Super-dreadnoughts

[Jester]

In many of the Sci-Fi books I read (David Weber for instance), there are two common ship classes above the BB. Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts. These are typiclly the largest ships out there make up the majority of the "Line of Battle".

I assume the game is balanced towards 1000 ton ships being the biggest but was wondering if there were any plans for CB to introduce ships bigger than the BB? If not, no worries as we can just "class" our biggest BB as DN and SDN respectively.

As a follow up question, is the game infact balanced to support ships no larger than 1000 ton mass? What impact would creating a bigger ship have on the game (This is more of a general question but if Dreadnought has already put some thougt into, would love to hear his thoughts as well).

Thanks!

[unclejoe]

My guess is that it would be the same interaction as is already present, just higher on the scale.

Armors would reach into the 12-13 range, requiring larger versions of the current weapons to penetrate (or new weapon types etc). But it wouldn't be much different than the current interactions...ie, it would take SDs and BBs to fight SDs since smaller ships wouldnt really mount threatening weaponry.

The Honorverse is interesting in that at the beginning of the series, a few CAs and/or a BC was a force to be reckoned with. By later in the series, the presence of absence of entire BC squadrons is meaningless to the scope of the battles. Of course towards the end of the series, even individual SDs are no less relevant than the weapons mix they carry.

[TheDreadnought]

Not including DNs/SDs was intentional. I'm not a big believer in the sloppy labeling that some of these sci fi series use. The term "Dreadnought" makes no sense in a sci-fi setting, thus by extension "Super-Dreadnought". For all intents and purposes, there shouldn't be a distinction between light and heavy cruisers for that matter. . . but that's easier to tolerate by just saying it has to do with size.

If you want to take the approach that when battleships got to be a certain size, they wanted to give them a new name and so used DN, ok. . . but I would suggest just splitting up the battleship hulls into BB/DN/SD classifications.

Either:

BB 80 - 89
DN 90 - 94
SD 95 - 100

Or match it up to armor rating:

BB 80 - 84 (8)
DN 85 - 94 (9)
SD 95 - 100 (10)

If you really want to go bigger. . . be aware that hull sizes above 100 have not been playtested for starships. There will be some room for them possibly because OWPs will start at 150. I wouldn't recommend upping the armor limits. As noted that would require a whole new set of weapons to be created. I'd say AV 10 represents the upper limit of what armor science can accomplish. You'd also have to spend some time looking at what hull sizes >5 do to the game.

So, there's a fair bit of development work involved in expanding the system above 100. Perhaps if enough people cry out for it, I might release a "Dreadnoughts" supplement with hull sizes 101 - 149 or so. But we'll see.

[RiflemanIII]

Not to mention that the historical usage of "Dreadnought" was to indicate a particular armament configuration, rather than as a marker of size. the "Super-Dreadnoughts" were merely the generation of battleships that followed the commissioning of the HMS Dreadnought, and even those were eclipsed by the inter-war and WWII battleships that came later, which were simply referred to as Battleships.

[warchariot]

I also think that hard points would become a problem. Yes, you could mount more weapons on a single hard point, but I think this becomes an issue with criticals taking out 6-7 weapons in one go. This could also be fixed, but seems to push the balance of smaller ships off the scale, where everyone takes one or two of these monster ships. Or the game becomes kind of an Ogre type game where one big ship fights many smaller ones without much luck. Of couse if you wanted to do a Death Star type game...

[kashre]

I don't particularly have a problem with sci-fi setting getting all weird with their ship designations... I figure when most of these things were invented the first time they picked something that was indicative of the purpose, but in a sci-fi setting they're going more on historical precendent and the coolness factor to sell it to the appropriations commitee or whatever rather than description.

I think the real question is how do you simulate Sci-Fi universes that have uber-crazy big ships... like the Super Star Destoyer... or the SDF-1 vs Zentradi battlecruisers if you're into Robotech... that kind of thing.

Personally I was thinking about the approach that Star Ranger used in one of his Full Thrust Crossover games. (http://star-ranger.com/Stuff/SFX2000.htm).

Make one really big ship by making 3-4, say, size 600 ships representing different sections. It would take a ton of tweaking, and it probably wouldn't be terribly balanced... but you don't make Super Star Destroyers for balance Thats the kind of thing that has to be balanced more on a scenario by scenario basis anyway.

[TheDreadnought]

I would prob use the battlestation rules for a super star destroyer. They didn't seem to do much in the way of tactical maneuvering and that way you could make them really powerful.