Freighters in the X2 Era
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Star Fleet Battles: New Product Development:
Module X2: a project for the future:
Freighters in the X2 Era
What would x2 freighters be like
The standard "cargo pod and an engine" freighters never had X1 so they don't need and won't have X2.
As far as Free Traders, Armed Transports, and Fast Couriers (FedEx) they'll get similar upgrades to anything else.
I dunno on the freighters.
Granted, W-era and Y-era freighters were the same thing, but there was a jump to MY/GW. With X1, it was more of an "experiment", where I would assume X2 is "the real deal". So, X2 freighters would be reasonable.
All it would entail is larger engines (so they have a chance to try and run) with X-level systems available (like the better batteries). They wouldn't be combat vessels or anything; just showing that the improved technology made it throughout the society, not just top-line warships.
While still just targets to X2 ships, they could be a nasty little surprise for any non-X holdovers.
2X-tech is too expensive for freighters.
Hmmm, upgrading the freighters would be adding two warp, one APR/impulse, and/or X1 batteries, with some added shielding (small freighter may be 8 per shield) ...
Or all this may be for the naval auxiliaries (as their systems could be dialed down to match 'normal' freighters) ...
Do there need to be X2 auxiliaries? Until the Xorks arrive (and they'll be in a subsequent module apparently), isn't the X2 era more demobilised than the era preceding it?
Freighters and auxiliaries with more power BUT NO X-TECH and NO X2-TECH during the X2 era are not without merit.
The no X2 freighters situation has me thinking.
The Orions will almost certainly have X2 tech ships, and that would make convoy raids much riskier if freighters aren't made more tough as the pirates become stronger.
How will the merchant shipping companies/empires of Alpha respond to the increased success of piracy?
Convoy escorts are an obvious answer, but with a general demobilisation after the General/Pacification/Andromedan wars, what will be available to escort them? X2 ships might be the answer, but will there be enough of them lying around to do the job? Maybe the Alpha empires will have dedicated X2 convoy escort classes? I'm not sure that it makes sense economically.
Here's an alternative:
After the WWII there was an enormous surplus of military hardware that found its way into civilian hands. My grandfather, a cartographer, was flying a decommissioned Lancaster bomber around in the arctic making maps. I know of a family near where I live who had (now donated to a museum) an old WWI tank that was their great-grandfather's farm tractor.
What if pre-X2 tech found it's way into the hands of civilian operators?
A merchant shipping company might employ a private security contractor in areas of high risk, and that private contractor might have modernised (but still not X), re-purposed old GW/ISC war craft at its disposal in order to provide that security. Maybe the merchant shipping company might even, through the use of improved skids and ducktails, provide its own fighter escorts, all cast-offs from previous wars, brought up to a whatever level of modernity a civilian operator might be able to.
Maybe the improvements aren't all improvements? Maybe drone supply would be a problem, and a civilian operator might take the drones off of an old Fed fighter and replace it with a couple ph-3s?
I don't know how feasible these options would be, but merchant shipping would have to adapt in some way to the increased Orion threat, right?
It seems unlikely that anything slower than an APT would be profitable if upgraded to X tech (even if it was available), but more heavily armed freighters might be plausible. The post WWII naval situation doesn't seem the best analog for the post GW SFU. Somali pirates aren't fielding guided missile destroyers competitive with NATO member vessels.
Maersk might not be interested in building faster and more heavily armed container ships, but (to use a different historical period) the East India Company would have been interested in heavily armed merchantmen, especiallly if they were available on the cheap.
Edit: Doesn't mean there would necessarily be any new ship classes involved, but if it was possible to build modestly improved armed freighters, it seems like there would be many potential buyers.
Benjamin Kidd:
Inevitably there are costs (the expense of building a whole new ship, irrespective of whether or not it includes some new technology) and costs (the cost of operating the new ships, which includes repair systems and personnel over the life time of the ship) and you get into the economies of scale.
If you have a shipping company, you need to consider that if your freighter is damaged (which will occur) and the technology of the freighter is so specialized you have to send the freighter for repairs all the way back to Earth, you might not build the freighter with the new technology, but rather use the older (proven) technology that can be repaired in multiple yards across the octant. Man power is cheaper if the crews do not have to handle maintenance on the new technology, which also cuts costs. Most cargos are not "time sensitive," there is no payoff for delivering a month early. Where there is a payoff for delivering early, the cargos are small and handled by the express boats (whether an Armed Priority transport or a Federation Express). Free Traders are not really express boats, per se, but make their living by being able to deliver to colonies that lack a Commercial Platform, i.e., their advantage is that they can land on planets, something the Freighters and Armed Priority Transports and Federation Express boats cannot do. (These can get their fast, except the freighters of course, but all are then dependent on Shuttles to move the cargo from themselves to the surface.)
In the end, the bottom line is served by the existing ships, and new technology does not improve their roles or function.
The real world of ocean freighters does not seem at all similar to SFBs.
The long quoted incidence of pirate attack is 1%. Given the real world statistics, the incidence of pirate attack (world wide) is less than 1% of both number of ships attacked, and percentage of cargo at risk.
To approach 1%, you have to look at the statistics more than 160 years ago. And even then, the actual attacks were located in a limited number of areas.
If you examine the “age of piracy” (roughly 1500AD through 1840.) yes, there is wide variance and people will quibble about the exact dates.
The point is, to find an applicable period where piracy was widely spread, you have to go back more than 100 years.
For example, pirates operated widely from the Caribbean, north along the east coast of North America, south on both the coast of South America and Africa, east to the Indian Ocean, south western pacific, to the west coasts of both south and North America.
The Tripoli (Barbary) pirates were active as well in the North Atlantic, Mediterranean. Infact, the Barbary pirates raided England and took hostages during at least one raid.
My point is, merchant ships needed protection, which was why so many civilian ships were armed, and in some cases, armed very well indeed.
I could see late-war / post-war pod-freighters might have larger engines and/or more weapons, but I don't see that any of that should be X-tech.
Garth L. Getgen
Steve Petrick:
I agree that no commercial shipper would adopt bleeding edge technology for their bulk haulers, and the APX covers the primary case for expedited cargoes where the improved strategic speed of X tech would be valuable.
If the only way to improve a bulk freighter is to actually apply X tech to the entire ship, then sure, no commercial haulers will use it, but it seems probable there would be improvements in generally available technology between Y150 annd Y200 that would allow for improved freighters that would be operated outside the core regions of an empire.
Even if they just worked out the warp stability equations to allow naval auxiliary engines on a modular container freighter (allowing for improved speed and acceleration of an armed freighter on an otherwise standard freighter without hard welding the hull) that seems like something many shipping lines would adopt.
What if there was an X-skid that could be built, allowing use of Aux engines and able to generate lots of negative tractor (the "run away" skid)? A shipping line would then use them for either perishable cargo (where the extra speed matters) or on known dangerous routes.
Benjamin Kidd:
Well, see Captain's Log #23 article "Development of the Standard Small Freighter." It includes a paragraph (on Page #11, left hand column, fifth paragraph, about upgrading freighter engines. HOWEVER that was back when Module R8 was developing and no SSDs were done, and "Ballast Mode" (also included in the article on Page #10, right column, first paragraph, was abused by the players and pretty much dropped).
Jeff Wile:
Adding guns to freighter means also adding crew. For one freighter, no big deal and if it happens to be the one the pirate attacks, good on you. Adding Guns to hundreds of freighters and adding crew to hundreds of freighters is an expense that does not pay for itself because the basic freighter will still lose the fight (yes, I did it back in the day, and gloried over how tough my freighters were until someone pointed out the actual costs of doing so). You are paying for all those extra mouths to feed even when they on average do not do anything except polish their weapons, eat their rations, and launder their uniforms. The fact of Piracy in the SFB universe remains that the Pirates CAN kill you, but are not necessarily GOING to kill you. It is just business, and insurance can cover the loss of cargo, and in the end is much cheaper than repairing a badly damaged freighter, or replacing it outright.
In simple terms, your problem is less Piracy (who only want to rob you) and more marauding hostile warships (which can include Pirates who are getting paid to disrupt shipping) which will destroy shipping. That is not so much a problem in "peacetime" which again militates against the concept of heavily arming merchant ships (at least until a war, full or limited, occurs).
A thought on real world freighter units. Over the last 100 years, or so, the speed and power plants haven't really changed that much. Fuel has, going from coal, to fuel oil, to diesel, and efficiency have improved, reducing fuel use per mile, but they are still the same basic engines. I'm not sure how you would model that in a tactical game, beyond a bit more power, or cargo space, as the engines get smaller.
Now in F&E, you might see better fuel efficiencies, if it would be worth including.
One hundred years ago, as I understand (remember? 
) things, most freighters were using coal fired engines; normally "Vertical Triple Expansion" engines. Oil fired engines supplemented (and eventually replaced) them.
Liberty ships used oil fired VTE engines, and the choice was made to do so based on their being well established, well recognized technology that was simple to maintain. Victory ships used marine diesels (and an improved hull form) and were almost "Hot Rods" by comparison.
Since then, we've seen expansions in the size and output of diesel engines, but aside from a few exceptions, the main developments in freighters has been an increase in size, as Adm pointed out, to increase efficiency.
From that point of view, I see the progression of large freighters to jumbo freighters to "Ore Barges" as the SFU equivalent to how freighters have progressed over the past century.
That leads me to think of the newer super sized freighters hitting the oceans nowadays. Will their eqivalents be six to eight cargo module freighters, or does that rapidly approaching Slirdarian with a VERY big club mean I'm going to be disuaded from this line of thinking?
As I dream it, you mostly aren't toting BULK cargo between places. You are transporting very specialized stuff between high tech plroducers and small locations.
So HiTech III loads up a couple containers of their high tech stuff (the infamous civilian bases we usually call targets) and gets back containers of luxury items (like furs, rare ores maybe partially processed, exotic food stuffs).
You are NOT shipping container of sneakers, rubber duckies, rice, etc.
But I could be understanding it wrong.
As for freighters? They'd undergo incremental improvements of design over time. So maybe they get an extra warp to each engine, or shields get a little better...
SVC NOTES THAT SFU HISTORY IS FAIRLY CLEAR THAT BULK CARGOES OF ORE, PROCESSED METAL, FOOD, LUXURY GOODS, MANUFACTURED GOODS, COLLECTIBLES, ETC. ARE COMMON.
Per the history covered in Captain's Log #23, by the end of the General War period, military freighter engines (two four-box engines for a small freighter, two eight-box engines for a large freighter) were commonly available and a small number of freighters even had larger engines.
In the X2 period, these improved freighter engines would presumably be less expensive and even more available, but exactly how widespread would they be? Are they cheap enough that in Y210 every freighter outside the core zones of major empires has "military auxiliary grade" engines by the standards of Y160, or do they merely constitute a fraction of the galaxy's merchant marine?
If the command and engine sections of most of the General War naval auxiliaries get sold as surplus and have significant useful lives left, and/or the factories that built the engines during the war developed efficiencies that translate to lower costs for those same engines in peacetime, then improved freighters will be more common.
Conversely, if the military surplus engines available are all going to break after five years or require a significantly more maintenance, improved freighters may not be any more common than in the GW era.
Personally, I would think that engine tech would get significantly cheaper and more reliable by this point, leading to fairly widespread adoption (perhaps a third of vessels outside the "safe zones" of an empire). The initial expense is significant, but your insurance costs would be lower, and you will be better placed to attract more qualified employees. If you had to choose between serving on two freighters for the same pay, wouldn't *you* pick the one able to disengage by accelleration?
For comparison's sake, there is a "fast" freighter [(R1.82) from SFB Module R11] that was used to support Operation Unity. It's noted that the engines would wear out relatively quickly, but that this was deemed an acceptable trade-off for the task at hand. Notably, even this ship is marked as having movement limitations.
Might it be an option to push the onset of five-box "small" and nine-box "large" engines (with the "ML" limits lifted) referred to in the Captain' Log #23 back to Y205?
Perhaps these engine types could be introduced initially as an upgrade to non-X WYN auxiliary units, and only gradually rolled out for transport (and/or auxiliary) units elsewhere in the Alpha Octant.
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On a separate note, would the Fast Naval Transport [(R1.95) from SFB Module R12] be considered close enough to a Free Trader or Armed Priority Transport in terms of its design lineage to enable it to be given X1 (and/or X2) incarnations; or would such advancements be off the table for this unit type, as they are for other "ML" transport units?
It is possible that the (R1.82) fast freighter has a higher strategic speed that the improved freighters mentioned in Captain's Log #23 are simply unable to match.
Reaching warp 7 (rather than 5.5) strategically could be what causes the more rapid degradation of the engines, while the five and nine box freighters are still chugging along at a max cruising speed of Warp 5.5, even though they are more manuverable in combat, explaining why such fast freighters were used in Operation Unity rather than simply top of the line standard freighters.