Fleets in the Iron Empires

“a battle group – typically, a carrier, six surface combatant ships, an attack submarine, a supply ship or two and a 70-aircraft fighter wing – costs more than $1 billion a year to maintain, Congressional analysts say.” - New York Times, May 20, 2001.

“retiring the [aircraft carrier USS] Kennedy would result in an estimated steady-state savings of roughly $300 million per year starting in FY2008, including roughly $200 million per year for crew pay and allowances, and roughly $100 million per year in ship operation and maintenance (O&M) costs” – “Navy Aircraft Carriers: Proposed Retirement of
USS John F. Kennedy: Issues and Options for Congress,” Updated August 29, 2006, Ron O’Rourke (a great guy, by the way), Congressional Research Service.

I can’t find a good figure for Bill Gates’ personal income, for some reason, but the Gates Foundation, the charity he founded, gave $1.36 billion in grants in 2005 and had $35 billion in assets (The Independent , June 27, 2006) before Warren Buffet gave it even more money this year, so it looks like Gates could easily maintain a single aircraft carrier with crew at $300 million per year, and, if he’d made the Gates Foundation about running a private navy instead of a charity, he’d comfortably and sustainably be able to operate a full CVBG (Fleet Carrier Battle Group) at over a $1 billion a year.

Buying the ships, aircraft, etc. adds a bit to the cost, obviously, but a carrier only costs $2.2 billion – that’s in my notes, I forget where I got it from – so he wouldn’t sweat about that, either.

And the United States, by the standards of historical empires, has a relatively poor group of super-rich individuals. I recall reading that in Roman times, there were several men who could have funded the entire imperial military for a year or so out of their personal fortunes. I presume the concentration of wealth in the Iron Empires, with its weak central governments and powerful feudal potentates, is much more on the Roman model than that of a modern democratic, capitalist society.

So a fairly unexceptional Forged Lord might be able to maintain quite an impressive force.

If he’s Forged, he’s gotta budget for an comperable anvil force in addition to his 1 billion dollar battle group.

So maybe double the figures?

Or not, I don’t really know how much the whole shebang would cost.

Although, I guess if this is a feudal model, then the subordinates pay for and maintain their own “horse, arms and armor” so speak, right? So maybe the costs aren’t as bad as all that.

Okay, mister math man :slight_smile:

Let’s try another tack. Look at Great Britain’s navy.

-Chris

Err – must I? 'Cause the economics of modern navies are only going to be a “this is probably in the same ballpark or at least somewhere in the bleachers but it gives us an idea at least” level of comparable.

The Brits have three weenie aircraft carriers – 22,000 metric tonnes displacement and 686 feet long for their Invincible class vs. 87,996.9 metric tons and 1,092 feet for our Nimitz class, of which we have eight in service and another – the USS George H.W. Bush, I kid you not – christened just this past October but not fleet-ready yet. So their whole fleet is probably not a lot bigger than one of our twelve carrier battle groups.

Checking… Lord, why isn’t this in Lexis-Nexis like everything else? Why didn’t you ask me when I was at my desk with all my reference books? Ah: official Ministry of Defense spending plan: Looks like “Totalpublicspending” is 35 to 40 billion pounds a year, of which about 4-5 billion pounds goes to naval operations, although procurement and personnel spending aren’t included. That’s $70-80 billion a year to fund the entire UK military, including pensions for veterans, and less than $10 billion a year to fund fleet operations (current ops, not including buying new ships).

So Gates could probably afford to operate the Royal Navy for at least a few years, though he’d probably have to spend capital rather than just fund it out of income.

Hee hee, look at me make Sydney jump through hoops. Sorry, my friend. This is a good example though. The actual expense of running the Hammer portion of a Forged Lord’s military (using Britain as an example of a mid-level noble), is around 15% of his total budget. So for every 15 Standards you spend on a battlerider, you’re spending 85 Standards on other crap (technicians, bureaucrats, starports, fuel, bagels, etc…).

So most forged nobles can field a little battlegroup, probably centered on one or two capital ships, with an assortment of smaller craft. They’ll be designed to be entirely self-sufficient, since only an idiot trusts his allies completely, and when the time comes when you have to turn on one yourself, you want to have the ability to do what you need to do on your own.

That’s the primary reason why the Iron Empires fleets will be thoroughly inefficient. TONS of wasted energy. If everyone could get together and field an Empire-wide fleet, organized in a rational way, for maximum defensive effect, you could have things like giant squadrons of battle-riders, and death stars and such. Instead you get armadas consisting of a hundred forged squadrons, all of them ready to turn on one another at the slightest provocation, each with its own logistical tail, its own anvil transports, etc… A flying circus.

-Chris

Heh. Actually that only took me ten minutes, max, but I was feeling whiny.

I absolutely hear you on the sheer screaming inefficiency of a galactic-scale civilization with effectively autonomous and heavily armed political entities on the single star-system scale. You’re not going to get huge squadrons of anything.

The as-yet-unanswered question is whether the battlerider model makes sense for that individual Forged Lord’s “one or two capital ships.” Unanswered, and unanswerable by anyone but Chris, since we don’t have any hard numbers or Tech Burning rules on this. We can mock up equations, but we can’t put any hard numbers in, so basically the answer is “whatever Chris Moeller thinks is more fun to write stories about.”

Holding all else equal – i.e. modeling different options for one Forged Lord’s fleet rather than trying to compare different industrial bases – the more tonnage a ship can devote to a particular system, the more powerful that system is going to be. In particular, the greater the percentage of a ship’s mass is devoted to its drive (sublight drive, specifically), the more maneuverable it’s going to be. Since there’s no air resistance in space, a huge ship with 50% of its mass devoted to drives is going to be faster than a tiny ship with 10% of its mass devoted to drives.

Therefore, if maneuverability is at a premium, you want your combat ships to have the absolute minimum percentage of their mass devoted to non-combat systems, such as crew accomodations, medical facilities, fuel storage, and interstellar drives. The way to do this is to separate as many of those systems as possible from the actual fighting platform.

Now, there are a myriad ways to do this. One extreme is the aircraft carrier model: One huge mothership on which dozens or hundreds of tiny fighters are totally dependent. The other extreme is to model it on a WWII fighter with drop tanks, or a Star Wars prequel Jedi fighter with a detachable hyperdrive ring: The fighting platform is basically self-sufficient, but it can boost its long-range travel capability with a system that it can then detach when it needs to maneuver in combat. The Traveller “battlerider” model, with one or two combat ships on a mothership of nearly equal mass, is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So is (God help us) the Enteprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its theoretically detachable saucer section that allows the non-combat parts of the ship to run away while the rest fights.

But in warfare, the most efficient option isn’t always the most effective. Carrying your interstellar drive, crew accomodations, supplies, and other long-range support systems into combat with you means you’re having to accelerate (and protect) a lot of extra mass, but it also means you don’t have to spend time launching before you engage or rendezvousing & reconnecting when you want to run for your life.

Since we don’t have any hard numbers for what percentage of its mass a self-sufficient Hammer warship would have to spend on non-combat systems, it’s impossible to calculate whether the efficiencies of a mothership-rider design would yield enough efficiencies to compensate for its inherent awkwardness. Given that Chris has said that Hammer crews are fairly small – implying that long-term crew accomodations take up relatively little mass – and that the interstellar HEx drive is simply a different version of the basic intrasystem HEx drive – implying that you don’t need two different sets of machinery – the efficiencies probably aren’t that dramatic.

In Traveller, Battleriders allowed you to pack the most firepower into the ships that were carried because jump fuel took up HUGE amounts of ship space.

The spinal mount, or main gun of the ship was the most devasting weapon by far. The optimal fleet consisted of a battlerider say 0.5-10 mil tons that carried mid-size ships about 10,000-30,000 tons armed with medium sized spinal mount guns. This allowed the most amount of ‘BIG’ guns to be brought into battle which was the most decisive factor in large fleet engagements.

Tactically speaking, if my memory from the 80’s serves me here, I would still build jump drives into the carried ships since the jump drives themselves didn’t take up very much space. Perhaps fuel space for jump1 or ability to use external tanks if required. That way, if the tender got roasted, there was a means for the carried ship to make it home allbeit slowly and probably with help.

Large asteroids made great tenders for low price and gave some natural armor for free to boot.

While expensive, the above scenario was reasonable to achieve in the economics of the Travller game.

I actually wrote a Travller ship combat program for the Commodore C64 (anybody old enough to remember) computer which still remains at my parents house mostly buried under a pile of 8d6 random stuff.

Burning Empires does not go into as much detail for ship building and combat as Traveller. I really loved the ship building and combat of the Traveller game but it could often become tedious in large conflicts…thus the computer program. BE seems to streamline this process which is probably a good thing. Most people aren’t going to be as anal as I am and spend days or weeks designing various ships to put together an optimal fleet and for what, to spend hours upon hours rolling dice for ship combat. That’s insane.

I agree. Tenders in BE in it’s current environment is probably a rarity on a large capital ship size level. If you only have a small fleet of vessels and can’t easily replace that fleet then buidling and losing a tender is a huge risk. While a kewl concept it is also questionable for game mechanics benefit. What advantage does it really provide? Color wise, go for it I’d say if it makes the game more enjoyable.

However, a large ship carrying a significant amount of troops and planet attack craft may make some sense. Again, this may lend itself more towards color in BE…if anyone still wants a good attack carrier travller design I probably still have it worked out on notebook paper in pencil complete with potato chip stains.

Sure, I’m still calculating the resource point cost to hollow out and steal that Valen moon…why?

I have fond memories of the ship-building system in the black-book Traveller basic set – the one with drives rated A to Z and so on. I have painful memories of the advanced ship-building system, which was so terrifyingly complex I didn’t even attempt to start a design. I’m impressed you actually managed to computerize the godawful thing. And yes, I agree, even if someone comes out with an interstellar add-on for Burning Empires, let’s NOT go anywhere near there in the ship design system.

I’m playing a Trillion Credit Squadron game in Traveller. We’re playing at that last tech level where nuke dampeners aren’t available yet. So my fleet consists entirely of missile drones. I believe I am the only player to have found this exploit, but I don’t know, because i haven’t recieved any combat reports yet.

Damn commo lag.

Take the Traveller discussion to the Chatterer, my friends.