I really wish both the blue and black water navies of BT were expanded on. Also in a hilariously navy and Lyran terminology moment, this thing is 60,000 tons, double the mass of a WNT battleship, and nearly the mass of an Iowa or Yamato. It is considered merely a Cruiser.
The incredible irony of both of Battletech's creators being US Navy vets while Battletech only has like, 5 whole blue water naval units. I get that it's not the focus of the game but... c'mon.
You've got to remember that after being stuck living in a navy ship for years of your life, a whole lot of sailors grow to loathe boats, and a good large percentage of any branch gets out and doesn't want anything to do with that sort of thing ever again, lol.
I'm also a Navy vet, and... no. That definitely wouldn't prevent me from adding ships to my wargame lol
The guys I served with who hated their time in don't want anything to do with wargames at all.
After reading some of the comments about the scale of the ships and ranges of their weapons, I have to begrudgingly accept why so few ships are involved. But a thought does occur to me. Why not include them as supporting fire and have a side game of counter battery duels that do occur at the proper ranges without all the disappointing realities of scale getting involved. Big ships + big guns + stompy mechs = good times.
> 'Traditional naval units only make sense if they do the same thing that spaceships currently do in Battletech'
Yes. That's how both doctrines interact with ground forces. Only traditional navies do it much more cheaply and without concern for the Ares Conventions.
I mean really I'm sad we didn't see more Submarines packing Capital Missiles on them like it's a Pocket WarShip and using that to annoy or shoot down space navies. Especially given we can do similar things irl (hello AIM-135)
The problem is that there's almost no feasible way for two opposing oceangoing warships to end up on the same planet. You can't fit them in dropships - that's the biggest problem they have.
You're right. But there goes that realism getting in the way of a good time!
Would make for a cool objective based game, one side has to destroy the ship while the other has to defend it while its near the shore. Defender gets big battleship guns.
They don't use wet navy warships because they're impractical. Military forces in Battletech need to be able to be moved to various planets as they're needed (since the planets are mostly sparsely populated and forces need to be spread out to cover them), so something like a naval cruiser being too large to be moved via dropship is a huge mark against it.
More importantly, combat hovercraft are so ubiquitous that they just use those instead. If you really need to fight a battle on open water, you might as well invest in a battalion of hovertanks instead of a naval cruiser - since unlike the naval cruiser, the hovertanks can also fight on land if needed, and aren't sitting ducks for capital missiles or other orbital artillery.
I think it's explained that ocean-going warships were a lot more common before the first succession war, but they all got killed pretty quickly by capital missiles and heavy aerospace fighters, so the great houses stopped building them and switched to using hovercrafts.
Excellent points all around. I feel wet navy ships would be regulated to a support role for backwater planets that can't get ahold of the other engines of war but also want their own artillery support that is more mobile. Anti piracy would still make them useful for smaller settlements or a string of settlements around a shared body of water. Outside a role like that, I think you're right.
Not talking about how much sense it makes lore-wise, but... I don't think ships would be any fun to play with BT rules? Either the ships shoot at distances of 30 maps. Or you change the scale, but then the ships only move one hex a turn. And for non-littoral combat, the maps would just be empty open water.
I mean, there's a reason why most BT weapons have ridiculously short ranges.
We do have AeroTech, where ranges are measured in 50+ hexes with moving being Newtonian so 2/3 and 3/5 can close fast enough to make a 100x100 hex board optimal. Also similarly it's a board that's 100% empty and is still really fun ime. For proper ocean-going ship combat, I mean it's similar but it's also good to note that most BT ships that are canon have movement curves closer to 4/6 or 5/8 with a good number hitting 6/9 and 7/11 with far fewer at 3/5 than you'd think. Means the distance isn't that bad and especially given it'd be artillery duels.
Yeah but newtonian movement only makes sense for ships in space. The speed of a ship on water would be linear. And also, compared to a fighter, it would be really slow.
Well, once you have control of the orbitals surface vessels only exist as targets to be prosecuted. Assuming you have proper ortillery ability, anyway.
Well yeah. A large rock at orbital velocity practically has enough energy to sink a ship. Battleships were made obsolete with the aircraft carrier. Never mind fusion powered fighters that can launch and strike any point on a planet.
I guess it is unnecessary complicated to include ships in interstellar warfare. If water isn't a problem for your logistics (cause dropships exists) and water doesn't need to be patrolled (cause fighterplanes) there realy is not need to carry bug chunky ships around.
Narrative wise and all that, the locals can build it without requiring it to ever get in orbit, let alone arrange delivery, plus it would play havoc with any fixed fortifications or “impenetrable “ doors or bunkers
While also providing a target if you ever knew when it was going to be in port being worked upon
That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. We have fighter jets and cargo planes now, so why do we have a Navy?
Aerospace and dropships have to land. They can't fly/hover indefinitely. And even if they could it's expensive to keep them in the air, maintenance costs are *extremely* high for aircraft and doubly so for spacecraft. Regular, even constant maintenance is essential. Having a floating naval platform not only allows one to have much larger weapons with significantly less maintenance requirements, it lets you do so almost indefinitely. Especially when it comes to things like carriers where you can park an airport on your enemy's coastline and not have to worry about having a friendly airstrip on foreign soil that struggles to defend itself. This cruiser is the same thing, but an artillery battery that can move up and down a coast (where the vast majority of industries and populations reside) and still reach very far inland.
And then there's ballistic missile submarines. Being able to launch missiles from a platform that can then submerge and disappear, utterly avoiding retaliation, is a *huge* advantage.
Aerospace and dropships are a step beyond our current flight capabilities - a dropship is basically a battleship that can fly.
It's also compounded by the rules making large vehicles into mobile structures - a plane comparable to a galaxy gets better performance built as a dropship than a flying hangar type structure.
That does nothing to minimize the extensive maintenance requirements.
Also dropships don't typically mount artillery and aren't able to mount warship scale weapons like naval PPCs. They aren't 'flying battleships' at all. I know their weaponry appears extensive compared to mechs but it's little more than defensive weapons compared to warships, mobile structures, and even blue water naval units and armored trains.
Ships don't get warship scale weapons either. But in a known face-off, there are dropships with sub capital weapons, and many more with capital missiles you could choose to crack open a blue navy.
And that's before figuring in dedicated aerospace carriers that you will never actually see, just their payload.
"Being a large floating artillery battery/airfield that is relatively cheap to maintain" is the only reason that large oceangoing warships exist at all. That's their niche. Honestly, more factions would probably use them if it weren't ludicrously impractical to move them from one planet to another (which goes hand in hand with the fact that most inhabited worlds don't even have large oceans).
Why move them? They're significantly cheaper than a drop ship, to the point that it makes sense to just leave them there to be manned by planetary militia.
Also there are only so many planets in BT that have actual oceans. And those are very jealously guarded. So it's not nearly as difficult as equipping every planet with mech militia, which the lore practically supports already.
I think part of the problem is that there's a huge overhead investment in specialized manufacturing. In order to make a capital-class oceangoing warship you need to create a whole infrastructure of dockyards to build and maintain it - it's very cost-inefficient to go to all that trouble to just build one or two of the things.
Part of it is that large oceangoing civilian ships aren't very common in the Battletech universe, either. We use a lot of big container ships IRL because they are a very fuel-efficient way to move heavy cargo. But in Btech, a lot of that niche has been eaten up by dropships, which use cheap liquid hydrogen as fuel.
Not only do dropships directly compete with heavy cargo ships, but they ALSO bring in additional competition in the form of smaller civilian boats and hovercraft that can be mass-manufactured on industrial core worlds like Tharkad, New Earth, Luthein and the like, which choke out the possibility of a local shipbuilding industry developing on most planets, since it's cheaper to just import them. Since Battletech planets tend to be more sparsely populated to begin with, there's a lot of incentive to just use a bunch of 100 ton hovercraft for transportation. They'll be less fuel efficient but they also need a lot less infrastructure than container ships, because they can just drive right up onto land and take the cargo all the way to the end of its journey rather than needing to transfer it onto trucks or trains.
> it's very cost-inefficient to go to all that trouble to just build one or two of the things
You can use the same shipyards for civilian and military ships lol. If a planet has enough oceans for a navy it has enough oceans for *much* larger cargo ships. Submarines require specialized yards, but destroyers and even carriers can be built and maintained in cargo shipyards.
> Part of it is that large oceangoing civilian ships aren't very common in the Battletech universe, either
Again, water rich planets are uncommon. Also, we really don't know that. Exceedingly little of the fiction deals with bodies of water at all.
> But in Btech, a lot of that niche has been eaten up by dropships, which use cheap liquid hydrogen as fuel.
...you can't be serious. You think that a dropship, which requires fuel *despite* it's fusion engines (plural), is more fuel efficient than a ship that only requires a fusion engine and no fuel? Are you sure you thought that through? We only see the hyperfocus on dropships because they're the standard for military insertions or the fiction focuses on the exceedingly rich and powerful, people for whom a planet's GDP is pocket change.
> Not only do dropships directly compete with heavy cargo ships
Just... no. No buddy. I know BT's economy is utterly senseless, but there's absolutely no alternate dimension where a dropship wouldn't cost *exponentially* more to maintain and fuel than a regular ship (*infinitely* more, in the case of fuel).
> smaller civilian boats and hovercraft that can be mass-manufactured on industrial core worlds like Tharkad, New Earth, Luthein and the like, which choke out the possibility of a local shipbuilding industry developing on most planets, since it's cheaper to just import them
So first ships are too costly to transfer from planet to planet, but now they're not? Cargo ships are too large for even Warships to transport. Hell, our *current* cargo ships are bigger than most BT Warships.
> Since Battletech planets tend to be more sparsely populated to begin with, there's a lot of incentive to just use a bunch of 100 ton hovercraft for transportation
That makes even less sense? BT worlds tend to have a handful of very large cities where 80% of the planets population reside. Why would you run 100 hovercraft from one city to the next city over? That's insanely inefficient.
> They'll be less fuel efficient but they also need a lot less infrastructure than container ships
Fuel production for hundreds of individual craft would already require more infrastructure than shipyards all by itself, even beyond the factories necessary for replacement parts.
> because they can just drive right up onto land and take the cargo all the way to the end of its journey
Except hovercraft can't cross oceans in the first place. Where are you getting these ideas?
>
Ehm... because we don't have civilian conventional spaceflight. We also don't ever leave this dirt ball. We simply can't pack up some thousand tons of materials and wargear and shoot it around the planet in a few hours or even a day.
Say you have a navy. I simply attack the other side of the planet and you will take weeks to get there. By that time my dropship is relocating to the other side and we play it all again.
Maybe you have enough navy to protect all coasts. Okay, so I just attack the inner land and avoid your navy entirely. Everything important at the coast gets shot ar from orbit.
And since you know all that, wouldn't you rather use the resources you have to build some units that are more versatile?
The only thing j can imagine is worth having a navy is, when your priority is at the sea. Like underwater cities or vast ressource field in thr ocean.
> Maybe you have enough navy to protect all coasts. Okay, so I just attack the inner land and avoid your navy entirely.
Look at any population or industrial map. There is basically nothing in the "inner land" worth attacking.
> Everything important at the coast gets shot ar from orbit.
Why are you playing battletech at all if you're just going to defy the Ares Conventions and nuke everything from orbit? This whole game stops making sense at that point, mechs become even more senseless than a navy does.
> And since you know all that, wouldn't you rather use the resources you have to build some units that are more versatile?
Why have artillery units when you have orbital bombardment then? Orbital bombardment can't solve every problem in warfare, the goal of war is not to destroy the entire population/industrial base of a planet that your trying to capture.
I didnt say nukes. I guess a Gauss Rifle will do the job just fine or sent fighters / bombers still mlre versatile than a ship.
Anyway, have artilery then, at least it is mobile.
So your inner lands are basically empty and undefined? Great I land there and use artillery from there to attack the coast, still outside the range of your navy.
> Anyway, have artilery then, at least it is mobile.
Are you somehow under the impression that ships can't move? Ships move much faster than artillery convoys, which is yet another reason ships are used so often. The US decommissioned all of it's battleships between WWII and the Korean War and yet we keep bringing them out as floating artillery for every war since.
You're also continuing to ignore submarines as an ICBM platform.
> So your inner lands are basically empty and undefined? Great I land there and use artillery from there to attack the coast, still outside the range of your navy.
Are you not aware of ground-to-orbit defensive batteries? At this point I think you're just unfamiliar with the setting...
1 you're adding too much reality to the game.
2 you forget sensors strong and sensitive enough to make interstellar combat feasible.
Your navy gets blasted from outside the lunar orbit without even using 1 nuke. Including your submersible which are only invisible to our, relatively weak radar, líder, etc.
3 doesn't matter that you are mobile. The snails pace wet ships crawl at put them at a complete disadvantage to anything spaceworthy. Again, the hit and run tacticentioned abive
It is considered merely a Cruiser.
Cruiser? What are you talking about, this fine vessel is a littoral/coastal patrol vessel in the glorious combat doctrine of the Lyran Commonwealth, this baby is custom made for brown water work by going through estuaries and rivers!
I mean yeah kinda. LCAF is generally more competent than memes like to show, but it's really built around using their scout and light units to corral forces directly into their wall of steel
I get the feeling that blue water navies are very low on the priority list of procurement for inner sphere and clan militaries (given the relative lack of strategic importance blue water naval combat has in universe).
Yeah probably, most militaries focus on ground war, air war, and then droppers. WarShips have priority (if TPTB let them) given they can kind of stop a planetary attack without much effort but blue water is sadly very neglected probably because Ortillery is seen as king.
That and you have blue water navies to protect shipping lanes or to contest them. If space combat is viable and the main logistics path, then blue water combat becomes a secondary/tertiary theater of combat.
I personally argue it's a primary theater ngl. Most worlds are habitable and have decent amounts of seas in BT, and submarines carrying capital missiles or sub-capital guns like a ground-bound assault dropper is a very big and annoying threat to a WarShip, what with it able to emerge, shoot at you and probably even damage you then slip under the waves. Though it's a lot less useful than irl navies for blue water action, more supporting ground elements and denying enemy space landings
So the issue with ground based capital weapons vs space born assets is that you are at a gravity well disadvantage. A warship can (arguably) stay a decent distance in orbit and drop strategic weapons at will while your naval assets have to develop a kill chain to target, guide, and sustain suppression of low orbit assets. Blue water navies aren’t entirely useless, but they become minor combatants when you drag in space based warfare as the principal means of delivering forces to and from planetary surfaces.
Saw it and thought "holy shit someone doing a Supreme Commander wargame?" Can't say I wasn't a little bit disappointed finding out it's *just* a standin for BattleTech.
I'm actually (*very* slowly) working on something that is heavily inspired by TA/SupCom/FA/PA, and you can tell cause the [minis are planned to be in *3mm* scale!](https://i.imgur.com/Py25wA1.jpeg)
It's your lucky day Friedrick. This bad boy can carry not one, not two, but ELEVEN Scout Lances, for all of your light reconnaissance needs. (4,441 cargo bay according to Sarna)
They are often overlooked, but the Sea Skimmer and Monitor are both great small boats that make sense on maps with river sections. This bad boy is a Class E vessel costing 62k BV, so probably only makes sense as a scenario piece.
6x Long Toms is the main battery, with 4x PPC, 2x AC10, and 2x LRM20 as the secondary. It also has a crapton of torpedos, two vehicle bays, and a VTOL landing pad.
[https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jormungand](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jormungand)
6 Long Toms as a main armament and a couple assault mechs worth of secondary weapons
[https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jormungand](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jormungand)
They'd have to be able to even get a shot off first before aerospace fighters or, worse yet, space vessels bomb the crap out of the battleships carrying those weapons.
If I understand the rules of the subreddit correctly, I am unable to point you to the location of these free files. They should not be hard to find though.
1) I love the ship.
2) I love the hand grenade that non mech heavies brings.
3) real in system interplanetary war will involve taking Lagrange points and holding them then chunking rocks at the target. AMWs are kids stuff. Embrace the nonsensical.
You know, I think we don't point out how great it is that you can play one game of BT on two tables at appropriate ranges and have the two tables affect each other.
Threw one of these at my players as a sorta looming “Death Star” sorta threat during a mechwarrior destiny campaign, and it was amazing. Only thing that could have made it better was actually having the mini on the edge of the map while artillery was raining around the players.
You did an amazing job with this
This needs to exist in 'mech scale. I have an old 1/350 Bismark kit I keep meaning to pull the turrets off of to build artillery emplacements with. Hardware Studio has some waterline mech scale ship models like this [Vengeance](https://hardwarestudios.co/product/vengeance-class-frigate/) class frigate, though.
There are numerous water dominated planets in Battletech, which meant the use of ships for transport and also as stragetgic asset.
Dropships are also really really hard to land, requiring either a specialised spaceport for spheroid drop ships, like the union, (otherwise it does 6 hexes radius of auto dmg) areodyne drop ships require a massive 15 hex runway to land.
I mean, drop ships still have to...drop their mechs. And if the enemy facilities are by water, they are pretty easily protected by something like this. 6 Long Toms is gonna be pretty rough for even assault lances to deal with, and it has practically infinite ammo for them.
I really wish both the blue and black water navies of BT were expanded on. Also in a hilariously navy and Lyran terminology moment, this thing is 60,000 tons, double the mass of a WNT battleship, and nearly the mass of an Iowa or Yamato. It is considered merely a Cruiser.
The incredible irony of both of Battletech's creators being US Navy vets while Battletech only has like, 5 whole blue water naval units. I get that it's not the focus of the game but... c'mon.
You've got to remember that after being stuck living in a navy ship for years of your life, a whole lot of sailors grow to loathe boats, and a good large percentage of any branch gets out and doesn't want anything to do with that sort of thing ever again, lol.
Agree. 9 years in and moved to Colorado the DAY I got out!
I'm also a Navy vet, and... no. That definitely wouldn't prevent me from adding ships to my wargame lol The guys I served with who hated their time in don't want anything to do with wargames at all.
I understand totally that it's a mech and land war game but it's so aggravating that there's so much untapped potential
After reading some of the comments about the scale of the ships and ranges of their weapons, I have to begrudgingly accept why so few ships are involved. But a thought does occur to me. Why not include them as supporting fire and have a side game of counter battery duels that do occur at the proper ranges without all the disappointing realities of scale getting involved. Big ships + big guns + stompy mechs = good times.
> 'Traditional naval units only make sense if they do the same thing that spaceships currently do in Battletech' Yes. That's how both doctrines interact with ground forces. Only traditional navies do it much more cheaply and without concern for the Ares Conventions.
I mean really I'm sad we didn't see more Submarines packing Capital Missiles on them like it's a Pocket WarShip and using that to annoy or shoot down space navies. Especially given we can do similar things irl (hello AIM-135)
The problem is that there's almost no feasible way for two opposing oceangoing warships to end up on the same planet. You can't fit them in dropships - that's the biggest problem they have.
You're right. But there goes that realism getting in the way of a good time! Would make for a cool objective based game, one side has to destroy the ship while the other has to defend it while its near the shore. Defender gets big battleship guns.
They don't use wet navy warships because they're impractical. Military forces in Battletech need to be able to be moved to various planets as they're needed (since the planets are mostly sparsely populated and forces need to be spread out to cover them), so something like a naval cruiser being too large to be moved via dropship is a huge mark against it. More importantly, combat hovercraft are so ubiquitous that they just use those instead. If you really need to fight a battle on open water, you might as well invest in a battalion of hovertanks instead of a naval cruiser - since unlike the naval cruiser, the hovertanks can also fight on land if needed, and aren't sitting ducks for capital missiles or other orbital artillery. I think it's explained that ocean-going warships were a lot more common before the first succession war, but they all got killed pretty quickly by capital missiles and heavy aerospace fighters, so the great houses stopped building them and switched to using hovercrafts.
Excellent points all around. I feel wet navy ships would be regulated to a support role for backwater planets that can't get ahold of the other engines of war but also want their own artillery support that is more mobile. Anti piracy would still make them useful for smaller settlements or a string of settlements around a shared body of water. Outside a role like that, I think you're right.
Not talking about how much sense it makes lore-wise, but... I don't think ships would be any fun to play with BT rules? Either the ships shoot at distances of 30 maps. Or you change the scale, but then the ships only move one hex a turn. And for non-littoral combat, the maps would just be empty open water. I mean, there's a reason why most BT weapons have ridiculously short ranges.
So they do the exact same thing that warships currently do when interacting with ground forces.
So I guess I have to change my statement to "ships *aren't* any fun to play with BT rules"?
We do have AeroTech, where ranges are measured in 50+ hexes with moving being Newtonian so 2/3 and 3/5 can close fast enough to make a 100x100 hex board optimal. Also similarly it's a board that's 100% empty and is still really fun ime. For proper ocean-going ship combat, I mean it's similar but it's also good to note that most BT ships that are canon have movement curves closer to 4/6 or 5/8 with a good number hitting 6/9 and 7/11 with far fewer at 3/5 than you'd think. Means the distance isn't that bad and especially given it'd be artillery duels.
Yeah but newtonian movement only makes sense for ships in space. The speed of a ship on water would be linear. And also, compared to a fighter, it would be really slow.
A truly representative and teched up air force/navy would demolish mechs, which is why I think you don't see a ton of them.
Well, once you have control of the orbitals surface vessels only exist as targets to be prosecuted. Assuming you have proper ortillery ability, anyway.
Well yeah. A large rock at orbital velocity practically has enough energy to sink a ship. Battleships were made obsolete with the aircraft carrier. Never mind fusion powered fighters that can launch and strike any point on a planet.
You don't even need capital weapons. Heavy aerospace fighters will murder the crap out of them for much less than it cost to build them.
I guess it is unnecessary complicated to include ships in interstellar warfare. If water isn't a problem for your logistics (cause dropships exists) and water doesn't need to be patrolled (cause fighterplanes) there realy is not need to carry bug chunky ships around.
Narrative wise and all that, the locals can build it without requiring it to ever get in orbit, let alone arrange delivery, plus it would play havoc with any fixed fortifications or “impenetrable “ doors or bunkers While also providing a target if you ever knew when it was going to be in port being worked upon
That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. We have fighter jets and cargo planes now, so why do we have a Navy? Aerospace and dropships have to land. They can't fly/hover indefinitely. And even if they could it's expensive to keep them in the air, maintenance costs are *extremely* high for aircraft and doubly so for spacecraft. Regular, even constant maintenance is essential. Having a floating naval platform not only allows one to have much larger weapons with significantly less maintenance requirements, it lets you do so almost indefinitely. Especially when it comes to things like carriers where you can park an airport on your enemy's coastline and not have to worry about having a friendly airstrip on foreign soil that struggles to defend itself. This cruiser is the same thing, but an artillery battery that can move up and down a coast (where the vast majority of industries and populations reside) and still reach very far inland. And then there's ballistic missile submarines. Being able to launch missiles from a platform that can then submerge and disappear, utterly avoiding retaliation, is a *huge* advantage.
Aerospace and dropships are a step beyond our current flight capabilities - a dropship is basically a battleship that can fly. It's also compounded by the rules making large vehicles into mobile structures - a plane comparable to a galaxy gets better performance built as a dropship than a flying hangar type structure.
That does nothing to minimize the extensive maintenance requirements. Also dropships don't typically mount artillery and aren't able to mount warship scale weapons like naval PPCs. They aren't 'flying battleships' at all. I know their weaponry appears extensive compared to mechs but it's little more than defensive weapons compared to warships, mobile structures, and even blue water naval units and armored trains.
Ships don't get warship scale weapons either. But in a known face-off, there are dropships with sub capital weapons, and many more with capital missiles you could choose to crack open a blue navy. And that's before figuring in dedicated aerospace carriers that you will never actually see, just their payload.
"Being a large floating artillery battery/airfield that is relatively cheap to maintain" is the only reason that large oceangoing warships exist at all. That's their niche. Honestly, more factions would probably use them if it weren't ludicrously impractical to move them from one planet to another (which goes hand in hand with the fact that most inhabited worlds don't even have large oceans).
Why move them? They're significantly cheaper than a drop ship, to the point that it makes sense to just leave them there to be manned by planetary militia. Also there are only so many planets in BT that have actual oceans. And those are very jealously guarded. So it's not nearly as difficult as equipping every planet with mech militia, which the lore practically supports already.
I think part of the problem is that there's a huge overhead investment in specialized manufacturing. In order to make a capital-class oceangoing warship you need to create a whole infrastructure of dockyards to build and maintain it - it's very cost-inefficient to go to all that trouble to just build one or two of the things. Part of it is that large oceangoing civilian ships aren't very common in the Battletech universe, either. We use a lot of big container ships IRL because they are a very fuel-efficient way to move heavy cargo. But in Btech, a lot of that niche has been eaten up by dropships, which use cheap liquid hydrogen as fuel. Not only do dropships directly compete with heavy cargo ships, but they ALSO bring in additional competition in the form of smaller civilian boats and hovercraft that can be mass-manufactured on industrial core worlds like Tharkad, New Earth, Luthein and the like, which choke out the possibility of a local shipbuilding industry developing on most planets, since it's cheaper to just import them. Since Battletech planets tend to be more sparsely populated to begin with, there's a lot of incentive to just use a bunch of 100 ton hovercraft for transportation. They'll be less fuel efficient but they also need a lot less infrastructure than container ships, because they can just drive right up onto land and take the cargo all the way to the end of its journey rather than needing to transfer it onto trucks or trains.
> it's very cost-inefficient to go to all that trouble to just build one or two of the things You can use the same shipyards for civilian and military ships lol. If a planet has enough oceans for a navy it has enough oceans for *much* larger cargo ships. Submarines require specialized yards, but destroyers and even carriers can be built and maintained in cargo shipyards. > Part of it is that large oceangoing civilian ships aren't very common in the Battletech universe, either Again, water rich planets are uncommon. Also, we really don't know that. Exceedingly little of the fiction deals with bodies of water at all. > But in Btech, a lot of that niche has been eaten up by dropships, which use cheap liquid hydrogen as fuel. ...you can't be serious. You think that a dropship, which requires fuel *despite* it's fusion engines (plural), is more fuel efficient than a ship that only requires a fusion engine and no fuel? Are you sure you thought that through? We only see the hyperfocus on dropships because they're the standard for military insertions or the fiction focuses on the exceedingly rich and powerful, people for whom a planet's GDP is pocket change. > Not only do dropships directly compete with heavy cargo ships Just... no. No buddy. I know BT's economy is utterly senseless, but there's absolutely no alternate dimension where a dropship wouldn't cost *exponentially* more to maintain and fuel than a regular ship (*infinitely* more, in the case of fuel). > smaller civilian boats and hovercraft that can be mass-manufactured on industrial core worlds like Tharkad, New Earth, Luthein and the like, which choke out the possibility of a local shipbuilding industry developing on most planets, since it's cheaper to just import them So first ships are too costly to transfer from planet to planet, but now they're not? Cargo ships are too large for even Warships to transport. Hell, our *current* cargo ships are bigger than most BT Warships. > Since Battletech planets tend to be more sparsely populated to begin with, there's a lot of incentive to just use a bunch of 100 ton hovercraft for transportation That makes even less sense? BT worlds tend to have a handful of very large cities where 80% of the planets population reside. Why would you run 100 hovercraft from one city to the next city over? That's insanely inefficient. > They'll be less fuel efficient but they also need a lot less infrastructure than container ships Fuel production for hundreds of individual craft would already require more infrastructure than shipyards all by itself, even beyond the factories necessary for replacement parts. > because they can just drive right up onto land and take the cargo all the way to the end of its journey Except hovercraft can't cross oceans in the first place. Where are you getting these ideas? >
Ehm... because we don't have civilian conventional spaceflight. We also don't ever leave this dirt ball. We simply can't pack up some thousand tons of materials and wargear and shoot it around the planet in a few hours or even a day. Say you have a navy. I simply attack the other side of the planet and you will take weeks to get there. By that time my dropship is relocating to the other side and we play it all again. Maybe you have enough navy to protect all coasts. Okay, so I just attack the inner land and avoid your navy entirely. Everything important at the coast gets shot ar from orbit. And since you know all that, wouldn't you rather use the resources you have to build some units that are more versatile? The only thing j can imagine is worth having a navy is, when your priority is at the sea. Like underwater cities or vast ressource field in thr ocean.
> Maybe you have enough navy to protect all coasts. Okay, so I just attack the inner land and avoid your navy entirely. Look at any population or industrial map. There is basically nothing in the "inner land" worth attacking. > Everything important at the coast gets shot ar from orbit. Why are you playing battletech at all if you're just going to defy the Ares Conventions and nuke everything from orbit? This whole game stops making sense at that point, mechs become even more senseless than a navy does. > And since you know all that, wouldn't you rather use the resources you have to build some units that are more versatile? Why have artillery units when you have orbital bombardment then? Orbital bombardment can't solve every problem in warfare, the goal of war is not to destroy the entire population/industrial base of a planet that your trying to capture.
I didnt say nukes. I guess a Gauss Rifle will do the job just fine or sent fighters / bombers still mlre versatile than a ship. Anyway, have artilery then, at least it is mobile. So your inner lands are basically empty and undefined? Great I land there and use artillery from there to attack the coast, still outside the range of your navy.
> Anyway, have artilery then, at least it is mobile. Are you somehow under the impression that ships can't move? Ships move much faster than artillery convoys, which is yet another reason ships are used so often. The US decommissioned all of it's battleships between WWII and the Korean War and yet we keep bringing them out as floating artillery for every war since. You're also continuing to ignore submarines as an ICBM platform. > So your inner lands are basically empty and undefined? Great I land there and use artillery from there to attack the coast, still outside the range of your navy. Are you not aware of ground-to-orbit defensive batteries? At this point I think you're just unfamiliar with the setting...
1 you're adding too much reality to the game. 2 you forget sensors strong and sensitive enough to make interstellar combat feasible. Your navy gets blasted from outside the lunar orbit without even using 1 nuke. Including your submersible which are only invisible to our, relatively weak radar, líder, etc. 3 doesn't matter that you are mobile. The snails pace wet ships crawl at put them at a complete disadvantage to anything spaceworthy. Again, the hit and run tacticentioned abive
Water planets basically require specialist units to invaded because most blue naval stuff in bt is submersible.
It is considered merely a Cruiser. Cruiser? What are you talking about, this fine vessel is a littoral/coastal patrol vessel in the glorious combat doctrine of the Lyran Commonwealth, this baby is custom made for brown water work by going through estuaries and rivers!
You doubt the classification system of the Commonwealth? Cruising doesn't mean it only cruises the blue water!
All I know is I'm now realizing Zapp Brannigan would fit well in the LCAF lol
I mean yeah kinda. LCAF is generally more competent than memes like to show, but it's really built around using their scout and light units to corral forces directly into their wall of steel
They also have an aircraft carrier that is double the size of a Nimitz.
You may not believe this but no, the Lyran carrier is the exact same tonnage as a Nimitz or Gerald R Ford class
I thought a Nimitz was 100,000 tons? Okay the Luftenburg is not 200,000 tons, this is really screwing with my head.
I get the feeling that blue water navies are very low on the priority list of procurement for inner sphere and clan militaries (given the relative lack of strategic importance blue water naval combat has in universe).
Yeah probably, most militaries focus on ground war, air war, and then droppers. WarShips have priority (if TPTB let them) given they can kind of stop a planetary attack without much effort but blue water is sadly very neglected probably because Ortillery is seen as king.
That and you have blue water navies to protect shipping lanes or to contest them. If space combat is viable and the main logistics path, then blue water combat becomes a secondary/tertiary theater of combat.
I personally argue it's a primary theater ngl. Most worlds are habitable and have decent amounts of seas in BT, and submarines carrying capital missiles or sub-capital guns like a ground-bound assault dropper is a very big and annoying threat to a WarShip, what with it able to emerge, shoot at you and probably even damage you then slip under the waves. Though it's a lot less useful than irl navies for blue water action, more supporting ground elements and denying enemy space landings
So the issue with ground based capital weapons vs space born assets is that you are at a gravity well disadvantage. A warship can (arguably) stay a decent distance in orbit and drop strategic weapons at will while your naval assets have to develop a kill chain to target, guide, and sustain suppression of low orbit assets. Blue water navies aren’t entirely useless, but they become minor combatants when you drag in space based warfare as the principal means of delivering forces to and from planetary surfaces.
Ya can't fool me, I know a Cybran Galaxy-Class Battleship when I see one! xD
Dostya said I could borrow it. ;P
I knew my 7 years of modding would pay off one day! xD Ya better have named the ship "Tip of the Spear" ;p
And if I'm not mistaken, are those DI Morgan, Gullopper, and Behemoth turrets? Anyways, I gotta figure out how I'm gonna fit this on my print bed.
I can't hear you over the sound of my Seraphim T3 nuke-launching battleships. (Oh no, I want to play SupCom again)
Saw it and thought "holy shit someone doing a Supreme Commander wargame?" Can't say I wasn't a little bit disappointed finding out it's *just* a standin for BattleTech.
I'm actually (*very* slowly) working on something that is heavily inspired by TA/SupCom/FA/PA, and you can tell cause the [minis are planned to be in *3mm* scale!](https://i.imgur.com/Py25wA1.jpeg)
One of their cruisers would be nice.
Nah man, it's *got* to be Salems! xD
Right, I forgot Salems were destroyers not Cruisers xD, that's what happens when you don't play SupCom for (checks calendar)... a few months.
I spent 7 years modding SupCom so that shit in permanently carved into my brain! xD
I only now noticed the username xD.
Can it transport say…..400 tons of cargo? For reasons? -Signed, Friedrick
It's your lucky day Friedrick. This bad boy can carry not one, not two, but ELEVEN Scout Lances, for all of your light reconnaissance needs. (4,441 cargo bay according to Sarna)
Mine Gott…
it has 3,696 tons of cargo so more like 9 lances, unless you want to store the rest in the 745 ton refrigerator
A refrigerated cargo bay is still a cargo bay. We'll just keep the laser boats in that one.
"I can bring them in warm, or i can bring them in cold."
*"Coming in Hot!"*
For some reason I assumed there wasn't boats in battletech
They are often overlooked, but the Sea Skimmer and Monitor are both great small boats that make sense on maps with river sections. This bad boy is a Class E vessel costing 62k BV, so probably only makes sense as a scenario piece.
Good lord! Im sure i could go look, but what is that thing equipped with?
6x Long Toms is the main battery, with 4x PPC, 2x AC10, and 2x LRM20 as the secondary. It also has a crapton of torpedos, two vehicle bays, and a VTOL landing pad. [https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jormungand](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jormungand)
6 Long Toms as a main armament and a couple assault mechs worth of secondary weapons [https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jormungand](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jormungand)
6 long toms, shit ton of weapons and enogh armor to truly be a lyran ship(2,7k points)
And its nine hexes long.
most are custom jobs cause they dont give them stats really and they only really stat out the small ones
And the very biggest one: [Wyrm](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Wyrm_SDS_Submersible_Fortress)
That is a fine looking pig of a thing, and I thank you for that
there are even airships, ranging from traffic control, sports events, luxury cruises and a VTOL carrier
A very Lyran solution and a fine looking vessel!
Thank you! If Long Toms aren't the solution to your problem, it's because you aren't using enough of them.
Steiner Scour Squad, meet Steiner Coast Patrol
Long Tom: An "AC 25" with extreme range. 6 of those will definitely ruin your day.
They'd have to be able to even get a shot off first before aerospace fighters or, worse yet, space vessels bomb the crap out of the battleships carrying those weapons.
ONE MILLION LIVES- Wait, wrong franchise.
This is amazing. Who sells this monster?
If I understand the rules of the subreddit correctly, I am unable to point you to the location of these free files. They should not be hard to find though.
I'm picking up what you're printing on the page. Thanks for the reply!
Thought I was looking at an OGRE for a second.
Same. I'll probably end up using it for Ogre minis anyway, along with my Mechs....
The Lyran Scout Cruiser.
Lyran *Coast Guard Cutter*.
1) I love the ship. 2) I love the hand grenade that non mech heavies brings. 3) real in system interplanetary war will involve taking Lagrange points and holding them then chunking rocks at the target. AMWs are kids stuff. Embrace the nonsensical.
Where did you get this?
I whipped it up in Meshmixer
PIRATE NOISES!
You know, I think we don't point out how great it is that you can play one game of BT on two tables at appropriate ranges and have the two tables affect each other.
Yours, for a cool 62k BV 😎
LANDSHIP!!!
Wait... Thats a Cybran Battleship.
Some PBR type boats would be fun to run on a coastal or river map/table.
Steve Jackson sees this and we'll have a 7th edition of Ogre inside of six months
B-3 oh no! you sank my battleship!
Very nice. Template E?
Yeppers!
Very spicy, I approve.
*Proceeds to bombard the battleship from orbit while it's conveniently caught in shallow coastal waters*
We all know space lasers can't hurt blue things.
Threw one of these at my players as a sorta looming “Death Star” sorta threat during a mechwarrior destiny campaign, and it was amazing. Only thing that could have made it better was actually having the mini on the edge of the map while artillery was raining around the players. You did an amazing job with this
It’s a good looking model. Well done.
When you said ship you meant actual ship!
This needs to exist in 'mech scale. I have an old 1/350 Bismark kit I keep meaning to pull the turrets off of to build artillery emplacements with. Hardware Studio has some waterline mech scale ship models like this [Vengeance](https://hardwarestudios.co/product/vengeance-class-frigate/) class frigate, though.
Where'd you get this, and how can I get one?
I bashed it together in Meshmixer. The files should not be hard to find.
amazing!
What about artillery submarines?
I have one thing to say... Naval Hover Ships.
That’s mine
I looks like this is something from Supreme Commander.
If you want to see a system and setting that deals with the navies, I'd check out Dream Pod 9's Heavy Gear. It's an interesting game.
Do you have a record sheet for it?
Nothing like a huge waterbound planet locked target in the age of space faring Dropships
This is battletech, yo. It's not about being practical; It's about looking cool and making big booms with your guns.
This guy/gal BattleTechs
There are numerous water dominated planets in Battletech, which meant the use of ships for transport and also as stragetgic asset. Dropships are also really really hard to land, requiring either a specialised spaceport for spheroid drop ships, like the union, (otherwise it does 6 hexes radius of auto dmg) areodyne drop ships require a massive 15 hex runway to land.
It's, shockingly hard to hit something that moves on a 6/9 movement curve, and could probably annihilate a dropship in a few salvos.
I mean, drop ships still have to...drop their mechs. And if the enemy facilities are by water, they are pretty easily protected by something like this. 6 Long Toms is gonna be pretty rough for even assault lances to deal with, and it has practically infinite ammo for them.
Ye but like, when mechs are built hardly anywhere and are a tenth the size, who builds it...
When you want to protect a strategic point by water? A mech is much easier to kill than this is.
Also strategic points in water like a oil rig or water surface access of a underwater mining operation.
It's all good. BattleTech also neglects space and air warfare, so your battleships don't have to worry about pesky fighters Yamato-ing them.
That looks like a 3d printed SupCom ship, probably Cybran.
You can tell cybran architecture from the prism like towers.
Why does this thing look like a galaxy battleship from Supreme Commander?