Archive through March 01, 2011
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Star Fleet Battles: SFB Proposals Board:
New Ships:
Processed:
Civilianized Orion ex-Police cargo ships :
Archive through March 01, 2011
What do the Orions do with all of the Police ships that they capture?
Ideally, they could do several things, including salvage, canabalization for spare parts, ransom (by selling the hull back to the race that they captured it from!)
What if they hauled the captured ship across the border to a neighboring (hostile) race and "civilianized" it? gut it of all redundant systems, replace the phaser 1s and phaser 2s (depending on what race the original ship came from) with phser 3's, replace the heavy weapons with either a drone rack (for drone using races) or a "heavy phser" such as a phaser 2, and make it into either a people mover (personnel transport) or a cargo mover. (note, in virtually all cases, a small freighter will be far superior in terms of operating costs, fuel efficiency, payroll than any such converted police ship).
the advantages would include, a fast ship (warp 6 in terms of GURPS RPG/Federation, better armed than most small freighter variants (except the various Q ships), and superior F&E command rating than any freighter.
Are these disadvantages/advantages worth putting up with/having?
Take for example, a FEd POL before or during the 1st or second Kzinti Fed Wars? would the Hegemony operate the civilianized Fed POL freighters in high risk areas where the nimbleness and high warp speed ability would allow high priority cargo missions a greater chance of being successful?
What about a Romulan operated Gorn civilianized Police ship? Would the Klingons be willing to allow a loyal subject race to operate a civilianized Kzinti Police ship during war time when successful resupply missions could mean the difference between a victorious campaign and a debacle?
I will try to post a Fed POL converted to civilian use by the Kzintis, if I can find the tabular data... just to illustrate a possible configuration.
| Systems | POL | OPOL |
| Sh#1 | 14 | 14 |
| Sh#2&6 | 12 | 12 |
| Sh#3&5 | 10 | 10 |
| Sh#4 | 9 | 9 |
| Phot-FA | 1 | 0 |
| Ph-1-FA&L | 1 | 0 |
| Ph-1-FA&R | 1 | 0 |
| Bridge | 2 | 1 |
| Lab | 2 | 0 |
| Probe | 1 | 0 |
| Aux Con | 1 | 0 |
| Trac | 1 | 1 |
| Trans | 2 | 1 |
| BTTY | 2 | 2 |
| Cargo | 2 | 12 |
| Shuttle | 2 | 2 |
| Emer | 1 | 0 |
| Ph-1-360 | 1 | 0 |
| Ph-3-360 | 0 | 1 |
| C Hull | 5 | 5 |
| Imp | 2 | 2 |
| L Warp | 5 | 5 |
| R Warp | 5 | 5 |
| Total SSD Bx | 37 | 37 |
Generally, the changes amounted to reducing the "redundant systems" by gutting the compartments in the hull. both forward phaser 1s, the photon, one of the bridge boxes, both labs, the probe, one of the transporters, the Aux Con, the Em Br.
The vanilla fed POL has 10 crew units, the OPOL would have 4 CU and 2 BP.
Other races police ships would be obvious variants of the Orions put such captured units into service.
The single biggest point about this proposal, is that the captured police ships would not be operated by any military/star fleet. they would be civilian at best or borderline pirate at worst, and then only operated at the sufference of the local police forces.
IF operated by Orions, it would be the smugglers rather than be an open pirate ship. It would have no stealth bonus, no ability to hype the engines and shares virtually none of the special abilities exibited by orions (except for the heightened weapons status... after all, Orions always expect trouble! 
Some special rules would need to be included on any such ships as these proposed here.
#1. OPOL style ships would Never ever be operated in or near the Federation.
#2. Only non Allied racial style police ships would be operated in the Federation.
#3 the reveres is true in all cases of non federation police ships in other star empires territory, ex: Kzinti police ships converted to Orion Civilian serve would never ever operate in or near Kzinti Space.
Comments?
Its an Idea I have allways bounced around in my head, as an Orion player anything for a few extra bucks is worth doing
Reid,
I have always wondered what that hollow sound was when you tilted you noggin!
Actually, it all depends on how much you (as an Orion) could get for the set. if you could make more from selling the components (such as photon torpedo launcher, phaser 1 or phaser 2 systems, the odd tractor beam system or the transporters etc) this might explain how the Orions were able to assemble their optional weapons systems avilability for the Orion Pirate combat ships.
and still have a functioning (though inefficient) cargo freighter.
Note the OPOL starts with 12 cargo boxes ... and they would be the full size 50 pointers, not the 25 pointers that the Orion combat ships have.
if you used the kind of changes that the Fed Police CVE thingy had basically converted the central hull where the 2 cargo boxes, 2 admin shuttles and the 2 phaser 3's were found into a hanger with 10 shuttle boxes (iiRC) the OPOL would have 16 cargo boxes, not just the 12 I posted above.
16/25=0.64 means you have 64% of the cargo capacity of a small freighter (though its spread all over the hull, lot more difficult to load and unload).
you also have 2 1/2 times the warp power of a small freighter and 100% more impulse power.
any one wanting to operate such a ship would have to have either very valuable cargo, or a huge contract to deliver high risk cargo somewhere. its the only reason why anyone would want to operate such and expensive ship. (atleast in my opinion!)
Unless, of course, the Orion Pirates were using the ship as a sort of tender to hold their ill gotten booty! such a ship (if captured and refitted) would be far cheaper than the MSRP that any Orion Crime Lord charge for an Orion Slaver/freighter.
Quote:What do the Orions do with all of the Police ships that they capture?
I reject the assumption that the Orions are capturing police ships with any degree of frequency. And when they do, converting it to Orion use would result in a ship not well suited to piracy (no Stealth bonus, etc). So they might convert it for use in a deception operation, but they'd be much more likely to ransom/sell it to the WYNs/scrap it/etc.
There already are ships that qualify under the "get cargo/people where they need to be fast and safe", there's even three such in X1 (FXX, APX, and FTX). Trust me, if expensive X-tech is historically applied to the problem, I can see this being done.
What's the advantage over a civilian Prime Trader (with the original Free Trader cargo bay mentioned in R1.67, not the lab/btty retrofit on the SSD)?
Your OPOL's shields are about equal, its armament is inferior, its cargo space is the same, its F&E command rating is identical (3), the parts and qualified engineers are harder to get, it's advertising the owner's illicit connections every time it's seen . . .
Quote:Trust me, if expensive X-tech is historically applied to the problem, I can see this being done.
Sure, but by Orion Pirates using a captured police ship hull when they can buy/steal Free Traitors, Slavers, and other priority cargo ships already? Ships which are either optimised for the job (as pirate ships) or are disguised so as not to scream, "Hey, I'm a stolen police ship!!"?
Seems to me that it would be very hard to 'file off' the serial numbers on a Police Ship...
good points, I withdraw my statement. This would only be good as a kind of reverse Q-ship, meant to hide in plain sight by looking like an authority... and they wouldn't have gutted it if they wanted that.
Or just to sell it to interested parties
If you really have a flood of captured police ships for some reason, I suggest:
1) Sale to a rival empire so its intelligence service can use them in a deception operation.
2) Sale to the WYN or a neutral zone planet as a garrison ship.
3) Use, with original armament, for piracy in the builder's empire, depending on deception to pass as a real police ship until it's too late. Less because it's an effective way to pirate, and more because now any police ship will be suspected as a possible pirate.
The Orion's ability to capture Fed Police boats was drastically curtailed after a conversation between Petrick and I during which I pointed out the Police BP's were woafully inadequate when compared to Orion BP. The POL's crew & BP were increased during the next printing. {grin}
Garth L. Getgen
Garth,
I would submit that if the Orions needed a POL for some (undefined) reason, they certainly have the ability to do so, heck SFH implies that there are different types of pirates beyond the overt types flying around in LRs, CRs, CAs and SALvage cruisers, you have covert Orions flying around in Free Traitors, free traders, prime traders small freighters, large freighters etc.
Not sure if Orions operated any skiffs though, for some reason I think the Orions did not operate skiffs, but I might be mis remembering that part...
Actually, a cargo variant POL would be relatively immune to pirate raids.
What Pirate would willingly attack a POL? little cargo, a POL arguably has weapons and speed and is nimble to boot, a Light Raider would not (under normal circumstances) be able to overwhelm the POL and could be seriously damaged by a POL.
With 12 (or 16 depending on which variant of the civilianized ex-police cargo ship you are talking about) cargo boxes the OPOL is better than either the FDX or the APT in carrying cargo, and is something like 95% as fast as either the FDX or the APT.
The OPOL might be more expensive to operate than a APT (more crew, larger warp engines, more expensive movement cost rate) but it also carries something close like 2 1/2 to 3 1/5 more cargo boxes than a APT.
If you do the math, on a per cargo box basis, the POL might actually cost out as more efficient to operate than either a FDX or a APT.
So does the yard that makes Federation POL also make a civilian carge version that LOOKS the same (right down to fake weapon mounts), but has carge inside rather than weapons?
If this were common its existence converts every POL into a Q-ship! If rare then no pirate will voluntarily attack it, instead they'll hide from it.
Even if it's not "cost effective" in some sense I could see a market, heck people bought a certain number of civilian versions of the Hummer, and that makes far less sense then a cargo-pol.
Douglas,
Nothing published to date indicates that there is a civilian "POL" market similar to the civilian "HUMMER" market in the REal World.
In the real world, there is an "after market" where police forces sell worn out, obsolete or surplus police cars that have had the special equipment removed (radios, search lights, gun racks, sirens etc).
I wonder if wornout surplus police ships ever get auctioned off to the civilian market?!?
Think of the 'Blues Brothers' moving with Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi driving around in a former police car...about the only game affect would be a higher than normal break down rating and most such ships would start with "poor" crew quality (because the dang ship is so worn out!)
I'd bet the Orions operated skiffs:
1) To use to service their easier "legit operations."
2) As patrols for their hidden bases
3) As scouts. IE they fly to Targetistan while carrying a cargo of stuff and to see if the load of Valuable"tinieum has arrived... If it has then the raider ships make their move.
4) To move small cargos of loot from wherever the raider can meet up/ cache it to a larger ship/ fence/ base...
5) And I think a tiny colony would be vulnerable to a couple skiffs loaded up with ground troops...
Michael,
You might want to check on that. I'd do it but I don't have my books and materials available now.
Orions clearly operated PFs, but I have a nagging memory that it was rare for Orions to operate Skiffs(perhaps one of the steves might clarify the point).
Unless you were making a point about "Overt" Orion operations (such as LRs, CRs, CAs, and Salvage Cruisers) as opposed to "Covert" Orion operations (such as Free Traitors, smugglers and hidden bases supporting pirate operations.)
The question for a cargo company is whether the ship can turn a profit. What does a cargo Pol do for me that an armed priority transport or Fed Express doesn't? No freighter ever wants to hang out and trade punches with a raider. They want to disengage. But in the meantime, there's upkeep on the engines and other military-grade systems with minimal cargo space for it to earn its upkeep let alone a profit. So you use it to run high-value, small-size cargo and that is why I ask why I want this instead of a APT or Fed-Ex.
If you're buying a cargo-pol as a convoy escort, then the question is what a cargo-pol gives me that a Q-ship doesn't.
Same question for an orion. What does a captured Pol do for me that a LR doesn't? the only thing it gives is deception value: temporarily fooling a convoy into thinking it is genuine, a window of time that won't last long. If the pol took damage in being captured (likely), its deception window will have likely closed by the time it is repaired.
Even if you can wipe the marks and things like IFF transponders so it's not immidiately identifiable as the captured pol it is, it's another thing to make it look legit.
This sort of ship works for a scenario or two but isn't really a class of ship.
John, in this case (OPOL as proposed) has a single phaser 3 (360 degree) and 12 cargo boxes (a sub variant combined the original 2xcargo boxes, 2xshuttle boxes and 2xphaser 3s into a huge 10 box cargo hold (and required relocating the admin shuttles somewhere else) for a total of 16 cargo boxes)).
It gives you a fast freighter (speed warp 6 in terms of GURPS PD, or speed 31 in SFBs) compared to a warp 5 free trader capable of speed 24 in SFBs that has roughly 125% of the warp power of a Free Trader and 0.166 smaller movement cost of the hull.
A free trader has 12 cargo boxes, same as the OPOL, (as proposed).
Thus, a OPOL could carry twice the cargo of a single APT (or the cargo company would need to send two APTs in place of a single OPOL.
I doubt you'll want to use it as an escort, cheaper to use a APT or a FDX.
Secondly, if you look at the proposal, the kind of ship would only appear outside of the territory of the race it was captured from... so the IFF transponders and other markings are irrelevant.
You talk about it "looking like a POL" as though the thing were 200 yards away and you look out of the porthole at it to see what sort of ship it might be. If an unexpected ship were to approach a convoy, planet or whatever, you'd be checking its transponder, security ID, passwords and all that while it was a billion miles away. You'd get some data from engine emissions after a while, but all that's probably comparatively easy to fake with any ship compared to the effort of capturing and maintaining a Pol.
Jim,
Try reading the proposal again.
It specifically indicates that such a ship would not be operating in the same region of space where similar ships (such as a Fed POL) would be operationg.
to put it bluntly, the only places a OPOL would be found would be in Klingon, Romulan or (during periods when the Federation is at war with either) the Gorns or the Kzinti.
In the cases of obvious variants (such as the Kzinti Police Corvette) it would only be found in Lyran, Klingon or (again, during periods of open war) the Federation.
Given the fact that such ships would nodoubt be older, poorly maintained, they could be likely to be Poor quality crews as well.
Now if you want to change the proposal so that such a ship might be found operating in the original territory where it would have been built and operated, fine... but atleast have the decency to acknowledge that you are changing the basic premise of the proposal.
Quote:such a ship would not be operating in the same region of space where similar ships (such as a Fed POL) would be operationg.
In which case, everybody would know that it's not an armed, standard POL (the Federation does not patrol in Klingon space), and thus there would be no deception value whatsoever in looking like a POL.
Quote:Given the fact that such ships would nodoubt be older, poorly maintained, they could be likely to be Poor quality crews as well.
Which would obliterate the absolute last-ditch minor comparative advantage of the OPOL versus the 12-cargo Prime Trader, because a ship with a poor crew gets no benefits from "nimble" status. (C11.33, G21.123)
--
If you need to carry 12 boxes of cargo at military speeds, the Prime Trader already is there (R1.67 is clear you can get a 12-cargo-box version), without having to stuff things into the irregularly-shaped hole where you pulled out a probe launcher, and for which you can get spare parts and trained engineers anywhere.
If the Federation is looking for a market for decomissioned POLs, there are Federation member planets, wealthy Federation colonies, and NZ planets who have an obvious use for a step up from an old freighter with a police skid. (Depending on the buyer, the Feds sell it either with weapons intact, or take out the weaponry first and the buyer installs his own civilian freighter skid-grade weapons.)
If you're an Orion who wound up with one and is looking for a market, there are similarly potential markets in NZ planets, the WYN, or even maybe Kzinti or Lyran nobles who want another hull for internal political games. Or, of course, the Klingon or Romulan intelligence services, who could use the thing in an operation.
Steven Ehrbar,
No, Not accurate at all.
You need to review the tactical Intelligence rules in SFBs (I don't have my books with me, but I beleive its rule D17.0).
Secondly, It is not the Federation seeking to sell decommissioned POLs, (see the original proposal.)
Now if you could get the steves to sign off on your interpretation, then fine.
but you are reading more into the proposal than what was posted.