How oceanic/maritime is your space?

[McPerth]

For many purposes, space may as well be an ocean... without the tin can, it's not a survivable environment, the distances are too far for travel without a ship, and all the most scientifically interesting places need a totally enclosed habitat. Plus, underway, often, all you see is a vast expanse, and the earliest expeditions never left sight of land.

And for other pourposes it's a fully new environment and no true comparable with anything in military changes¹ (no posible in-route interception, enemy may appear without warning, what means you have to cover, at least twith token forces for warning, may points at once, no pursuit posible, as you don't know where enemy goes, difficult coordination, as ships are out of touch/communications while in jump, etc...).

Note 1: all of this assumes jump style FTL travel. For warp one, many of those are not true​

 

[Barsanuphius]

In terms of general terminology I use a lot of naval terms and slang in describing ships and ship operations.

Ships have decks, bulkheads, partitions (walls that aren't structural), overheads.
There are hatches not doors.
The bathrooms are heads not "freshers."
Port, starboard, fore and, aft are used.
You have ladders not stairs.
The non-space fairing are called "Sand Crabs" by the space fairing.
You "Get underway" and "Stand out" from (star) port.
The starship has a helm on the bridge.
The ship for combat goes to "Quarters" or "General Quarters."
One "Sets details" for things like docking at the starport, getting underway, FTL jump, or transferring cargo and the like.
The crew stands watches.
You have staterooms, cabins, a galley.

That sort of thing. I like it to sound nautical when dealing with ship operations. The more it sounds almost like the days of sailing ships the better.

This I try but not all my players follow through, well my wife does. Also a PC was promoted in the Technical division from a Technician Specialist 4 to Technical Sargent, the Player literally had her character "Skree" with joy. So they are learning!

 

[salochin999]

In my upcoming ATU:

• Navy service renamed Space Force (the actual name of a particular service, in-setting, may vary). Standard ranks tweaked/renamed
  
• Marines service renamed Troopers (ditto)
  
  I will retain the LBB#1 merchant ranks. Those fit perfectly what I envision.
  
• no gravitics, so stacked decks for thrust simulated ''gravity" may be a thing
• spinning space stations
  
  
• no/few portholes and windows (except on smaller craft, trans-atmospheric)-- use view screens instead
  
  
• if the bridge is in the forward (away from rocket thruster exhaust) end of the vessel, that's to put more compartments and more shielding between the crew and fusion power plant-- see above about windows on interplanetary ships

• Those 2-D star charts are jump charts, but grossly simplified. Jump space is ''smooshed flat." (Not my idea, but I'm using it. It seems that some other Traveller fans have explained it this way for years. Does anybody know who came up with the notion first?)

---------------------------------------------


Based on what I have read in LBB#2, space travel in the game works a lot more like, well, space travel, than like oceanic travel.
So I really don't need any rules changes. It's really all just swapping out some terminology and maybe tweaking ship deck design.





But that's what I plan for my upcoming ATU.


What about you guys?


Do you use space navies with midshipmen, ensigns, admirals, etc.? Lots of naval traditions? Just a few?

Marines with cutlasses?


Space pirates that look rather like Age of Sail pirates, real or romanticized?



Weather in jump space?


A romantic/retro-tech/rule-of-cool take on solar sail technology for interplanetary travel?

1) I think the use of archaic terms and traditions makes a lot of sense in a far-flung space empire as a form of cultural glue - making people feel connected to the whole. So it makes perfect sense to me the Imperium would do this especially in the navy.

2) Navy or Air Force? Could be either I guess and possibly based on function i.e. if in YTU the space forces are built around carriers and fighters then maybe archaic air force terms/ranks and if it's based on ships of the line then navy? (Or both with rivalry between the two).

3) For me the above leads to wanting a naval rank structure roughly following age of sail Britain with a tri-partite split between ratings, mates (NCOs) and officers but in a hi-tech navy I'm not sure that makes sense and so needs the lower ranks greatly compressed so for example maybe
E1 Rating (rookie)
E2 Midshipman (trained specialist)
O1 Ensign
other officer ranks

Marines would be much more NCO heavy as they would often be used in small detachments.

So - function first to decide the categories - then archaic terms applied to the categories.

#

I also divide the navy into three branches: line (pilots and gunners), science (navigation, computers, medical sub-branch) and engineering with captains mostly coming from the line branch.

#

gravitics / port holes / bridge etc

I want port holes etc in my SSU so I'm toying with the idea of having some kind of a tech split between J-1 and J-2 so my SSU is different from my J-3+ BSU.

For example if gravitics is expensive or takes a lot of power (or gets more expensive / uses more power with size i.e. volume based?) then differences between small and large ships could be explained that way: small ships or large and expensive ones (navy) might have gravitics but large ships on a budget wouldn't.

Similarly spinning space stations might be cheaper and more cost-effective than gravitic ones.

Along the same lines a merchant container ship with a spinning crew quarters might be cheaper but expensive passenger liners use gravitics (maybe with a spinning "steerage" section).


#

"Marines with cutlasses? Space pirates that look rather like Age of Sail pirates, real or romanticized?"

I do. I see it as a psychological thing - humans in space trying to distract themselves from the vastness of it all by clinging to common tropes. Uniforms also.

Modified though. My favorite pirate weapon is a rocket launcher for low-g designed to look like a flintlock pistol. It has a targeting system and when locked on squeezing the trigger ejects the rocket at low velocity. Once out of the barrel the rocket fires and carries it to the target.

Also I think the tropes would be wrong or mixed up due to time so pirate / viking / punk style mashups.

#

"weather in space"

This is a big one and I intend to do this at some point. The basic idea would be a gravity ocean and the jump drive, gravitics etc are all based on manipulating this. The gravity ocean would have tides, storms, whirlpools etc. The hazards could be avoided by following a safety first jump practice but risky jumps would be possible - so basically an extension of the misjump idea. If you made a risky jump, misjumped and got stuck in the "gravity void" for a time then as well as space weather there might even be void creatures coming through the walls - or at least you might imagine they were as I was going to have misjumps / space weather have some connection to psionics.

Apart from that solar flares and Star Trek like anomalies are a good source of "weather" mishaps imo.

#

I want it all in one universe - an Asimov style BSU with a weird science / star trek anomalies / firefly / space viking style SSU running alongside

 

[whulorigan]

3) For me the above leads to wanting a naval rank structure roughly following age of sail Britain with a tri-partite split between ratings, mates (NCOs) and officers but in a hi-tech navy I'm not sure that makes sense and so needs the lower ranks greatly compressed so for example maybe
E1 Rating (rookie)
E2 Midshipman (trained specialist)
O1 Ensign
other officer ranks

Or perhaps:

E1 Rating (Crewman)
E2 Technician /Specialist
E3 Chief / [Warrant Officer's] Mate (Crew Leader)

W1 Warrant Officer (technical specialist / overseer)

O0 Midshipman (Officer Trainee)
O1 Ensign + (Commissioned Officer / Line)
other officer ranks

 

[salochin999]

Yes. Part of the Mates' function in reality is/was maintaining discipline so if you have a lot of ratings / specialists then that role of experienced specialist + discipline maintainer would still be there. It depends on the nature of the crew really and how "boisterous" they are.

Does the crew have a lot of ratings needing NCOs to maintain discipline or is it more Star Trek with almost all the crew quasi-officers apart from a few security guys?

I think tat may be what makes the dividing line.

 

[whulorigan]

Yes. Part of the Mates' function in reality is/was maintaining discipline so if you have a lot of ratings / specialists then that role of experienced specialist + discipline maintainer would still be there. It depends on the nature of the crew really and how "boisterous" they are.

Does the crew have a lot of ratings needing NCOs to maintain discipline or is it more Star Trek with almost all the crew quasi-officers apart from a few security guys?

I think tat may be what makes the dividing line.

My thought was also that "E1-Ratings" would be "Apprentices/Trainees", "E2-Technicians" would have earned a certification, and "E3-Chiefs/Warrant Officer's Mates" would be responsible for duty assignments and general on-site direction of work for a given shift. The Warrant Officers would then be the Master Specialists who are in charge of their entire particular area Technical Specialty on board the vessel.

 

[salochin999]

My thought was also that "E1-Ratings" would be "Apprentices/Trainees", "E2-Technicians" would have earned a certification, and "E3-Chiefs/Warrant Officer's Mates" would be responsible for duty assignments and general on-site direction of work for a given shift. The Warrant Officers would then be the Master Specialists who are in charge of the entire Technical Specialty on board the vessel.

Yes I think that makes perfect sense with a large crew.

I'm also wondering about the kind of ship like in "Red Dwarf" or "Alien" where everyone is an officer apart the two maintenance guys

 

[whulorigan]

Yes I think that makes perfect sense with a large crew.

I'm also wondering about the kind of ship like in "Red Dwarf" or "Alien" where everyone is an officer apart the two maintenance guys

Can't speak to Red Dwarf, but in Alien, the ranks (IIRC) are based on Merchant Service ranks and positions. I don't remember all of the characters' names off the top of my head, but Tom Skerritt's character was the "Captain" (obvious officer), John Hurt was the 1st Officer, "Ripley" was the 2nd Officer (but was also specifically referred to as having the rank of "Warrant Officer" in the beginning of Aliens), and the other woman was the navigator (which is traditionally an officer's position, so I am guessing she filled the role of 3rd Officer - probably also a warrant officer in this case). Several of those licensed "officers" may have been either commissioned or warrant.

Generally, certain positions are traditionally officer-billets. In merchant services, usually the navigator (and I believe the cargomaster) are secondary roles over which particular Licensed Officers in the deck-division (1st, 2nd, and and/or 3rd Officer) have oversight. And the Chief Engineer is also normally a Licensed Officer (at least a Commissioned or Warrant Officer), and is assisted by a Licensed 1st, 2nd, and/or 3rd Engineer if the crew is large enough.

But I am by no means an expert on the Merchant Service and their traditions.

I would guess that a lot of the reason for the "top-heaviness" of the ranks as seen in the "space-services" is that many of the functions of the ship are highly automated (as are many wet merchant ships today), and only require an overseer to take care of things that cannot be handled directly by the ships automated systems (which would normally be taken care of by ratings on a less sophisticated vessel).

 

[BwapTED]

I expect that a typical ''Space Force'', IMTU, will have plenty of enlisted men. It's just that starship pilots are officers. So are some other job positions on starships. Go to a Space Force base and you'll see a larger number of enlisted guys in jumpsuits. Technicians, most of them.

People have suggested that robots might often do jobs that enlisted men would otherwise do. Fair enough. But that idea of automation cutting down on the number of humans needed to run an organization also applies to officers. All those officers doing admin stuff; how many might be replaced by software?

Maybe the ship's AI writes the PowerPoint presentations for the robot crew?

It seems to me that several factors bear on this stuff:


Which rules? LBB2? High guard? Something else? Big ship vs small ship, what size crews, etc.


What are the historical roots of the military and mercantile services in the setting?


Robots? What TL of computers and programming is in use?

 

[salochin999]

I would guess that a lot of the reason for the "top-heaviness" of the ranks as seen in the "space-services" is that many of the functions of the ship are highly automated...

I think that's exactly it. A function that might once have needed 20 ratings, 3 mates and a junior officer is automated to the point where it now only needs the officer.

If so then the rank structure might depend on crew size. For example a dreadnought with a mass of gunners might still have the three-part ratings / mates / officers structure, maybe engineering too, but pilots and navigators not?

edit: which ties back to air force vs navy although if you include the technician part of the air force then it's the same.

@CombatMedic

"Big ship vs small ship, what size crews, etc."

I think that must be a big part of it.

 

[Frankymole]

When I did a Blakes 7-based campaign, the Navy was the "Fleet" arm of the Terran Federation Space Command; the Army became the ground forces so they had regiments, etc. The Navy had numbered fleets (8 or more). Ranks such as Admiral were retained, and the Marines obviously formed part of the Fleet; ground assaults would've varied depending on whether they were from established bases or new beach-heads and attacks on the orbital components of star/spaceports, space stations etc. The main problem was the Scout Service, since Blakes 7 is set in an empire that isn't really expansionist until it has to recover territory following a cataclysmic war. There must've been an exploratory an mapping arm but it isn't gone into in any detail, so I made it a function of the civilian administration with obvious naval escorts. After all, like the Third imperium, the Federation is most notable as a military force between the stars.

 

[Timerover51]

I am thinking of treating the Scout Service as a combination of the US Coast Guard for ship operation, and something similar to Andre Norton's Survey Service for the planet-side work. The Coast Guard uses the Navy's System of ranks, but I will have to work up the planet-side system. I have the Scout Supplement, but I have never been happy with the ranking system.

 

[salochin999]

I am thinking of treating the Scout Service as a combination of the US Coast Guard for ship operation, and something similar to Andre Norton's Survey Service for the planet-side work. The Coast Guard uses the Navy's System of ranks, but I will have to work up the planet-side system. I have the Scout Supplement, but I have never been happy with the ranking system.

IMTU the Scout service was originally as you'd expect - a frontier scout service - but as the Imperium expanded it found the sort of individuals that were good at that first task were also good at watching the backwater interior space of the Imperium that wasn't important enough for the navy - in other words rangers in space

So IMTU the Scout service has an exterior division (ship and technical skills) and an interior division (ship and investigation skills).

In the modified career rules for this the [strike]Rangers[/strike] Scouts don't have much of a hierarchy and just defer to whichever one has the highest skill for a particular task. They also (IMTU) have the highest survival roll so their informal ranks are more a mark of the amount of time they haven't been killed. They change a lot but are currently: "oneup", "deuce", "threetime", fourfer and "full house".

 

[david.wendelken]

In my upcoming ATU:

[*]no/few portholes and windows (except on smaller craft, trans-atmospheric)-- use view screens instead

Gus Grissom might disagree with you on your total reliance on fancy electronics.

If you don't know the reference, look it up.

 

[Timerover51]

Gus Grissom might disagree with you on your total reliance on fancy electronics.

If you don't know the reference, look it up.

I would agree with you, David. I remember that incident all to vividly.

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

Nice.

IMTU the Scout service was originally as you'd expect - a frontier scout service - but as the Imperium expanded it found the sort of individuals that were good at that first task were also good at watching the backwater interior space of the Imperium that wasn't important enough for the navy - in other words rangers in space

So IMTU the Scout service has an exterior division (ship and technical skills) and an interior division (ship and investigation skills).

In the modified career rules for this the [strike]Rangers[/strike] Scouts don't have much of a hierarchy and just defer to whichever one has the highest skill for a particular task. They also (IMTU) have the highest survival roll so their informal ranks are more a mark of the amount of time they haven't been killed. They change a lot but are currently: "oneup", "deuce", "threetime", fourfer and "full house".

Nice to see either I successfully infected someone with my Scout Ranger meme or it has been lurking and stealth infecting.

I like the Term names, that is cool and considering the Scout Service makes sense.

Also, liked someone's earlier comment about the Scouts serving like the Coast Guard, but I have a Space Guard for that. It's mostly locals with Imperial subsidies and grants for the poor systems to get SDBs. Still, might have it administered by the Scouts.

 

[WistfulD]

Nice to see either I successfully infected someone with my Scout Ranger meme or it has been lurking and stealth infecting.

I like the Term names, that is cool and considering the Scout Service makes sense.

Also, liked someone's earlier comment about the Scouts serving like the Coast Guard, but I have a Space Guard for that. It's mostly locals with Imperial subsidies and grants for the poor systems to get SDBs. Still, might have it administered by the Scouts.

I would think that they would, but it depends on what the chartered or conceptual perview of the Scouts (/Rangers) is UTU. I imagine the Scouts as one of those agencies that has to fight to define and keep ahold of it's charter and role as historical changes allows other organizations to try to creep in. Kinda like the marines during the shift from the age of sail or the Department of Human Services or USGS in U.S. civilian government.

 

[salochin999]

... I imagine the Scouts as one of those agencies that has to fight to define and keep ahold of it's charter and role as historical changes allows other organizations to try to creep in. ...

IMTU the Imperium only cares about the clusters made up of the Alpha planets and their hinterland so the Scout service is the cheapest way to keep tabs on everywhere else.

 

[BwapTED]

Gus Grissom might disagree with you on your total reliance on fancy electronics.

If you don't know the reference, look it up.

I know perfectly well who Virgil Grissom was, and how he died.
RIP

But perhaps you missed the part about trans-atmospheric and small craft?
Apollo 1 isn't comparable to spacecraft built in space, never intended to land on planets.

IMTU (as it had been developing) I'm not using artificial gravity. Larger spacecraft are built in space and move from point to point in vacuum.

There are, IMTU, there are smaller craft that would have some shuttered and shielded viewports.
But that's not what I talking about, as I noted upthread.



This has been an influence:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/misconceptions.php

Scroll down to the section on windows for more on why a lot of open windows is not a useful , or safe, thing on the kind of hard sci fi space vessels I'm describing.