How would magic interact with late TL5 naval warfare? & Campaign idea

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

I'm not arguing about the overall accuracy - as I said, 25% accuracy is enormously superior to naval artillery. I'm concerned about the effects of failed teleport spells: "If you miss your roll by more than 1, you suffer no physical injury – but you go somewhere else. The location is up to the GM! A critical failure with this spell can send the caster anywhere the GM likes – make it interesting! – and cause physical injury, as long as it doesn’t kill the caster outright." Having 0.5-2% of your teleport bombs appear within your own ships' armor envelopes is not acceptable, nor is having 2/3rds of them going somewhere undesirable, even if you're getting 25% hits overall. Making attacks that rarely hit is acceptable, if you make enough attacks, but not if some of those attacks hit your own ships.

Mm, but here's the rub: the critical failure rate of magic generally might work for a tabletop RPG game, but would not remotely cut the mustard in real life. If for ANY spell there was nearly a 5% chance it didn't work, and (generally) a nearly 2% chance of a critical failure, no one who wasn't insane or desperate would be a spellcaster. Think of that naval artillery, for instance: if a naval gun suffered a critical failure one shot in fifty, either they'd have to use condemned criminals as gunners, or they'd hang the engineers from the yardarm. But, according to GURPS rules, unless the gun crews all have Gunner-16+, that's exactly what would happen.

HMS Warrior, as an example of late TL5 naval technology, had a 15-gun broadside, which guarantees a critical failure a little better than once every three broadsides. So ... do we put a higher failure rate on military magic than anyone IRL would accept with military machinery?

Originally Posted by Witchking

If I am reading the OP correctly he was thinking late 1800's max and since the thread seems to have a current of ironclads rather than pre-dreadnoughts the actual date might be closer to mid-1800's.

According to High-Tech, TL5 runs to 1880, which is why I figured on the Warrior-class ironclads as representative of "late" TL5. I'd be interested in the OP clarifying that.

[seasalt]

Originally Posted by Refplace

It all depends on the magic system you go with.
I think the best fit would be a narrative magic system using Impulse Buys. It also works well with wildcard skills if you want those.

What book is this from? I currently only have GURPS: Magic. I actually ran an IRL game with my home group (Castle Falkenstein, which is close to this era, actually) where the mage used "threshhold" and I could never figure it out, I always had to take his word for it that he was able to do a spell or not. My initial thought was to use the standard system with some kind of Dungeon Fantasy-esque "energy point batteries".

Originally Posted by ehrbar

Note that if you've got late TL5 power plants, you've got Draw Power and Teleport Other to teleport bombs. 4,345 hp worth of engine not used for something else will feed a mage 9 energy/second to first cast Air Vision (thus negating any hiding behind smoke, fog, etc.) and then launch 49-lb bombs...

I really like the idea of power plants being harnessed and used to power the more impressive feats that can affect a naval battle.

However, in general I'd like to avoid "magi-tek", because if you can just put enchantments on your guns to make them all-around better, it becomes just technology. So, I was generally going to go the "rare but powerful" rule with magic users so that they don't become just another kind of technology. I do like the idea of teleporting small bombs as an occasional tactic against lightly-armored ships, just not making it so ubiquitous that it becomes "technology".

Basically I want to have real-world military technology in a mostly unaltered (or, at least, technically possible) form, with fantastic elements alongside them.

Originally Posted by Rupert

That naval warfare between the American Civil War and WWI was fairly rare is, I think, more an accident of history than something innate to the technology. It does make guessing how combat would be conducted a bit tricky though, especially given the rate of change at the time.

One thing to consider - combat between small ships with only one or a few per side was far more common and gunboats, coastal defence boats, and later destroyers and motor torpedo/gun boats are small enough that individual actions and valour can matter.

Not really. Even a small warship of this era will have a crew of at least a few dozen, out of which only one is making meaningful decisions, and the others are just cogs in a machine. Nobody wants to play a crew member, unless the game is about traditional wilderness adventuring, in which case the ship is just transport to the latest adventure site. Playing a gunner is like a DnD game where you roleplay as the party fighter's sword and get to roll for damage when he decides to attack something.

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

Never mind non-existent. The cargo capacity of the largest zeppelin ever built was 15 tons. They were also insanely dangerous; of the US Navy's five airships, the Los Angeles was the only one that survived to be decommissioned. As far as the "really large" bit goes, just for comparison, a Ford-class aircraft carrier is only half again as long as the Los Angeles was, and the longest ship ever built was a little over twice as long. I admit myself to a touch of "But zeppelins are cool!", but that ain't gonna fly, Orville. As John says, aircraft carriers toting dragons isn't a whole lot more fantastic.

I think I like the idea of monstrous beasts being carried around on a "carrier" ship, and how they have to be clever and subtle to pose a threat to ships. With mounted machine guns, it seems clear that getting close to a warship would be extremely dangerous, so I imagine that flying beasts would probably have a harness allowing them to carry bombs. Because of their low airspeed and high responsiveness compared to real early airplanes, they might be pretty damn accurate, but training them would be difficult and expensive (unless they are sentient, as dragons might be. I kinda like the idea of dragons being commissioned as military officers).

That means, there would need to be "interceptors" to stop them, as there was no effective anti-air artillery at this era, and anything outside machine gun range is pretty much invulnerable to surface fire. If it is a dragon with armored scales, machine gun bullets might not even hurt them much (especially when firing up and losing velocity).

I feel like the main weapon for the riders of flying war beasts would be bolt-action carbines. An early machine gun would be too heavy, and even if it wasn't, the beast probably wouldn't tolerate it. Plus fire breath or etc. from the creatures.

As for zeppelins, they are cool. Even if they have to be land based they would still be very important, as they can scout, serve as platforms for spellcasters, and (with or without magic) land boarding crews un poorly-defended merchant ships. And surface warships really can't do anything to harm them. Even flying monsters probably couldn't climb high enough to attack a zeppelin, or perhaps only rare breeds could.

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

What I did in my Fantasy Mass Combat game was create a new Special Class called "Magic (Mag)" which counted as Recon or C3I for any situation where those classes gave situation bonuses - so Magic superiority reduced the Indirect Attack penalty, gave a bonus for the Raid strategy, etc. But it was distinct from those classes, so a magicless army fought differently than a mage heavy army.

You could subdivide a Magic special class as much as you cared to, and give magic elements additional special classes - so Communication mages might be (2) C3I, Mag while Elementalists are 4 (Arm), Art, F, Mag.

This strikes me as a great idea. I think this is probably the best way to handle it. Thanks!

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

OK, thinking about dragon carriers. Lets assume a carrier about the size of a mid-19th century ironclad, like the larger vessels at the Battle of Lissa (but lightly armed for the size, since she's not supposed to be in gun-range of other vessels of similar tonnage). Lets also assume that an air-cavalry dragon takes up as much space as an elephant, eats enough meat for ten sailors, and drinks enough rum for twenty (necessary to breathe fire during battle). So, how many dragons can this hypothetical dragon-carrier ship carry?

This is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping to have.

Now, as per Mass Comat, aircraft carriers have their air wings *included* in their statistics. A "capital ship" has transport value of 4, just enough to carry a single war elephant. That seems... a bit too small, but I suppose that this is supposed to be incidental transport capacity on a fully-crewed warship, not a transport. There is also a TL6 "landing ship" that could carry 2 war elephants.

Assuming a dragon weighs a few tons like an elephant, weight is not really the issue. The original ironclad frigate, HMS Warrior, carred ten heavy guns that weighed twice as much as an elephant, and ANOTHER THIRTY medium guns that massed about another 30 elephant/dragons. The real limitation is space and supply.

For game purposes, I was going to say that, say, dragons cound as "PE fighters" or "PE fighter bombers", with half troop strength, maybe as "super soldiers" to bring them back to TL6 equivalent (honestly, I think fire breathing dragons might have the edge against early biplanes). A ship designed to carry them would have about transport capacity 40. That would allow for, say, 5 groups of "fighter bomber" dragons, each 'flight' being two beasts, for a total of ten.

That seems reasonable from a logistic standpoint. A couple hundred men's worth of extra meat and drink is not too difficult to arrange considering how much a supply ship can carry. In terms of troop strength, the ship itself would have a low TS of just 100, as if it were five "landing ships" glued together. Maybe we can also glue an "escort ship" to it to make it a TS of 600 instead, just so it's not totally helpless.

Then, the five flights of dragons add 375 points of troop strength. The total of 975 TS is about equal to two torpedo boat destroyers, whereas a "capital ship" (which I'll probably be splitting up into smaller categories) is 20000 TS. That feels about right - such creatures won't be winning battles on their own, but air superiority can be a force multiplier for the bigger ships. Maybe we could also have a "grand cavalry carrier" which is like four of those, for a battleship-sized vessel that can carry and deploy forty dragons (or equivalent) at a TS of 3000 for the ship itself and 1500 for the dragons.

[seasalt]

Originally Posted by Witchking

A few questions the OP/GM will need to decide:

• How relatively expensive is powder? Are gunners routinely conducting live fire training?
  
• How large a priority are the various national fleets making the science of gunnery? (The Royal Navy did not really settle on a 'satisfactory' system until 1927 after quite a bit of effort.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_...tillery_ranges
  
• What date (approximate) is he shooting for the naval tech of the campaign to be?

Also remember that while the goal is for a ship to demonstrate good shooting, plenty manage just average, and some are flat terrible.

Exercising a Navy costs quite a bit of money in fuel, ammunition, and increased maintenance.

Some powers have built a Navy but not chosen to invest in keeping it healthy.

All are factors what performance can be expected at the end of the day.

These are all good questions.

I was thinking of a setting where navies have gotten large (as it's a setting where controlling islands and commerce lanes is super-important) but are not very professional yet, so even the crews of the most modern ships are not very skilled at first, which leaves room for learning by experience and players refining techniques themselves in the field and pioneering new tactics and training.

Or, maybe, the only ones who have instituted proper professional training and practice are the enemy faction which gives them the edge and the "good guys" have to play catch up and overcome cumbersome military traditions and resistance by demoralized crews.

As for exact era, I have to confess my first thought was of pre-dreadnoughts, which I suppose is actually TL6. But, in retrospect, ironclads of the 1870s or so might be a better idea, since it allows for possible ramming maneuvers, and who doesn't love ramming? Ideally, the campaign should be at a time equivalent that has rapid innovation going on, so that a more modern type of warship can show up midway through the story and scare the pants off the player characters and serve as a "boss fight" of sorts, as well as a possible prize to capture for themselves (at which point the campaign will probably be close to over - niche games like this don't last for very long anyway).

One thing that I definitely want to include is proper torpedoes (not the janky "bomb on a stick" kind), though. So I suppose I'm still leaning towards an 1890s era, more or less. Since this isn't a historical setting and includes magic and such it's no problem to play fast and loose with the historical era.

The naval battle in a fantasy book that inspired my interest on this idea included early-20th-century equivalent "battleships" and escort frigates on one side, against a motley pirate armada including a few ironclads, as well as earlier partial-armored screw-boats, and a huge swarm of obsolete wooden paddle-steamers backed up by dirigibles on the other side. And both sides having underwater combat divers of aquatic races as well, and flying gremlin things summoned to attack the airships. The obsolete pirate fleet, despite being several times larger, got chewed up horribly but managed to eke out a victory by sending the tugboats that propelled their (rather unrealistic) "floating city" as fireships loaded with explosives to make suicide ramming attacks on the battleships while their screening ships were tied up dealing with all the old wooden ships attacking them.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by seasalt

For game purposes, I was going to say that, say, dragons cound as "PE fighters" or "PE fighter bombers", with half troop strength, maybe as "super soldiers" to bring them back to TL6 equivalent (honestly, I think fire breathing dragons might have the edge against early biplanes).

An Airco DH.2 had a maximum speed of 95 mph and was armed with a .303 machine gun with an effective range of around 150 yards. A dragon[1] can probably beat it in a close-range, low speed dogfight, but can't control the range or fight at long range. Boom-and-zoom type tactics would see the dragon picked apart in multiple long range passes. And that's a fairly early biplane - a Sopwith Camel is another 20% faster, carries twice the guns, and climbs faster.

[1] I'm assuming a war dragon is something similar to a DFRPG Large Dragon with ST 50, SM +5, DR 9, and air move 21 (or max speed 42 mph). Breath weapon range is around 10 to 40 yards and damage is roughly equivalent to a single .303 rifle round, though admittedly as a burning area attack.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

Mm, but here's the rub: the critical failure rate of magic generally might work for a tabletop RPG game, but would not remotely cut the mustard in real life. If for ANY spell there was nearly a 5% chance it didn't work, and (generally) a nearly 2% chance of a critical failure, no one who wasn't insane or desperate would be a spellcaster. Think of that naval artillery, for instance: if a naval gun suffered a critical failure one shot in fifty, either they'd have to use condemned criminals as gunners, or they'd hang the engineers from the yardarm. But, according to GURPS rules, unless the gun crews all have Gunner-16+, that's exactly what would happen.

HMS Warrior, as an example of late TL5 naval technology, had a 15-gun broadside, which guarantees a critical failure a little better than once every three broadsides. So ... do we put a higher failure rate on military magic than anyone IRL would accept with military machinery?

Yes. But we don't use military magic to duplicate things that mundane equipment does more reliably and and often better. There actually was a time when you could expect that kind of misfire rate with firearms. You'd be lucky to get medieval handgonnes to be that reliable. The result was that they weren't used much because crossbows did the same thing more reliably.

Also few of the critical failure results are actually dangerous instead of just annoying and useless.

But there are things that you can do with magic at sea that TL 5 gear can't do. Divination. Long distance communication. Finding the enemy. Creating favourable weather conditions. Turning small vessels invisible and making them fly. These are things where the occasional misfired spell isn't going to outweigh the strategic and tactical advantages of being able to do things that can't be done any other way.

[Witchking]

Originally Posted by seasalt

These are all good questions.

I was thinking of a setting where navies have gotten large (as it's a setting where controlling islands and commerce lanes is super-important) but are not very professional yet, so even the crews of the most modern ships are not very skilled at first, which leaves room for learning by experience and players refining techniques themselves in the field and pioneering new tactics and training.

Ok. In the absence of a 'fleet doctrine'/'scientific manual of gunnery' how good a ship's gunnery is will very heavily depend on the ideas and attitude of the officer in charge (captain for single vessels, commodores/admirals for squadrons/fleets).

This has a fair bit of historical precedent. Back to the days of sail. Does a captain care entirely too much about the spit and polish of his ship (shooting the guns ruins the brightwork don't cha know!) or is he so concerned about combat efficiency that he will dip into his own pocket to buy powder for additional gunnery drills?

If a ship's captain or other relevant officer is the 'right' type expect a ship to have significantly better gunnery than the fleet 'average'.

Some example officers from RL:

Sir Percy Scott RN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Scott
Adm William Sims USN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sims

Also speaking as a sometime PC...I have played in a number of situations where a PC is 'captain' and the other PC's are effectively department heads (tactical officer, chief engineer, science officer, major of marines, etc). It can work. Particularly as a good captain will often solicit the advice of his officers before setting on a course of action.

So a ship with a captain 'ahead of his time' and a gunnery officer pioneering new methods of the art could well be cutting edge gunners.

To do that would of course require the correct skills take and attitude for the players to possess. In a naval campaign though it would be well worth it.

Have fun.
I think my personal choice might be a torpedo boat enchanted with Reverse Missiles or a dirigible scout ship with a couple of weather mage crew.

[ehrbar]

Originally Posted by Rupert

Only if you also have good enough magic to negate the fire control problem - you'll need a fairly exact range, speed, and bearing for the target (relative to your ship), or you miss.

Teleportation spells in GURPS include the fire control, thanks; that's why they require that you target "a place you are looking at or one you are familiar with", with penalties for non-direct viewing or lesser degrees of familiarity. The spell itself does the positioning; you only miss the target location if you fail the spell roll. And the spell says "instantly moves", so what does speed and bearing have to do with it?

If a GM wants to invent all sorts of additional limitations, well, they can, but that's all pure house-ruling. A place the character can see is a place the character can hit with an unmodified spell roll.

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

On the other hand, Teleport Shield isn't that expensive for covering 30-50 yards of radius, which should be enough to cover the most vulnerable parts of the superstructure.

The radius isn't the issue. Teleport Shield is an Area spell, with no special provisions for the third dimension in the spell text. As a result, it only protects to a height of four yards (Magic, p.11). Targeting his bomb to a space 12 feet and one inch above the deck avoids the Teleport Shield entirely.

Since neither the spell nor the spell class has any provision for extending height, each additional four yards of height in the protection is going to cost you another casting at full energy cost and another spell "on", unless you've got house rules to help. At some point after adding protected height the attacker is going to either have to eat the Teleport Shield penalty or need another skill (perhaps Artillery (Teleport)) to correctly pick a place above the moving vessel that will allow his bomb to fall to its target, but the guy using Teleport Shields is going to have to pay quite a bit to get things to that point.

[Rupert]

If you are looking at a spot of air, which is what you're doing when you're teleporting something above a ship, as it's generally transparent you can't look at it directly. Thus you need to know it's exact range and bearing from you. Now, when you measure that with your various spells (or with some kind of optical rangefinder), you know these things for that instant. But you need to cast the teleport, and on all but the smallest ship you probably can't be right by the bomb and in a good observation spot (especially as the bombs really, really shouldn't be out on an open deck), so by the time you're all set up, the target has moved. So how far? For that you need to know its speed and bearing, and you need someone to graph it out, or to plug it into a TL6 computer, or some kind of enchanted device that emulates that.

And even if you consider all this something someone can do from a single spot, easy-peasy, it's still a waste of an IQ13+, Magery 3+ mage.

By the way, the 8-9 energy per second required for this eats most or all of the power output from an early ironclad or steam-powered wooden warship's engine, or even more! Napoléon, the first purpose-built steam powered capital ship, had an engine with an output of 574 ihp, Warrior's engine was good for 5,270 ihp, and the later HMS Defence's engine was only good for 2,540 ihp. That's 1 energy/s, 10 energy/s, and 5 energy/s (rounded down, because a fractional point is useless). Only Warrior can actually support a teleporter out to more than a 100 yards, and only by accepting a huge loss of speed - and she was a large ship for her time, and most ironclads the RN made for the next decade were smaller with smaller engines (due to the massive expense of ships of Warrior's size). As ironclads were poor sailing ships, and especially had poor sailing manoeuvrability, this is a major limitation.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

Never mind non-existent. The cargo capacity of the largest zeppelin ever built was 15 tons. They were also insanely dangerous.

But an enchanted zeppelin with magically strengthened frame, Armor spells and magical materials which replace flammable hydrogen with gravity repelling gas could fly and might be viable.

Heck, cut out the middleman and have flying ironclads like Space:1889.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by ehrbar

The radius isn't the issue. Teleport Shield is an Area spell, with no special provisions for the third dimension in the spell text. As a result, it only protects to a height of four yards (Magic, p.11). Targeting his bomb to a space 12 feet and one inch above the deck avoids the Teleport Shield entirely.

Good points. Though I'm not particularly worried about teleport bombs detonating on top of the armor deck, just on the lightly armored parts of the superstructure

Since neither the spell nor the spell class has any provision for extending height, each additional four yards of height in the protection is going to cost you another casting at full energy cost and another spell "on"

When I said it's a relatively cheap spell, I meant as an enchantment. At 50 energy per yard of radius, it's not adding that much more to the already staggering cost of an ironclad warship. Having to have another layer for every deck does make it more expensive, but the superstructures of the ironclads and early steel battleships were a lot shorter than the superstructures of superdreadnoughts with their need for elevated directors and rangefinders.

But since its an enchantment, you pay the cost during the build and there's no penalty for spells on.