[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.

John
--
"Thousands of Sarmatians, Thousands of Franks, we've slain them again
and again.  We're looking for thousands of Persians."
--Vita Aureliani

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