AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 5K
We already have a ship design system. Just turn the drives into percentages (the same percentages as the ACS system!), add SpineMaker with volume in Dtons and costs in MCr, and done...
Battle-Class Ships (BCS? FCS?) Again (Rob / 2026)
- Thread starter robject
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AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 5K
The big decision for combat is: Is it attritional (like Mongoose) or is it one shot one kill (like LBB5 spinals)?
One shot one kill as mandated for mesons in canon probably invalidates battleships also mandated in canon. Combining the two takes some fancy footwork...
One shot one kill as mandated for mesons in canon probably invalidates battleships also mandated in canon. Combining the two takes some fancy footwork...
Badenov
SOC-13
Which canon, and which Battleships? By and large, spinal mesons only fit in what I think of as battleships, though I guess my idea of battleships are closer to Light Battleships in the wiki.
This reminds me of Grand Admiral Thrawn in Star Wars who studied an enemies art to understand their psychology to defeat them.
Would a rigid doctrine usually lose to a flexible doctrine?
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
My answer has been twofold.
Damage is EPx10= tons, divided by 2 into 2 hits of half each. Weapon code drops per 100000km distance, goes up when closer then 100000km.
Armor can flat out shrug off smaller surface hits. Armor costs multiples of space for smaller hulls and gets extra for larger.
Surface hits go on surface damage first hit than second goes whole ship, meson goes internal first and whole ship second. Spinal PA or nukes go whole ship both hits.
Radiation gets hits that follow the main hits.
So with maxed armor plus drops in weapon power due to range, the larger battleships can only be affected by spinals, lucky nukes or high velocity missiles at the end of their run.
Something like a factor 8 nuke hit is 8000 tons and gonna pen most armor- depending on luck that could be spread between hull and fuel and a larger ship won’t feel it, or it could go straight to the power plant and mission kill the target.
Both-and. My process borrows from the concept in Book 2 and Mayday, in that ship capability is the damage track. This gets me (a) toughness for larger ships, (b) loss of capability as a ship takes on damage, (c) operational repair rules that are easy. The attack mechanic, meanwhile, can leverage this and permit strafe-like behavior where one hit can do multiple crits, making spines terrifying and putting a bit more oomph into battleships.
Say the Battleship Dilbert has capabilities like (repair, defense boost, spine boost, launch initiative, and missile salvo).
Now, say we have a Fast Light Cruiser Emesh. This unit has two capabilities.
The Dilbert gives its spine a boost and attacks, while the Emesh attacks with its secondaries, because it is pretty sure its primary attack is nowhere strong enough to penetrate the Dilbert's primary defenses.
- The attack value is greater than the Emesh's primary defenses, so one capability is damaged.
- The remainder value is also greater than the Emesh's secondary defenses, so the other capability is damaged.
- With both capabilities damaged, the Emesh is Out Of Action.
Let's say the Emesh gets lucky and overwhelms the Dilbert's cruiser defenses, barely.
- One capability on the Dilbert is damaged.
- Assuming the battle is over, the Dilbert can engage its 'repair' capability and fix the damage. Since the battle is over, this is a true repair rather than a battlefield band-aid, so a week is spent in system while repairs are done.
Maybe it takes 12 Emesh cruisers to take down a Dilbert reliably?
Maybe I'll tune offenses, or defenses, or the CRT, or I say something like "that's why we travel with escorts", or I do all of them.
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@mike wightman You asked about hull tonnage, so I'm going to design a Eurisko hull with a spine.
Let's pretend there's an absolute minimum hull size of 10,000 tons if you're carrying a spine.
SPINE
Meson spine (TL13), 5000 tons, Spine Index 11.
Stage: Modified. TL+2, Spine Index +2, so TL15, Index 13.
Bulk: VLight. 50% volume, Spine Index -5. So 2500 tons, TL15, Spine Index 8.
Spine Index 8 is Damage 8 (that's a coincidence). Ok so it's a weak spine, but it's only 2,500 tons.
Let's say there isn't any more payload. It's just a spine that we're wrapping a hull around.
HULL
Armor. Minimal. 4%. We could just do no armor at all of course.
Maneuver-1. Call it 3% volume. Won't matter.
Jump-1. 2.5% volume.
Jump fuel. 7.5% volume. (TL15 with Stage Effects).
Powerplant-1. 1.5% volume.
Power fuel. 1% volume.
Crew/Life Support is about 6% volume. I forget. Close enough.
Total percentage = 25.5%
VOLUME
2500 / (1 - 0.225) = 3355 tons.
Our absolute minimum kicks in, and this ship is inflated to 10,000 tons. It really should have secondary and tertiary offenses and defenses anyway so this is not unreasonable.
CAPABILITIES
This thing is going to have two capabilities, but I'm not sure if they're going to make a difference for this design. The weak spine and sad power plant makes me think it's not going to be able to power up its attack. It can't repair. It has no secondaries. I'm just going to leave that be for now, since Eurisko is about being overwhelmed by orcs anyway.
DESIGN EVALUATION
According to the CRT, about half of my medium cruisers are vulnerable to a spine 8. Moreover, this spine has a 50% chance of hitting a ship per shot. So it really is a Eurisko design. A medium cruiser will have 3 capabilities, so these weaker cruisers will get six shots apiece on average before being put Out Of Action by Eurisko attack. So one medium cruiser = six of these Euriskos.
Now, if those medium cruisers have multi-target capability, then you'd have to outnumber the other side by a factor of something between 18:1 and 12:1.
And the Euriskos still can't touch half of my medium cruisers, and can't touch anything larger than that. So they would be able to wipe out the auxiliaries only to eventually get rendered obsolete.
Beefing the ship up with reasonable defenses alone makes it more survivable -- though it would also make it more expensive. As it is, one hit from anyone kills it.
So as it stands, my system here blunts Eurisko a bit, forcing the designs to be at least somewhat balanced, which is what defines a warship in Traveller anyway.
BETTER DESIGN
It might be more effective to pour the cost into something with good secondaries and multi-target capability.
Or... hmm maybe even better is to gauge the minimum viable spine for killing capitals and then build that out. I wonder...
Let's assume that's a Medium Meson Spine-15 ("R") which has a rating of 16 and is 5,000 tons.
Yeah that's a lot better! The hull is still going to be 10,000 tons.
ABUSING THE SCENARIOS
I'm sure there are exploits there; they're just not the same as HG1 or HG2. My takeaway is: don't do Trillion Credit Squadron tournaments with any system.
Let's pretend there's an absolute minimum hull size of 10,000 tons if you're carrying a spine.
SPINE
Meson spine (TL13), 5000 tons, Spine Index 11.
Stage: Modified. TL+2, Spine Index +2, so TL15, Index 13.
Bulk: VLight. 50% volume, Spine Index -5. So 2500 tons, TL15, Spine Index 8.
Spine Index 8 is Damage 8 (that's a coincidence). Ok so it's a weak spine, but it's only 2,500 tons.
Let's say there isn't any more payload. It's just a spine that we're wrapping a hull around.
HULL
Armor. Minimal. 4%. We could just do no armor at all of course.
Maneuver-1. Call it 3% volume. Won't matter.
Jump-1. 2.5% volume.
Jump fuel. 7.5% volume. (TL15 with Stage Effects).
Powerplant-1. 1.5% volume.
Power fuel. 1% volume.
Crew/Life Support is about 6% volume. I forget. Close enough.
Total percentage = 25.5%
VOLUME
2500 / (1 - 0.225) = 3355 tons.
Our absolute minimum kicks in, and this ship is inflated to 10,000 tons. It really should have secondary and tertiary offenses and defenses anyway so this is not unreasonable.
CAPABILITIES
This thing is going to have two capabilities, but I'm not sure if they're going to make a difference for this design. The weak spine and sad power plant makes me think it's not going to be able to power up its attack. It can't repair. It has no secondaries. I'm just going to leave that be for now, since Eurisko is about being overwhelmed by orcs anyway.
DESIGN EVALUATION
According to the CRT, about half of my medium cruisers are vulnerable to a spine 8. Moreover, this spine has a 50% chance of hitting a ship per shot. So it really is a Eurisko design. A medium cruiser will have 3 capabilities, so these weaker cruisers will get six shots apiece on average before being put Out Of Action by Eurisko attack. So one medium cruiser = six of these Euriskos.
Now, if those medium cruisers have multi-target capability, then you'd have to outnumber the other side by a factor of something between 18:1 and 12:1.
And the Euriskos still can't touch half of my medium cruisers, and can't touch anything larger than that. So they would be able to wipe out the auxiliaries only to eventually get rendered obsolete.
Beefing the ship up with reasonable defenses alone makes it more survivable -- though it would also make it more expensive. As it is, one hit from anyone kills it.
So as it stands, my system here blunts Eurisko a bit, forcing the designs to be at least somewhat balanced, which is what defines a warship in Traveller anyway.
BETTER DESIGN
It might be more effective to pour the cost into something with good secondaries and multi-target capability.
Or... hmm maybe even better is to gauge the minimum viable spine for killing capitals and then build that out. I wonder...
Let's assume that's a Medium Meson Spine-15 ("R") which has a rating of 16 and is 5,000 tons.
Yeah that's a lot better! The hull is still going to be 10,000 tons.
ABUSING THE SCENARIOS
I'm sure there are exploits there; they're just not the same as HG1 or HG2. My takeaway is: don't do Trillion Credit Squadron tournaments with any system.
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Doctrine represents externalities not represented by simple physics.
Societal structure, command structure, budget, etc.
Everyone wants the biggest, cheapest, etc.
But for some they can't have it or it doesn't work for them.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 5K
In a one shot one kill system small cheap riders are just as lethal and just as difficult to kill as battleships, as LBB5 demonstrates.
Most people don't seem to like that...
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 5K
Isn't this supposed to be T5?
We already have an expectations of how T5 works. We already have Mains (small spines) in ACS, they are just big weapons...
We know we can make batteries on the fly to combine many smaller mounts into large devastating attacks.
We know we have to combine many mounts into batteries to hit at longer ranges.
Shouldn't "capabilities" be something actually identifiable, rather than buzzwords?
Damage should be directly linked to ship's systems, with actual tonnage, cost in MCr and weeks in the repair yard?
IIRC, Mayday and Battle Rider were fairly close to the basic systems with the same weapons and damage locations.
How would this simple ship be rated?
Code:
TL-15 C-ZU44 Ergo 2 Comfort 2 Demand 0 Agility -1
Spoiler:
How are the "capabilities" linked to ships systems like drives, fuel tanks, or weapons being damaged?
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I also think we should look at those glimpses of battles showcased in Agent of the Imperium and Marc's other literature. Does the system reproduce (or can it reproduce) the battles as seen there?
Were those battles one shot, one kill?
How did the Meson Screens work as described in the story?
Were those battles one shot, one kill?
How did the Meson Screens work as described in the story?
Yes, and that's why I used the Emesh in Dilbert's example above. I'd prefer a one-shot-one-kill ability, in the downward direction.
Yes, they follow from design decisions.
That's true. And once I'm happy that the combat system has adequate representation power for the OTU, then I can start thinking about unit design and mapping in existing designs.
They are, and they're good consistent systems that hold together.
With the caveat that the design rules are not very developed, what I can see so far looks something like this:
Dilbert C-K3444-4010-00410. Two capabilities (unknown).
C - Cruiser.
K - 10,000 tons.
3 - Unstreamlined.
44 - Maneuver and Jump
4 - Crew size.
4 - Primary defense.
0 - Secondary defense.
1 - Tertiary defense.
0 - Troops.
00 - No spine. See notes.
4 - Secondary offense.
1 - Tertiary offense.
0 - Marines.
A main gun is an ACS "spine", but it's not even a spine, it's a secondary; and it's not a BCS spine. It's only 600 tons, and you had to give it Distant Range to get there. You'd want to use SpineMaker to design a spine. So the jury is out on the primary offense.
Primary defense is armor and screens; that maps to a primary defense of 4.
Main gun + bays maps to a secondary offense of 4. Most of this power is in the main, so there's no salvo capability.
The barbettes and turrets map to a tertiary offense of 1 and a defense of 0.
10,000 tons would have two capabilities. If they're not evident from the design intent, then we'd have to figure out what your ship's distinctives are and make room in payload space and install them. From the mission code (C) it's a "Cruiser" which excludes some capabilities but, well, since most ships are cruisers, I think there's plenty of room there. Maybe if the power plant were significantly larger than required then we could say that we have the ability to overcharge the spine, but not with the current design. And what is "significantly larger"? A black globe might be nice, but how will that work in combat? Is it just an operational benefit? And my fave currently is a multi-target capability for secondaries, but how do you know a design has that as opposed to a "regular" setup? I don't know. Maybe it's what happens when you overbuild secondaries.
Ideally you'd know what the available capabilities are and angle your ship towards a couple of those. And we intuitively do know some things that could be capabilities. That's not "ship design", but at this point? That is "system" design, and I've spent more time blowing ships up than thinking about the design system.
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Badenov
SOC-13
So a N Meson can be shoehorned into a 10,000-ton hull. With Agility 6 it's as hard to hit as possible, and a meson hit wrecks it as hard as the meson wrecks a 300,000-ton behemoth. But I can field a carrier and like 12-14 of the SDBs for the cost of that 300,000 battlewagon. The N Meson wrecks a target as surely as a T Meson or an R Meson, and because you can cram so many more N Meson SDBs into a carrier, it's a big threat.
It sort of mimics the role of the torpedo boat as battleship killer, but you need a meson to kill it, so it's a proper line-of-battle battleship despite its small size.
And now I can muse about what a Battle-Class ship is.
Firstly, this is anything but a simple ship, with a level of detail that surpasses High Guard and approaches TNE.
My first thought is that navy ships are all designed "the same way" -- and I think that means that unless the class of ship dictates otherwise, it's going to have a standard tech-level-rated degree of military engineering.
OF COURSE your hull MUST protect against EVERYTHING. To not do so is SUICIDE. So the armor value remains, but forcing you to always choose the correct mix of anti-layers for BCS is Bad Design.
In other words, 4.8% for Jump-4, 0.8% for Maneuver-4, 1.1% for Power-4, all scaled.
Take my paragraph here with a grain of salt, because I like hand-crafting BCS. I admit to using software to build ACS; I don't like that either, but it's convenient and ACS is here. My critique is that at this level it's far too nit-picky. You saved 400 tons on a jump drive. Hooray! Except at this level, it's noise. Use the base system without stage effects, and pick by a table of percentages; it's not a different system, it's an efficient presentation that speeds the process along.
Again, noise.
Ordinarily I would make this important, but High Guard has taught me that it's a poor proxy for an actual combat DM.
Again, what capital ship is NOT going to have FULL COVERAGE of ALL MEANINGFUL SENSORS at the BEST RESOLUTION IT CAN GET?
In short, 5% volume to support the crew. Thom and I rounded up to 6%. Same difference.
Again, big grain of salt when reading this paragraph. Because you missed adequate defenses and tertiaries, your ship is likely to be gutted by secondary fire. But, you didn't actually miss defenses: you have an excellent armor rating. So perhaps "armor" also counts for the secondary weapon rating -- it should, right? So the design system has to account for that.
But that is exactly the problem with BCS. It's not ACS; it won't have the hit-location chart required for ACS combat. If it did, the combat system with squadrons vs squadrons would run longer than High Guard.
So BCS MUST USE ABSTRACT COMBAT, and what's more it MUST HAVE ABSTRACT SHIP DESIGNS. There's no reason it can't import ACS -- and to your point, it should, because isn't this T5?
But it's not ACS design, and it's not ACS combat.
So then, what is it?
That's why I'm running combat by hand with abstract unit cards.
But that's also why I'm making those unit cards more detailed than Fifth Frontier War.
And GRAIN OF SALT AGAIN PLEASE, but... Battle Rider's weapon stats? They're 100% tactical, complete with ranges and effects. It's very handy to take the exact weapon designs and to be able to use them as-is in a tactical movement task-force game. You might be able to map ACS/BCS to Battle Rider counters. But that doesn't work for me, because (REMEMBER THE GRAIN OF SALT) BR has zero solo play ability. It probably could work well for people who play Battle Rider with their friends.
That is exactly the major question that I don't know yet. I haven't thought hard about it. But I'm not that worried about it. If it doesn't work, okay, I'm done.
is that simply because of the sensor ghost rules and "knowing" what's in the fuzzy shapes?
And range. But you silently made a good point -- I'm comparing the wrong things. Take out the tactical elements and BR has similarities to HG. So it's not that BR has no solo play; it's that BR is integrally a tactical game, whereas what I've got is just the shootin' part.
So tack on those tactical rules to my combat rules and, yeah, it would vaguely resemble BR.
But take away those tactical rules from BR, and you can run it, but the counters end up with all that range info that's unused.
There is one difference; I abstract away range in these combat rules, whereas TNE (and ACS) builds them out of the design process. So a design element is ported in for the tactical rules.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
One point with my system re ACS hit chart and rolls- it’s actually really really fast.
Most secondary weapons won’t pen the armor at long ranges so it’s just missiles and big spinals.
I ditched the HG tables and it literally is one ACS table, but with 1d6 hitting the surface systems, 2d6 for whole ship checks including 12 crit, and 1d6+6 for internals. Rad is 1d6+3.
Say meson gun hit, baseline 18000 ton hit but 10000 at range. 5000 ton internal hit for first all applied on one system, radiation hit doubles that if system is affected. Leftover primary damage rolls into the second hit. Second 5000 plus ton hit rolls against whole ship, rad hit rolled separately whole ship. Three hit locations, maybe some follow up rolls, done. All done.
Probably too fiddly for your intended scale/resolution speed, but the crazy 1000x roll monsters CAN be tamed.
Most secondary weapons won’t pen the armor at long ranges so it’s just missiles and big spinals.
I ditched the HG tables and it literally is one ACS table, but with 1d6 hitting the surface systems, 2d6 for whole ship checks including 12 crit, and 1d6+6 for internals. Rad is 1d6+3.
Say meson gun hit, baseline 18000 ton hit but 10000 at range. 5000 ton internal hit for first all applied on one system, radiation hit doubles that if system is affected. Leftover primary damage rolls into the second hit. Second 5000 plus ton hit rolls against whole ship, rad hit rolled separately whole ship. Three hit locations, maybe some follow up rolls, done. All done.
Probably too fiddly for your intended scale/resolution speed, but the crazy 1000x roll monsters CAN be tamed.
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That's a useful simplification. One table is definitely a speedup, and I love the idea of using different rolls in order to span the table differently.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Thats a big part of it, but the tonnage/weapon factor range drop is another, and doing it all on tonnage so LBB2 and 5 ships can play together was also a must. Not your legacy design problem here, but it all has to hang together whatever system is involved.
One other reason that drove me batty was the easy maneuver hits nicking a little fighter and a huge battlecruiser the same in surface hits. I suppose the massive crit hits make up for it, but still.
Maybe an SSD style in your case with small craft single box hits for maneuver/power, speed ratings of low/medium/high with more boxes for range change based on competitive rolls, etc.
Or even something like your capabilities 1-5, with a last reserved box for mission kill representing losing power plant/computer or other supercritical.
If its got only 1 capability and the mission kill box, 1-3 capability 4-6 mission kill. If an already dead capability gets hit it’s ignored, bigger ships are harder to bring down.
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