Remind me to read this after Origins, but I'm still dubious there is a product in here. A list of these "other proposals" would be helpful.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Friday, June 05, 2009 - 11:34 pm: Edit

SVC:
Here is a partial list of "other proposals"... I just made a quick selection, trying not to repeat items already listed earlier by other participants... and I havent checked all of the various races topics yet.

Item#	title	description
1.	Light weight star ship designs	more than a dozen proposals in thread.
2.	Prime Trader Variant	A Police FLG variant built on a Prime Trader hull.
3.	Federation Protected Cruiser	another CL variant SSJ proposal.
4.	Federation (old) Destroyer.	(Destroyer built on the CL style).
5.	Federation Aux Light Cruiser	(mated Prime Trader with a small freighter).
6.	Federation “new” escort Destroyer.	(FFG saucer with 15 point warp engine)
7.	BCHe Pre General War BCH variant.	(Year 160)
8.	DD(w) refit.	(Upgrading old NG DD’s)
9.	A “True” Light Cruiser for the Klingons?	(An LD6 variant with Tug engines).
10.	Threat file - Kzinti CM.	(Klingon estimate of a CM based on the CL style ship)
11.	B10 Fun -	(not a middle years thing but it is funny. Could be a humor article in CL.)

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Saturday, June 06, 2009 - 12:00 am: Edit

If one wanted to see a Klingon BB, why not a conjectural B6?

A conjectural thick-hull Lyran BB could be neat, too.


On the Fed BC thing, a conjectural BCE which echoes the also-conjectural BCP could be of interest, maybe, possibly.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Saturday, June 06, 2009 - 12:40 am: Edit

Actually, I think that was a Kzinti BCHe thing... not a fed.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Saturday, July 25, 2009 - 09:24 pm: Edit

SVC:

You asked to be reminded about this topic after Origins was over.

Quote:By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, June 05, 2009 - 11:11 am: Edit


Remind me to read this after Origins, but I'm still dubious there is a product in here. A list of these "other proposals" would be helpful.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, July 26, 2009 - 03:30 pm: Edit

I will put it on my list but it's on page 2, with about 50 items per page.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Saturday, April 07, 2007 - 01:23 pm: Edit

Race/Empire: Gorn
Type: CL-Early
Time: Y121
Base Hull: CL

The Gorn CL is the first 24 hot-warp war-cruiser, available way back in Y121. This seems implausible to me considering how long it was before other races released their hot-warp war cruisers (Y160-Y170). My thinking is the date on the CL was wrong and there is actually a CLE version with 20 warp available in Y121. This would also affect variants like the COM.

By Jeremy Gray (Gray) on Saturday, April 07, 2007 - 01:32 pm: Edit

Tos, what year would you suggest for the new intro date of the existing CL? My thought is Y168-Y170 (roughly the same time as the Rom SPA enters service). Maybe Y168 so the basic CL without the plus refit as it exists today would still historically exist for a period.

Dale McKee (a self-admitted Gorn nut and good friend) is going to kill me for this, but I agree with you. Y121 is awful early. The Gorn CL would be fine with 20 warp. Changing the YIS is not totally unheard of in SFB. The Fed DN and some older Rom ships have undergone YIS changes or SSD changes in the past few years. I generally don't like tinkering the ships from the early days of the game, but from a rationaly point of view, the Gorn CL of the middle years would still be just fine with 20 warp.

I think the COM and SR would be the only variants effected. Might be worth posting a note in the G3 thread too.

By Jim Davies (Mudfoot) on Sunday, June 10, 2007 - 06:43 pm: Edit

OFFICIAL MENTION OF SHIP IN ANOTHER TOPIC.
#########################################
Hydran Amazon
SFB; PROPOSALS BOARD; SHIPS; Hydran Light Cruiser
James B Pennington, March 16 2007
Race: Hydran
Time: Y134
Type: MY Fusion CL
Hull: Unique, based on short Ranger
General outline of idea: CL consort to the Ranger
#########################################
PER SVC DIRECTIVE, COMMENTS ON THIS SHIP
SHOULD GO IN ITS OWN TOPIC, NOT THIS ONE.

By Jim Davies (Mudfoot) on Sunday, June 10, 2007 - 06:43 pm: Edit

OFFICIAL MENTION OF SHIP IN ANOTHER TOPIC.
#########################################
Hydran Centaur
SFB; PROPOSALS BOARD; SHIPS; Hydran Light Cruiser
James B Pennington, March 16 2007
Race: Hydran
Time: Y158
Type: MY Hellbore CL
Hull: Amazon (same topic)
General outline of idea: CL consort to the Dragoon
#########################################
PER SVC DIRECTIVE, COMMENTS ON THIS SHIP
SHOULD GO IN ITS OWN TOPIC, NOT THIS ONE.

By Jim Davies (Mudfoot) on Sunday, June 10, 2007 - 06:44 pm: Edit

OFFICIAL MENTION OF SHIP IN ANOTHER TOPIC.
#########################################
Hydran Hoplite
SFB; PROPOSALS BOARD; SHIPS; Hydran Light Cruiser
Jim Davies, March 21 2007
Race: Hydran
Time: Y134
Type: MY Fusion CL, no fighters
Hull: Shortened Ranger
General outline of idea: CL version of the Ranger, with a shortened centre hull and no fighters
#########################################
PER SVC DIRECTIVE, COMMENTS ON THIS SHIP
SHOULD GO IN ITS OWN TOPIC, NOT THIS ONE.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - 01:42 pm: Edit

I'm not sure if they should be mentioned here or in some other thread; but the Federation OCA and OSR in Captain's Log #38 and Captain's Log #53 respectively, plus the Kzinti CAM in Captain's Log #50, would each count as Middle Years ships that might be worth adding to a published module someday.

As, for that matter, might a would-be Carnivon Early Dreadnought.

Also, to continue with the "lost empires" for a moment, are there any "new" Middle Years ships for the Romulans, the Gorns, or the ISC which might be made to exist over in one of the "Paravian timelines" from Module C6?

By Shawn Gordon (Avrolancaster) on Tuesday, February 04, 2020 - 04:29 pm: Edit

In reading through this thread I see an unspoken agreement about one thing: that the MY ships should be 'good.'

I disagree.

One of my favourite things about the pseudo-historical nature of the SFU is that a great deal of care has been given to the idea of mistakes, historical dead-ends, terrible doctrines, and errors. This models real military history. The Fi-Con is an awful idea that is exposed as a doctrinal error through contact with the enemy. The early Fed fighter without a direct fire weapon is a mistake due to its lack of dogfighting capabilities (in an era when they should have known better). The 4 photon version of the DD is a famous example of a flawed concept (although it still has uses, and is "fixed" by the +4 AWR).

Real world equivalents of these mistakes are the British Battlecruisers of WWI where "speed will be their armour" was the argument for building them, but it turned out that instead nothing was their armour as gun-sights had improved. Vietnam era aircraft that lacked cannons or machineguns (such as the F-101, F-102, A-6, and if I'm not mistaken early F-4s) were a clear inspiration for that Fed fighter without a direct fire weapon (I don't have Module J next to me, I'm on mobile), the conventional wisdom at the time being that once you could build supersonic jet fighters, dogfighting was over. The MacAdam shield-shovel is another example of terrible military innovation, as it was useless as a shield and as a shovel. There are countless others, but you get the point.

Although wartime innovation can be bad innovation, extended periods of peace starve new tactical innovations of real tests. Wargames can only do so much. The longer the peace, the more investment is made in the mistakes that would have been caught earlier were it wartime. The period before the Four Powers War, although it contains conflict, contains no large-scale conflict. We should see terrible, flawed, garbage ships and doctrines.

Many of the designs here are early technology plus improvement, or later technology minus capability. We need ships like these in the middle years. We also need things that aren't merely incremental improvements. We need bad innovations that seemed plausible at the time, and were championed by people of great military eminence, but that were exposed as flawed and unusable within months of the galactic powers observing what real war would look like, either through direct fighting or military observers.

I like the idea of the MY being an intensely exploratory and experimental period, with most of the designs and doctrines that stood the test of time being the ships we're already familiar with.

I have no fleshed out versions of these mistaken innovations, but here's some spitballing:

How about a terrible proto-carrier that soured the idea of fighters for a generation? Gorn probably fit here since they get no indigenously developed fighters ever. What if they have a capital-sized ship that has few or no heavy weapons, and instead has something like 24 admin shuttles? Maybe instead have 12 super admin shuttles? If super admins are used, they should be too terrible to be considered for use in later eras. Maybe they are two-space, but have the hit points and speed of a regular admin shuttle, and replace the Ph-3 with one Ph-2, or two Ph-3s?

What about a new (later abandoned) Fed hull type? I can imagine an argument by some desk-admiral that once speed 31 ships become available, close-quarters fighting and drones (since slow and moderate are the only drones anyone has and nobody can see the future) will become a thing of the past. Maybe this ship eschews all phasers of any kind, and is only armed with 6 photons (but suffers shock if more than 3 are fired in a turn, the idea being to have a steady stream of photons from distance)?

What about an empire that concurrently experimented with the idea of arsenal ships? In addition to the classes we're familiar with, they could have battle groups of a great deal of over-armed, possibly slow or underpowered, SC4 ships?

Now, I want to be clear, I don't think that Module YM should be primarily terrible ships, only that there is room here for them. I also wouldn't want the terrible ships to be unfun. My idea is for them to be a fun, unique challenge, for them to be lower tech ships in the style of the weird ships in C4 or R12. 

If nothing else it would give the MY its own identity, set it apart from other expansions, and create a way to do something interesting in the Alpha Octant without revising old material or stepping on anyone's toes.

The final shape of the product might be something like 50% variants of existing hulls and other ships that fill tactical holes between Y120-Y160, 25% refits of EY ships, and 25% catastrophically flawed, but interesting dead-end pre-war innovations.

By Shawn Gordon (Avrolancaster) on Tuesday, February 04, 2020 - 04:30 pm: Edit

Didn't mean to octuple space that, I think it was a consequence of pasting it from my Notes app.

Sorry. (Fixed)

By Norman Dizon (Ichaborn) on Tuesday, February 04, 2020 - 05:29 pm: Edit

Intriguing.

By Stewart Frazier (Frazikar3) on Tuesday, February 04, 2020 - 10:20 pm: Edit

Hmmm, interesting indeed, still it's easier to say than do.

One successful 'dead end' was the Lyran heavies (HDD, HFF) near the end of the Four Powers War (made obsolete due to the trimarans in Y164). Not easy to do with other empires …

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Wednesday, February 05, 2020 - 12:17 am: Edit

Another SFU fan who likes that idea. Other ships of that idea include the Federation NVL (R2.35) and Hydran Horseman (R9.10) and Traveller (R9.11) light cruisers.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Thursday, February 06, 2020 - 08:38 pm: Edit

To look at it from another angle, there are several examples of Middle Years ships where one or other issues not directly related to their performance in SFB terms led to them being less than entirely successful designs.

In some cases, this could be an engineering issue, as was the case for the Klingon LD5 light cruiser from SFB Module R8. Despite the "L-" designation, the LD5 is a "modern" (GURPS Prime Directive Tech Level 12) design. However, the Klingons found the 10-box warp engines on the LD5 to be balky and unreliable, so were unable or unwilling to put this ship into series production. That said, the Klingons found that by continuing a limited production run of the D6 alongside the D7, they were able to more than get by in the absence of a "true" light cruiser hull - at least until the time came for the D5 war cruiser to be commissioned.

In other cases, the issue might be structural in nature. A good example of this is the Fed old heavy cruiser from Captain's Log #38: based on a sretched old CL hull, the OCA was a competent ship, yet one which seemingly lacked the flexibility which the Constitution-class heavy cruiser promised to offer. Notably, while an unfinished OCA hull was eventually completed as an old survey cruiser (as seen in Captain's Log #53) and itself represented a significant step forward from the light survey cruisers which the Second Fleet had used hitherto, the OSR would soon be overshadowed in turn by the superlative Byrd-class galactic survey cruiser design.

But then, there is another region of the galaxy where the Terran-hull CL would inspire a range of larger and more powerful hull types, some of which would later surpass the OCA itself. Yet in those cases, necessity (and infrastructural support from a friendly local power) did much to drive such innovations.

Plus, there are other "design competitor" hulls out there, such as the Kzinti CAM in Captain's Log #50, which heel show the experimental aspect of the Middle Years in the Alpha Octant.

Oh, and to follow up from a post I made earlier in this thread about a would-be "B6" design, perhaps it might be interesting to see such "BBE" designs for other empires also. (As also noted above, a Lyran BBE inspired by the Royal Tiger and Royal Panther designs would be quite distinct from the Cave Lion battleship type.)


And of course, the more Middle Years hulls are made to exist in SSD form, the more potential candidates might then exist to add to the set of Middle Years Ship Cards over in Federation Commander: Briefing #2.

By Shawn Gordon (Avrolancaster) on Friday, February 07, 2020 - 11:59 am: Edit

Nerroth, you've brought up some interesting examples. It makes me think another possible inspiration for the MY as an exploratory period could be the tanks for the interwar years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanks_of_the_interwar_period

These came about when tank doctrine was still up in the air, and it wasn't clear if the tank should be a replacement for cavalry, an infantry support vehicle, or something else entirely.

What you have are multi-turreted monstrosities, underpowered vehicles, bizarre but promising dead-ends like the tankette, and the odd feature that ended up sticking.

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Friday, February 07, 2020 - 12:22 pm: Edit

Another inter-war experiment that didn't pan out was the "Long-Ranged, Heavy Fighters." The Me-110 was one such experiment, and we all know how well THAT one turned out.

The British also had quite the run of turretted fighters; The Boulton Paul Defiant and the Blackburn Roc were two of the better known disasters in this field, but there were a number that were even worse.

These were experiments based on experiences during the four powers... Uhh, make that World War I.

()

By Mike West (Mjwest) on Friday, February 07, 2020 - 01:41 pm: Edit

Ooooo. Maybe the turreted Federation cruiser (and presumably, dreadnought) could have been actually produced! (And an abysmal failure, but still actually flown to at least some degree.) That'd be freaking awesome!

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Friday, February 07, 2020 - 04:29 pm: Edit

Actually, with the Defiant and the Roc, both those planes had rear firing turrets, but nothing firing forward.

I recall an article on the history of Federation Destroyers that there was one, the U.S.S. Kaufman, that has its warp engine mounted backwards. Perhaps more ships like her?

By Mike West (Mjwest) on Friday, February 07, 2020 - 06:27 pm: Edit

I was just using it as a segue into the idea of reviving a "joke" version of the Federation CA that used a turret. It has nothing to do with the fighters in question other than the word "turret".

The idea for the Fed ships is that the top center of the saucer on the CA (and this could be extended to the DN) would actually be a turret that can rotate enough to allow the forward weapons to have access to the entire FX arc, but only 120 degrees at a time. (I am assuming it could not face to the rear, as they don't want to take out the warp engines.) This would obviously rearrange things as the forward phasers and the photons would all have to be "on top" to be in the turret.

Again, this is not a new submission (or even a submission of any kind). The CA idea was actually done somewhere in some random periodical. But, making "real" versions of the ships (even if unique failures) would be a fun addition to the product.

By Douglas Saldana (Dsal) on Friday, February 07, 2020 - 08:50 pm: Edit

Looking at the blueprints, I think the photons are already on top (they are beneath the bridge on the CA). Only the forward phasers are on the bottom half of the saucer.

By Mike West (Mjwest) on Friday, February 07, 2020 - 10:21 pm: Edit

I know where the weapons are. The forward phasers would have to be moved up top. I didn't say which would have to be moved, just that the forward weapons would all need to be up top. And the side phasers would likely need to be flipped too, in order to make room for the rotation mechanism.

But, really, that's too much design for this topic. Just saying that making a "real" turret cruiser and dreadnought would be cool should be enough. Petrick will design the ship if it is ever needed.