[Space/Spaceships] TL9 nomad fleet - playable?
 

Greetings, all!

There are many examples of such autonomous, self-sufficient fleet-civilizations - the Homeworld fleet, the Quarian Flotilla of Mass Effect, the (not exactly self-sufficient) human fleet of Battlestar Galactica, the Nomads of Infinity, and likely many others I haven't mentioned. How would you go about:

• GMing it? All characters officers and/or project leaders? All characters from a team dedicated to one type of task? Ars Magica-style?
• Building the fleet? What spaceships numbers (aside from #1) are essential in your opinion? What would minimal the fleet size/budget be? What would the interesting one be? Which systems would you prefer to keep on a flagship/mothership (if any), which would you prefer to have distributed throughout the fleet?
• Picking TL nuances? Which FTL drives are more fun? Which technologies would you limit?

Thanks in advance!

Re: [Space/Spaceships] TL9 nomad fleet - playable?
 

Unless the characters happen to be commandiing officers, I would not built the whole fleet in advance. Just give some approximate numbers regarding size and composition - and define the ships most important to the PCs. If I built everything beforehand, I would expect to forget something which I might need later and didn´t think of before.

I would always choose a FTL drive which will function only if certain conditions are met - thus enabling the GM to trap the fleet or parts of it in a system - thus, no Star Trek Style Warp or no Star Wars Style hyperdrive, but something like Traveller-Style jump drive (need to reach jump points, needs fuel).

Re: [Space/Spaceships] TL9 nomad fleet - playable?
 

I. All the players are Ship AIs. Passengers are a resource, ally group, or dependent.

II. Hierarchy: Each player has multiple PCs. One upper level management (Admiral, President, Director of Science, Chief Diplomatetc), one naval crew (gunner, pilot, fighter jock), one marine (for land missions), and one "mook." Policy is decided by meetings of uppers, adventures conducted by others, with flavorful mixing at odd intervals.

III. Grey Eminences: The PCs are assistants and troubleshooters for the leaders, who happen to be incompetent in entertaining ways.

IV. Destroyer: the PCs are the crew of a small, long range, but powerful military vessel that gets sent off on its own a lot for various reasons.

There are lots of options here, and it further depends on your setting. In a gritty hard science uninhabited universe, you need a lot of reliability and redundancy to last very long. In a cinematic super science setting with civilizations all over the place, you can make do with a rag tag collection of random commercial and civilian vessels.

If you want the fleet to stay nomadic, you need to limit tech that makes it easy to settle down. If they are running from something, tech that makes it easy to disappear is right out. If they are looking for something, tech that makes it easy to hide is a problem. In general, easy transport and fast information transfer both tend to discourage nomadic lifestyles, so both of these should be at least marginally difficult.

Re: [Space/Spaceships] TL9 nomad fleet - playable?
 

I would not build the fleet on a budget, in part because it usually requires a fair amount of handwaving to make a self-sufficient fleet anyway, in part because the numbers don't tend to have any real in-game use. Depending on the game, anywhere from a few hundred people to a million people seems playable.

Re: [Space/Spaceships] TL9 nomad fleet - playable?
 

Thats really depends on what kind of game your players want to play. If you want to explore how the fleet lives and survives, then go Ars Magica.At least two ships with full life support. Antything from SM+10 and up.Like largest Renaissance-era cities. Capable of carrying a few hundred thousand people, I think.If the fleet is designed as nomad fleet, so most even distribution of vital components is rational. Do not put all your eggs into one basket.
But random and somewhat ineffective (due to sheer diversity of built, bought, stolen and scrounged vessels) distribution much more intresting to play and deal with.Fixed jump point pairs (without need of Stardrive system onboard) and low-dV TL9 STL trips between them. TL9 is already pretty much restrictive.

Re: [Space/Spaceships] TL9 nomad fleet - playable?
 

I'd go with the characters being the advance scouts for a colonization fleet. They appear in system in a small vessel a week or so before the main fleet shows up, check for hostile forces and give the planets a look-see. That way when the fleet emerges at the edge of the system they'll know to run away instead of proceeding in if they don't get the all-clear.

I wouldn't use an FTL drive. I'd use a JAFAL drive that can't be used inside a solar system.

Re: [Space/Spaceships] TL9 nomad fleet - playable?
 

Actually, for many game styles, the numbers actually do have an in-game use. This is what many tramp freighter campaigns are like - maximizing profits by optimizing all the other numbers - like fuel expenditure, number of hired assistants etc.

As to the specific needs of such a fleet, I looked over Spaceships, and noticed (1) that it is more important to figure the required proportions and the minimum size of a typical ship than a specific build for the whole fleet (since ships scale up with no overly complicated calculations) and (2) we have many of the tools necessarily to find those proportions.

Here's what I found so far:

Most ships need at least one system dedicated to one of each: Control Room, STL drive of some sort, reactor or other energy source, FTL drive of some sort, and a fuel tank (unless the none of the drives require fuel).

At least one significant ship needs Mining and Refinery systems. It is not exactly clear if it would be more efficient to have a Homeworld-style Refenery ship with a Hangar, and lots of STL Miner Ships.

'Population' ships consist of the necessary systems, plus an Open Space (or two for redundancy), with the rest of the slots filled by Habitat systems. Note that they are not 100% living space - there are also schools, offices, labs, clinics etc. The % of space dedicated to each will probably be analogous to that on earth, with some corrections.

Several ships should have Fabricators, preferably those with storage facilities. I'm not sure how to properly build a HW-style mobile shipyard in G:SS.

Anyone willing to comment or expand on my simple observations?

Re: [Space/Spaceships] TL9 nomad fleet - playable?
 

In a "fleet" setting, you'll probably want to include at least one Hangar Bay in every large craft. Transferring cargo would be considerably safer from internally docked ships vs "tubes" connecting ships externally.

This is tricky. I'd think that smaller ships for the mining and refining with some sort of base cargo ship (for storage of refined materials and FTL tranport of the smaller ships) would work better. The problems with "in flight" mining/refining are going to be based more on the FTL/STL settings of the game than anything else. Ships with FTL and reactionless thrusters are going to be easy to deal with as they won't have to deal too much with delta-V and reaction mass. Reaction drives will require considerable planning on the part of mining operations as any of the vessels involved will have to expend reaction mass in reaching the raw materials and returning to the fleet.

Sounds about right, though 'population' ships might want to include at least 1 fabricator system to help with essentials.

Mobile shipyards for a fleet would be limited in the size of ships they could construct. Unless setting up 'camp' for a while, any ships built should be able to fit inside (no larger than what can fit in the hangar bay). If a larger ship is needed, then the fleet would need to 'camp' for the duration of construction.

Re: [Space/Spaceships] TL9 nomad fleet - playable?
 

SS6 covers how shipyards work fairly extensively. The only thing you'd need to change for a mobile shipyard is putting engines on it.

...And figure out how you want to work the economics of it. But the shipyard design is probably solid.
As well as cutting down on need for outside support, the HT bonus is a significant plus for a long-term habitat craft, and it gives them a good extra way to contribute to the fleet economy without having people commuting to work between ships.
Fleet or not, any ship too large to expect to dock in someone else's hangar bay probably wants a hangar bay of its own. Barring hyper-optimized specialist ships that can't bear to give up the space, which a nomad ship shouldn't be.

Re: [Space/Spaceships] TL9 nomad fleet - playable?
 

What kind of stl thrusters are you using? If it's anything non-superscience (especially at TL 9) you probably need more than 1 fuel tank. My general rule for non-superscience designs up to about TL 10 is half the craft is tankage.