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

[AnotherDilbert]

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.

Interestingly the particle barbettes are the main weapon that do by far the most damage, 500 damage dice compared to the "main" guns 200 damage dice. The turrets have no range, they are just defences.

What is conceptually the difference between 500 damage dice from a PA spinal and 500 damage dice from PA barbettes or bays?

What would be secondary and tertiary defences?

Sounds very subjective so far...

 

[jec10]

Can't you de-fang the Euroskis by including big, power-hungry meson screens (so power hungry that 20-50,000t battle riders can't afford them) that screen out most of the small spinal mesons? Big battlewagons have a reason for being.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Firstly, this is anything but a simple ship, with a level of detail that surpasses High Guard and approaches TNE.

Basically T5 is nit-picky enough that you must use software support, this ship is more-or-less defaulted by my Excel sheet, with minor manual adjustment. From my perspective, it's a very simple T5 ship.

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.

Agreed, just as in ACS, but here we are...

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.

Stages have a large influence, e.g. indirectly through fuel volume, and that gives large differences by TL.

E.g. my ship would be 20% overtonnage without the drive stages:

Compared to with drive stages:

This is how TL differences are expressed in T5 ship design, if I step down to TL-14 I lose ~700 Dt, making the ship much less capable:

That is far from noise.

Again, what capital ship is NOT going to have FULL COVERAGE of ALL MEANINGFUL SENSORS at the BEST RESOLUTION IT CAN GET?

Those are very basic sensors, "the best" sensors would take thousands of tons, far out of reach for even most BCS.

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.

Armour protects against everything, except mesons.

A better classification for BCS weapons would be Meson, PA, Missiles, and noise, each with specific defences.
Meson: Screens only.
PA (whether spinal, bay, or barbette): Armour only.
Missiles: Armour, lasers, possibly dampers.

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 BCS is just another T5 sub-system?

BCS should describe the same underlying reality as ACS, just at a different level of abstraction. It should more-or-less yield the same results, just faster.


It sounds to me that you want LBB5 ship design, but with a higher level of abstraction in the combat system. But that wouldn't be T5 BCS, would it?

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Can't you de-fang the Euroskis by including big, power-hungry meson screens (so power hungry that 20-50,000t battle riders can't afford them) that screen out most of the small spinal mesons? Big battlewagons have a reason for being.

That would just make battle riders larger, and battleships even less viable as they can't have both jump fuel, spinals, and massive screens.

 

[robject]

Basically T5 is nit-picky enough that you must use software support...

ACS is nit-picky, yes.

But BCS is just another T5 sub-system?

BCS should describe the same underlying reality as ACS, just at a different level of abstraction. It should more-or-less yield the same results, just faster.

Agreed, it's another T5 subsystem. And yes, at a different level of abstraction.

 

[jec10]

That would just make battle riders larger, and battleships even less viable as they can't have both jump fuel, spinals, and massive screens.

I have no problem with needing big ships carrying big mesons to duke it out - it is just the (unintended I submit) way that CT/High Guard favours small battle riders with small mesons that are still capable of killing the biggest ships that I dislike and was what I thought the problem was here - admit I've probably completely missed the point though and will disengage!

 

[Badenov]

I have no problem with needing big ships carrying big mesons to duke it out - it is just the (unintended I submit) way that CT/High Guard favours small battle riders with small mesons that are still capable of killing the biggest ships that I dislike and was what I thought the problem was here - admit I've probably completely missed the point though and will disengage!

So, the problem, I think, is the disconnect betweem what makes an efficient killing machine (smallest hull that can mount a meson spinal) vs what are considered the classic dreadnaughts of the Traveller Universe. We are told that majestic dreadnaughts of 300,000 tons or more ply the spacelanes, showing the flag and spreading 'cool' out over the galaxy. And I like that image, too. But the people that wrote those giant dreadnaughts into the game world had not considered the question of what makes a ship efficiently deadly per the actual game rules.

And it feels like the zeitgeist of that early majestic dreadnaught thing carried into many game universe designs, and it wasn't until more thoughtful/ruthless players worked out that a handful of tiny spinal-armed SDBs that are tough to hit can blast that mighty dreadnaught out of space fairly easily.

So, you're right in that the tiny hunter-killers taking down a mighty dreadnaught is not what the look and feel of the game universe seens like it's supposed to be. But consider that the mighty seagoing dreadnaughts these giant spacecraft were conceived around were themselves so vulnerable to the recently invented torpedo boat that they had to make a new class of ship, torpedo boat destroyers, to screen the dreadnaughts.

So I imagine the tiny meson SDBs in the role of the torpedo boats that the giant dreadnughts are vulnerable to. The complicated bit and where the narrative falls down a little is that spinal mesons are the only weapon that everyone is vulnerable to, so your 'torpedo boats' and your torpedo boat destroyers are both armed with the same weapons. The other problem is the rule that you can only have one spinal no matter how large your ship. At 20,000 tons, that's not unreasonable. At 200,000 tons, it's a bit silly. A 2000-ton spinal is 1% of your hull, like a 1-ton turret on a 100-ton ship. The idea that that's your limit feels silly to me. In my Traveller Universe, we limit multiuple spinals to 1/6 of that total ship mass (though in jump-capable ships, it often doesn't get above 1/10th), so a 500,000-ton Tigress becomes the fearsome war machine that it seems from the hype that she ought to be. (*Edit: an option for the multi spinal thing: 1. Multispinals are in huge casemates like RL battleship turrets and so don't require pointing the ship to hit. That would also let them engage different targets if they like.)

And that's how I would make a dreadnaught fearsome. (Caveats: 1. Rules un-playtested. 2. 300,000-ton Dreadnaughts are still more vulnerable than the tiny SDBs. But getting 5-6 tries to roll a 10+ isn't awful. 3. Screens of destroyers to fight the meson SDBs are crucial. 4. All my imaginings are for TL15, with Rating 9 nuke dampers. At lower TLs, masses of nuclear missiles can blunt those low-TL spinals pretty quickly. And the dreadnaughts can pack a ton of missiles, too.)

 

[kilemall]

So, the problem, I think, is the disconnect betweem what makes an efficient killing machine (smallest hull that can mount a meson spinal) vs what are considered the classic dreadnaughts of the Traveller Universe. We are told that majestic dreadnaughts of 300,000 tons or more ply the spacelanes, showing the flag and spreading 'cool' out over the galaxy. And I like that image, too. But the people that wrote those giant dreadnaughts into the game world had not considered the question of what makes a ship efficiently deadly per the actual game rules.

And it feels like the zeitgeist of that early majestic dreadnaught thing carried into many game universe designs, and it wasn't until more thoughtful/ruthless players worked out that a handful of tiny spinal-armed SDBs that are tough to hit can blast that mighty dreadnaught out of space fairly easily.

So, you're right in that the tiny hunter-killers taking down a mighty dreadnaught is not what the look and feel of the game universe seens like it's supposed to be. But consider that the mighty seagoing dreadnaughts these giant spacecraft were conceived around were themselves so vulnerable to the recently invented torpedo boat that they had to make a new class of ship, torpedo boat destroyers, to screen the dreadnaughts.

So I imagine the tiny meson SDBs in the role of the torpedo boats that the giant dreadnughts are vulnerable to. The complicated bit and where the narrative falls down a little is that spinal mesons are the only weapon that everyone is vulnerable to, so your 'torpedo boats' and your torpedo boat destroyers are both armed with the same weapons. The other problem is the rule that you can only have one spinal no matter how large your ship. At 20,000 tons, that's not unreasonable. At 200,000 tons, it's a bit silly. A 2000-ton spinal is 1% of your hull, like a 1-ton turret on a 100-ton ship. The idea that that's your limit feels silly to me. In my Traveller Universe, we limit multiuple spinals to 1/6 of that total ship mass (though in jump-capable ships, it often doesn't get above 1/10th), so a 500,000-ton Tigress becomes the fearsome war machine that it seems from the hype that she ought to be. (*Edit: an option for the multi spinal thing: 1. Multispinals are in huge casemates like RL battleship turrets and so don't require pointing the ship to hit. That would also let them engage different targets if they like.)

And that's how I would make a dreadnaught fearsome. (Caveats: 1. Rules un-playtested. 2. 300,000-ton Dreadnaughts are still more vulnerable than the tiny SDBs. But getting 5-6 tries to roll a 10+ isn't awful. 3. Screens of destroyers to fight the meson SDBs are crucial. 4. All my imaginings are for TL15, with Rating 9 nuke dampers. At lower TLs, masses of nuclear missiles can blunt those low-TL spinals pretty quickly. And the dreadnaughts can pack a ton of missiles, too.)

This is the way.

 

[mike wightman]

The game authors recognised that battle riders can out perform warships on a hul vs hull nasis.

"In addition to prompting a strategic reevaluation, the Fourth Frontier War (1082 to 1084) also brought about a minor counter-revolution in naval tactics. Prior to the war, naval architecture had concentrated primarily on the battle rider as the main
vessel intended to stand in the line of battle.* A battle rider is a non-jump-capable capital ship generally carried on a large (up to one million tons) fleet tender. Such a tender carries a complete Battle Squadron (BatRon) of from six to eight vessels.
While it is undeniable that a BatRon of battle riders will invariably defeat an equal tonnage squadron of jump-capable battleships,** the early weeks of the Fourth Frontier War uncovered a serious design weakness. When faced with superior numbers, the riders were unable to withdraw and jump out-system due to the timerequired to secure them in their tenders. Thus, rider BatRons suffered disproportionatelosses in the early stages of the war.
The solution arrived at was to concentrate all rider BatRons in the strategic reserves while manning the frontier delaying forces exclusively with ships. (Note: in naval parlance, the term ship is reserved for jump-capable vessels, while non-jump capable vessels are referred to as boats, riders, or monitors).***"
* battle riders are the main BCS, but not the one most likely to be encountered in frontier systems.
** a battle rider carries one spinal, a battleship carries one spinal, more riders means more spinals.
*** there is another option at TL15 - build riders with jump 1 drives.

Battle Rider: Non-jump capable ship intended to,stand in the line of battle in space combat and carried interstellar by a battle tender.
Two opposite views in naval architecture have dominated the design of the major battleships of space navies. The battle rider concept involves a large jump-capable tender carrying many (two to ten) heavily armed and armored battle riders. The opposite concept is the battleship, a large jump-capable ship which carries the jump drives and fuel tanks internally.
The battle tender, so integral to the concept of the battle rider, is little more than a large dispersed structure with jump drives, fuel tanks, and basic controls. By dispensing with the need for jump drives and jump fuel tanks on each of the riders, each becomes ton for ton more heavily armed and armored. It is generally held that, in any meeting between a battleship and a battle rider of equal tonnage, the battle rider will triumph."

 

[AnotherDilbert]

I have no problem with needing big ships carrying big mesons to duke it out - it is just the (unintended I submit) way that CT/High Guard favours small battle riders with small mesons that are still capable of killing the biggest ships that I dislike and was what I thought the problem was here - admit I've probably completely missed the point though and will disengage!

It's built into the system with percentage based components and one shot one kill meson guns.
Basically Carrier/Riders don't have to pay to armour all that jump fuel, so becomes smaller, hence cheaper, than battleships.

 

[mike wightman]

There are two concepts I run with for riders.

The sled - the smallest hull that can carry the spinal PA/meson gun of choice and still have agility 6

The battle rider - as above but with armour and screens, so is larger.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

In my Traveller Universe, we limit multiuple spinals to 1/6 of that total ship mass (though in jump-capable ships, it often doesn't get above 1/10th), so a 500,000-ton Tigress becomes the fearsome war machine that it seems from the hype that she ought to be. (*Edit: an option for the multi spinal thing: 1. Multispinals are in huge casemates like RL battleship turrets and so don't require pointing the ship to hit. That would also let them engage different targets if they like.)

And that's how I would make a dreadnaught fearsome. (Caveats: 1. Rules un-playtested. 2. 300,000-ton Dreadnaughts are still more vulnerable than the tiny SDBs. But getting 5-6 tries to roll a 10+ isn't awful. 3. Screens of destroyers to fight the meson SDBs are crucial. 4. All my imaginings are for TL15, with Rating 9 nuke dampers. At lower TLs, masses of nuclear missiles can blunt those low-TL spinals pretty quickly. And the dreadnaughts can pack a ton of missiles, too.)

Doesn't address the main problem: A single hit kills the entire Tigress and all its weapons.

In an engagement between a BB with ten spinals and ten riders, the BB will die and one or two riders, leaving most riders unscathed.


If you want to make BBs viable, you have to remove the one shot one kill mechanic, i.e. mesons.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

There are two concepts I run with for riders.

The sled - the smallest hull that can carry the spinal PA/meson gun of choice and still have agility 6

The battle rider - as above but with armour and screens, so is larger.

An you get the rock-paper-scissors triad of:
Meson sleds kills meson riders.
PA riders kills meson sleds.
Meson riders kills PA riders.

 

[kilemall]

Doesn't address the main problem: A single hit kills the entire Tigress and all its weapons.

In an engagement between a BB with ten spinals and ten riders, the BB will die and one or two riders, leaving most riders unscathed.


If you want to make BBs viable, you have to remove the one shot one kill mechanic, i.e. mesons.

Or change the hit mechanic so there aren’t so many damn internal crits.

A big one for me is making crits disabled instead of destroyed. The tonnage hit associated with the crit still is destroyed if it exceeds the system’s tons, but short of that tells how damaged it is.

Since I have the repair mechanic be on tonnage as well, a light crit of say 50 tons might be a minor power feed mechanism, reroutable within a turn or two and thus the big boy isn’t out of it.

Depends on what effect you want- since my focus is player run ships, I want engineering drama and player comebacks. Others wanting to derby it up won’t want that.

Another mitigation is reducing weapon strength by range. I have a lot of fineness to that mechanic with actual maneuvers but I am under the impression the majority prefer abstracted range.

Ok try this abstraction- all beam and particle weapons are full factor at short range and half the factor at long range. Energy obviously still no long range. Missiles are half factor at short range and full at long range (effects of kinetic impact).

Defenses become more potent when incoming is halved, and range choice becomes critical. And meson screens and hull choice loom large if you can stay at long range.

 

[whartung]

While it is undeniable that a BatRon of battle riders will invariably defeat an equal tonnage squadron of jump-capable battleships,** the early weeks of the Fourth Frontier War uncovered a serious design weakness. When faced with superior numbers, the riders were unable to withdraw and jump out-system due to the timerequired to secure them in their tenders. Thus, rider BatRons suffered disproportionatelosses in the early stages of the war.

This is what happens when your people in your War College are knuckleheads, or you simply refuse to listen to them.

It can also be considered a gross intelligence failure.

 

[Badenov]

There are two concepts I run with for riders.

The sled - the smallest hull that can carry the spinal PA/meson gun of choice and still have agility 6

The battle rider - as above but with armour and screens, so is larger.

I see that the sled is the concept that 'keeps you honest' in terms of putting secondary weapons on riders. There'd be no way to win a meson-only duel with the sleds, but they're vulnerable to everything. Attacking something like a stock Tigress would be mutually assured destruction as the number of missile bays would wipe every sled out just from the missile hits. The sleds outnumber the riders 3:2 or more in Mesons, so you'd need to rely on secondary weapons to fight them. On the other hand, since they are vulnerable to everything, you're going to lose huge numbers of them in any fight. And they're a bit too expensive for me to think of them as expendable. My question then is: Is this a campaign idea actually in play, or just a TCS-style matchup?