FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Rupert

It will certainly encourage the use of message torpedoes/probes. If you use Spaceships there's already incentive to use many small ships over few large ones, even for civilian use - the cost per ton is the same, the payload per ton is the same, and the 'small ship fleet' is more flexible. For military purposes, the small ships are even more strongly selected for - missiles make ships eggshells with hammers, so you want each egg to be as cheap as possible.

The proposed FTL system hammers this home, even with a relatively slow loss of speed with increasing mass.

It would likely kill carrier+fighter and carrier+rider concepts, because the big carrier would be strategically slow compared to a fleet of small ships.

It would make small PC-owned ships faster than the lumbering great warships of the Evil Empire. However, if two FTL drives means you go twice as fast, a 30,000 ton ship with two drives is very nearly as fast as a 1,000 ton ship with just one, which might not be a strong enough speed difference to really differentiate ships by speed.

Assuming that you include the defense favouring switches then it creates the early 20th century paradigm of battleships for heavy firepower, destroyers for speed and cruisers to catch destroyers.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Assuming that you include the defense favouring switches then it creates the early 20th century paradigm of battleships for heavy firepower, destroyers for speed and cruisers to catch destroyers.

While these classes had differing tactical speeds, where their strategic speed varied it did in ways you might not expect - for long distance movement destroyers were often quite slow because they were small (making them uneconomical at quite quickly as their speed rose, and they lost speed in bad weather) and carried little fuel (so they had to travel slowly to conserve fuel if they were moving long distances between bases). Cruisers were only faster than battleships if they had reasonably close bases for the same reason. However, these things varied a lot depending on the exact time - before reduction gearing was used the only steam turbine ships with good range were ones with 'cruising' turbines, and that limited them all to quite slow cruising speeds.

Also, if you're using that naval model, destroyers are fleet boats and FTL that's faster than that of the battleships is wasted, as they'll be moving as a group. Cruisers are the scouts and would need fast FTL speeds, but destroyers wouldn't.