Power Projection: Fleet has detailed boarding and capture rules. You can even shuttle damage control parties aboard your prize. And the psionic rules include use of Zhodani teleport commandoes to board and capture if that is your desire.
High Guarding again
- Thread starter Ulsyus
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AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 5K
Frozen Watches are great to replenish crew after a low-factor meson hit, i.e. at lower TLs.Not DURING a battle, no.
AFTER a battle though ...
You tell me.
If your navy needs to jump (somewhere) in order to engage an enemy ... if they "win" and capture crippled starships, how long is it going to take "rescue crews" to arrive on scene in order to crew/tow away those crippled craft?
Spare crews are much cheaper on transports, rather than your combat ships. They are even better protected in the Reserve where the enemy can't fire at them.
Do you even want damaged captured ships? E.g. the Zhos can't repair higher tech Impie ships, and the Impies don't want low-capability, low-tech Zho ships. Captured ships would perhaps be a thing in civil wars.
Crippled ships, i.e. effectively victims of meson spinals, are likely not going anywhere on their own, at least at higher TLs.
A Meson N striking will inflict about 3 crits in addition to a Fuel Tanks Shattered. The victim has about 17% chance of being jump capable and 33% chance of surviving without a Ship Vaporised, Jump Drive Disabled, or Power Plant Disabled. And that presumes the enemy doesn't scuttle the ship before retreating.
If the enemy uses battle riders, as any competent foe would in CT, they would just load stricken riders on the tenders and jump them out when retreating...
Recommissioning stricken ships, your own or captured, basically requires transports capable of carrying the entire ship, or repair ships capable of carrying and installing tens of thousands of Dton of drives. The transport capable of carrying a battleship costs more than a battleship itself, and how many of those do you have? Each transport would take months transport a ship back to a yard, and months back to the front, needing escorts the entire time, draining your frontline fleet of resources. I.e. the logistics of recommissioning disabled ships is far more complicated and far more expensive than providing a spare crew.
For a rider there is little to no problem, of course, just pop it into the tender and transport it to the shipyard.
The end result is that crippled ships will probably be repaired in situ, if you can keep the system from being raided by the enemy for many months while you call for spare drives, the drives are manufactured, the drives are transported, and then the drives are installed... Note that your entire fleet probably needs shipyard repairs after every battle, so will not be available to defend the system.
Or you use riders and the problem goes away...
Have I mentioned the combat advantage of riders yet?
Not necessarily, but you want to capture ships, if nothing else, for intelligence gathering. You can scuttle them later, or stabilize them to hold their crews until they can be POW exchanged.
Teleporting from a fast moving object to another fast moving object: possible only if the teleporters are telepathically linked to an ESPer and the ships are briefly close enough?
There were a few good scenes in BSG (the later series) where centurions boarded the Galactica in a battle and had to be contained. But to do that in a HG game where a vessel was still functioning seems like madness...
...unless it was a way to capture a ship not quite crippled enough to jump out, said capture then preventing the repair and return to action of another fleet unit.
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Maybe handwaved by invoking artificial gravity and inertial compensation? Otherwise, physics says no.
But you can board them, and you can recover derelict ships as easily as those under control... HG is an interesting work, but not with flaws and oddities.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Current edition has inertial compensation as a byproduct from the manoeuvre drive, so the compensation is for the acceleration created by said manoeuvre drive, not created outside of it.
Both Brilliant Lances and Battle Rider have rules for boarding, though they aren't terribly detailed.
Actually, it's explicitly stated that the boarding party can act as a prize crew and operate and repair a captured ship (HG'80, p.43).
Because for some unknown reason you can recover ships that are disabled in the battle line whilst the tender remains in the reserves... Space Magic.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
"In a campaign, victory goes not to the, player with the best fleet-building or tactical battle skills (although these are important) but to the player who can best strategically maneuver his forces, concentrating them for local numerical superiority, outguessing or outwitting his opponent."
"Outmoded ships may be improved by refitting"
Captured Zhodani hulls can be refitted with TL15 drives and weapon systems.
Zhodani may not be able to refit captured hulls with TL15 components, but there is nothing in the rules to say they can not repair damaged systems is there?
Replacing a destroyed system would require canibalising other captures vessels, or downgrading the system to TL14 standards. The power plant is the biggest deal, all Imperial crew should be told to render their power plants to slag in the event of capture, but is their an official scuttling rule?
"Outmoded ships may be improved by refitting"
Captured Zhodani hulls can be refitted with TL15 drives and weapon systems.
Zhodani may not be able to refit captured hulls with TL15 components, but there is nothing in the rules to say they can not repair damaged systems is there?
Replacing a destroyed system would require canibalising other captures vessels, or downgrading the system to TL14 standards. The power plant is the biggest deal, all Imperial crew should be told to render their power plants to slag in the event of capture, but is their an official scuttling rule?
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
No, next turn you put a 99t fighter squadron in the battle line while the tender recovers the damaged riders.
Why shouldn't them? After all, their Colonial fleets have much lower TL ships, and they use them too...
That's why I assumed some of the crippled Riders (te first ones to be so crippled) will be recovered, but I guess once most of them are crippled, there's no way to recover them without risking your precious Tenders. remember they will need two turns for jumping, and I have serious doubts the fighters may hold the line for 3 turns (one to recover the riders, two to jump).
My main point has always been the combat system of CT:LLB2, CT:HG and MT will produce lots of crippled ships, and few destroyed ones. As some of those crippled ones will be left in the "battlefield", the winner will be able to recover them.
Even if they are recovered by the freindly Tenders, there's no way the massive shipping loss told about in Rebellion will occur with the rules used to write them, that was my second point.
And the OP numbers seem to agree with this conclusion...
Boarding is (IMHO) absurd as a tactic in large Fleet engagements (as much fun as they are in RPG), as told above, as if you "keep the battlefield" you will capture those hulks anyway, and if you don't, having captured them will not help you, as they will be recaptured.
Those are pretty big things which would require pretty big transports to move. And I would think they'd need a lot of supporting infrastructure which would be absent in the field. That's a good deal of resources working in a riskier environment than a shipyard which will be better defended. Also the cost of all those supporting resources would be better put to building and supporting your fleet overall. You're also tying up ships to hold the volume that could better be used elsewhere. I believe that any ship so damaged that it needs an engine swap out would be scuttled instead of repaired. (There may be a stripping of parts first?)
Just a few thoughts . . .
I may be thick but how are those stats read? Do they reflect the ship or what they did to the other ship?
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 5K
Agreed, the initial boarding force is just troops, but then you can transfer additional crew.
But, technically, frozen watches can only replace casualties, not be woken to be transferred to another ship.
After the battle where most recovery is done, you can presumably do whatever you want.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 5K
It's even worse, you recover them before you form the battle-line in the Battle Formation Step.
But that is not really magic as the reserve isn't far away, out of range, just screened by the battle-line. A ship can freely move between the Reserve and Battle-line without any requirement of a working M-drive.
You send a ship or three to block fire on the tender, hence it (and the disabled ship) is in the reserve, pick up the disabled rider, and Bob's your uncle...
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 5K
Sure, making them more expensive and worse than Imperial TL-15 designs.
The Zho can't repair TL-15 systems, but can refit with TL-14 systems.
The new systems can't be bigger than the originals, hence lower capability, hence problem...
In the end making them worse than Zho ships.
There is no scuttling rule, but, as far as I know, an official ruling that scuttling was allowed for the Eurisko II fleet (not the TL-12 rocks, but the later TL-13 fleet).
I would assume left behind disabled ships would be scuttled. And at least computer systems would resist hostile takeover, see A1 Kinunir.
