Battle-Class Ships (BCS? FCS?) Again (Rob / 2026)

[robject]

Please see prior art for lots and lots and lots of ideas from COTI and from Marc and so on.

This is Rob's view as of 2025 and 2026.

0. Unit Cards. I've been doing some line-of-battle with unit cards, and tweaking the numbers as I go. Sample attached.
1. SpineMaker. This is a spine-build system that resembles ACS weapon configuration. Attached.
2. Payload-First. Yadda, yadda.
3. Capabilities. "Capabilities" lets me differentiate units by ability, but also size and damage track.

Operational Plan. See Marc's "system subway model", attached, for a concept I want for operational movement and strategy.

The Combat Turn

1. Each ship selects a capability to activate, and puts a white die on it.
2. Each ship attacks:
   1. Select a target, and an offense to use against it.
      1. Modify situation, based on capabilities chosen by attacker and defender.
   2. Resolve attack.
      1. Typically: roll 1D and index into the CRT row with the attack value column.
      2. Compare with the corresponding defense on the target.
      3. If it's larger, it's a crit. Defender marks one capability on his ship as damaged (black die).
         1. "Strafe"/Cascade: If the remainder is larger than the next smaller defense value, that's also a crit.
         2. Repeat if possible.
3. Any ship with all capabilities damaged is Out Of Action.

 

[mike wightman]

Don't you have to designate hull tonnage first and then you can build the spinal weapon for it?

Minimum sizes for spinals?

 

[kilemall]

This seems more like professional ship design- determine the primary system you are wanting to use, then wrap the ship around it.

The capability mechanic seems like a burn down big boats to Mayday thing.

Personally I have a more fluid definition for spinal- it’s more a mounting/firing arc/relative size thing. So a 50 ton meson mounted on an 800 ton ship is spinal, spinal PAs mounted on an Empress are big turrets and there can be multiples.

 

[robject]

Don't you have to designate hull tonnage first and then you can build the spinal weapon for it?

Minimum sizes for spinals?

Good question. It seems to work right, but boundary testing is needed, isn't it? Eurisko warning.

I've been thinking more about combat, because Don's Rule says "figure out how you want combat to work first, then figure out how to design those ships." But we already have High Guard soooooo yeah.

 

[Condottiere]

At the other end of the stick, you also have to consider limitations, technological, financial, manpower, infrastructure.

 

[whartung]

Don't you have to designate hull tonnage first and then you can build the spinal weapon for it?

You'd probably dynamically balance it. Make a random hull, drop in a spinal, and then resize them together until you get the performance you're looking for.

The spinal and hull are so tightly tied together, they tend to be designed together. (Nominally, as while you can "add more ship" around the spinal, most ships are "just" motors for spinals in the end.)

 

[robject]

Don't you have to designate hull tonnage first and then you can build the spinal weapon for it?

Minimum sizes for spinals?

Mike, I think I'll edit in the rules into the first post there. I'd like High Guarders to see where I'm aiming at, and then figure out if the idea has any merit.

You should know that Don McKinney also drafted High Guard 3, in two versions -- one an organic growth out of HG2, and the other an "alternate" that is a little more detailed (he expanded the USP in the "alternate" version to represent secondaries separate from tertiaries).

At one point, Marc mused that High Guard could mesh with BCS. I think that is still possible, exactly because BCS (as I'm thinking of it) is a bit more abstract, so there's room to wiggle. Maybe.

 

[robject]

Ok I'll confess to having an amended USP. Instead of being cagey about it I'm just going to splat it here and let everyone tear it up.

Tigress. BK-V463E-L996-GS996 Ar La Ms Or Po Wr

BCSP (BCS Profile)

• BK - mission code. High Guard's codes, modified only for combat vessels, so it's roomier.
• V - volume straight from High Guard.
• 4 - hull config - not HG - not yet finalized. Directly usable as a combat target number OR a modifier of sorts.
• 6 - maneuver
• 3 - jump
• E - crew complement. Uses LBB4 Mercenary troop strengths up to 9, then uses High Guard volume numbers from there.
  
  
• L - armor rating (20 in T5).
• 9 - cruiser defense factor (defensive bays)
• 9 - point defense factor
• 6 - troops for defense. Same scale as crew.
  
  
• GS - spine type and rating. G=meson, S=17.
• 9 - secondary (bay) weapon factor
• 9 - tertiary (turrey) weapon factor
• 6 - marines for offense. Same scale as crew.
  
  Capabilities ( = also damage track )
  
  
• Ar - armor "boost". improves armor rating for this turn.
• La - launch initiative.
• Ms - missile salvo.
• Or - ortillery for ground attacks.
• Po - spine power "boost". improves spine attack for this turn.
• Wr - repair facility. can repair damaged capability. (maybe not as tactically useful as I thought, but it still has operational value)

 

[robject]

I've updated the OP with the skeleton of the combat turn @mike wightman . I'll likely follow up with explanations of any and all sorts, as well as the origins of each element. I drew from concepts in HG, TCS, FFW/Imperium, and Mayday.

 

[robject]

P.S. This time around I'm really trying to do things the "Don McKinney Way", which means: design the combat system first, and only THEN design the design system.

P.P.S. Note that even Don found it difficult to follow that order, because after all we DO have High Guard... and everything else...

 

[mike wightman]

High Guard is ... lacking.

having a longer string to split turrets, bays and spinals is something I have been proposing now for nearly three decades, but if BCS can abstract turret and bay weapons then perhaps that is a concept worth exploring.

I was looking at HG79 again the other day and notice the turn phases are subtly different, there is almost and I mean almost an abstract tactical movement, especially this the greater movement option of HG79 compared with 80.

If this is going to be moving counters on a systems map and then transferring to a tactical map then more individual ship details are likely to be needed, if the counters contain the various factors (go take a look at kreigsspeil dice) then we could just line them up with abstract movement and formation.

 

[Badenov]

P.S. This time around I'm really trying to do things the "Don McKinney Way", which means: design the combat system first, and only THEN design the design system.

P.P.S. Note that even Don found it difficult to follow that order, because after all we DO have High Guard... and everything else...

This is why I design ships in Excel. I enter in desired agility, all my desired equipment (with mass, cost, and power consumption), and let the spreadsheet calculate how big a power plant I need. I do enter in my intended hull size, but if I've got too much stuff. I just type in a larger number and everything gets recalculated for me.

 

[whartung]

P.S. This time around I'm really trying to do things the "Don McKinney Way", which means: design the combat system first, and only THEN design the design system.

Well, that's the dark truth of it.

If combat is to be meaningful, it needs to be balanced. And the only way to do that is to design the combat system, and then design system that works within those constraints.

What you can lose is things like local (racial) flavor, or trying to capture doctrine. Players, as rule, don't care about "doctrine", they care about winning. So, if you want a "fighter/missile boat" doctrine to try and compete with a "cruiser" style, you need to encompass that in actual rules somehow, rather than just trying to capture physics and their effects. Which is what our current systems trend toward (thus the discussion about how, from a design POV, very large, powerful lasers would dominate a TNE universe given how the "physics" of it works and that we can have "spinal lasers").

Contrast to the TCS tournament limits based on pilots and such and how they would impact the fleet through artificial constraints.

My biggest nit is simply that physics based combat is just "boring". Its not clear to me that the detection and sensor systems provide enough terrain to warrant their complexity, or do they just drive the ships closer together before they unload on each other. Terrain (however manifest) is what makes maneuver important.

And it also comes down to that one video of a large space game combat, with ships just blasting away at each other. No visible rhyme or reason -- just blasting away, and one side eventually wins as the other side runs out of ships. And when you have Fleet A doing 10% attrition to Fleet B, and B is doing 7% attrition in return -- fleet B is dead (depending on the sizes of the fleets of course). Napoleonic salvos across open fields.

I know I'm a stuck record, but it just seems pretty intractable to me.

 

[kilemall]

I ditched the silly USP string decades ago. Multi spinals, meson bays and meson spinals, no letter code is going to hamper my naval engineering!

 

[jec10]

One of, IMHO, the genius bits of Battle Rider (full disclosure of bias: I consider it the best published Traveller squadron/fleet combat system) was the way task forces worked. This actually gave a game use for Fleet Tactics skill from the RPG. And it introduced fog of war and gave you a reason to use sensors. And it was so much better than activating individual ships, or having battle by spreadsheet as in High Guard.

 

[robject]

My biggest nit is simply that physics based combat is just "boring". Its not clear to me that the detection and sensor systems provide enough terrain to warrant their complexity, or do they just drive the ships closer together before they unload on each other. Terrain (however manifest) is what makes maneuver important.

There is a solution to this, but it's not with fleet combat.

I'm serious when I say that Thunder Road was an eye-opener for me. And, it's not a new game... I think it's 40 years old... The entire draw to Thunder Road IS the physics.

So... take Mayday, blunt the momentum angle just a bit, then add in chaos... For example, put it in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant. And you've got something. Demolition Derby... in spaaaaace.

 

[robject]

So here's my use case.

Fast but with differentiated units. If you think about what makes a Lightning a Lightning, then that's an approximation of what I want to be important to the battle.

My representational goal is that, but not more than that.

 

[robject]

One of, IMHO, the genius bits of Battle Rider (full disclosure of bias: I consider it the best published Traveller squadron/fleet combat system) was the way task forces worked. This actually gave a game use for Fleet Tactics skill from the RPG. And it introduced fog of war and gave you a reason to use sensors. And it was so much better than activating individual ships, or having battle by spreadsheet as in High Guard.

To me, the genius of Battle Rider was that it took Mayday and extended it to (a) task forces made up of (b) ships of any size.

 

[robject]

High Guard is ... lacking.

having a longer string to split turrets, bays and spinals is something I have been proposing now for nearly three decades, but if BCS can abstract turret and bay weapons then perhaps that is a concept worth exploring.

I was looking at HG79 again the other day and notice the turn phases are subtly different, there is almost and I mean almost an abstract tactical movement, especially this the greater movement option of HG79 compared with 80.

If this is going to be moving counters on a systems map and then transferring to a tactical map then more individual ship details are likely to be needed, if the counters contain the various factors (go take a look at kreigsspeil dice) then we could just line them up with abstract movement and formation.

One more thought. I don't think Marc is/was thinking about abstracting design away for BCS.

This is me going off on a tangent.

I think this because High Guard 3 allows that higher level of detail, and I don't remember Marc ever sounding concerned about that. That level of detail is what sends me over the bend, probably because I'm not a wargamer.


Regardless... SpineMaker is built on Marc's concept, which is a builder-like system for spines. And I'm keeping that, because Marc's right: the most important bit of a capital ship should be the spine, and spine design should have some oomph to it.


Don's HG3 predated SpineMaker by a decade, but even it has maker-like echoes in its spine tables.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

The problem with all that is that we already have a ship design system, and at least an outline for a ship combat system.

Don't add another incompatible ship design and combat system!

Building an intermediate ship in either system should give at least close to the same result.
Combat with the same ships in either system should give at least close to the same result.