[GZG] [LONG] Philosophy of shipbuilding

There has been much discussion of large ships vs. small ships, point cost and
balance in combat.

Now, this following discussion is bound to be wrong in details--I'm
not a naval historian by any means. I just play one on the internet.

The modern naval force mix is an artifact of the torpedo, aircraft,
and (today) ship-killing SSM.  It is not graven in stone, and actually
makes little sense in the Full Thrust world.

It used to be that ship were divided roughly into three categories.
You had your line-of-battle ships that in the Napoleonic era were
those top three rates of ship -- basically 64 guns and up.  A
fourth-rate ships (50-56) guns would be either used as a heavy frigate
(all US frigates of the War of 1812 were of this rating, which is why
the RN issued orders not to engage US frigates without a 2-1 numerical
advantage).  Frigates more typically carried 30-50 guns are were used
as "cruisers" (a job description not a ship class). There were
sixth-rate ships of 30 or less guns, but those weren't worth much save
in commerce raiding. Then you had unrated ships, including
Sloops-of-War (or a Corvette, 14-20 guns), Bomb vessels (8 guns, with
mortars throwing exploding shells), Gun-brigs (10-14 guns), Cutters
(4-14 guns), Gun-boats (1-4 guns), and other auxiliaries.

Now, for a standup slugfest with another navy, only line of battleships were
invited. A fleet would consist of a number of battleships of varying rates
with a handful of smaller ships attached as couriers and scouts. At Trafalgar
there were 27 line of battle
ships--3 First Raters, 3 Second Raters, and 20 Third Raters.  The
fleet was supported by 4 36-gun frigates, and pair of auxillaries--the
Pickle and the Enterprante of 10 and 8 guns respectively.

Now, if I were to show up to a 3500 point Full Thrust game with 1 superdread,
1 dreadnought, and 5 battleships, and a destroyer people would cry 'munchkin'.
And yet, at one time that was a reasonable force mix. What changed?

The torpedo. Torpedos could sink even quite large ships in one or two hits,
and they could be launched from a small ship.

> From Wikipedia:
***
On 16 January 1877, Turkish steamer Intibah became the first vessel to be sunk
by torpedoes, launched from torpedo boats operating from the tender Velikiy
Knyaz Konstantin under the command of Stepan Osipovich
Makarov during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78.

In another early use of the torpedo, Blanco Encalada was sunk by a torpedo
from the gunboat Almirante Lynch, during the Chilean Civil War on April 23,
1891.

By this time, the torpedo boat had gained recognition for its efficiency, and
the first torpedo boat destroyers were built to counter it. Torpedoes were
also used to equip gunboats making them torpedo gunboats, ships of around
1,000 tons displacment.
***

The Grand Prince was designed to be a mothership to four torpedo boats. The
average torpedo boat about 30 to 50 m in length, armed with up to three
torpedo launchers and small guns and developed speed
of 20 to 30 knots (37 to 56 km/h).

These things were in every single navy's inventory in a brief period of time.
Short construction times, high lethality, minimum manning requirements.

That's what destroyers were invented for. They were invented to keep these
little bastards away from the battleships. No one wanted to bet
that the quickfiring 4-5" guns coming into use as secondary armament
on the 'dreadnoughts' would save a ship that took over a year to build (The
HMS Dreadnought used turrets originally intended for another ship, only spent
four months on the ways, and still took a year and a day to enter service) and
had a crew of over 700.

Then the destroyers started carrying torpedos themselves, and since they could
operate on the high seas where the torpedo boats couldn't, they had a role of
their own. Cruisers zipped around the high seas looking for enemy warships for
the battlefleet (but NOT engaging) and sinking such destroyers as they could
find wandering by themselves. In the big fleet engagement that never happened,
the destroyers were to have fought amongst themselves, any breaking free would
have launched a torpedo attack on the enemy's battleline. But the real
killing would have been done dreadnought-to-dreadnought, everything
else was to have been a sideshow. Of course, because the German High Seas
Fleet came down with galloping cowardice, that big engagement never happened.

Aircraft further altered the equation, with escort ships acting as radar
pickets (to detect incoming air strikes) and layers of
anti-aircraft defense.  The carrier came into prominence as a
generator of aircraft sorties, and the battleship was deemed too vulnerable,
especially as shipkilling was now nearly exclusively done by aircraft (carried
only on huge specialty carriers) and ship to ship missles, which like the
torpedos of the 19th and early 20th century, could be carried on practically
anything. I understand the Norwegians
at one time had or investigated purchasing truck-mounted Hellfires to
use as coastal defenses. The Koma and Osa classes are direct descendants of
those torpedo boats. But they are the main armament of
major warships including so-called destroyers that are actually
cruiser-sized.

Full Thrust doesn't have torpedos.  It doesn't have any one-shot,
one-kill weapons.

A salvo missle salvo will average 12.25 points of damage. 3.5 missles time 3.5
points of damage. 1 salvo fired at by 1 PDS would (asuming
the PDS shoots down 2/3 of a missle on average)  does 9.91 points of
damage. Not shipkilling at all except for small ships. To kill my Kilikis
Superdreadnougt (75 hull 26 armor, 9 PDS) would require 10 salvos that all hit
at the same time and do average damage.

Building a 1-shot SMR vessel might look like this:

Mass factor 14 Hull Type: Average (Hull Integrity 4) Crew Factor 1 Armament:
1xSMR Sensors: Standard sensors, 1xFire Control Drive Systems: Main Drive
rating 6, FTL Drive NPV: 48

Now, you could do this. You could even buy 17 of them for what it
costs me to build a single superdread.  It is rather an all-or-nothing
scenario, because if the superdread survives, it wins. The missle boats might
escape, but the superdread is going to show up at their main base and blow in
into scrap, and without missles those things aren't worth a damn except as
kamikazes.

Now, it seems to be that I have reached one of two conclusions.

Either the points cost for small ships is balanced relative to large ships
(because of the threat of SMR boats like above) or there is no inherent need
for small ships to show up at a playing table. I realize that the latter
conclusion bothers some people who argue that navies will build small ships
for a variety of reasons. And to that, I answer that they are correct. Navies,
or at least successful navies, will not ask those small ships to do things
they cannot do. Small ships cannot exchange volleys with dreadnoughts and only
a damn fool expects them to without some sort of decisive advantage (20th
century torpedos or whatever).

The question is, what do you want to achieve in your game? Do you want to
accept the rules as they are, and work out what the implications would be if
those rules reflected reality? Or do you have some image in your mind of what
starship combat "should" look like and you continually tweak the rules until
you get that result? Because you can't stop people for looking for
advantageous designs based on the rules as you use them. Just like the real
military designers try to get the most firepower out of their equipment given
the laws of physics, limits of current technology, logistical and strategic
considerations, and political constraints.

Adjusting the game balance (by raising points costs for larger ships and
reducing it for smaller ships) means that people will be encouraged to find
strategies to exploit the advantages of smaller ships. If it were adopted,
expect to see a proliferation of designs such as that posted above. One
suggestion I saw somewhere was to change the base cost of the size of ships to
total mass squared, divided by 100. That would cut 12 points off the cost of
that ship, and for the cost of a dreadnought (now 1204 points) I could buy 100
of the little buggers.

Just for "realism" I could use them in waves of only 20?

Wouldn't that be fun? Wheeeeeeeee! I give it two weeks before the list would
be overwhelmed with stories of your opponents mounting pebble on flight bases
to get the required 100 ship models.

Do note that I havn't addressed the question of fighters, mostly because I
don't think anyone is left who hasn't got some sort of 'solution' to the
'fighter question'. I'm going to ignore their existence until such time as Jon
prints new and improved fighter rules, or the beta test rules are given more
official blessing, or
whatever.   And even then, to understand them I'd have to play with
them and I havn't got a chance to do that any time in the next year.

What I'd like to see in this proposed discussion of victory conditions and
scenario design is a discussion of ship preservation. There should be an
incentive to have damaged ships break off and withdraw, and even for the
entire task force to withdraw if things get pearshaped. Especially if your
squadron is primarily capital ships, there has got to be a reason to preserve
that investment. This isn't Honor Harrington here.

Mini-campaign suggestion ala Trillion Credit Squadron:

1> Each force gets 5,000 points 2> Each force must be capable of landing
troops and orbital bombardment 3> Each force is limited to 100 pilots (a pilot
is required for each ship or fighter 4> Use this fleet with the scenario
(mission cards)

Adjust as you need to with your group

[quoted original message omitted]

<uber-snip>
> no one-shot one-skill weapons

Concur. If you want small ships involved, you need to give them a weapon which
might cripple a capital ship in one punch. Otherwise leave the slugging to the
heavies.

> ship preservation

I think the way to do that is to have a "Morale" core system. The admiral may
be willing to sacrifice you, but you may not share that opinion.

Heh. Honor Harrington. It's true, Weber seems to take great enjoyment in
slinging thousands of nuclear bomb-pumped laser devices around space,
and I think it's only been just in the last book or two where even the
slightest hint of worry about preserving limited resources in ships actually
has gotten mentioned even once.

In my own gaming when I used to play this on a regular basis, we had a
fairly free-form design system where you were allowed to bring basically

anything you want within a certain point limit. Yes, this had a tendency to
evolve into a state where somebody would have an enormous temptation to build
a dreadstar with most or all of their point totals. There were, however, a few
fairly serious missions where smaller craft not only were

useful but were very powerful in the battles.

The first mission is the wonderful "banzai boat". Everybody knows what this
guy's out there for. It's an itty bitty, completely expendible ship, often
small enough that if you wanted you could probably stuff it in a spare hangar
bay for giggles and not even bother carrying FTL on the thing, that was
deployed in smallish swarms around larger capital ships in order to eat up
salvo missiles. Because, yeah, if you threw enough salvo missiles at a large
ship, it was usually going to die unless it was so stupidly maneuverable that
you couldn't hit the thing, and in our games, if people
bothered bringing large ships the min-maxing was usually in favor of
heavier armaments capable of punching holes in a small moon rather than
humongous amounts of drive space to keep it zipping between asteroids at will.
Since banzai boats are cheaper than drive systems capable of moving a brown
dwarf around dime sized corners, that's usually the solution I tended to use.

The second mission was as a needle beam striker. There is nothing a dreadstar
fears more than to have a bunch of needle beams outflanking him (or worse,
cloaking and sneaking up behind him) into a position where they can take down
drives and screens and leave them looking like heavily armed metal asteroids
floating through space. Hands down, the shortest Full Thrust games I've ever
been a part of haven't involved my infamous fighter strikes, they've involved
situations where my opponent threw a heavily armed dreadstar battleship at me
with no fighters and no smaller escorts and the
things had drives and/or screens functional for about four turns.  The
only thing that seperates a dreadstar from a more reasonably sized warship in

this case is that it makes a much more expensive sitting duck when it's forced
to surrender to the enemy.

There's other potential missions where I could visualize small craft being
useful. Islamic Fed style suicide bombers with SMRs is one, although those
don't pack as much sheer dread for a larger ship as needle strikers do. If a
starfleet has the resources to waste on ships that have absolutely no real
capability to defend dirtside targets from attack (a need which is simulated
very nicely by forcing people to play on fixed tables) you've got the "Mongol
horse archer" sort of ship with flimsy hulls, high class (i.e. long ranged)
beams and ridiculously high thrust. If needle strikers got dangerous enough
you could even justify bringing FT equivalents of destroyers for much the same
reason as destroyers were invented in real life. I tend to use fighter strikes
to serve this mission myself though, and it's one of the few reasons I would
ever fathom for giving a dreadnought a small fighter complement if it's not
going to bring an additional carrier escort as well to help those fighters
actually be useful against another

capital ship.

But yeah... if you don't have some strategic or tactical reason for using
smaller ships, I don't happen to find it terribly "munchkin" to use primarily
larger ones at all. And if the rules haven't given smaller ships a reason for
existing, that's the fault of the rules set, not the players.
As it is, Full Thrust _does_ give a few reasons why small ships would
want to go near a dreadnought fleet, just that there aren't very many of them,
so unless you've got a scenario (campaign or otherwise) where picket forces of
smaller ships are a real asset, there's not really a whole lot of reason to
bring them if you haven't armed them with something that makes them a real
threat to larger ships. Even at that, it's perhaps an interesting scenario how
a needle striker mission would balance together with a picket mission against
other escort ships the same size, or whether the needle strikers

would have to basically be left as flighty patrollers that run to report at
the first sign of trouble if they ever went out on their own. Alas, it's a
large set of theorizing that would require me to actually get new people to
play with now that I've divorced my old FT buddy's sister.:P

E

> There's other potential missions where I could visualize

Ahem. They're not suicide bombers, they're "Islamic Fed strike boats, crewed
by volunteers who are eager to ascend to Paradise as glorious martyrs". And
they're actually not all that eager. They're intended as cheap pickets,
capable of seriously damaging a CL or smaller and tehreby detrring
raiders. And we're re-fitting them with Heavy Missiles so
they can strike from longer range.