Naval Procurement Doctrine for Stellar Polities

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

It's a little difficult to think in 3e TLs these days but if you're using default Ve2 numbers I don't think you can make an at all viable starship at TL8. Even handwaving the stardrive as Emergent Superscience you're left needing Reactionless Thrusters.

True enough. Distinguishing starships from spaceships as the former being FTL-capable while the later are not, you need a stardrive in order to have a starship and that isn't possible before TL10, though one could go Kitty Hawk (the example vehicle in Vehicles) and handwave it as an advanced technology the Terran Union found, or somewhat more likely an old version of the technology that someone (maybe the Merchantile League, somewhat less likely the Imperium or GPR) is willing to sell to the Terran Union for a big enough return.

Stardrive aside, I think a practicable starship with TL 9, or maybe even TL 8 components could be made. Note that I said practicable, not practical. I would expect it to work in the sense of "you can get there from here with that thing and even have a fair fight when you get there," but anyone from TL 10 or beyond will be looking at it in wonderment. Not because it's such a terrific notion but because, like the bumblebee, it's such an amazing example of applying brute force to a problem better solved with elegance.

Then there's Force Screens. You generally need those too. Any stellar nation Space Opera called their TL7 (hence forth SOTL) would default to TL11 in Ve2. There weren't any stellar nations below SOTL 7.

Yes, to force screens which are TL 11 in GURPS Vehicles. On the other hand, I'm going to be doing some serious hammering of the setting to get into even an approximate shape that I'll like. One of the changes that I'm entertaining at the moment is giving force screen technology to only one or two of the star nations and letting the ones without just armor up to meet the challenge. Given the amount of energy a screen can absorb in Space Opera (SO hereafter), and the fact that most warships mounted three layers of force screens, I think comparable armouring up would require something on the order of increasing the armour by a factor of ten. Given that SO's BattleArmor just reduced the penetration value by something on the order of half, my immediate conversion may just be increasing the starship's hit points by a factor of eighteen or maybe just armouring it to a DR with a value that's nine times that of the starship's hit points. And OTOH, I'll probably be using ablative armour, although durable ablative armour may be a better fit. I don't think I'll be using metal armour, or collapsed matter armor (which IIRC was what the "fluff" in SO suggested was what BattleArmor constituted.

Technically, all the star nations whose starships of war were shown, were all SOTL 10-11, which I read as TL 10 with some TL 11, except the Terran Union which was SOTL 11. However, their ships were apparently not sent to the breakers when they became outdated as each class of ships shown had statistics for all SOTLs from 7 onward.

I don't think I'm going to be running a Space Opera campaign as such, just hoovering up anything that looks good for a GURPS Space or GURPS Traveller campaign. Seldon's Starcraft Compendiums are a nice place to start and I may port most of the planets from the SO's Star Atlas series over, though some of them are going to need a rethink or two to make them a little less cartoony for my taste, and the aliens have little appeal for me. I am half-thinking that I might modify the Blarads and MekPurrs to be ElfQuest's Trolls and Elves respectively, but half-thinking is all I've done with it.