On Wed, 11 Jul 2012, Onno Meyer wrote:
Johannes replied to me:
If it's mission is to fight rouge civilian ships, lightly armed might be
enough. The question just would be if such a ship would have the right
size to be converted in a tramp freighter.
Hello Johannes,
say I have a freighter design with empty weight 10,000 tons
and loaded weight 30,000 tons. Now put the same engines and
power plants into a smaller hull, and use the weight saving
from that for a few guns. Empty weight just under 10,000
tons, loaded weight 10,000 tons, and the same power to
weight ratio as a freighter running light.
But surplus ships of this model wouldn't be useful as
freighters, to little payload space.
To convert the whole ship, it would have to be something like a troop
transport, or other military transport ship. But propably you can use the
drive and other components for "new" freighters. As long as you can't
operate multiple such components on one ship, to get more output, that
gives a size limit to the freighters. The surplus components might still
be in good working order, they just might be more scannable then newer
ones.
Otherwise maybe you can come up with assumption about FTL scanning and
communications, where a fleet of destroyers might catch freighters with
drive hunt tactics. (Which would mean you need more destroyers, which
again is good in context of the tramp freighter orign thread)
I believe this requires a warp drive and long-range FTL
weapons.
Could also work, if you need to set your target when engadging your FTL
drive, that destination is scannable, and you need to make multiple hops,
and starting the FTL drive takes some time.
Depending on FTL scanning assumptions propably destroyers could be used
similiar to submarines. Hang about traderoutes, attack passing freighters
and civilian ships, run when a warship is sighted.
Commerce raiders, not destroyers. Historically, the best
raiders were converted merchantmen. Warships are just too
noteworthy.
If you mask your raider as civilian ship, then yes. Though then the
goverment has an incentive to keep traders in sizes fitting their raiders
in business. Building larger raiders or subventioning smaller freighters
would be their options then and the latter might be more ecconomical.
If on the other hand you are able to sneak a military ship into enemy
territory, you have the equivalent of a submarine and you can make WWII
style submarine warfare. The analogy gets better if the sneaking ability
comes at some cost, and thus not every military ship will have it.
And if you either need to cover a large territory, or if any cloaking
devices loose efficiency with size, you get size limits for thoose ships.
_______________________________________________
GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]>
http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
