Worlds of Design: The Warship Trinity

Cordwainer Fish said:

When i was going through my mother's things looking for the title to her car [1], I came across one of my first grade report cards. It had a handwritten note criticizing me for going to books to find information rather than asking someone. Today I'm a librarian and whoever wrote that note is dead.

[1] I never found it but I did find her divorce papers, which as it turned out I would need much, much more.

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That’s lovely for you, but this thread is about spaceships. Thus far you’ve only made a cryptic comment about software, a terse assertion that that’s somehow relevant here, and then this anecdote about becoming a librarian.

I’m choosing to ignore the fact that you seem to using an allegory to say “look it up”. Why not just speak plainly and tell us what point you’re trying to make? Alternatively, why comment at all if you don’t want others to engage with your comment? If your next reply is equally opaque, I’m going to assume you’re a bot.

EDIT: And now he blocked me.

I was there back then, eurisko was interesting, though more like "rules lawyering" kind of way, for what it did, exploiting loopholes such as self destructing it's own ships. EABA of space combat, probably not. High Guard, and Trillion Credit Squadron were fun supplements, not very RPGish, we called them "dice rolling madness." lol

I haven't really toyed with designing fleets from the ground up for a TTRPG, mostly just my own fiction (In the TTRPG space I'm using pre-existing settings, ie. Star Trek and Star Wars, really). So there is a change in perspective for a TTRPG ... where do the PCs fit in? A protagonist for a novel has different requirements than a party of PCs for a TTRPG campaign. In general, I'd assume PCs aren't looking to be basic crewmen doing laundry on a dreadnought, they'd be officers, movers and shakers. So you'd want ships that players can manage, ideally. So this, to me, tips the scale towards your corvettes, frigates and light cruiser equivalents. Ships large enough to have a full crew, but not have to manage the thousands of NPCs crewing the party's Dreadnought. Or not, you do you.

You can do a "west marches" sort of hex crawl with a big spaceship, because it islike a floating town. I did that with a Traveller Kinunir from Adventure 1, a university bought a demobbed one, filled it full of mercs and sent it off to do research work.

dragoner said:

You can do a "west marches" sort of hex crawl with a big spaceship, because it islike a floating town. I did that with a Traveller Kinunir from Adventure 1, a university bought a demobbed one, filled it full of mercs and sent it off to do research work.

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The Leviathan class merchant cruiser from Adventure 4 was perfect for this. Four thousand L-Hyd tons displacement and designed for travel into the hinterlands. It had back up maneuver and jump drives just in case. A level of detail typical of British Traveller material.

Anyway, back on topic, before you can design warships / fleets you need to know the technology available. In Traveller I had three broad categories of ships based on weaponry. In Traveller, the three size / power categories of weapons were "turrets" (small, typically taking up 1-2 tons), "bays" (50-100 tons) and spinal mounts (taking up thousands of tons). Weaponry dominated my ship types.

Escorts were small ships (this includes destroyers, frigates, etc.) massing 1,000 tons or under. A ship could have 1 turret per 100 tons displacement. Cruisers (light cruisers, heavy cruisers, frontier cruisers etc.) massed 3-20 thousand tons and had bay and turret weapons. You could have one bay per thousand tons displacement. Capital ships (battleships, battlecruisers, etc.) were (literally) built around spinal mounts with bay and turret weapons supporting the main armament. A ship could only have one spinal mount. Capital ships tended to mass 50,000 tons plus. You could build ships up to 1,000,000 tons but still have only one spinal mount per ship.

The point is, my ship types were determined by the weapons available and the size of ship needed to carry them. Maneuver drives were not too different in capability and jump drives were similar in ability across ship types. The jump drives were capped largely by the tech level of the yard building the ships.

Different technology would have altered the ship types and sizes.

I strongly suspect that sensors and fire control are the dominant factor in space warfare. Can you see them before they see you? Can you calculate a firing solution? Can you predict how they will try to evade?

If you are doing the Yamato vs. Iowa comparison and you are focusing on shell size, maximum speed and armor belt thickness and not on the Iowa's integrated mechanical computers and sub-millimeter wave all weather radar then you've missed 90% of what differentiates the two vessels in combat. Fightability (how easily the weapon system can be employed and commanded) and information gathering and processing dominate over traditional "hard" metrics in real combat situations. If I know sufficiently more than you know about the tactical situation and I have faster decision making loops, then I have a near absolute advantage.

And we can see this in how WWII destroyer combat between USN and the IJN played out over time. The side with the better information gathering and processing dominated its era nigh completely.

Viewed this way, the events at Samar weren't actually surprising. If you view the two fleets by tonnage, weight of metal to throw, thickness of armor and so forth it should be a one sided IJN victory. But if you view the two fleets by speed of the decision making loops, their ability to collect accurate information, and their ability to act on that information because of the fully integrated mechanical fire control and stabilized gun systems then it was like one side with a bunch of muskets versus the other side with automatic weapons.

I suspect in space combat that is going to be even more true.

Mod Note:

@Cordwainer Fish - These are discussion boards. If you bring up something obscure, you should expect to be asked about it, and to treat that request with some grace rather than to tell others to do homework. It is unclear why you would, on discussion boards, bring up a thing and then refuse to discuss it. Kind of defeats the purpose, you know.

@doctorhook - If someone's playing games with you, getting sucked into that game isn't going to help you. Disengaging is okay.]

As with wet navies, the means of travel decide how space navies work.

Hardly any SF setting acknowledges the vast emptiness of space. Most asteroid fields look like a fresh accretion disk. Travel times are reduced to intercontinental flight times, or at worst to the travel times of Diesel- or Steam-turbine driven transatlantic ferries.

The typical response of SF settings to the emptiness of space is to skip the empty portions using some form of FTL shift out of the regular space continuum, whether by creating a warp tunnel that compresses distances or by entering a dimensional or inter-dimensional realm, possibly tied to fixed entry points or gates. Interactions during such transits don't typically occur, but interesting story hooks bring them in.

Other settings have gates or worm holes allowing for near-instantaneous transition from one node to another.

Insertion into a gravity well and escape from it typically experience some hand-waving, often assuming some technology for localized gravitation control.

The limitations of FTL traffic will define the ships and ship categories, and the (lack of) engagement ranges. If people use FTL-mode or assisted FTL-mode for longer in-system distances, ship encounters will be focused near the travel destinations. If microjumps are possible, fleet formations would have to adapt. If ammunition becomes FTL-capable, tactical doctrines need to adapt - possibly through FTL interdiction by some technobabble means. There might be "natural" forms of FTL interdiction, like required distance from gravity wells for safe FTL insertion.


Space fleets are about controlling assets or taking control of them, or destroying hostile assets or combat power.

Long range engagements typically involve masses thrown at high velocity, risking Kessler-syndrome for the space lanes where such conflicts happen. Most assets are rather immobile, such as inhabited planets or massive orbital or LaGrange habitats. Kinetic strikes require some acceleration of mass, and possibly some penetration aids against atmospheres or defensive measures.

Self-propelled missiles or projectiles with explosive warheads (such as fusion bombs or matter-antimatter annihilation, possibly skipping on the matter for anti-matter war heads) may provide indirect hits on a targeted volume, roasting the volume with hard radiation and heat. Theoretically, some form of explosion-accelerated shrapnel is conceivable, but spatial saturation diminishes greatly along an omni-directional shockwave.

Warheads might release directed attacks like focussed flechettes or somewhat coherent or focussed beams of energy or particles or plasma from comparatively close distance.

Hypothetical gravitation-control technology should be re-direct kinetic strikes or beam weapons by changing the space curvature along the way, denying the (direct) path to the target. Same for warp-tunnel technology.

Obviously, a fleet (and orbital installations) needs to be the platform for the weaponry employed. The fleet has to provide mobility and power to the weaponry, and ideally some form of protection from enemy strikes and ways to hide or at least obfuscate the actual position. It requires detection systems and communication between fleet elements.


The typical fleet design wants units that are stronger (and more resilient) than more mobile units and more mobile than stronger units. You can have glass cannons able to destroy heavy units, but these glass cannons can be ammunition with AI targeting rather than crewed ships.

Effectively, what is the role of crews in space combat, and why send biological organisms anyway? Teleoperation of drones comes with a lag that increases with distance, but drones can tolerate accelerations way higher than anything biological systems can survive. Teleoperation relies on stable communication between the operator and the drone, though not necessarily vice versa if the operator has access to sensor data from other sources.

If you want an on-board operator, you likely take an AI. If you want to make it more personal, a cybernetical clone of the operator's decision-making, providing feedback from the operation to be integrated at least in the cybernetical clone patterns if not to the biological source for the operator.

Cybernetic enhancements might allow for such "possession" of remote units without direct feedback, with re-integration of the experience (in case of doubt, making the operator experience a recording of the engagement as an immersive simulation).

What are typical space fleet tasks? Engineering and maintenance are the routine tasks, keeping the system running. Logistics keep the ship stocked with fuel, ammunition, life support, and a modicum of replacement parts for damaged systems. Sensor systems and navigation are ongoing tasks, too.
During combat, part of the crew gets combat roles - tactical decisions (influencing navigation, too), fire control (target aquisition, tracking), ammunition and energy logistics, and damage control - often more from in-combat abuse of engineering systems than from enemy fire.

Crewed ships other than insertion chutes tend to be higher on the resilience side and limited on the mobility side. They might be little more than command and service modules for accompanying automated units, possibly similar to a carrier. Close escort craft could be remote-operated.

FTL-communication would greatly reduce signal lag between operators and drones, but any kind of communication might be interdicted or jammed, except possibly quantum-coupled systems that allow transfer of single-use bits of information. (Whether such systems would survive FTL traffic or warp-tunnels would be another consideration.)

Rather than military applications, crewed combat-able vessels may be used for "border control", customs and police actions, or for long-range expeditions into the unknown not trusted to AI probes.

Another important thing for the ships: sensors to detect what's out there, and communication abilities.

Especially If they are to operate together with other ships.