Colonial battle squadrons: dreadnaughts or battle riders?

[Black Globe Generator]

As I'm piecing together the Imperial Navy assets for MTU, I had an interesting (to me, anyway) thought: most colonial navy's (that is, planetary navies which contribute ships to the subsector fleet in time of war) BatRons will consist of battle riders rather than dreadnaught or battleship squadrons.

Battle riders offer more bang for the buck to a planetary navy whose first priority is self-defense. Few planets are concerned about force projection beyond anti-piracy patrols in neighboring systems in support of trade, a role which is admirably served by a cruiser squadron rather than a dreadnaught squadron.

This creates a nice counterbalance to the Imperial Navy, which in turn loads up on dreadnaughts, battleships, and battle cruisers instead - if the Emperor decides to take the war to an enemy beyond the borders of the Imperium, Colonial squadrons are much less likely to be a significant part of the force.

Please be aware that I'm offering this for a general discussion topic rather than searching for the "right" answer - the preceding does not come from canon (at least not from what I've read), and I'd like to hear different thoughts beyond just what's graven in the cool, polished granite of the OTU. That's not to say that canon isn't welcome - if you do reference canon, please be so kind as to include the source.

So...whaddya think? Does this make sense?

 

[Blue Ghost]

It would depend on how wealthy said system was/is.

I can see a system wanting to project power if tracking down corsair or pirate activity beyond it's sphere of influuence, and a battle rider squadron might be just the thing to do that.

Then again a large number of Kinunir-esque BCs (the small battle cruiser concept) might also be the way to go; i.e. something with some punch that could jump on its own, but was more akin to a small Imperial destroyer than anything else.

I don't know really. A toughy.

 

[mike wightman]

Battle riders for system defence make a lot of sense.
They are smaller, and therefore cheaper, than an equivalent starship.
At the higher TLs it is easy enough to fir a jump 1 drive to a rider to give it the option of an escape.

Speaking of escape, it would be worth the Imperial Navy allocating some empty jump tenders to transport colonial riders around if necessary.

Looking at the named colonial squdron counters in FFW nine out of the sixteen squadrons are jump 1, three are jump 2, two are jump 3, and two are jump 4.

 

[bozzutoman]

This seems quite sensible.

Depending on its political power and strategic value, a System Navy would maintain one or more mid-sized jump-ships for power projection, but the bulk of their "fleet" would be composed of
battleriders/SDBs.

By Imperial edict these ships must be equipped with universal Battletender mounts. The Imperial Navy, however, would be the only entity allowed to operate battletenders.

This allows each system to be in charge of their self-defense, but would severly limit "domestic squables" with neighbors and more importantly, rebellions.

I suppose if appropriate, J-1s might be allowed for insystem micro-jumps or quick escapes.

The Imperial Navy would then trend to more capital ships, cruisers, and of course battletenders.

 

[mike wightman]

Another little "cheat" would be to build a rider with a more powerful jump engine, but only enough fuel for a jump 1.
Drop tanks could be provided by the Imperial Navy to allow for more strategic mobility if the situation warranted it.

This is the idea behind my Imperial Navy Pocket Battleships...

 

[robject]

Yep, seems reasonable to me, too. In fact, you could scale a defensive force from the 400t SDBs all the way up to 20,000t "system defense boats", i.e. battle riders, with a similar set of scaled transports for some percentage of the force.

And Sigg's Pocket Battleship concept sounds useful.

 

[Hal]

One thing to consider regarding battle rider batrons over more jump capable battleships and dreadnaughts is the replenishment times required to bring a batron to full strength again.

If you lose a jump capable battleship or dreadnaught, you lose the "hull" build time spent on making that ship. The smaller ships take less time to build than the larger jump capable ships. If you have four Dreadnaughts in a batron, and one is destroyed, one lightly damaged, one heavily damaged, and one untouched - you have a batron that will take a fair bit of time to bring back to full functional capacity. Now, enter the prospect of using Battle riders. Usually, they are FAST hulls, heavily armored, and generally have one feature that the jump behemouths don't have - interchangability. In other words, the Batron goes to a nearby system whose system defense fleet contains more than a few non-jump mobile battle riders. They are "reserves" in the sense that the wounded Batron missing one hull, has one badly damaged hull, and one lightly damaged hull - can drop off the damaged hulls, and pick up three new replacements and be ready to fight immediately.

 

[robject]

Good points, Hal.

So, what benefits to dreadnoughts confer? What benefits, if any, do y'all think they ought to confer?

 

[mike wightman]

They look impressive

 

[The Oz]

In HG or T20 combat dreadnoughts don't provide much more benefit than what Sigg already said, they look impressive. DNs can provide a multitasking capability: one big DN can be a battleship, a carrier, and an assault transport all rolled into one. But you pay a high cost in vulnerability for that multitasking.

I think that DNs should provide a lot of firepower in a very tough, hard to kill platform. This isn't possible in CT/T20, however.

 

[mike wightman]

By the way, I think I can get my pocket battleship down to 40,000 tons or so.

Jump 6, maneuver/agility 6, factor T meson gun, factor 15 armour, factor 9 screens, fuel for jump 1.

With drop tanks it goes up to 64000tons and drive performance is halved, but that's ok for peace time...

 

[Border Reiver]

The big two advantages of BB over BR batrons are their instant readiness on arrival insystem and their ability to withdraw in the face of overwhelming opposition without having to go through docking with the tender and the vulnerability that entails.

 

[bozzutoman]

Another BB advantage is reaction time. If a courier jumps insystem with news of invasion, the jump-fleet is ready to go almost instantly.

The rider-fleet will most likely need to recover SDBs from across the system losing valuable hours, or possibly even a day or two. If any of the rider's compliment is in a neighboring system, that's a whole week lost.

 

[The Oz]

BBs also provide the ability to spread out your jump-capable forces: a BB squadron can be in eight different star systems at once, if needed, but still retain all their strategic mobility. A BR squadron would have to wait for the tender to come and collect them all before the squadron could move as a unit.

 

[robject]

Originally posted by The Oz:
I think that DNs should provide a lot of firepower in a very tough, hard to kill platform. This isn't possible in CT/T20, however.

I tend to agree on both counts. I will lobby for T5's wargaming aspect to make necessary adjustments. No guarantees.

Originally posted by The Oz:
BBs also provide the ability to spread out your jump-capable forces: a BB squadron can be in eight different star systems at once, if needed, but still retain all their strategic mobility. A BR squadron would have to wait for the tender to come and collect them all before the squadron could move as a unit.

OK, that's a strategic benefit. In wargames, strategy is key.

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
By the way, I think I can get my pocket battleship down to 40,000 tons or so.

This is simply amazing. And 40k is a nice size, bigger than the smallest possible spinal carrier, but not too big to carry. Bump it down to Jump-5 or Jump-4 if you need to squeeze it for space... but then, it won't really grant much extra space, will it?

In fact, why carry fuel for Jump-1? Ah, for emergency use. Yeah, keep that.

 

[Hal]

Originally posted by The Oz:
BBs also provide the ability to spread out your jump-capable forces: a BB squadron can be in eight different star systems at once, if needed, but still retain all their strategic mobility. A BR squadron would have to wait for the tender to come and collect them all before the squadron could move as a unit.

The problem with this approach is twofold:

1) communications is limited by the speed of light within a star system. Gathering up a Battle rider squadron would be limited to picking them up in one system. Doctrine for any fleet (BR or Jump capable Capital ships) should never be to split up a squadron's assets making the BATRON weaker.

2) BR BATRONS will resist such splitting up of the forces because of its reliance on the Mother ship. Thus, all assets will be together when called upon rather than spread out. The time it takes to get the word out to Battleships & Dreadnaughts split amongst other systems will be made worse because they require the courier jump transit time to get a message to them to prepare to jump, and co-ordinate where to jump to. Call it 1 week to send message to outlying ship, plus 1 week to contact and transmit orders and make ship ready to jump. Then 1 week to actually jump to rendevous point, then time to converge to a functional BATRON formation.

 

[Hal]

Originally posted by robject:
Good points, Hal.

So, what benefits to dreadnoughts confer? What benefits, if any, do y'all think they ought to confer?

Dreadnaughts under the HIGH GUARD system offer one benefit that the Battle Riders do not: they have a larger hull to soak up damage. Case in point:

A T class spinal mount gains ONE automatic critical hit bonus if it fires upon a 200,000 dton hull (S class hull size). A T class spinal mount firing at a 40,000 dton hull however, suffers T minus N or 6 critical hits. Unless it has armor C (ie 12 levels of armor), it WILL take crits when it.

The other benefit of having a larger hull is of course, the larger numbers of weapon systems possible.

What kills me as a wargamer however, is the fact that larger ships require fuel tankage capacity for long jump legs as compared to the volume saved in Battle riders that are then devoted towards armor. A big ship with long jump legs must of neccessity, lose some ability to armor itself

 

[mike wightman]

I can't imagine building a battle rider with anything less than full armour for its TL - perhaps one less for odd TLs

A TL14/15 battle rider only has to be 20-30kt to be immune to the T PAW crits.

It is also virtually immune to any non-nuclear missile hit - you'd have to be really lucky with your pulse laser batteries though

 

[Hal]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
I can't imagine building a battle rider with anything less than full armour for its TL - perhaps one less for odd TLs

A TL14/15 battle rider only has to be 20-30kt to be immune to the T PAW crits.

It is also virtually immune to any non-nuclear missile hit - you'd have to be really lucky with your pulse laser batteries though

Unfortunately, it isn't immune to Meson spinal hits.

 

[veltyen]

Or any criticals
(I'm looking at you fusion-bay-weapon)