"Look behind yo . . . too late."

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Wednesday, July 08, 2020 - 01:35 pm: Edit

General question:

Is there a need for additional civilian missions and roles in Star Fleet Battles? I do not have a formal proposal to present., but, for example...

Much like the real world, fishing boats (trawlers) dragging huge nets to catch fish. could a civilian reclaimation group of ships (call it a factory ship with works boxes) and a cargo pod or two process radioactive particles harvested by specialty free traders in a radioactive terrain zone?

It would be slow, dangerous work but if the process resulted in cargo loads of highly enriched uranium ingots the process thus creates a commodity or energy resource that can be sold to any industrial world. It might also represent a Orion Pirate mission in a radioactive terrain zone where the Pirates goal is to steal th3 cargo without 1) poisoning the crew or 2) leaving the Pirates ship(s) vulnerable.

At some point, a systemic method of handling 5he cargo, the processing and the safe delivery of cargo to its destination would need to be articulated. Even the Orion’s need to understand that exposure to radioactive materials is a bad idea tm

I assume the Free trades could be vanilla FTs, no special rules. The factory ship might have to have a special pod configured with works boxes, cargo boxes and some sort of arrangements to control the processing of radioactive particles on board. (Cargo boxes filled with lead shielding?) on such pod for small freighters, two for a large? A small processing variant can fill one cargo pod at a time. Large freighter could fill two such pods at the same time.

No idea how much value can be reclaimed, but should be enough to justify assigning ships to the mission.

Or take the Dilithium Sheep. They grow dilithium wool. What if the byproduct was composed of unneeded heavy metals? Gold, platinum, paladnium? Silver? You might see groups of harvesting ships following behind thE dilithium Ship collecting Dilithium sheep droppings?

(Working hard to maintain a straight face.)

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Wednesday, July 08, 2020 - 02:15 pm: Edit

Jeff Wile:

What you describe could be handled by having an ore-processing ship (which already exists) and a number of shuttles to "scoop" the radioactive materials. In short, the needed ships already exist.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Wednesday, July 08, 2020 - 03:38 pm: Edit

Yeah, I know.

That is why I referred to Vanilla free traders, no special rules.

I was talking about missions and roles for civilian ships already in the game.

Collecting radioactive material from a radiation Zone is not currently A listed mission for civilian .

There could be a number of other jobs that freighters (large or small), free traders, APTs, Skiffs could be doing.

Sure, harvesting radioactive particles is mining.

Just seems that there should be any number of other things that could be back ground for scenarios.

For example, what about harvesting fish from water worlds using regular skiffs. That way, the catch can be flown to a freighter in orbit for shipping to market? Definitely not mining, but gives a role for agricultural ground bases. Or instead of skiffs, use cargo shuttles. Works either way.

By Richard Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Wednesday, July 08, 2020 - 03:57 pm: Edit

I'm sure there are a myriad of variants of civilian ships, but that doesn't mean they have to be defined for Star Fleet Battles.

In the rare case that these things find themselves in a starship battle, I imagine that the scenario involved can use an existing civilian unit and include special rules for any special case in the scenario involved. I expect this would be a very rare thing, not worth the work of making into a new SSD in a new product.

By Mike Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Wednesday, July 08, 2020 - 05:41 pm: Edit

Uranium? Why bother when you have fusion & dilithium antimatter?

By Steven Zamboni (Szamboni) on Wednesday, July 08, 2020 - 06:45 pm: Edit

Dilithium crystal are supposed to be rare, and the electromagnetic fields needed to power it up are probably not something you want running in the same room with people you want to keep around. There's likely plenty of demand for power systems smaller, cheaper, or more stable than a starship warp core. I can see a demand for all sorts of radioactive materials and alloys, especially for isotopes that aren't found in traditional main sequence star systems that may have industrial uses we can only dream of.

Back to ships, it's like that many in-system "infrastructure" ships won't need warp engines at all and are quite fine putzing around the system on impulse power. There's likely a thousand different ships doing the most boring daily things that have the most boring SSDs.

(Game-wise, these putt-putts are also nigh-invulnerable given that they start rolling for sublight evasion as soon as they leave the dock. The closest many pirates will get to seeing one of them is if they drop by the factory showroom for a tour.)

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Wednesday, July 08, 2020 - 08:40 pm: Edit

Mike Grafton:
You bother when you need more ships than your existing ship yard capacity can not build all of the ships you need to fight a war.

In 1940, the U.K. ordered 60 Ocean Class freighters with simple expansion style steam engines. Those kind of engines were decades behind modern steam turbine engines, and infact were known to be less efficient and effective power plants at the time the order was placed.

All modern marine power plant producers were already committed to building their maximum capacity of modern steam turbines for warship construction.

18 steam boiler systems producers (many originally building boilers for factories or other industrial plants) were engaged to build the marine power plants (built to civilian specifications) for the original 60 Ocean Class ships as well as the liberty class freighters.
eventually, more than 2,100 freighters were built, at the height of production, it was reported that 3 ships were being completed every 2 days. (So stated by Wikipedia, so it may not be totally accurate, but I suspect its good enough for this discussion.)

Bottom line, even though I addressed ship production rather than radioactive materials, Steve Zamboanga already addressed it in detail.

The part I am addressing is the implication that obsolete systems have no place in modern war.

As SPP or SVC can tell you, quantity has a quality all its own.

If you needed 2,100 freighters to fight a war, and your choice was to use old obsolete engine designs, or do without... the choice is clear. You go to war with what is available..

By Shawn Gordon (Avrolancaster) on Thursday, July 09, 2020 - 10:51 am: Edit

It sounds like what you want is something like a "Corporation's Game" or a "Merchant Trader's Game" sort of thing. A T or U entry that would allow you to play as a single merchant ship, or corporation operating merchant ships, where the goal is to mine and ship valuable resources either in peacetime or wartime.

Is that about right?

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Thursday, July 09, 2020 - 11:35 am: Edit

No, not really.

In SFB scenarios, the only groups of civilian ships that appear generally are engaged in convoys or awaiting assembly at a base or populated world.

I was just trying to suggest that there may be other kinds of reasons for several (or more) ships to be present at a scenario.

As SPP correctly noted, mining ships already exist in SFBs.

I was using real world examples of fishing ships (trawlers) (factory ships) to illustrate the possibility of other missions in a SFB scenario.

Yes, I know there are refugee situations where civilian ships can be pressed into service to carry people to safety.

Another possible mission might be like the often mentioned (never modeled) star fleet Corp of engineers.

Whether the mission is terra farming, or building a star port or placing a PDU or establishing a deep space construct(SAMs,COMPL, Base Station, Star Base, mobile baseEtc.) we know tugs can be assigned to the mission, but it was mentioned that before tugs were invented, freighters could have been used instead. (Note:before the treaty of SMARBA, the Romulans need some way to complete such missions... may be they still used sublight
freighters To build the needed outposts...

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Thursday, July 09, 2020 - 02:57 pm: Edit

Jeff Wile:

Ore Processing ships can serve as the centerpiece of a mining operation. Various prospectors operate around it and go to it offload their finds, and the processing ship turns the finds into ingots and stores them, then transfers the stores to regular freighters in exchange for fuel and goods to continue supporting the mining operation. No military ships around. If the threat level remains small, their could be some local defenses that could range from skiffs to armed freighters.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Thursday, July 09, 2020 - 03:46 pm: Edit

The principle thing is that if you can imagine a set up of civilian ships and have a raider, or raiders, arrive to accomplish some deed whether fair or foul (depending on your point of view), the selection of civilian shipping and bases can be crafted for your pleasure.

By Shawn Gordon (Avrolancaster) on Thursday, July 09, 2020 - 10:06 pm: Edit

SP

Did anything ever come of the "Orion Pirate's Game?"

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Friday, July 10, 2020 - 04:32 pm: Edit

Shawn Gordon:

Nope. Several people offered to do one, but they never followed up.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Friday, July 10, 2020 - 05:25 pm: Edit

Lots of effort, but certain problems were seemingly impossible to resolve.

True random events are difficult to simulate, the number of variations of freighter modules (command and drive) plus the very large number of skids and ducktails created a huge selection of variants, not all of which “play nice” With the SFB systems, the difficulty in modeling the incidence of pirate attack (on the order of 1% Per month) and not knowing with any accuracy How many actual freighters are in play, nor do we know how many actual legitimate freight stops are occurring each month. (There being in the Federation alone more than 187,000 “useful places” according to GURPS Federation.)

The initial attempt to build a “Orion Pirates Game” resulted in a very skewed data set of encounters. The chances of encountering a police Q ship were far higher than star fleet history said that it should occur.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Friday, July 10, 2020 - 05:37 pm: Edit

Pirate game doesn't need to have a truly statistically representative set of encounters.

It needs to have "enough" routine encounters that the pirate player can't afford to assume every freighter is a Q-Ship, and the routine encounters need to be worth enough VP that screwing one of them up is a serious problem for the pirate player. (Maybe 5x normal value if you have only about a fifth as many routine encounters as "expected".)

That said, it is a LOT of work to set this up.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Friday, July 10, 2020 - 05:50 pm: Edit

A pirate captain's game had a number of issues.

In theory, it had to handle a light raider (LR) and a raider cruiser (CR), but should also have been able to handle a war destroyer (DW) and a battle raider (BR).

in theory it should allow for a change of cartels, or it should not, but it should allow a player to pick any of the cartels to start with.

The concept of the freighters being variable basically is a problem, but if there is not a chance of a Q-ship it skews the tactics. If you KNOW there are not Q-ships, you can go all out to cripple the freighters, if you know that in every freighter encounter there is a possibility, you have to wary.

Then there are the missions, which have to be the same. Not every mission involves freighters. Missions might included enforcing your franchise against another Orion. But will include raids on colony planets (which creates an issue with the defenses, i.e., a Light Raider is not going to tackle defenses that a Battle Raider can, and a Battle Raider is not worth going after something that could not fend of a light raider.

There have to be enough missions that it is a campaign, but it cannot be open ended.

By Shawn Gordon (Avrolancaster) on Friday, July 10, 2020 - 07:28 pm: Edit

I ran a campaign with a friend I called the Anabasis, and the premise was that an Orion mercenary company from the Omega Cartel was hired by a faction within the Hydran Royal Family that launched a civil war. In the first part of the first battle of the civil war the Hydran noble was killed and his forces scattered. This was set right before the Four Powers war. The point of the campaign was to move across nodes on a map and make it back to the Omega Cartel, some nodes had Orion hidden bases, some nodes were open territory. Every border was marked. There were branching paths on the map back to the Omega Cartel.

The initial forces were two LRs, a CR and a CA.

The Orion Mercs had a "heat" level that slowly went down (10% per turn, with each turn representing a month). Every move to a new node cost fuel. Raiding cost fuel. Fuel was very expensive. So were repairs. So were replacement crew. So were new ships or replacement weapons. Damaging a ship caused a half point of heat. Crippling a ship caused one point. Capturing caused two. Crossing a border meant a tough encounter, but only half your heat would carry over to the new empire.

Every month you could move across the map or raid. Raiding meant selecting from three procedurally generated options that included things like basic piracy, raiding a fuel depot, bank robbery, etc. LRs used half the fuel as CRs, and you were incentivised to split your forces into separate raiding groups since they would each generate their own procedural 3 options, meaning you could maximise opportunities.

Every time you moved between nodes you had to fight a running battle against pursuing local forces proportionate to your heat level. The forces that would show up (instead of the CA reinforcement in basic piracy and other such things) would be based on your heat level.

You had to raid to get enough money to buy fuel (or sell ships you started with or captured). You had to keep moving to cross into new territories to lower your heat, or lay low (ie: not raid for campaign turns). Every time you laid low you would lose 1D6 crew units that would lose faith in your ability to get them home and would desert.

We used crew exp, and we kept track of things like stores and cargo. It was a lot of fun, but it was definitely geared towards being a campaign for the two of us, and not for mass appeal. It had a lot of spreadsheets and bookkeeping.


I wonder if there's a way to salvage some concepts from the Anabasis for use in an Orion Pirate's Game.


I think a "heat" system could probably be used to represent strength of and likelihood of reinforcements, as well as likelihood of security skids and whatnot. Maybe a table with cards and what they mean at heat 1 vs heat 5 vs heat 10+?

Laying out multiple options each round, each with various amounts of risk could probably be used to crush some of the "oh, you RNG'd into a campaign loss, so sorry" effects.

I think I might put something more thought through together when I have some time if you're still open to submissions on the topic.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Friday, July 10, 2020 - 07:29 pm: Edit

I posted to the Orion Pirates captain campaign topic. It’s down in the proposals section of the bbs.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Saturday, July 11, 2020 - 12:07 pm: Edit

Shawn Gordon:

That sounds more like a (T0.0) campaign (which is alright for what it is), but not a Pirate Captain's Campaign.

The thing about a pirate captain's campaign is that it should showcase the things that are different from a fleet captain's campaign. The events should mostly be a single ship. Take a Light Raider and raid a colony, raid a convoy, pick off an annoying police ship, enforce franchise, etc. (compare to Frigate Captain's Campaign). Then toughen things up and run it as a Raider Cruiser, same targets and mostly the same goals, but stronger defense (Fleet Captain's Game). The years pass, and eventually Battlecruisers take over from heavy cruisers as the "Enforcer" ship for the cartel, and you can have a heavy cruiser be the ship on campaign (same missions, but the defenses need to be tougher).

While fleet ships have to deal with space monsters in the campaign, Orion ships would not normally deal with the monster unless they took a mercenary contract to (unlikely, shortage of labs to gather information, but if the monster is known quantity, i.e., so many damage points will kill it, I could see it happening.

But it needs to have enough missions and variation to be interesting. Sending the Orion on 10 convoy raid missions is just not that interesting.

By Shawn Gordon (Avrolancaster) on Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - 11:38 pm: Edit

There, I gave it a shot. I posted my attempt at the Orion Pirate Captain's Game in the relevant thread.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Friday, July 17, 2020 - 10:57 am: Edit

There was an item posted to the Fox News browser page today. It concerned a new species of fish that lives in very deep ocean waters where there is little ambient light.

The part that caught my attention was the part that “some how” the skin/scales of this “fish” absorbs 99% of The light That does illuminate this fish. The story went on to talk about how these fish appear as shadows instead of as distinct shapes.

Makes me wonder about the game mechanics At work for the Romulan Cloaking Device, and the earlier Veil device.

I realize that the rules are set and will not change.

Still, for back ground purposes (and possible fiction and GURPS PD issues...) is it possible that the Cloak and veil systems are a primitive kind of energy dampening field?

That would explain the high energy costs associated with them.

Not sure there is any where for this conversation to go... but let’s say that the present cloaking device renders the cloaked ship “99%” light unreflectant.

Hard to improve 99%.

For game purposes, let us assume that to improve CDs to 99.9 effective means increasing the energy cost by an additional 100%. (Double the current cost).

I do not see how it improves the game.

I guess where I am going with this is, the only material improvement, while still Retaining the current game parameters would be an improvement in energy efficiency. (I.E. cheaper to operate a X2 tech cloak.)

Is there another improvement that would be better?

By Ted Fay (Catwhoeatsphoto) on Friday, July 17, 2020 - 11:44 am: Edit

A bad-*** technology idea!

Maybe this is something that could be given to the Souldra? or Xorks? That way, it's "in the game" but not really affecting the Alpha octant at all, or until the X2 era and can remain more of a "curiosity" technology.

By MarkSHoyle (Bolo) on Friday, July 17, 2020 - 11:55 am: Edit

See the cloak as an energy spray, breaking up sensor waves....

Guess I would put it with the French idea of spraying water around a ship.....
Don't recall if that continued and went anywhere....

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Friday, July 17, 2020 - 12:25 pm: Edit

I've always thought that cloaking doesn't so much eliminate in the 3700 to 7000 angstrom range as it baffles energy emanations from the ship it's protecting.

My reason for thinking that way is this; the classic Starline miniatures were roughly 1/3250 scale, a standard SFB hex (10,000 kilometers) to this scale would be about two miles, so trying to "Eyeball" a starship would amount to trying to eyeball a Starline miniature at a range of several miles.

(Sorry if that seems kinda weird to y'all. As I've often said, I'm someone with Asperger's and that's just the way my brain works.)

As to HOW cloaks work, perhaps a good starting point is how the cost of cloaking goes up with the amount of power the unit attempting to cloak generates. With power coming from fusion or contraterrene sources, my best WAG is that sensors are detecting something having to do with a byproduct of disruptions in the Strong Nuclear Force.

HOWEVER, I'm no physicist, no Professional Engineer, or anything like that, so who knows...