Researching Imperial/subsector/colonial Navies

[Hal]

Hello Folks,
As an ongoing project, I am working on research of sorts regarding naval forces within the Spinward Marches. The task is a somewhat daunting one in that I'm running into areas that are not too well defined (in my eyes at least). Unfortunately, there are other issues at hand that make this a difficult task - which includes problems with canon information, lack of information, and even contradictory information. As such - I am working on trying to bull my way through that haze and create something (with the help of others) that makes sense and is useful for anyone else who might desire that level of detail.
If you go to http://users.adelphia.net/~alaconius
you will find a button leading to my Lunion subsector map. If you click on any given star, you will get in general, mostly data on individual main worlds as per the original Traveller Spinward Marches Supplement. I will make no bones about the fact that certain things are not "canon" with regards to certain worlds. I am changing those things that bug the living hell out of me. In general however, I'm trying to keep population numbers valid, tech levels valid, and so forth.
For those who look at the information, you will see a line that reads "Per capita income" along with "Modified GDP". These two lines are based on GURPS FAR TRADER that is given based not only on the original rules for determining Gross Domestic Product - but also on the exchange rates given in GURPS FAR TRADER. What this does is gives each planet's gross domestic product in Imperial Credits (CrImps). If the Per capita income doesn't seem all that high - bear in mind that in addition to being based on factors within the world such as the tech level and such - it is also based on the exchange rate. The PCI is in fact, calculated in Imperial Credit values.
What do I intend to do with all this information? Why, use it for budgeting of course!

This is where you all come in. Canon lists the following fleet structures either in High Guard, Megatraveller's REBELLION, or in JTAS #9 "WAR" issue. If people have access to any information from Challenge magazines for example, or have ideas they think might help - this is the place to speak up

Imperial Navy - Regular Navy as mentioned in the WAR issue of JTAS. This is the fleet that is charged with the defense of the Imperium outright. It is also intended to be kept together during times of peace to facilitate rapid response fleet movements in the event of an attack by the Zhodani forces. By definition, the Imperial navy is answerable only to the central ruling Imperium.

Subsector Navies - these are so called local province navies (source: High Guard pg 1) who are responsible for patroling their subsectors (source: HG pg 2)

Planetary Navies - These are relatively self-explanitory in the sense that they are raised by individual worlds for the express purpose of defending the world.

Funding:
As there isn't all that much information available on funding, and since Marc Miller has ruled out the rules from either of TRILLION CREDIT SQUADRON and/or STRIKER, it behoves me to develop my own funding scheme. Since I would like to keep this scheme more or less "realistic", I've had to settle upon the use of "Gross Domestic Product" along with general taxation rates. Military spending is a function of a given percentage of any given world's Gross Domestic Product. Taxation of member worlds provides the subsector commander with his/her/its budget for which a portion is allocated towards Military spending/funding. The Imperial budget of course, comes from treaties made with the world in question such that they provide the Imperium with a geld permitting the Imperium to function. From that tax, the Imperials allocate their funds towards military spending with the rest of course being used to pay for governmental expenses including salaries, equipment funding, etc.

It is my hope that I can create a general picture of funding such that GM's can decide whether to utilize the "universe" provided or tweak it to suit themselves. My project will also hopefully clarify certain issues regarding canon with regards to Traveller. For instance, Marc Miller mentions Colonial Fleets in his War issue of JTAS (#9 to be precise). The odd thing is? He describes Colonial fleets as being locally funded and locally manned - by PLANETS.

Question:
Are colonial fleets raised by specific homeworlds or are they raised by subsectors? Is it possible that Colonial Fleets are actually both? That for worlds that raise a fleet specifically, they are named for the world that raised them. For colonial fleets that are NOT raised by any one specific world, they are subsector fleets?

That's it for now, I'm sure I will be hitting people with other thoughts and ideas as time progresses. But for now, I'm looking to get the ball rolling and to get my web site "officially live" instead of "not officially online". As to when it goes officially online?

It goes officially online once I start the Piracy Play by Email game. Incidentally? The piracy issue will in general, depend on how I am able to define the fleet structure for the subsector navy of Lunion. For it will be the subsector Navy of Lunion that is going to be charged with the anti-piracy suppression mission.

One last comment. If you note, there will be a downloads page. On that page, it is my intention to make available the excel spreadsheet that I used to calculate values if at all possible. This way, people can do their own tweaking with the numbers I provide

 

[Hemdian]

IMTU planets allocate some of their military budget to a planetary navy. This covers things like SDBs and monitors, but may also include jump capable warships (the named colonial squadrons in the 5FW board game). But some of their military budget may also be pooled with other planets of the subsector into a NATO-like mutual defence force: 3I approved subsector navies (the numbered colonial squadrons in the 5FW board game). Along with funding, recruitment also tends to be local.

Additionally there is a second tier of 'alliance': in addition to 3I regulation and oversight of subsector and planetary navies, the 3I makes ships of the IN available 2nd hand at a discount. This has the advantages of (a) making it cheaper for subsector navies to raise fleets, (b) provide another source of revenue to the IN for modernisation programs, and (c) helps standardise equipment to a certain extent. This is furthered by temporary personnel exchanges between the IN and subsector navies.

Also, I think worlds in the 3I interior will feel less need for (and thus will spend less on) local subsector forces compared with worlds nearer the frontier. So IMTU frontier worlds that contribute to a subsector navy have a 3I tax discount. Overall military spending would be comparable, but just with a different emphasis.

Again looking at the 5FW board game I notice that the IN has 55% of its fighting squadrons (batrons and crurons) as batrons, while colonial forces have 34% as batrons. In other words Colonial forces heavily favour crurons over batrons.

Regards PLST

 

[Hal]

Snipped some good stuff

Originally posted by Hemdian:


Again looking at the 5FW board game I notice that the IN has 55% of its fighting squadrons (batrons and crurons) as batrons, while colonial forces have 34% as batrons. In other words Colonial forces heavily favour crurons over batrons.

Regards PLST

Thanks! THAT was very much needed regards to ship types. Since I have to build from scratch many of the ship types (Funny how there aren't too many official ship designs rated for Tech levels 11, 12, and 13 in Traveller ), I will need to know what kinds and how many. Having a budget at all at least gets things rolling.

I've been looking at the CIA website showing the military budgets for various nations and I can see where some have a HIGHER percentage than what you might think is worth the while - but those high rates tend to be for countries with low populations or with a lower "tech base" than the bigger nations. Hmmmmmm

 

[Hal]

Originally posted by thrash:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Hal:
For those who look at the information, you will see a line that reads "Per capita income" along with "Modified GDP". These two lines are based on GURPS FAR TRADER that is given based not only on the original rules for determining Gross Domestic Product - but also on the exchange rates given in GURPS FAR TRADER. What this does is gives each planet's gross domestic product in Imperial Credits (CrImps).

If I understand what you're saying, I believe you've made a mistake: the per capita GWP figures in Far Trader are given in CrImp already. You would have to convert to get GWP in local credits. </font>[/QUOTE]Hi Chris,
If you're right on this one, then that means the GDP of the sector is even higher. *shudder*

 

[Ben W Bell]

Originally posted by Hal:
THAT was very much needed regards to ship types. Since I have to build from scratch many of the ship types (Funny how there aren't too many official ship designs rated for Tech levels 11, 12, and 13 in Traveller ), I will need to know what kinds and how many. Having a budget at all at least gets things rolling.

I've been looking at the CIA website showing the military budgets for various nations and I can see where some have a HIGHER percentage than what you might think is worth the while - but those high rates tend to be for countries with low populations or with a lower "tech base" than the bigger nations. Hmmmmmm

In case you don't have it, Traveller's Aide #7 Fighting Ships has a fair few designs for TLs 12 and 13 and one or two for TL11. PLus some more information on fleet structures and the like.

Also be carefuly with your assumption on Higher precentage military expenditure. At the beginning of 2001 the US had a military expenditure of 3.9% GDP, which is a huge portion.

 

[Hemdian]

Originally posted by Hal:
THAT was very much needed regards to ship types. Since I have to build from scratch many of the ship types

For a fuller analysis click here. (I wrote this some time ago and in counting the different types I did not look at overlap between regular and colonial forces.)

Something else to remember with budgets: only a portion will be spent on navies (of whatever tier), a large part will go the the army, air force, wet navy, COACC, and planetary defence batteries. Balkanised worlds in particular will focus the lions share on the first three.

Regards PLST

 

[BetterThanLife]

I did some analysis on TCS numbers. They produce some staggering results when applied at the Subsector level. (In a thread somewhere i posted some of the net results, not the details as I haven't found them yet from when I built the Glisten Subsector Navy.) The numbers seem rather large, pirates definitely come out on the short end. but applying the same formula to the US in the mid 80s it comes out fairly close to President Regan's ship building budget. (Granted that was a rough estimate based on numbers provided by the Navy and I rounded the smaller ships to one number.) While the 700 ship Navy that President Regan envisioned was never completed the numbers from TCS would have built it, barely. But I thought that was the point.

 

[flykiller]

I did some analysis on TCS numbers. They produce some staggering results when applied at the Subsector level. (In a thread somewhere i posted some of the net results, not the details as I haven't found them yet from when I built the Glisten Subsector Navy.) The numbers seem rather large, pirates definitely come out on the short end. but applying the same formula to the US in the mid 80s it comes out fairly close to President Regan's ship building budget.

now complete the analysis. using TCS rules, how long will it take the shipyards to spend that money by building ships? depending of course on capital ship size, quality, and quantity, I came up with over forty years to expend the initial ten year budget.

 

[Hemdian]

Yes but remember (as Hal pointed out at the start of this thread) that Marc Miller has said that TCS (and Striker) economics only apply to those sub games and can't be applied to the OTU.

(Oops, I'm a homeless person. Anyone in the UK got a spare bed please email me.)

Regards PLST

 

[flykiller]

Yes but remember (as Hal pointed out at the start of this thread) that Marc Miller has said that TCS (and Striker) economics only apply to those sub games and can't be applied to the OTU.

that just makes the problem worse. TCS naval tax rates are too low, and TCS shipyards are too big.

 

[Hal]

Originally posted by thrash:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Hal:
For those who look at the information, you will see a line that reads "Per capita income" along with "Modified GDP". These two lines are based on GURPS FAR TRADER that is given based not only on the original rules for determining Gross Domestic Product - but also on the exchange rates given in GURPS FAR TRADER. What this does is gives each planet's gross domestic product in Imperial Credits (CrImps).

If I understand what you're saying, I believe you've made a mistake: the per capita GWP figures in Far Trader are given in CrImp already. You would have to convert to get GWP in local credits. </font>[/QUOTE]Hi Chris,
Since I can't know what went on in the "design phase" of the book for GURPS FAR TRADER, I can only speculate. Based on the fact that much of what was done with the Per Capita Income seems to be inspired by Striker Book 2 page 38. I noted that it isn't taken verbatum from the book )

In any event, in Striker, they give PCI and after that, on page 39, they talk about exchange rates coming into play in addition to the original per capita income listing. Consequently, it would appear to me that this is the case.
I did note however, that TL 15 in Striker mentions an income of 22,000 Cr instead of the 15,000 Cr as listed for GURPS Tech level 12 (supposedly the same tech levels). So based on that observation - your comment could very well be true
This is starting to give me a headache overall. The ONLY way that I can make Marc Miller's vision of the Third Imperium permit piracy is if the budget for the military is relatively limited. Sure - the taxes can be raised and the naval ships can be mass produced until piracy is no longer a viable option - that's a given. My situation is that I have to figure out how to craft a budget that both makes sense *AND* permits Marc Miller's Traveller to exist. Any budgetary system that permits a lot of money for the naval shipbuilding is going to shoot down that potential in a major rush.

What I intend to do this Tuesday (my day off from work) is design a spreadsheet that lists every vehicle in use by the Lift Infantry (Norris' Huscarles?). Then I intend to try and figure out the weapon loads and such and get a ballpark estimate of what an infantry regiment costs. We know what ships cost, but do we know what the army units cost? What about COAAC costs? What about planetary Defense costs? Part of the problem MAY be that there is just TOO much money for ship building because these other factors were not calculated.

Truth is however - if by use of the budget methods - I still arrive at the conclusion that Marc Miller's universe is flawed and illogical (aside from the science fantasy!

) then that too will have been worth my while

 

[Hal]

Tidbit of interest...

Training costs in the year of 2000 (2001?) were on average across all services - $28,800 per man with roughly 33% allocated to equipment costs and/or managerial costs. The rest were wages and benefits. This pertains to the initial basic training costs - not the ongoing costs as time progresses.

How does this relate to Traveller? What I suspect I will do is calculate the average wage for militants in the Imperium - increase this value to include "benefits" and then multiply all of this factor by an additional third to derive a baseline "average training cost". Comments?

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Hal:
Tidbit of interest...

Training costs in the year of 2000 (2001?) were on average across all services - $28,800 per man with roughly 33% allocated to equipment costs and/or managerial costs. The rest were wages and benefits. This pertains to the initial basic training costs - not the ongoing costs as time progresses.

How does this relate to Traveller? What I suspect I will do is calculate the average wage for militants in the Imperium - increase this value to include "benefits" and then multiply all of this factor by an additional third to derive a baseline "average training cost". Comments?

I'd enjoy seeing your work.

 

[Hal]

Updates:
Recruitment costs US Military 1999:
Army: $11,000 per recuit average
Navy: $ 8,835 per recuit average
Air Force: $ 6,089 per recruit average
Marine: $ 6,006 per recruit average

I've got access to the pay scales based on service and based on ranks (plus combat bonus) for that year as well.

So now all I have to do is work on Off base Quarters allowance, health care benefits, and normal wages per year per type (although Doug's Ground forces already does this) and see where it takes me.

For comparison purposes - STRIKER rules indicate that the cost per conscript is 10,000 credits, trained is 20,000 and professional long term is 30,000 credits (IIRC). That gives me a starting point to work with.

Addenda note: Based on a CBO report, medical spending rose from 25% of cash compensation to more than 1/2. Cash compensation was defined in the report as being basic pay plus housing allowance plus subsistence allowance. Oddly enough, after giving those figures, it said that medical spending per active member was $6,600 in 1988 and rose to 19,600 in 2003. Using the percentages in question...

1988 = 6,600 x 4 = 26,400 per active service member
2003 = 19,600 x 2 = 39,200 per active service member.

 

[Hemdian]

Originally posted by Hal:
So now all I have to do is work on Off base Quarters allowance, health care benefits, and normal wages per year per type (although Doug's Ground forces already does this) and see where it takes me.

Googling around I found some facts and figures covering US Navy personnel costs. It gives average basic rates of pay for different ranks in different US military services and for each also lists a rate "billable to other federal agencies". This latter being basic pay, pension, medical costs, housing and subsistence, and other miscellaneous costs. Analysing it (and fudging the figures slightly) I came up with the following:

Personnel costs = basic pay + X, where 'X' is ...

O10 65%
O9 70%
O8 75%
O7 80%
O6 85%
O5 90%
O4 95%
O3 100%
O2 105%
O1 110%

E9 120%
E8 130%
E7 140%
E6 150%
E5 160%
E4 170%
E3 180%
E2 190%
E1 200%

A while back I pulled the basic pay calculations out of an old JTAS article and applied it to the IN rank list.

Regards PLST

 

[BetterThanLife]

I never claimed that the Regan plan was ever completed. (In fact it wasn't.) Of the 700 ships in the plan just over 300 were already in service. Several shipyards were involved. (In everything bu carrier construction.) And during the Regan Administration and the following Bush Administration (A period of less than 12 years) The Navy did get to the neighborhood of 500 ships.

Shipyard capacity is a definite question but I don't recall anything on actual shipyard capacity in TCS. (Besides nothing says all the ships have to be built locally.) Now if you build them in series instead of parrallel....

To pull an example of a massive build up out of Literature, look at Grayson in the Harrington Series. They built dozens of Superdrednaughts simultaneously. (Not bad for a planet with no modern warships 5 years before starting the program.) By the "War of Honor" they had, argubably, the most powerful fleet at the resumption of hostilities. (And not one modern ship at the start of the war.) When building a Navy, you don't build one ship at a time. (Though if you only have building slips to build one at a time I guess you do until you build more yard capacity.)

I personally think the TCS numbers might be a bit high, but percentage of population wise they are actually reasonable.

Originally posted by flykiller:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />I did some analysis on TCS numbers. They produce some staggering results when applied at the Subsector level. (In a thread somewhere i posted some of the net results, not the details as I haven't found them yet from when I built the Glisten Subsector Navy.) The numbers seem rather large, pirates definitely come out on the short end. but applying the same formula to the US in the mid 80s it comes out fairly close to President Regan's ship building budget.

now complete the analysis. using TCS rules, how long will it take the shipyards to spend that money by building ships? depending of course on capital ship size, quality, and quantity, I came up with over forty years to expend the initial ten year budget. </font>[/QUOTE]

 

[BetterThanLife]

Originally posted by Hemdian:

Again looking at the 5FW board game I notice that the IN has 55% of its fighting squadrons (batrons and crurons) as batrons, while colonial forces have 34% as batrons. In other words Colonial forces heavily favour crurons over batrons.

Regards PLST

That makes sense when you look at the roles of teh two different classes of ships. Cruisers are the workhorse of the fleet. They do the patrols, the piracy supression, the scouting the independent operations. Battleships/Drednaughts are the fist, the actual Line of Battle, kept concentrated for offensive operations and key system defense.

In T20 it doesn't really matter if you are facing a Cruiser or a Drednaught when armed with a Spinal Meson they are equally deadly but in all other versions of Traveller there is a major difference.

In Supp 9 you will see that the Battleships have the best of everything. Max armor, higher screen levels, massive secondary batteries. Where Cruiser designs are a compromise. More of one thing less of another. TA7 doesn't reflect this design philosophy, and the Drednaughts have no armor. (So there is naught to Dred.

) But in T20 with the absolute power of the Meson Spinal I guess it doesn't really matter.

 

[Hal]

For what it is worth Gentlemen, I do want to make sure I thank you all who participate in this. Hemdian espeically considering your current circumstances! Thanks everyone who is posting URLS for me to read so I can assimulate this.
Currently, I'm reading the information from GURPS TRAVELLER GROUND FORCES - more particularlly, the logistics and the TO&E aspects. I'm currently typing them into my spreadsheets so I can organize things for an "at glance" type of analysis. I'm still fuzzy in how the bits and pieces fit together for the Battalion level organization - as my spreedsheet isn't agreeing numbers wise with the values supplied by Doug Berry in his book. This is because I'm trying to account for EACH man in the Battalion. I can make my spreadsheet agree on Company level - but I suspect my battalion level information is missing a few "drivers" for a few vehicles.
One interesting thing I've noted reading GROUND FORCES is that the Subsector Navy is responsible for the running and maintaining of the Troop transports used in the Imperium. NASTY!

I'm also having fun typing in a US pay rate chart for 1999. I've completed the math for calculating the Traveller pay rates and placed it in a format identical with that of the US pay rate for purposes of comparison. Eventually, I'm going to want to try to use ratios of health care to basic financial remuneration and apply that same ratio to the Costs for Imperial/subsector militaries. This way, I can come up with something that is in the ballpark for Battalions as utilized in Traveller. I find it most interesting when you consider that a single Grav tank platoon in GURPS GROUND FORCES costs 72.8 MCr not including maintenance and/or personnel costs (not to mention consumables, ammunition etc). A company of Grav tanks runs about 254.8 MCr just for the tanks themselves.

As the numbers come available, I will post them here for people to comment on - ask me how I got them (make me defend a thesis if you will) and so on. This way, if I leave anything out, or go TOO conservative in pricing or not conservative enough - some of you can kick me in the shins saying "Hey there bucko"

Again, thanks everyone who is helping me on this. I'm betting that the results will be an unexpected eye opener...

 

[Hal]

Question? At my website, I included the GDP for each world in TL 12 (Traveller Tech 15) levels. Would it help to include other data as well? In other words, what kind of data would people like to see that might be helpful for their own thinking?
For example - Ground Forces indicates just how many Battalion equivalents there are available for each world. It also gives rules on building up the Military for each of those worlds based on Tech levels, populations, etc. If I were to include the Battalion equivents for the worlds - would that be helpful?

In general, if I do that - what would people consider to be a reasonable ratio of Infantry to Armored?

Just thinking aloud

 

[Hal]

Originally posted by Bhoins:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Hemdian:

Again looking at the 5FW board game I notice that the IN has 55% of its fighting squadrons (batrons and crurons) as batrons, while colonial forces have 34% as batrons. In other words Colonial forces heavily favour crurons over batrons.

Regards PLST

That makes sense when you look at the roles of teh two different classes of ships. Cruisers are the workhorse of the fleet. They do the patrols, the piracy supression, the scouting the independent operations. Battleships/Drednaughts are the fist, the actual Line of Battle, kept concentrated for offensive operations and key system defense.

In T20 it doesn't really matter if you are facing a Cruiser or a Drednaught when armed with a Spinal Meson they are equally deadly but in all other versions of Traveller there is a major difference.

In Supp 9 you will see that the Battleships have the best of everything. Max armor, higher screen levels, massive secondary batteries. Where Cruiser designs are a compromise. More of one thing less of another. TA7 doesn't reflect this design philosophy, and the Drednaughts have no armor. (So there is naught to Dred.

) But in T20 with the absolute power of the Meson Spinal I guess it doesn't really matter. </font>[/QUOTE]I have to thank you for posting that commentary. I'd forgotten about the issues with the T20 version of Dreadnaughts and weapons and the like It reminded me that the TA7 might not have much in the way of information I can use when designing ship types. Thanks for the heads up!