On 17Jun2020 0531, Greg Nokes wrote:
> I’ve done a lot of thinking about small ship IMTU’s over the years,
> and it always comes down to:
>
> If you want the attacker and defender to be balanced, you have to
> allow for ships to be roughly the same size as the defenders.
>
> If you say that Jump blocks ships over 5k dton, or 2.4k dton, or 30k
> dton, but you can still build SDB’s and monitors and stations up to
> 500k / 1m dtons; attacking systems with appreciable resources is a
> fools errand. Or you end up with skads of destroyers tossing
> themselves at large, impervious things.
>
> I’d love to have a small ship universe - it really appeals to me, but
> the I’d have to use both hands to hand wave that one away.
>
> The only reason that I’ve ever come up with is cost, but the real
> world kinda disproves that with the mega-ships that we build.
>
> Even if we say that Artificial Grav and Inertial Compensators goes up
> exponentially with the volume of the ship, then build hulls with those
> systems in a subset of the hull.
>
> I fear that humaniti loves to build big things, and we will never find
> a way to hand wave away the happy fun balls.

Yet aside from aircraft carriers, which the operators devoutly hope
never actually get hit (i.e. never come up against an actual equal
opponent), today we use warships substantially smaller than in the past.

There's a reason for it, and it can be used to explain a 'small ship'
setting - weapons that can kill a ship of any size in a few hits, but
which can be mounted on small ships. Nuclear missiles without good
damper tech, for example. Now a large ship is just a huge pile of
credits waiting to be set on fire, while a fleet of small ships spreads
the credits out so they don't all burn at once.

The problem with small ship Traveller settings is that you end up with a
'huge fleet' setting instead, which might be as bad or worse for one's
purposes as a 'big ship' setting. Using good old Supplement 9 - Fighting
Ships, from CT, we find that a /Sloan/-class Fleet Escort is 5,000 tons,
and thus the biggest ship you could build using Book 3 sizes (it's more
capable than a Book 3 ship, but that's not really relevant to my point
here) and costs about GCr3.3. Using TCS a TL15 world with the mean
population of 1.7 billion people has a naval budget of about MCr850,000,
and can thus afford to build and run over 2,500 Sloans on a peacetime
budget.

Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the problem isn't the
big ships, it's the '/big worlds/'. Most worlds have quite small
populations (the median and mode is 500,000), but the worlds with
hundreds of millions or billions of people and TL8+ can afford stupidly
big navies - that 'average' world above can afford over twenty
Tigeresses or fifty-odd conventional 200 kDTon battleships.

If you want smaller ships and small navies in YTU, you need to find some
excuse to remove the hi-pop, mid-high TL worlds.

Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>

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There's also the question of, for lack of a better term, 'willingness'.

The USA, from what I've read, had the largest economy in the world by 1880 but it's navy was pretty dink & it was decades before it could challenge the really big boys.

The RN (UK) dropped big CV's but then, decades later, changed their minds & now they've got'em again.

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