Empire Defense

This is based on the '4 battleships, 4 cruisers per subsector' rule of thumb. Using battleship-equivalents and cruiser-equivalents and my own real-world knowledge (I worked in the arms trade as a defense analyst for a while), I came up with figures based on this for how many of what you can have available.

Obviously deploying these ships in the 4 + 4 per subsector manner is asking for defeat in detail, so my model concentrates all the capital ships and most of the cruisers with the Sector Fleet command (along with most of the tankers and suitable escorts), while each subsector commander gets a bunch of destroyers as his main force with a cruiser (or two if he's lucky) as his heavy force.

The need to deal with the Grand Threat (fleet of capital ships) means that most of the budget is tied up in big ships. 'want of frigates' as Nelson called it is a problem but you can survive a bit of piracy and smuggling; you can't survive a major fleet defeat and the loss of your sector capital.

The colonial fleet makes up much of the slack in terms of patrol ships and escorts. There is little need for a world to maintain capital ships other than prestige maybe, so most surplus capital ships go to the fleet reserve or else are gutted as monitors to defend key worlds and naval bases.

The colonial fleet thus is mainly composed of older destroyers and smaller craft that are both affordable to individual worlds and also serve a useful purpose in terms of making the spacelanes safer for their owners' merchant shipping.

It is common practice to assign a higher proportion of first-line escorts to the Sector Fleet and give the sector fleet's theoretical allocation to the subsector commanders at better than 1:1 transfer. This puts the best units with the fleet and the lower capability ones where they are still useful.

The basic breakdown, then is something like:

All or almost all capital ships including carriers Most cruisers and cruiser-equivalents including carriers Majority of first-line destroyers and escorts Some colonial fleet assets, ie most capable cruisers and old battleships if any are present

One or more cruisers or cruiser-equivalents (e.g. carrier of cruiser size) Some first-line escorts and destroyers Many colonial escorts and destroyers Of course, the Sector Fleet is based and deploys within the subsectors it contains, and regularly lends units or sends task groups under sector fleet command to deal with specific problems. Sector fleet does also maintain some patrols, but for the most part its mission is to remain concentrated to deal with major threats, not to scatter its ships hither and yon across the sector.

However, the basic system is:

Protect and patrol local space with whatever assets they possess

Keeps the peace with some first-line escorts, destroyers and cruisers,
backed up with a larger number of lower-capability colonial ships in the
same class.

Comes down like a hammer on anything the Subsector Fleet can't deal with,
but only in the short term. Mostly remains concentrated to act as the hammer
and to deal with major problems.

Now, given that at the most 1/3 of assets can be out on patrol at any one
time (and usually it will be less than that), ships in jump, etc, it is not
possible to put piles of vessels in every system. Apart from anything else,
that's too expensive. So major shipping lines and sites of special interest
(e.g. where attacks have become common) get standing patrols and guardship
deployments, lesser worlds get put on the patrol rota for irregular but
fairly common patrols, and backwaters sometimes are not visited for several
months at a time, and then only for a couple of days.

I seem to recall doing a numbers breakdown in GF but I can't recall the
exact numbers.

[The above comes from an off-the-cuff post I made on TML paraphrasing the basics of the fleet model we used in the Traveller supplement Grand Fleet as published by Avenger Enterprises via Comstar Games. It is reposted with my permission. - MJ Dougherty, December 21st 2007]