldom be to the death or even serious injury. Leadership for an assault carrier probably will probably be the results of mock dogfights. If your wingman proves they are a better pilot than you are they become the lead and you become the wingman. Show you are better than your squadron commander and you become the squadron commander. at a certain level it will move from dogfights to fleet simulations.

Very few will challenge those above them unless they are certain they will be successful. Some will decide the best path to be subordinate to more skilled / experienced leader, even if they probably could win a challenge.

 

[Condottiere]

The question would be if command of the unit comes with the assault carrier.

I mentioned the assault carrier as the ideal starwarship for a high level Vargr leader, as it would have decent protection, performance, and firepower, as well as a smallcraft flotilla and a ground forces contingent, with extensive barracks, stores, and command facilities.

However, actually getting hold of one, is another thing, as the Vargr are unlikely to be able to build or maintain one on their own, specifically spare parts for the drives.

 

[Rupert]

The question would be if command of the unit comes with the assault carrier.

I mentioned the assault carrier as the ideal starwarship for a high level Vargr leader, as it would have decent protection, performance, and firepower, as well as a smallcraft flotilla and a ground forces contingent, with extensive barracks, stores, and command facilities.

However, actually getting hold of one, is another thing, as the Vargr are unlikely to be able to build or maintain one on their own, specifically spare parts for the drives.

The Vargr managed to maintain a sector-sized polity in a form that was recognised as being the same polity by human powers for centuries. They are not nearly as unstable as a casual reading of canon suggests. It's more that Humans in the TU are amazingly able to maintain huge, sable, polities. I don't think the TU Humans are the same as us.

If they can build and maintain a sector-sized state, they can build and maintain large shipyards and large ships.

I would say that the vast majority of leader-capable Vargr do not, in fact, have piratical leanings, so most of the time a leadership change does not result in radical shifts in 'fleet policy', just a swapping on who is Number One, and then a reshuffling of the immediate hierarchy as the defeated ex-leader gets challenged until they sink to the new 'level of competence'.

Challenges won't generally happen 'out of the blue' (the hot heads who challenge constantly will have run off to be pirates and gangsters long before they get access to large ship command), but because of a trigger, like losing a fight in a way that results in subordinates losing confidence in their leader, and so on. A carrier/tender certainly has the advantage that bored subordinates can't just fly away, but I do think that means more leadership challenges, because they effectively can't split, so the only way out (that doesn't involve losing status be abandoning the group and all the lovely assets) is up.

 

[Condottiere]

If the problem that the Vargr have could be simplified into one word, it's succession.

That, and one eighth of their adult population are corsairs.

That sort of implies that maintaining leadership positions is somewhat precarious, and that worse than unemployment, a major part of the working population seems inclined to take shortcuts to obtain funds for operating costs.

Traveller numbers tend to be all over the place, so there are no concrete numbers which indicate what's actually required to maintain either naval vessels, nor mercantile fleets, and how much tonnage a given interstellar polity can build and maintain, except what we can infer from Imperium statistics.

Which, would appear, a lot less than you'd have thought.

As far as I can recall, there aren't many Vargr vessels larger than a kilotonne.

Power plants are pretty easy to build, and scale up; in fact, you don't even need to do that, you can link any number of variants to the grid without penalty.

Drives, jump or manoeuvre, would be the actual bottleneck for Vargr shipbuilding.

And, subsequently, spare parts for them.

 

[Rupert]

Traveller numbers tend to be all over the place, so there are no concrete numbers which indicate what's actually required to maintain either naval vessels, nor mercantile fleets, and how much tonnage a given interstellar polity can build and maintain, except what we can infer from Imperium statistics.

If one uses TCS then upkeep (including crew, etc.) is 10% of the ship's value per year, double that in wartime. Vargr probably pay more in 'peacetime' because I doubt their crews tolerate sitting round in port doing nothing as well as human crews do, or one could assume that while the navy might pay peacetime rates, corsairs are always 'at war'.

 

[Rupert]

As far as I can recall, there aren't many Vargr vessels larger than a kilotonne.

I don't think a lack of published examples is a good guide to how common ships of any particular size are for a given species or polity.

 

[Condottiere]

In terms of starwarships, and the assumption that the Imperium Navy is the most powerful in known space, overall and per sector, we have an upper limit as to what that would be.

Commercial shipping, supposedly, could be calculated by whatever metric would be used to calculate arrivals at starports and spaceports, per system.

Since the default corsair ship is four hundred tonnes, and they're considered a threat to most Imperium commercial starships, doesn't seem likely that most Vargr commercial ships would exceed that tonnage, despite having even more motivation than the Imperial ship owners to do so.