Did the Successor States have an unofficial agreement to dial back on warships?

[Korzon77]

Okay, in more recent books, we find out that the DCMS for example, had destroyers and that one Samarkand class in orbit--but they were declared as being impossible to reactivagte during the clan war. But they had been mothballed (not very well) due to expense.

But you don't do that if you think you're going to need a weapon-- you keep it, whatever the cost.

Secondly, the lack of transit drives doesn't make much sense--even in 3025 the Successor states were beyond age of war technology and the first warship drives predated that era. It would have been difficult, but it wasn't anything like trying to upkeep star league technology.

So why did they vanish?  I'm going to go with a more or less unofficial agreement.

1. The fleets of the successor lords *did not secure victory*. In the end, the ships were lost, by and large maintaining a stalemate or limited victory.
2. More so than any other conflict, their fleets proved vulnerable to being destroyed.
As a combination of one and two, by the end of the second succession war, Warships could very well be seen as being a more or less bad investment--but one that you might need to make if the other side had made it.

However, because of the destruction of the various warship yards, no power was in a position to build new warships and any attempt to do so would be noted, allowing the other states to either attack it before it was ready, or build their own warships.

However, to do so would be eocnoimcally ruinous, so the various states more or less came to a "I won't build it if you don't" agreement. As the third succession war continued, and the doctrines of limited conflict and war by maneuver rather than war to destruction, new generations of officers grew up, and what had been a pragmatic arrangement became more set,  simply because most leaders and admirals saw the kind of war exemplified by the warship fleets to be both wasteful and ultimately--futile.

[Deadborder]

Despite being Age of War era technology, Warship Transit Drives and Compact KF cores were both lostech by 3025. Comstar had actively suppressed both technologies (Operation HOLY SHROUD et all) to prevent the Successor states from retaining either. Furthermore, no successor state had a capacity to build such (The only yards left that could build a Warship were in the Terra system) or even yards to handle Warships. It was stated in several sources that the only reason that the Successor States were able to start Warship programs in the 3050s was because Comstar gave them the technology to do such.

Just because technology is Age of War era doesn't mean that it can't be LosTech. The Compact KF drive and transit drive were the product of a very different era of technological development and economics to the Succession Wars.

The surviving warships of the Succession Wars era (Such as the aforementioned Samarkand) were inoperable veterans who's transit drives and/or KF drives were nonfunctional with the Successor States having no capability to repair them.

[Dulahan]

The book "First Succession War" describes this in detail.

But in general, during the First Succession War?  Any shipyard that could produce a Warship was a Priority target, and every state knew it.  They didn't survive long.

Worse, most of the shipyards were pretty close to the old Hegemony and thus, right on the front lines and easy targets to boot.  There was something about why most were there that had to do with the Amaris era.  But I forget those details.

Anyways, the point is, the start of the First Succession War?  There were 900 warships amongst the states.  By the end?  There was around 30, and barely any surviving jumpshipyards period (And none of them able to make a warship).  Moreso, they were, as was said above, the most expensive part of the military, and just not worth it.

[Dayton3]

Once you don't have other warships to fight there is not that much push to build them.     Like no nation today building big gun battleships anymore even though they would be useful for shore bombardment.   

[I am Belch II]

They attacked and blasted everyone of them to peices. That and other tech was blasted back to the stone ages.

[Garrand]

I think the reason no one builds big gun battleships anymore is because if you are wealthy enough & powerful enough to build capital ships, you build aircraft carriers. Much more bang for the buck!

I think another factor to consider is that the Succession Wars absolutely shattered the economies of the IS. If it came down to C-bills, the successor states had the choice to build either more warships, or another regiment (or several!) of mechs. In the end mechs hold territory whereas warships don't, and the various powers probably didn't have the resources to to both...

Damon.

[Challenger]

The problem with the economic arguement is the haste with which warships were built once the drives stopped being lost tech.

Ultimately the canon arguement stands, the Inner Sphere stopped using warships because there was noone left who remembered how to build/maintain their drives.

Challenger

[Moonsword]

Ladies and gentlemen, the analogies to contemporary military naval procurement strategy need to stop.

[Nicoli]

I think that for the most part they all realized that warships become less effective the more you have. There are plenty of options out there to counter them; however, as long as you don't have too many targets for those counters they are not really effective to always keep around.

I would be interested to see if a Heavy Compact K-F drive wouldn't come into being something that would allow the construction of a proper armored jumpship.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

The problem with the economic arguement is the haste with which warships were built once the drives stopped being lost tech.

That was because the Federated Commonwealth and Draconis Combine suddenly had neighbors with warships and felt the intense need to have warships of their own, since they didn't really know any better ways to counter them.  And since they were building ships, suddenly the FWL and CC needed warships.

Then the FedCom Civil War and Jihad happened, and the Successor States started finding out about the real cost of warships when they started losing them in combat.

[marauder648]

I'd say that a kind of gentlemanly agreement did play a part of it, but mainly it was the sheer cost.  Something tells me that even without Comstar murdering all the scientists they could and doing other shenanigans AN UNEXPECTEDLY LARGE NUMBER OF GAS OVEN FIRES AND CAR CRASHES.  Then the Houses might well have been able to brute force their way to make a drive system or something. 

But with the fact that WarShips were in part responsible for them all being in the position they were in in terms of technology and factories etc, then it was a case of "If you don't build them, then we don't."

[Dulahan]

Note also, the fleet engagements of the First Succession War?  Pretty much dwarf any fleet actions of the Jihad.  We're talking a couple with over a hundred warships and a couple hundred combat capable drop ships... on EACH SIDE.

[Iracundus]

How to Make Warships Great Again? 

If the battles to overthrow Amaris and then the fleet battles of the 1st SSW didn't obsolete Mechs, I don't see why we can't try to find a way to have both stompy robot and Warship battles again.

[marauder648]

Very true, even the battle for the Sol system in the Jihad would be seen as a moderate clash between modest sized forces compared to the Jutland esque battles of the 1st Succession War. 

Where there any major fleet clashes during the Amaris Civil War, not counting actions against the SDS drones, but the fleet of the Amaris Empire that is.

[idea weenie]

I think the reason no one builds big gun battleships anymore is because if you are wealthy enough & powerful enough to build capital ships, you build aircraft carriers. Much more bang for the buck!

I think another factor to consider is that the Succession Wars absolutely shattered the economies of the IS. If it came down to C-bills, the successor states had the choice to build either more warships, or another regiment (or several!) of mechs. In the end mechs hold territory whereas warships don't, and the various powers probably didn't have the resources to to both...

I think the second factor here is the more critical one.  Warships are built to deny ground stuff to the enemy (and kill other Warships), while ground forces are used to grab ground stuff and use it for yourself.

(Ground stuff = factories, design labs, chemical centers, advanced refineries, etc.  Aka all the good stuff that goes into an industrial economy)

During the 1st and 2nd Succession Wars, there was plenty of ground stuff to be destroyed on both sides, and Warships had fun.  As the 3rd Succession war started up, leaders realized that the other guy's ground stuff was needed for their own empire to survive, and they needed ground troops to grab it.  At the same time, it was obvious the another Successor state was managing to sabotage their Warship repair yards, so by splitting up the military construction among ~dozen Mech factories instead of a single Warship yard, it would be harder for the opponent to get lucky.

[Gaiiten]

Waships do have a very bad cost-benefit calculation.
Pocket warships and PWS carrier warships are the future, imho.

[Dayton3]

I wonder if the retaking of Terra during the Amaris Civil War also argued against large scale building of warships as well?   IIRC the Reagan Defense System and its network of "Caspars"  drone warships really did a number on the Star League fleet carrying the invasion force to Earth which shows that even a huge force of warships is vulnerable when attacking a single point target which has massive defenses.

[Dulahan]

I wonder if the retaking of Terra during the Amaris Civil War also argued against large scale building of warships as well?   IIRC the Reagan Defense System and its network of "Caspars"  drone warships really did a number on the Star League fleet carrying the invasion force to Earth which shows that even a huge force of warships is vulnerable when attacking a single point target which has massive defenses.

The answer to that is No.  Post Amaris all 5 houses went on a Warship building spree.

[chaosticket]

Warships have few applications and fewer practical ones.

#1 Space Superiority, even one warship means you can dominate a region unless another Warship can contend.

#2 planetary destruction. Any weapon capable of traveling through space is a large enough scale to be outside of typical warfare and instead of considered a weapon of mass destruction.

#3 Prestige. Warships being as costly and time consuming to make as well how powerful they are means they are mobile signs of power.

Like the real world Battleships are a nice idea but the cost to build and maintain even one is considerably larger that what it takes to destroy one. The cost of one warship is enough to build an army of battlemechs, themselves extremely expensive.

Star Wars kind of got it right in the expanded universe as warships were highly effective in smaller engagements where they were the "top dogs" and otherwise is symbols of power and/or terror.

[Nightlord01]

Warships have few applications and fewer practical ones.

#1 Space Superiority, even one warship means you can dominate a region unless another Warship can contend.

#2 planetary destruction. Any weapon capable of traveling through space is a large enough scale to be outside of typical warfare and instead of considered a weapon of mass destruction.

#3 Prestige. Warships being as costly and time consuming to make as well how powerful they are means they are mobile signs of power.

Like the real world Battleships are a nice idea but the cost to build and maintain even one is considerably larger that what it takes to destroy one. The cost of one warship is enough to build an army of battlemechs, themselves extremely expensive.

Star Wars kind of got it right in the expanded universe as warships were highly effective in smaller engagements where they were the "top dogs" and otherwise is symbols of power and/or terror.

You clearly aren't seeing how modern warships are employed, which is more or less exactly how BT warships would be employed.

Warships tend to have large cargo holds, making them good for HADR tasking, they can pinpoint bombard an area on a planet allowing them to take out entrenched defences, they can actually ensure your combat forces get to land. Weapon of mass destruction is an emotive term, there's not a single weapon out there that can't have unintended casualties There's plenty of uses for warships, more than there is for a battlemech, truth be told.

Simply put, there's few to no warships because the Devs don't like them, that's fair enough, but lets call a spade a spade here. Warships make sense in universe, even with pocket warships and fighter spam being around, there is always room for the largest assets. They may be limited to only the richest nations (which is probably one of the reasons the Devs don't like them), but those richest nations would be building those ships if for no other reason than it leads to a massive asymmetry of force in the battle space. Thus other rich nations will also build them, just to keep pace, leading to proliferation of warships among nations that can afford them.

[Daryk]

And proliferation of nuclear anti-ship missiles to counter them...

[Sartris]

warships are limited in-universe because space combat is a peripheral element of the game. you can't focus on big stompy robot goodness if you focus on the massive space battles that have to take place to insert / deny insertion of ground forces

Scenario Rules:
Roll a 2d6 for each dropship. On a 8+, that dropship was destroyed before landing and those forces are not available to you forever.

[marcussmythe]

Okay, in more recent books, we find out that the DCMS for example, had destroyers and that one Samarkand class in orbit--but they were declared as being impossible to reactivagte during the clan war. But they had been mothballed (not very well) due to expense.

But you don't do that if you think you're going to need a weapon-- you keep it, whatever the cost.

Secondly, the lack of transit drives doesn't make much sense--even in 3025 the Successor states were beyond age of war technology and the first warship drives predated that era. It would have been difficult, but it wasn't anything like trying to upkeep star league technology.

So why did they vanish?  I'm going to go with a more or less unofficial agreement.

1. The fleets of the successor lords *did not secure victory*. In the end, the ships were lost, by and large maintaining a stalemate or limited victory.
2. More so than any other conflict, their fleets proved vulnerable to being destroyed.
As a combination of one and two, by the end of the second succession war, Warships could very well be seen as being a more or less bad investment--but one that you might need to make if the other side had made it.

However, because of the destruction of the various warship yards, no power was in a position to build new warships and any attempt to do so would be noted, allowing the other states to either attack it before it was ready, or build their own warships.

However, to do so would be eocnoimcally ruinous, so the various states more or less came to a "I won't build it if you don't" agreement. As the third succession war continued, and the doctrines of limited conflict and war by maneuver rather than war to destruction, new generations of officers grew up, and what had been a pragmatic arrangement became more set,  simply because most leaders and admirals saw the kind of war exemplified by the warship fleets to be both wasteful and ultimately--futile.

Attempting to explain it in universe, with economics, will just kill catgirls.  We can extinguish them up through 3025 by assuming loss of means of production - all the population in the 'sphere wont build you a compact core if noone knows how to build compact cores.

But by 3050 that Memory-Core Powered Cat Girl was out of the bag, and nothing can put it back in.  Houses WERE cranking out warships, though with fumbling baby steps as they work out the kinks and bring yards back online.

Then the PTB used the Wobblies to clean up all the warships and their factories (barring of course the Clans, cause... Clans).   This gets your numbers back under control for a while. 

But between the Jyhad and 3145?  I got nothin.  The knowledge base exists.  Warships are proven to be terrifyingly powerful, and Snow Raven and Ghost Bear are known to HAVE the things.  My only guess is the Succession Lords assumed that, no really, this time we mean it, the wars are over and the good times are here and it will never happen again.

The justification for a lack of warships is that the game is called Battletech and its about Mechs, and the PTB believe that Warships will take away from mechs (A proposition about which I have opinions, but no proof - and if I wanted to make those decisions, Id make a lot of money and buy the company.  And probably run it into the ground).  Heck, the MECH numbers can only be explained in the 3025 era.. everything after that exists in a tension between 'Lets upgrade and pretend weve got real militaries run by people who care about winning' and 'War as Sport of Kings and YOUR DUDES CAPTURE WORLDS'. 

This was chosen in favor of Your Dudes.  And once youve decided that Your Game is about Your Dudes, sacrificing that aura (and sales) in the name of having the universe make sense is a fools errand.  For ever BTech player that scratches their head and goes 'hunh', theres 100 more who just want to play the game, and they buy books too.  They are, and as a buisness case SHOULD, be the focus.

So if you want warships, economics, science, or logic, write an AU.  If you want to make money selling a game about stompy robits and YOUR DUDES, write Battletech. 

This is not a criticism.  If they want to keep the company going (and we want them to), you have to make money.

[Daryk]

In the vein of that AU, seriously... check out Drakensis' just finished magnum opus down in Fan Fiction (Davion and Davion (Deceased)).

[Dulahan]

"Terrifyingly powerful" but still vulnerable.

Part of why they stopped being made was Assault Dropships, Fighters with Nukes, lots of ways to kill them that weren't warships.

Heck, the Clan Invasion got a big reprieve because of a fighter crashing into a warship's bridge.  So yeah, just not the best investment beyond certain situations.

[chaosticket]

You clearly aren't seeing how modern warships are employed, which is more or less exactly how BT warships would be employed.

Warships tend to have large cargo holds, making them good for HADR tasking, they can pinpoint bombard an area on a planet allowing them to take out entrenched defences, they can actually ensure your combat forces get to land. Weapon of mass destruction is an emotive term, there's not a single weapon out there that can't have unintended casualties There's plenty of uses for warships, more than there is for a battlemech, truth be told.

Simply put, there's few to no warships because the Devs don't like them, that's fair enough, but lets call a spade a spade here. Warships make sense in universe, even with pocket warships and fighter spam being around, there is always room for the largest assets. They may be limited to only the richest nations (which is probably one of the reasons the Devs don't like them), but those richest nations would be building those ships if for no other reason than it leads to a massive asymmetry of force in the battle space. Thus other rich nations will also build them, just to keep pace, leading to proliferation of warships among nations that can afford them.

Those uses dont have as much relevance when it comes to spaceships against planets. Its still much cheaper to build defenses like missile silos. A Great big battleship cant take over a planet by itself. Their holds are filled with military forces. Firing at entrenched positions misses the point that battletech avoids those. From mechanized infantry, armored vehicles, battlemechs, aerospace forces, dropships. About the only static objectives are ones you dont want to fire on, mostly the infrastructure like battlemech factories.

Now if you want to blow up cities sure warships are great. You could just make unarmed drone ships and send them into kamikaze runs and have massive damage that can wrecks planets.

Warships costs Billions of C-bills. Battlemechs cost Millions. Cheaper combat vehicles costs less than a million.

The Jihad VS Warships can pretty much just be explained as Word of Blake nuking every ship.

In real life World War 1 was shown to have a massive military buildup and then quickly turn into anti-climaxes. The Battle of Jutland in 1917 was the largest concentration of battleships and by the end of it battleships as a factor. They still made them at a far smaller size for various reasons. a Large factor was proliferation of torpedoes and carriers. a much cheaper and smaller carrier could launch planes capable of destroying a battleship. Battleships never became cost-effective.

Now in universe its mostly about the loss of military grade shipyards to produce the warships. Jumpship shipyards are just transport vessels and even those are extremely valuable.

To clear warships are not useless. Even a weak warship would still be useful for fire support. The thing is the resources to make even a single warship could instead build an army, and not every planet has any defense at all let alone Warships.

[Alsadius]

If we want an in-game justification for ships not being common, just bring back Castles Brian. Heavily armored ground-to-space weaponry will deny the orbitals to most WarShips, and then they can't do the crazy bombardment stuff that murders Mechs by the thousand. They can dominate the space lanes away from planets, and blockade effectively, but they can't blow out the defenders easily. Combat drops to take out fortresses become a major part of gameplay, and that's a great Alpha Strike scenario.

What good is one Lev-III if you have a hundred HNPPCs on ground? You can build those hundred for less than a billion C-bills($905M for the guns alone, but the mounts and armor are probably cheap), so the economics works too. You can protect ~40 planets against a gigantic battleship with a good chance of success, for about the same cost as that one battleship. The BS is more flexible, but the ground defences can be spread fairly widely. Spend the same amount on fixed defences as you spend on the fleet, and Mechs will still have a huge role to play.

You'll need options for landing them in the teeth of ground fire, but I can think of a few good options for that off the top of my head - rules for high-speed passing runs that drop combat units, stealth armor for space units, and small craft equipped as drop shuttles come to mind.

[marcussmythe]

"A Ships a Fool who Fights a Fort"

Only concern - those Castles Brian NPPCs are going to sweep the sky of Dropships, too.  I think we have to make our anti-ship defense weapon be something that makes you hate having a K-F Core.

[Daryk]

Nukes are the best anti-ship weapons, hands down.  Generally, those aren't something you want to be firing close to your planet.

[Charistoph]

Nukes are the best anti-ship weapons, hands down.  Generally, those aren't something you want to be firing close to your planet.

Only if there is a chance they could hit the planet.  Detonating them in the magnetic fields does some very interesting things...