Group Design Challenge: WarShip Arms Race

[marcussmythe]

Its interesting that our ASF designs are focusing on the 80-90 6/9 design space.

May make my next one either a straight up Lyran Recce Bird, or flip to the interceptor end of the design spectrum... something in a 30 ton 10/15, maybe?  But without terrain or TMM, with +2 free thrust and overthrust forcing control rolls - I have trouble justifying anything but the biggest, meanest ASFs in 150 ton Fighter Bays.

Maybe a redesign of the aerospace rules needs a light fighter bay - or to simply unify carried tonnage of fighters!  “A ship may operate X tons of ASF and SC for every 1.5X of mass devoted to bays”

The ‘grand unified ship charts’ are cool, and Im glad to have them.  Lets keep a grain of salt for them, though... most notably, throw weight is absolute value of weapons, which makes NACs, espc big NACs and Missiles over-valued (Range and Ammo/Intercept Issues, respectively), while making Naval Lasers, PPCs and (eventually) Gauss Rifles appesr low value, due to not reflecting accuracy.

[marcussmythe]

Several nations basically don't believe in Dropships.

Problem with droppers is cost.  300M for a (relative to warships) eggshell carrying 12 fighters (or equivalent mission load) is pushing the boundaries of good sense, IMHo.  Consider how much you can do with say a 6 or 9B CBill Warship compared to 20-30 Small Droppers.  Now, medium and (especially!) Large droppers go a long way to fixing this... the 1B Large dropper is a thing of real value, and the relative flexibility probably makes droppers a defensible choice once you hit mediums.  But...

.8 B per collar.  By the time you've brought 12 dropships on collars, the collars could have bought a battleship.  But you say, Im taking my losses on droppers, not warships, and the collars survive!  Yes... -if- Droppers could out-perform their cost in warships ‘naked’, without having to worry about FTL costs.  Nothing indicates that is the case.

Now - flexibility is still a thing.  10 Collars full of droppers could be troop landings.  It could be fuel.  It could be 10 Droppers worth of anything.  That has value.  Its landing troops in giant armored boxes instead of in drop chutes or small craft landers (I think small craft landeds are a better idea, but reasonable minds differ).  This could be good.

And droppers can ride on Jumpships, greatly lowering the FTL cost... but adding a vulnerability. 

Eventually, the LF Battery will come along and greatly escalate the already no-joke Collar costs - to the point where even with militarized behemoths hanging off them, I can’t make it work in my head.   This leaves us with a ‘slow’ fleet, maybe with collars for big droppers, a fleet mix of fast and slow, focusing collars on slow ships, or an all fast (LF fleet) likely without collars, though the Hegemony might well choose ‘less, more flexible/faster’ ships, because when your budget is infinite and your foes outweighed 10:1, you are more interested in covering -every- capability and having -no- vulnerabilities that might be exploited than you are in scrabbling for every advantage and taking bad trade-offs like the mere mortals.  :D

[Alsadius]

Yeah, the economics of DS are problematic. I suspect medium-sized DS will help a lot with that - quadrupling cargo or tripling carrier capacity for +67% cost(or more like +20% if you count the collar) is a much more attractive proposition. By the time we get to L-F batteries I think I'll have enough of a grasp on how the cost calculations work in practice to judge whether I want to amend the rules or not. Tripling the K-F cost is just so crippling. It's already $802M for a WarShip to add a single collar by my count($80,200,000 to base KF drive cost, x5 for a compact drive, x2 for a WarShip hull), and if it's $2.4B that's just nutty. I might do something like make it a flat billion(so $2B net on a WarShip) to add a L-F battery, in the hopes that people will use them for something other than a dedicated scout/raider. (Alternately, I might just tell you that the cost is staying the same but you can charge both drives at once, to double strategic flexibility. IDK.)

In the same vein, I've given some thought to making a tech unlock reduced maintenance costs. No promises yet, but in the short term I'm going to merge all three laser types into a single tech instead of making SL/ML and LL separate, and juggle a few things thereafter. That'll give me room to add new techs to the game. It might just be Invasion-era stuff that's appropriate for a Age of War-era game, but tech is feeling like it has a lower impact and less player buy-in than I hoped for. I want to have a bit more flexibility, because I want to fix that, and I also want to have the freedom to make big changes without needing to simply change the ground rules by decree.

[marcussmythe]

Its... gonna be hard to get buy in on tech, at least under the rules we have.

You pay money, to get a no better than 1 in 6 chance (inasmuch as the the Hegemony wins at will) chance of having a technology 1 turn earlier than everyone else.

Then, once you have that technology, there has to be a conflict during your 1 turn advantage.  Most nations dont have fights most turns, so now your at spending real CBills for a 1 in 12 to 1 in 18 chance of it mattering.

Then, come the turn in question, it has to matter -as much or more- than the 12 to 18 turns worth of expenditures would have.  Very few technologies on the list offer that sort of advantage - most of them are relatively meaningless upgrades to fighter scale weaponry. Theres a few big ones (Armor is huge, bearings only will be huge, LF Batteries are a game changer).  But outside of those (and that suggests strategic shopping based on player foreknowledge) - who wants to be the guy who threw away a few cruisers worth of CBills to have LB-X Autocannons a turn early?

As a side issue, the single most important technology existed at game on.  Naval Accept No Substitutes Autocannon.  Cheap, flexible, more damage efficient than anything rlse and varying from the biggest point blank boom out to nearly as long range (and far moee damage and cost efficient) than the naval energy weapons, NACs are simply too good.  Not ‘break the game’ too good, but certainly ‘Medium lasers and PPCs in 3025’ too good - if your not using them, have a good reason!

RE:  Lithium Fusion - even if you cant double-charge, the double jump instant response and tactical FTL are huge.  And I never understood why one could not charge the core off of the sail and the batteries off of the Fusions (or vice versa).  Or hang a double sized sail.  Or run your fusions more and feed both.  Or run two sets of hardlines from a station.

Reducing Maintenance:  Might be interesting.  Another thought would be to tie warship maintenance to mass rather than construction cost - and perhaps climb faster than size goes up, such that the expensive to build small ships are cheap to makntain, and the battlewagons are cheap to build but hard to keep in space?

Heres one:  Exclude collars from maintenance cost, and put in tech to lower dropship COST (but leave maintenance alone).  Then collars make sense on long lived ships, and Droppers are (relatively) expendable attrition units.

We know that as much as we worship the Holy CBill (all hail!) here, in-universe component costs cannot be static - I give you proof in the form of the mere existence of XXL equipped mechs, or the fact that a CERPPC costs the same as its IS Cousin.

Wanna see tech expenditures go up?  Announce whats being researched, blind auction it in PMs, and give the winner exlusivity for a while.  How long?  Lets say default 10 turns, and for every full 10% of the winning bid you put up, you get it one turn sooner.

Then allow espionage to play catchup, but at increased cost - say 2-1.  And maybe give the Capellans 1-1 Espionage, cause Capellan.

[truetanker]

My Trojan MK2 has a twin, Smeg.  :thumbsup:

I might not be able to post for awhile, work has me doing massive amounts of hours for the next month. Just assume I'm watching. Hard numbers when Internet and new Laptop battery arrives.

TT

DON'T EAT ME YOU PURPLE BYRD!!!

[truetanker]

Then allow espionage to play catchup, but at increased cost - say 2-1.  And maybe give the Capellans 1-1 Espionage, cause Capellan.

I second this, but give us the ability to go after SAFE as they have a sucky counterintelligence. LOKI should also get this, but their a bit stronger... need more booze and gold than normal!

 :))

TT

[Lagrange]

W.r.t. LF batteries, they already allow concurrent charging according to TO page 323, as long as you have multiple power sources amongst {Sail, Fusion Drive, Energy Recharge Battery}.  This means that moving twice as fast is routinely possible with an LF-core.  Restated, you can reach a factor of 8 more volume with an LF drive (or a factor of 4 given the planarization of stars in BT).  It's actually somewhat better than this because you can more routinely shortcut through uninhabited systems.   Doing Sail + Fusion Drive for example should be easy, and it provides much stronger motivation for energy recharge batteries.  Overall, the price of LF is high at x3, but at the same time if it's reduced by any significant amount it becomes a must-have rather than a plausible design choice.

Dropships are quite noneconomical right now, although I agree that will change in the future with large dropships.  Cost is a significant factor, but another very significant factor here is the fact that design does not matter.  If design mattered, significantly more value would be eaked out of dropships and dropcollars would naturally become a more preferred option.  Overall, this seems like an issue that will simply go away over time, and it seems fine to have different nations pursuing different strategies at this time.

W.r.t Research, I agree that the optimal strategy is to go with 'zero' given the current rules.  I've left it pegged at 1% of the budget for the TC on the theory that this justifies reverse-engineering developed tech and that wild swings in research dollars are counterproductive.  For more realistic rules:

• The winner of a tech's research sets the cost of the tech at 1/2 the cost of their research budget since they last won a tech.  The idea here is that multiple directions were pursued before double-down on the useful thing.
• Other nations can hear about the tech, but they do not automatically get it.   Instead, they must use directed research (a separate budget) at the tech's price or steal it at a price of full/(# nations with tech).
  
• Salvage of working systems of unknown tech makes reverse engineering 1/10th cost.

Edit: This approach satisfies several realistic properties.

• You generally don't know how much research is necessary in advance to do something, unless it has already been done.
• Much of research is exploratory, so if you know exactly what your end state is before you start, it's cheaper to get there (half price here).
• As a technology proliferates, it becomes easier to acquire.
• Salvage of real systems is super-helpful in replicating them.

It also makes research significantly more desirable since proliferation is not automatic.

[Kiviar]

Cost is a significant factor, but another very significant factor here is the fact that design does not matter.  If design mattered, significantly more value would be eaked out of dropships and dropcollars would naturally become a more preferred option.

I have been on Alsadius' case from day one about making dropships non-generic for this exact reason. Aerospace fighters I can accept because that would be a pretty big nightmare to organize, but having the design of dropships not matter not only cuts us out from 1/3 of the design field in a game about design, but it also leads us to situations where players can just ignore one the most iconic vehicles in the setting because it is not efficient.

As it stands, even light dropships aren't really that bad. A typical Federated Suns fleet has the collars to carry about 12 of them, and assuming they are all Rainbows that is 48 barracudas, 192 ac5s, 552 machine guns, 72 aerospace fighters and 16000ish armour. Deploying them may be roughly the cost of a class 4 ship, but, you are getting a lot more versatility and mobility with them than a single battleship is going to give you.

But ultimately I think we need to remember that we aren't fighting TT games here, so WAAC thinking is ultimately just going to hurt the experience, as, nobody is really going to 'win' anyway.

[marcussmythe]

On the flip side - they arent proven inefficient enough that noone uses them - I mah in fact be wrong!  And I enjoy having diversity in fleet concepts.

[Lagrange]

To the extent that the Tick is an exception to the "dropships are abstract" rule, the ability to make dropships explicit was obviously super-helpful for the overall RGW design. 

[Alsadius]

I figured that the tech auction system would result in the price finding a natural level. If it's too expensive at $15B total invested per turn, people stop until it's at $5B(or whatever). That said, I don't think it's really worked like that - it seems to be more of a fluff investment for most people, not a game-optimal one. Thinking about it, I think I might have a better system:

Tech is divided into three fields - Miniaturization, Strengthening, and Advancement. Miniaturization is heavy on mech-sized weapons, but also includes things like mobile HPGs. Strengthening is big on armour and increased scale of construction. Advancement is blue-sky tech, or substantial jumps to existing tech that aren't really smaller or stronger. (Yes, these fields are a bit vague. That's intentional - it lets me keep them fairly balanced, and it means it's not totally obvious which tech is in which category, to discourage excessive targeting.)

Each player's research budget is divided up between the three fields. Each turn there will be a roll in each field for each player. If a tech is found in that field, your research budget there is reset and you get the tech. If it's not found, the research budget carries over to the next turn. Yes, this means you can discover up to three techs a turn(though I expect an average of 1-2 instead). I want to get to all the cool 2700s techs before we all get bored or too busy to continue, and that might help.

Each player researches independently. However, to allow for spread, the base cost of a tech is reduced by 10% per turn since discovery, plus 20% if a neighbour has it and a further 30% if you've salvaged it from them in battle. There's still no espionage (consider any spying efforts to be part of your research budget), but for really important techs, you might wind up launching an attack for the sole purpose of trying to blow up something that carries it.

I referred to the "base cost" of a tech, not the "cost". It's not a cost system per se - it remains a raffle system. If the base cost of a tech is $2,000m, that basically means that 2,000 raffle ballots saying "You lose!" are put into the draw. If you invest $1,000m into that field, that's 1,000 ballots with "You win!" on them, which means a 1/3 chance of winning. If you don't get it, then those 1000 ballots carry over, plus any additional that you invest on the next turn. If you invest another billion, you now have 2000 ballots, for a 50/50 chance of winning(or better, if your neighbour discovered it since then)

So, a few questions for the crowd:
1) Is this more interesting?
2) Am I worrying too much about obfuscation? I want to avoid "Oh, the next turn is improved armor, I'll snap that up for sure!", but I'm not sure secrecy is the right play there.
3) Would you feel like I was taking options away from you by essentially forcing you to buy research every turn?
4) Is the faster tech pace something you'd like to see?

[marcussmythe]

1.)  Interesting.
2.)  Computational overhead/bookkeeping concern?
3.)  Major midstream rules change - pro/con.
4.)  Willing to give it a try.

[Smegish]

While I'm not a huge fan of changing rules mid-game, that particular change, combined with the opportunity to have some new piece of tech long enough  to get an advantage out of it looks good to me. The big issue would be bookkeeping, but most of us are already running spreadsheets in various forms to track this game anyway, so shouldn't be too big a hassle.

The costs coming down based on time since discovery and for each neighbour with it gives me a strong Europa Universalis vibe, which I'm good with.

[Alsadius]

Re #3, to be clear the tech being researched this turn would still work under the old system. It'll be discovered in 2409, exclusive to the discoverer for 2410-2419, and universally available in 2420. But research budgets for next turn would work under the new system.

Re #2, it'll be somewhat more. But with a decent spreadsheet, I don't think it'll be too bad. I feel like having a chance at any of the next 2-3 techs might be better than security through obscurity, but that means bookkeeping of a different sort to replace it, and I have to figure out which tech you get. But it means I can offload the record-keeping onto the player base if I need to, because I don't need to keep stuff hidden.

Hypothetical system: Costs of each tech are somewhat higher, but every turn you roll against the next three techs in order within each category. You'll usually get the oldest(since it'll be cheapest, and you'll have first crack at it), but if you miss then you get a chance at the next one, and the one after. This does mean you can blow a chance at reverse engineering something you salvaged and get an unrelated tech instead, but that actually seems kind of realistic.

Oh, also, one wrinkle I didn't add above. If we ever get to 1SW levels of saturation nuking, I might throw tech loss ballots in as a penalty for damage taken. If those hit, you lose access to a tech you've previously unlocked. Seems like a good way to model a dark age, IMO, which the current system can't do.

[Lagrange]

1) More interesting, and modestly more realistic.
2) Overhead is not a concern.
3) Either way.
4) This will make tech advancements significantly more difficult for the TC given the budget disparity---I'd estimate 60-70 years behind or 30-40 years behind if salvage is relevant.  This also seems to shift a bit to far towards nonproliferation compared to modern human history.

The history of nuclear weapons on Earth:
July 16 1945: United States Trinity Test
T+4 years, .86GDP: Soviet proliferation
T+7 years, 0.021GDP: British proliferation (Involved in manhattan project)
T+15 years, 0.027GDP: French proliferation
T+19 years, 0.025GDP: China proliferation
T+22 years, 0.0017GDP: Israel proliferation (Estimated, not officially acknowledged)
T+25 years, NPT goes into effect.
T+29 years, 0.039GDP: India proliferation
T+53 years, 0.027GDP: Pakistan proliferation
T+61 years, 0.017GDP: North Korea proliferation

Drawing analogies, the United States was a TH level superpower coming out of WWII, so there was proliferation to two 'house' militaries within the first decade, two more within another decade, and then two significant peripheral powers within 3 decades.  Even with extremely active attempts by existing powers to disrupt further proliferation it spread to relatively minor countries in 5-6 decades.  I'd peg the TC as a 'significant peripheral power', so it would be nice if the TC could be only 30 years behind the TH, and it should be significantly less so with battle salvage (none of which occurred in the case of nuclear weapons above).  Given the factor of 60 disparity in budgets between TH and TC, you can see why I'm assuming the TC will acquire techs at 0-10% of the base cost.

[marcussmythe]

Its certainly slow proliferation - and thats gonna be hard on everyone who isnt the Terran Hegemony or a very rich IS power.

OTOH - How long did it take the entire Inner Sphere to start meaningful production of clan grade equipment?

If its not a long (long) potential advantage, though, noones going to bother to spend meaningful money on R&D, because even the biggest game changers really arent.  We could freeze tech right now and build navies that could give anything possible in the rules a real fight, even if built to 3150 standards.  Theyd be outclassed, yes, but as discussed - NACs never go out of style, and the many billions saved over those turns would go a long way to redressing the balance.

Ultimately, while I think its a neat idea, the tech curve just feels too flat to me on Capital Weaponry to get us to want to chase tech, other than for fluff purposes - if we saw the kind of changes that lead from ‘AC/5s’ to ‘DHS XL Engine TComp CERPPC/iATM’, well, that would be different.  But the best guns for Naval Combat were in service at game on, Manuver Drives never improve... armor does, radically, and LF Batteries change the world - but thats about it.

[Lagrange]

If proliferation is not automatic but rather costs money, then people will certainly spend money on research for useful techs at whatever rate makes sense given the cost. 

The remaining issue is the number of useful techs.  I don't know a general answer here, but for the many ASF-scale weapons which plausibly don't matter, there is an alternative mostly consistent with the battles so far.  Declare that capitol scale armor subtracts 10% of it's value (i.e. 1% of the standard scale value) from a weapon's incoming damage. Thus 20 capital armor (i.e a Kutai) grants immunity to an AC/2 or MG and significant resistance to an AC/5.  When an AC/10 comes along, that matters for warship design, and an AC/20 even more so as you need 200 capital armor to resist.

Edit: I added an estimate of GDP (in current dollars) of the countries at the time of nuclear proliferation.   This seems to be consistent with the cost dropping by about an order of magnitude/decade until the NPT came into effect which raised the cost significantly.   Presumably, production creates a minimum cost.

[Alsadius]

A quick update - I don't have the turn written(clearly), and likely won't for at least a few more days. And the tech system needs some further thought as well, because I'm not sure that what I outlined will actually work. I'll keep you posted.

[Lagrange]

I wanted to mention a few things I found while reading up on the Taurian Concordat.

• Apparently, the TC had the second largest navy in the inner sphere with 127 warships in 2575, just before it all came crashing down in the Reunification war.
• I also discovered that the Pleiades cluster apparently ends up with 100 inhabited worlds beyond the major ones (Electra, Maia, Merope).  The TC in this era seems to be about 65 inhabited worlds + the Pleiades.  In 2400, the Pleiades is 50-100 more inhabited systems (varying due to an uncertain timeline for colonization) doubling or tripling my understanding of the TC size.

In the earlier discussion about budget per inhabited planet, there seemed to be a consensus that the periphery nations budget/planet was higher.  If the above is correct, it's actually a substantially lower budget/system for the TC.

[Jester Motley]

1) Is this more interesting?
Yes, if this weren't BT with BT tech.  But unless we significantly butterfly into a 4X type game that kinda resembles BT, I don't see research being that big of a deal.  The other issue is that in game/canon, new tech spreads like wild-fire.  Plasma Cannon/Rifles came out in 3068 from the CC, but according to the Techmanual, "the Sharks managed to mimic this weapon system the following year..."  ER ML/SL came in 3058, not 10 years after the clans showed up and, according to the TechManual, people showed an interest in them.  Reverse engineering "helped".  Targeting computers took 12 years til the Fed Suns had them.

Triple-Strength Myomers came out in 3050 in CC, and by 3058 DC had the No-Dachi using them.  (Funny, some texts say CC came out with TSM in 3050, some say the Feds in 3050...)  The Lyran's had the Defiance in 3057.  (Of course, either could have gotten the tech from "alliance" or through trade.  A number of techs are described as passed along that way...)

Either way, 10 years, 20 at the outside, seems to be all it takes for tech to spread.

2) Am I worrying too much about obfuscation? I want to avoid "Oh, the next turn is improved armor, I'll snap that up for sure!", but I'm not sure secrecy is the right play there.

While that would be nice, if the tech doesn't matter all that much, then it doesn't matter if its known or not.

3) Would you feel like I was taking options away from you by essentially forcing you to buy research every turn?

I'm a tech junky.  I'm the guy that plays Axis and Allies as the 'merkins and throws all his cash every turn at research.  On the flip side, this is a money sink CC can't afford, so the end result doesn't matter to me.

4) Is the faster tech pace something you'd like to see?

I'm here to design fleets that are 'sane' BT fleets.  But an RPG/roleplayed 4X game sounds like fun to me as well.  I'm just not sure it conforms with what we said we were going to do way back when.  It's one thing to say "the TH had a coup" but its still the TH juggernaut.  Its another to say "The Capellan Confed demonstrated their new Wave-Motion Main gun today.  First of the new cybortechnology powered by pure tardoculture, it's expected to lead the fight against the newly discovered 50 foot tall aliens called the Zebrelli."

Seriously though...  I think an RPG based on a 4x game sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.

[Alsadius]

I wanted to mention a few things I found while reading up on the Taurian Concordat.

• Apparently, the TC had the second largest navy in the inner sphere with 127 warships in 2575, just before it all came crashing down in the Reunification war.
• I also discovered that the Pleiades cluster apparently ends up with 100 inhabited worlds beyond the major ones (Electra, Maia, Merope).  The TC in this era seems to be about 65 inhabited worlds + the Pleiades.  In 2400, the Pleiades is 50-100 more inhabited systems (varying due to an uncertain timeline for colonization) doubling or tripling my understanding of the TC size.

In the earlier discussion about budget per inhabited planet, there seemed to be a consensus that the periphery nations budget/planet was higher.  If the above is correct, it's actually a substantially lower budget/system for the TC.

Huh. I knew the TC did well in combat, but I thought it was mostly TC luck, SLDF incompetence, and heavy use of local "terrain". They were actually that big a player? I'd basically pegged them as having a lot of thinly-populated planets anchored by a few industrialized ones. I may need to give that some thought too.

1) Is this more interesting?
Yes, if this weren't BT with BT tech.  But unless we significantly butterfly into a 4X type game that kinda resembles BT, I don't see research being that big of a deal.  The other issue is that in game/canon, new tech spreads like wild-fire.  Plasma Cannon/Rifles came out in 3068 from the CC, but according to the Techmanual, "the Sharks managed to mimic this weapon system the following year..."  ER ML/SL came in 3058, not 10 years after the clans showed up and, according to the TechManual, people showed an interest in them.  Reverse engineering "helped".  Targeting computers took 12 years til the Fed Suns had them.

Triple-Strength Myomers came out in 3050 in CC, and by 3058 DC had the No-Dachi using them.  (Funny, some texts say CC came out with TSM in 3050, some say the Feds in 3050...)  The Lyran's had the Defiance in 3057.  (Of course, either could have gotten the tech from "alliance" or through trade.  A number of techs are described as passed along that way...)

Either way, 10 years, 20 at the outside, seems to be all it takes for tech to spread.

2) Am I worrying too much about obfuscation? I want to avoid "Oh, the next turn is improved armor, I'll snap that up for sure!", but I'm not sure secrecy is the right play there.

While that would be nice, if the tech doesn't matter all that much, then it doesn't matter if its known or not.

3) Would you feel like I was taking options away from you by essentially forcing you to buy research every turn?

I'm a tech junky.  I'm the guy that plays Axis and Allies as the 'merkins and throws all his cash every turn at research.  On the flip side, this is a money sink CC can't afford, so the end result doesn't matter to me.

4) Is the faster tech pace something you'd like to see?

I'm here to design fleets that are 'sane' BT fleets.  But an RPG/roleplayed 4X game sounds like fun to me as well.  I'm just not sure it conforms with what we said we were going to do way back when.  It's one thing to say "the TH had a coup" but its still the TH juggernaut.  Its another to say "The Capellan Confed demonstrated their new Wave-Motion Main gun today.  First of the new cybortechnology powered by pure tardoculture, it's expected to lead the fight against the newly discovered 50 foot tall aliens called the Zebrelli."

Seriously though...  I think an RPG based on a 4x game sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.

1) Timelines got compressed a hell of a lot in the Invasion era, because that's the era the books cover. Compare that to the best-described Age of War tech - Mechs - where the key tech was invented in 2350, the first actual Mech was fielded in 2439, and they were first used in battle in 2443. The first other house to take the tech stole it in 2455 and first used them in 2459, and it wasn't until 2466 that all the great houses had the tech. Almost 30 years, with house-sized research budgets. I'd wager it took the Periphery even longer. That's the pace of tech advancement when it's not being driven by the time pressure of the fictional stories(and tech sharing due to fear of the Clans).

2) I feel like if the tech doesn't matter, I've screwed up.

4) I don't expect to go past Dark Ages tech, regardless of system. Maybe there'll be a couple non-canon techs here and there to address game-breaking strategies, or to fix holes in rules(like my discussion of maintenance reduction as a tech), but I don't want Death Stars here. I feel the need to quote TVTropes here:

> Over the course of a decades-long struggle, Civilization and Boskone went from ordinary starship battles to star-powered lasers, antimatter bombs, planets used as missiles, antimatter planets used as missiles, faster-than-light missiles, faster-than-light antimatter planet missiles...

Amusing to read about, of course, but that was not my goal. I want realistic Battletech units too, and most of my rule changes so far have been an effort to make things more realistic instead of less. That is still my goal going forward.

[marcussmythe]

Regarding tech not mattering - to reiterate an earlier point, I think this is a case where the fault lies in your stars, not yourself.

BTech just doesnt advance fast enough and those advances dont change things enough.  Where they do advance, cross contamination keeps advancements from staying secret and piling on. 

Even for all their technological might, the Star League ‘Royal’ Mechs are only a moderate qualitative edge over their House Standard Designs.  The most extreme case of uptech advantage, the clans, rests on a foundation of sufficient handwaving, fiat, and just so stories that I do not feel it is a good model.

[Lagrange]

Huh. I knew the TC did well in combat, but I thought it was mostly TC luck, SLDF incompetence, and heavy use of local "terrain". They were actually that big a player? I'd basically pegged them as having a lot of thinly-populated planets anchored by a few industrialized ones. I may need to give that some thought too.

The general model of "a lot of thinly-populated planets anchored by a few industrialized ones" seems to be accurate, so it's mostly a question of scale.   The "big" planets seem to be those mounting a regiment+ of volunteer guards (+ the Pleiades + Taurus).  Several of these colonies cease to exist after the reunification war and several more change hands.

I don't know about TC luck or SLDF incompetence, but "terrain" is supposed to really matter when jumping into the Hyades cluster, with a significant chance of losing a ship unless you have a Taurian astrogator.   There also seems to be a deep militarization of society due to FS paranoia.    For example the Constabulary has a mission profile of training civilians into guerilla fighters in the event of invasion.  There are also a few elite forces like the SASF.  Given the latter, I need to increase maintenance to reflect troop quality.

[Lagrange]

Regarding tech not mattering - to reiterate an earlier point, I think this is a case where the fault lies in your stars, not yourself.

In some sense, it's a shame we didn't do dropshuttles here, as the difference between dropshuttles and dropships matters significantly.

[marcussmythe]

If we are adding technologies, something that changes the math on droppers seems to be a grand idea - lowering costs for collars and droppers, and/or their maintenance, would be interesting.

[marcussmythe]

A quick update - I don't have the turn written(clearly), and likely won't for at least a few more days. And the tech system needs some further thought as well, because I'm not sure that what I outlined will actually work. I'll keep you posted.

Turn is written when its written.  Right is better than Fast, and if I get a lot of fighting this turn, its going to settle at least some debates currently running hot in the LCN Design Bureas (IE the back of my head) - so much the better if its good data!

[truetanker]

* Thumps his service baton open palm like *

Get crakin'  or the coals for you!

TT

[marcussmythe]

Generalist ‘Warships’.

Ive been fiddling with a lot of concepts as my ‘yard mania’ phase draws to a close.

I notice that my current designs are cargo light, Ive built no droppers (I hates the cllar costs, I hates them, precious) and Ive built no invasion transports.

Has anyone fiddled with a ‘Star Destroyer’ type concept - hybrid carrier/gunship with a defent cargo load and a heavy vehicle/infantry carriage capacity? 

Im wondering if the advantage of multirole utility, freedom of action, and increased difficulty of enemy targeting (by spreading capability across multiple hulls) will pay for the fact that your essentially ‘down’ 3:2 - IE it takes 3 hybrids to match the combat power of 2 purist warships?  If nothing else, large cargo bays and the ability to carry multiple regiments of troops makes the defender’s life really tough, if any enemy warship could, suddenly, jump out if the nodal point your monitoring wih enough cargo to go almost anywhere and possibly an invasion force onboard...

I suppose one advantage is it would delay obsolesence - even if the dominant paradigm for weapons, speed, and doctrine changes, a big, burly, multirole unit will never be ‘out of style’

[truetanker]

Has anyone fiddled with a ‘Star Destroyer’ type concept - hybrid carrier/gunship with a defent cargo load and a heavy vehicle/infantry carriage capacity?

Me, Scapha II.

TT

[Alsadius]

Isn't that basically every Terran ship? They don't have the vehicle bays or crew quarters, so all ground forces need to go into cargo pods, but they all have the space for that. (The Cruiser is the one exception, with 5ktons of cargo, but that seems like a mistake somewhere in the source materials. 5k was my calculated space, but Sarna claims it should have 95ktons.) They're a bit fighter-light by this game's standards, I guess, but this seems to be their intended design theory.