Inspired by that excellent "Byzantium" series on Channel 4 (UK), I dug out my
WRG "Armies of the Dark Ages" book to have a look at the Byzantine Thematic
system. The "Themes" were the "Military Districts" of the Empire, responsible
for defence on both land and sea. There was an Imperial standing army (and
navy), of elite status units collectively known as the Tagmata, and each theme
provided a set number of troops (and ships where appropriate). The Thematic
troops were divided into 1st and 2nd classes, the latter only suitable as
police, and were supported by land grants and a regular (but infrequent and
often inadequate) cash grant from central funds. Large portions of the armed
forces were provided by foreign mercenaries.
This seems to me like a pretty reasonable way to run an SF empire, with Themes
consisting of a small group of planets under a governor. The Thematic forces
might include patrol vessels on merchant hulls (2nd class), with some
reasonable cruisers and escorts as the 1st class forces, and almost all of the
really heavy units belonging to the Tagmata.
> On Fri, 19 Sep 1997, Robin K Paul wrote:
> Inspired by that excellent "Byzantium" series on Channel 4 (UK), I dug
This sounds very cool - and could be a good campaign basis, with players
as Sector Governors/Sector Admirals/whatever, with orders to make war
upon
the enemy and stuff. It would get rid of a lot of diplomatic/admin BS,
and allow players to concentrate on the front line instead of the bottom
line...
Sept. 23, 1997
Dear SCI list:
Happy Fall everyone.
The below person -- Garnet -- is not a member. Garnet is a relative
of a psychiatric survivor and he is going through a rough time involving his
mother, who is an electroshock survivor. Anyone want
to chat with him by e-mail? I've sent him info about group, etc. If
you e-mail him, tell him you're a Support Coalition.
Good news: I got an update from Garnet and he said that as far as he knows his
mother is not NOW receiving electroshock. She's in Ohio.
If you do choose to respond, please tell the list you're doing so, so we don't
innundate him with mail. Thanks
[quoted original message omitted]
What a strange question for a miniatures games mailing list!
If you're using UNIX, the "-p" flag should preserve the permissions.
> From the SunOS man page for cp (1):
-p, --preserve
Preserve the original files' owner, group, permissions, and timestamps.
-R, --recursive
Copy directories recursively.
If you're using a different flavor of UNIX, you should read the man page to
see if the same flags will work.
another thought on the question of realistic fleets- in the past, a
couple of us here have considered the Napoleonic era as a source of
inspiration, and produced a few conversion systems. I was looking at a fleet
list for the RN in 1804, and the thought struck me that the Napoleonic
"standard
battleship", the 74-gun 3rd rate ship, could be equated to the FT
standard
battleship (Mass-48). This gives a conversion factor (extra simple, and
ignoring huge differences in broadside weight!) of "Guns x 0.648648649" = FT
Mass. This turns out to work remarkably well; a 100-gun 1st rate gets
a
Mass of 64; most frigates become light or escort cruisers; 28-gun 6th
rates are mass-18, with assorted unrated sloops etc being escort sized.
The
biggest ship of the time, the 130-gun Santissima Trinidad, is Mass-84.
If
USS Constitution is considered a Mass-36 superheavy cruiser, she comes
out at "55.5" guns, which is pretty close to the truth!
At this time, the RN had 94 74-gun ships, and 8-900 vessels altogether.