Cha0zz wrote:
Or maybe I'm just being a grammar nazi

Whatever you are im going to bed, I have to be up in 45 minutes to unload trucks for the next 8 hours perhaps homework could have waited until after sleep. Whatever the case have nice day/night/ timeframe

HoratioScumdog wrote:
The corvette is the smallest, fastest, and most maneuverable of the light capital ships.

There is no such term as "light capital ship", and even if it did exist it would not apply to a corvette.


A capital ship is using the definition the navys "most important" ships, and to quote wikipedia: "they generally possess the heaviest firepower and armor and are traditionally much larger than other naval vessels. A capital ship is generally a leading or a primary ship in a naval fleet."

It is debatable if a Cruiser is large enough to fit the role of being a capital ship. During WW2 only the heaviest cruisers were considered capital ships, and only by some nations or in some situations ( like when in a fleet where they are the primary/biggest ship ).


A light cruiser, destroyer, frigate or corvette are normally called escorts instead. Their role is to escort the big capital ships and provide screening and protection from threats like submarines, air attack, cruise missiles, torpedo boats or hostile escorts.

darkhorizon wrote: Whatever you are im going to bed, I have to be up in 45 minutes to unload trucks for the next 8 hours perhaps homework could have waited until after sleep. Whatever the case have nice day/night/ timeframe

Thanks man, you too
(it's 11h30 so day )

Edit; eh just noticed I'm going a bit off topic sorry for that )

Rabiator wrote:BTW, Dreadnoughts still used to carry a few smaller guns. But those were MUCH smaller than the big main guns.

Yes but they were not intended to be used against "real" targets.

Previously the "mixed" armament of battleships was due to the greater accuracy / weight of fire when using faster firing smaller caliber "main" guns at shorter ranges.
Improvements in "gunnery computers" made it possible to use all big guns to good effect at longer range.

I can understand the desire and need to have a super fortress flagship, we can even call it a Dreadnought, but I think to lock the whole hull class into such a narrow definition as really big battleship seems a bit limited to me. This is LT, we ought to think of any number of ways that this large ship could be used to benefit a fleet/faction.

I posed the idea of using it as the logistical heart of a fleet, moving behind and sending teams of smaller ships out to supply the fleet, but this role could be easily fulfilled by lighter class ships

I would also like to point out that modern navies no longer use battleships, and I doubt that their short comings would get any better in space. I do however recognise that battleships are freaking awesome and welcome them warmly into LT

Ixos wrote:

HoratioScumdog wrote:
The corvette is the smallest, fastest, and most maneuverable of the light capital ships.

There is no such term as "light capital ship", and even if it did exist it would not apply to a corvette.


A capital ship is using the definition the navys "most important" ships, and to quote wikipedia: "they generally possess the heaviest firepower and armor and are traditionally much larger than other naval vessels. A capital ship is generally a leading or a primary ship in a naval fleet."

It is debatable if a Cruiser is large enough to fit the role of being a capital ship. During WW2 only the heaviest cruisers were considered capital ships, and only by some nations or in some situations ( like when in a fleet where they are the primary/biggest ship ).


A light cruiser, destroyer, frigate or corvette are normally called escorts instead. Their role is to escort the big capital ships and provide screening and protection from threats like submarines, air attack, cruise missiles, torpedo boats or hostile escorts.

Thanks Ixos

I wonder if we should refer to these smaller ships as lower case vessels (I kid! I kid!), but seriously I think there should be a name to differentiate the act or role of escorting with the name "escort" (destroyer, cruiser, frigate). Mostly because I can see players flying around in frigates and destroyers doing anything but escorting

HoratioScumdog wrote: I would also like to point out that modern navies no longer use battleships, and I doubt that their short comings would get any better in space. I do however recognise that battleships are freaking awesome and welcome them warmly into LT

Im not a military guy but afaik the shortcomings are not shortcomings per-se but a lack of distinct advantages.
As missles can as well be fired from cruiser sized vessels and cruisers have multiple planetary range.
Battleships also dont have any more survivability compared to a cruiser, sinkable by 1 or 2 torpedoes and modern cruise missles ripping through all economically feasible armor types and strenghts.
So why waste the resources on a big single target which has all the disadvantages of "all eggs in a single basket".

But in LT bigger ships could carry bigger armaments, thicker armor that actually survives missle impacts, shields that may prevent any damage that would have ccrippled a cruiser and have ranges of maybe multiples of that of cruisers, battleships have an advantage compared to cruisers again, besides the eggs in the basket effect.

I suppose I should read the suggestions forum more because I completely overlooked Alcazz's post from a while back.

With my Naval Review thread what I am really trying to do is imagine how these ships can all work together at the operational level, combining what we know about; sensors, data, the sharing of information, and what we know about weapons and Engagement Range

JoshParnell wrote:Naturally different weapons have different ranges Missiles are generally the longest-range, as I mentioned somewhere else.

The exact numbers are yours to play with

Although this Josh quote seems to deal more with range and not whether or not my heavy cannons can fire at an enemy simply because he has up to date data (hopefully) of their position. This lovely film courtesy of the AAF ca 1944.

I have some highlights here if you don't care to watch it to help me illustrate my point: note all of these links are very close together so you may not want to open them all at once
Here we can imagine this little guy as the recon vessel, the sensor ship, or the spy. The sensor vessel will then transmit his data in some manner to:
This little guy, the command and control vessel, the information center of the fleet decides it has a viable target for the fleet's long range guns.

Aside from the support by artillery fire, the flow of operational data also dictates where you send your bombers to raid, your cruiser teams to advance, your fighters to create their elastic defense! Your dreadnoughts to... Dreadnought! All the while maintaining overlapping fields of fire so as to crush any enemy counter attack

See? I'm attempting to make my thread relevant at least

The key concept here is "specialized functions."

The moment you have units with specialized functions as part of an organization, two effects matter:

1. There are different kinds of things you can do that are worth doing within the targeted sphere of operations.
2. Getting the most out of having specialized units in a group requires a higher level of command and control.

Functional real-world organizations usually have both of those effects in play. But they're different depending on if we're talking real world or game world.

1. Consider that first item: doing specialized things. In the real world, by definition you can do anything you can do. If a unit has some specialized function, then that function has some purpose that's distinct from other purposes. In other words, if a unit is optimized to perform some action, it's because that action is something that can be performed in the real world.

That's worth pointing out because it's not necessarily true in the world of a game. In a game, which is created by people, "mechanics" are virtually always an action-consequence pair that had to be consciously designed and implemented -- the point being, if no one designed and implemented it, you can't do it. So we could invent different capabilities for different kinds and size classes of ships in LT as the day is long, and while that might be fun, it's functionally irrelevant if there aren't specialized activities -- designed and implemented by Josh -- that are best performed by different kinds and size classes of ships.

Will there be?

2. Command and control -- in the real world, an anarchic organization is an oxymoron. (Or to put it another way, a mob.) Getting the most effective use out of a group composed of units with specialized capabilities requires several things: understanding those capabilities individually, understanding their interconnected effects, and having the ability to impose an order on those units that applies those combined effects to achieve an intended goal.

Real-world organizations can have that. They don't all have it, and some that have it lose it, but it is at least a thing that is possible. In a game, though... we're back to "code is law." Individual capabilities is addressed in part 1 above. This second part is about whether the developer allows individual (specialized) effects to add up to bigger things (including inter-unit communications), and whether players have the power to organize such groups and apply their massed effects to a gameplay goal. If either of those is not the case or is extremely limited, then that's a game where the biggest and most guns wins, and clever tactics and operations are not a supported form of gameplay.

So these would be my questions before I think too hard about fleets in LT:

1. Can ships specialize?
2. Are there distinct gameplay mechanics associated with those specializations?
3. Can specialized units be grouped in ways that amplify their individual capabilities or grant new capabilities?
4. Can specialized units (or sub-groups) communicate status and invent multi-unit plans?
5. Is there "terrain" in space that group leaders can perceive and make use of in their plans?
6. Can those plans effectively use specialized unit or group abilities to optimally exploit local terrain features?
7. Can some players (human or NPC) impose such orders on other units to achieve the goals of a mission?

You're right of course Flatfingers, I am by no stretch of the imagination, a programmer. So its true that I cant really say what is and is not possible to do with the AI's understanding of operational level combat.

I do however think that the answer probably lies in a modified version of the missions and tasks system Josh has been working on recently, combined with some sort of hierarchic command structure, in which smaller groups would try to carry out their tasks given by the next chain up in the command structure, while given the freedom to operate in their local area as the situation calls for.

Again I have no idea how one would actually teach an AI to understand these things and I mostly just made this thread for hypothetical fun. I do hope though, that when it comes time for Josh to start thinking about these things more seriously and in depth, that our hypothetical drivel might help him to brainstorm what he needs to get the job done and in the mean time we can all have fun learning from one another

What about a gunboat? Its a cross between fighter/bomber/frigate. It has the versatility of a fighter, the pay load of a bomber and the armor of a frigate. Granted if it would make it in game it would be rather expensive.

Well said, Horatio.

For what it's worth, I'm strongly in favor of game features in LT that support interesting tactical play (such as "terrain" in space). That's why I unleashed that novel above; I'm just thinking out loud about what core features might be needed to enable the kind of gameplay you capably described at the start of this thread.

I'd definitely like to see something like that. Ships being able to communicate information and direction to each other, and ships with different capabilities used effectively, make tactical play much more interesting than simple numbers of artificially clever individuals.

While battleships can be powerful and fun to play with, these days, carriers are pretty much the top of the heap, because of their ability to project their power or influence.

Poet1960 wrote:While battleships can be powerful and fun to play with, these days, carriers are pretty much the top of the heap, because of their ability to project their power or influence.

Remember that we have had no serious naval conflict between advanced operators for quite a long time.


If they in 1939 were wrong about the usefulness of Battleships in large scale conflict only 20 years after the last serious large scale naval war, then we are probably 3 times more wrong about our conclusion that Carriers rule the waves today since it was 60-70 years since carriers really were challenged against a serious opponent in real large scale naval combat...


If big Battleships are bad because your putting all the eggs in the same basket, then I fail to see how more then twice as big super-carriers are any better!

IMHO huge Carriers of today are just as much of a prestige ship that Battleships were before WW2, I can give them that they are fairly good at bombing defenseless Arabs that can't shoot back... But again that is not very relevant for a real conflict now is it?

Poet1960 wrote:While battleships can be powerful and fun to play with, these days, carriers are pretty much the top of the heap, because of their ability to project their power or influence. ;)

That's because offensive technology has vastly outpaced defensive technology.

If battleships could have armor and shields to shrug off the small weapons that fighters carry - and there was an actual war where this mattered - battleships would start to look interesting.

Since we're working with handwavium and unobtainium, battleships can be as well protected as we say they are. =P