Some questions on Spaceships design

[Rotpar]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

And even so, I'd hesitate to call a vehicle with only one Big Gun a battleship.

Well, that's kind of the purpose of a pocket battleship. It was Hitler's response to the Treaty of Versailles and the limitations it placed on his navy. Since he wasn't allowed to build a ship large enough to call a battleship, he attempted to put the weapons of a battleship onto a smaller vessel. That's the goal I have at the moment, a smaller warship that has more firepower than it should for its class, plus the AI assistance, to violate some treaties.

[Frost]

I realy don't think that it is so clear cut as all that historicaly heavy cruisers, battle cruisers, battleships and even in some earlier cases 'first class Gunboats' teneded to display a significant overlap especialy if one tries to clasify them by armorment. To my knowledge there is no definitive argument for assuming that the Panzerschiften were 'heavy crusers' as opposed to Battle Cruisers which in at least in British and Japanese service (I don't have enough information on german practice) were used in the same way as 2nd class battleships had been half a century before i.e. as heavy scouts and placeholders for the genuine article.
But to get back to the topic I would have to agree that the design proposed sounds more like one of the gunboats I already mentioned, these were defensive vessles built in the 1870's, 80's and 90's usualy light or scout cruser sized but carying one or two battleship guns. The design had two purposes, to decisively out rainge if not decisively outgun scouts and commerce raiders and opperating in groups to provide a last ditch deffense against battleships. If this is the desired effect then the design seems very plausable.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

The pocket battleships (Deutschland-class panzerschiften) were heavy cruisers with unusually big guns. But they hardly had battleship guns on them. They had 11-inch guns, whereas battleships and battlecruisers of the time had 14-inch, 15-inch or even 16-inch guns. They were remarkably powerful and well-armoured for heavy cruisers, but they didn't have battleship weapons.

They were also considerably over the 10,000 tons displacement they supposedly were built to, not especially fast for a cruiser (and yet not significantly faster than a contemporary battleship), and because they carried their six 11-inch guns in two turrets in some ways had less useful firepower than an equivalent eight-inch cruiser. As a propaganda tool they were a coup. As warships they were not that great, and normal six-inch or eight-inch cruisers would've served Germany better.

One of the ways the pocket battleships evaded the intention of the Versailles treaty limits was that they were initially built 6% over the limit and quickly 'refitted' to 21% over the limit. That sort of thing is hard to represent in the coarse scale of GURPS Spaceships, which notices nothing less than 73%.

Graf Spee wasn't even that close - she was 20% over as built, and the Germans used a fairly generous method of measuring 'standard displacement' too (ie they lied).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Rotpar

1. Is there any way to simulate using a larger weapon battery than the hull size would normally allow? I could use the spinal battery except that takes up too much space and doesn't fit too well with my concept.

2. Can I use the automation rules on other crew requirements?

1. Not by playing with SM ratings of wepons. 1 SM is 3x ship size and a ship 1 SM up has weapons 3x as massive. You can't mount a weapon 1 SM greater than a Main Battery _except_ by making it a Spinal Mount.

3x mass is a _lot_. That's much more than the modest increase in gun size seen in pocket. battleships. The whole thing about the SM system is that it gives you components proportional to the ship's size.

You could do other things like giving the main battery a +1 TL boost and saying that this actually represents an advanced prototype gun system.

2. I'd say yes.

Fred Brackin

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Rotpar

2. Can I use the automation rules on other crew requirements? The ship is also supposed to have an illegal AI that reduces the number of crew needed to operate and thus reduce the overall size of the ship.

Is there any reason not to just let the AI act as crew? Switching human crew for AI doesn't directly reduce size, as the physical control stations are a very minor part of the picture, but the AI(s) doesn't need quarters.

Using the automation rules for this, to me, seems vaguely retrotech-ish to me. Something from the days when AIs were unbreakable from the physical construct of their host computer (not without going crazy and singing popular music from the Gay '90s, anyway).