Seldon's Starcraft 2 and the Space Opera Trillion Credit Squadron

Zoe the cat and I spent a productive Sunday afternoon perusing the Starships of War for Space Opera. I started a spreadsheet of ship statistics, intending to do some "Trillion Credit Squadron" fun.

Trillion Credit Squadron

Back in the day, Traveller supported wargame style play. One supplement in this line was Trillion Credit Squadron. Players designed their own fleets, using the High Guard big ship rules. Then they lined them up, using the ship combat rules and slugged it out to find out who was the best designer and fleet commander. The results were very interesting; Douglas Lenat ran hundreds of simulations using his AI Program while designing his fleets and won the national contest two years running. 

Space Opera’s shipbuilding rules never included the ‘secret’ military design rules. In their absense, we can use published examples. Eight sample fleet lines were published in Seldon’s guides 2 and 3. 

The compendiums sad Stats for Destroyers, Cruisers, and other space warships. In the fiction, Battleships designed according to each fleet’s capabilities and cultural preferences. Four more or less human cultures, four more or less alien cultures. 

Every Starnation’s culture was reflected in their ship designs. The UFP built the best ships they could; the expense was no object. In comparison, the Mercantile League kept a close eye on the bottom line. Both had to protect hundred of allies and colonies scattered over hundreds of lightyears. The oppressive Azurich Imperium built big nasty attack ships for their relatively few chosen crews. Their ships were not designed to defend broad areas of space, but merely for destruction. The Galactic People’s republic had more manpower. They built many cheaper ships to utilize this advantage.  

Each ship classification came in several varieties t different levels of technological sophistication. Each ship had a price, fixed to the ‘hard’ credit of the Federation and League banks. Prices ranged from a few megacredits for cheap starfighters, to hundreds of Billions for the top of the line Battlestars. 

I built a spreadsheet model for buying warships. List out the classes and their prices, pick and choose and compare.

For example, take the most expensive ships in the books, Federation Concordant Battlestars. One point two five million tons, crews of thousands. Carries thousands of marines, hundreds of fighters, and tens of thousands of tons cargo. Each mounts over two dozen of the most powerful ship to ship weapons, with armor and shields to match. With crack gun crews, a Battlestar can wreck a destroyer in less than five minutes. UFP Battlestars are not super-fast, but they can cross between stars faster than GPR or Imperial battleships. Big bad mama-jammers. 

With a trillion credits we can afford three Battlestars. And we get change. Nearly a hundred billion left over to buy full fighter groups, ten destroyers, and thirty scout/couriers. That’ll make some pirate lord or galactic tyrant soil their pants

Or what the heck, let's stock up on destroyers. For a trillion, we can get 200 destroyers, ten destroyer leaders, and full fighter load outs – nearly 1,700 fighters. They’re lifting over 38,000 Space Marines.

A trillion credits of Fleet corvettes and Scouts yeilds 2,400 ships. None of their guns will even scratch the Battlestars’ paint. But they can launch ten times as many missiles as the Battlestar’s fighter groups.

More to follow!

How much is a ton of Starship?

In FGU’s Space Opera RPG (1980) Spaceships are sized in Tons. Section 9.9 in Book 2 on Page 54 tells us a ton of ship equals a volume of 3 cubic meters. 

(Or you are a true blue patriotic American fanatic, 100 cubic feet. Not equal, but close enough for D&D.)

Ships in Book 1 and Seldon’s Compendium of Space Craft Vol 1 (1981) are constant with this volume to weight ratio.

But in Seldon’s Volume 2 (1984) there’s a stealth rule change. A ton of ship is now 30 cubic meters. This ratio is repeated in Seldon’s Volume 3 (1988). We can be reasonably sure it’s not a typo.

The Nike Scout and Nemesis Corvette class ships are in both Seldon’s Volume 1 and Volume 2. In Vol1, there are volumes listed for these ships. This is consistently 3 cubic meters per ton. Volume totals are not in the stats in Seldon’s Volume 2 and 3.

I don’t believe any of FGU’s published Space Opera deck plans included a scale. They work just as well scaling 1 square meter up to 100 square feet. Triple the width and length add a few centimetres headspace and deck thickness.  A drawing scaled for  3 cubic meters equals one ton easily translates to 30 cubic meters equals one ton.

Handwave, Handwave, close enough for D&D. 

Actual weight/mass of these ships doesn’t matter. In the Space Opera game, ships use ultra-science inertia-less antigravity faster-than-light space drives. They don’t violate the laws of physics as we know them.  Space Opera sends rampaging hordes of bugs to devour the laws of physics. Space Opera tech is "Sufficiently Advanced"!

Why the change? I speculate the Nemesis corvette inspired the change. That boat carries a company of space marines. Somebody familiar with shipping requirements of a military unit may have seen the deck plans. And had a fit of the giggles. It was the 1980s, the news was full of stories about military transportation during the Gulf War.

Same for anybody who tried to fit in Fighter bays. Same for anybody who tried to figure out how some of these ships made money trading. Any ship that can’t carry standard shipping containers does not have a cargo bay. It has a broom closet.

This sort of thing was not unique to the Space Opera game. I remember it affecting the more popular Traveller Game. I was surprised while reading Traveller High Guard. A Traveller ton is 13.5 to 14 cubic meters. The volume of a ton of liquid hydrogen. Why? A ton of water is a single cubic meter. Real world ships have 3 to 5 cubic meters of interior space per displacement ton. Early deck plans published by Judge’s Guild were tiny, compared to later plans for the same ships. 


So a ton of Space Opera ship takes the volume of two tons of Traveller ship. A Nike class scout is 7.5 times the volume of a classic Traveller scout. It has a bigger crew, more and bigger guns, better defenses, and ridiculously higher performance.