A brainstorm over defences and commercial

[Froggiest1982 (OP)]

As per topic I am going to highlight a couple of things to either extend the defences capability of the commercial/civilian ships or to make it more uniform.

So far, for commercial ships, we can use any layer or armor, CIWS, and size 1 sensors for our defences. This obviously apply for stations as well, with the non Armor penalty added to it.

So, following the above, wouldn't shields (either of a capped size or all sizes) be better as commercial tech? This will help in holdinga bit longer in case of attack. Especially now that we have raiders.

Eventually, wouldn't then make sense for consistency to limit commercial ships to 1 level of armor if we keep things as they are?

Basically option 1 could be:
Any X armour either all or capped like engines
Any X shields either all or capped like engines
CIWS
Size 1 Sensors

while option 2:
Armour 1 layer
CIWS
Size 1 Sensors

Obviously there is always option 3: Keep things as they are.

[Bremen]

I believe the idea is how maintenance intensive things are. So armor, being solid metal, or a more sturdy low performance engine, or smaller sensors, are all civilian, but things like shield generators, high performance drives, and large and sensitive detection systems all require constant servicing and thus count as military.

In a perfect world, I've always kind of wished the system wasn't purely binary, and breakdowns were based on how many military systems you had rather than being straight up commercial or military ships. IE you could have a freighter and put a missile launcher on it, which would mean it would occasionally get breakdowns, but only proportional to how many systems were military - essentially it would have 1/10th the breakdowns of the same ship with 10 missile launchers, or maybe a hundredth the breakdowns of a dedicated warship with all military systems. That would mean if you wanted to you could have lightly armed merchant vessels without the maintenance requirements breaking you, but honestly I feel the current system still works decently well.

[nuclearslurpee]

Eventually, wouldn't then make sense for consistency to limit commercial ships to 1 level of armor if we keep things as they are?

No. This would kill the concept of heavily armored assault transports/dropships and make planetary invasions much less interesting as you're basically forced to bombard STOs even if you don't want to.

I don't think shields are needed for commercial ships, since if a commercial ship comes under fire it is probably not going to have a chance to recharge shields anyways. Maybe for roleplay it is a good idea but I don't see a mechanical reason to add this.

I would like to see some way to arm commercial ships beyond CIWS so they have a token defense against raiders, pirates, etc. The trick is how to do this without creating a loophole where players just build a lot of armed commercial ships to have a no-maintenance navy and without imposing arbitrary restrictions (e.g., only one weapon per ship).

[Froggiest1982 (OP)]

Eventually, wouldn't then make sense for consistency to limit commercial ships to 1 level of armor if we keep things as they are?

I don't think shields are needed for commercial ships, since if a commercial ship comes under fire it is probably not going to have a chance to recharge shields anyways. Maybe for roleplay it is a good idea but I don't see a mechanical reason to add this.

Shields will help with stations for instance. Generally speaking, yes the idea was to brainstorm over general defense capabilities of the commercial navy.

I hear you over the transports, and probably other 100s cases.

One other thing I was considering is to have another weapon similar to the new particle with a fix tonnage and not OP thanks to lower ranges and damage if compared. To avoid the problem of making beam fc commercial you could use the same system used for CIWS.

[nuclearslurpee]

One other thing I was considering is to have another weapon similar to the new particle with a fix tonnage and not OP thanks to lower ranges and damage if compared. To avoid the problem of making beam fc commercial you could use the same system used for CIWS.

One thought I've had for a while is to allow CIWS to fire when repelling boarders on the ship's hull, whether at the dropship or the boarding marines themselves. This way commercial ships can't participate in naval combat (which is fine IMO) but they can be a bit riskier for an enemy to try and capture for free.

Commercial ships shouldn't really have much defense against naval ships anyways so I think this could work well.

[Andrew]

Historically merchant ships , particularly important ones in the age of sail could carry enoiugh light weapons to stand a chance against anything smaller than a frigate, most did not though , then again pirates of the day had the same scale of armement as merchant ships often including guns taken from said merchant ships as real heavy cannon were harder to come by as less foundries made them.
Once you get to steam ships you have two types of armed merchant ships the first is normal merchant ships with a light cannon and maybe a few AA machineguns intended to stop surfaced submarines attaking them with guns, and armed merchant cruisers (or raiders) which were either built with hard points guns could be mounted on or had fairly extensive conversions, these ships had light cruiser grade guns but their lack of armour and fire control limited them to engaging merchant ships.  Although on two occasions at least armed merchant ships sank or drove off armed merchant raiders and one armed merchant raider sank a genuine cruiser.

For Aurora maybe something like for every 50,000 tons a merchant ship can mount a gun probably limited to a fairly small size and if you pay a premium to build it some armed mechant ships can carry a few larger guns again probably a size down from your largest guns for them maybe a gun for every 10-15000 tons

[lumporr]

This is one of the advantages of larger commercial vessels - in the 100-200kt+ range, you can add on a commercial hangar deck, maybe a maintenance module for the bigger, slower ships, a little extra MSP, and then every one of your government freighters has at least some protection. I usually use a 1,000 ton box of missile tubes for this purpose, to dissuade any lone raiders, but a pair of bombers could also work. If you wanted to put an extra hangar deck on there as well, 2,000 ton corvettes have been enough to either distract or dissuade raiders in my own experience.

I usually combine this with a doctrine of tugs/barges, and put the hangars on my tugs, so that no matter what they're pulling, they'll always have some defenses available. In fleets, this works to even greater effect, with a larger salvo of missiles (or fighters or whatever) available to see off threats. In terms of roleplay, these are listed as "deployable weapons", which also lends itself to arming large, militarily important stations (such as a DS9, for example), but I think that's probably a more common use case anyway.