That also suggests why the Imperium had a lot of classes without the Meson Screen. During the overall peace where no major Domain+ sized wars were going on, many of those cruisers would do peace time duty, patrols to punish some Vargr corsairs or whatnot, a lot of showing the flag and reminding people the Imperial Navy is not to be trifled with, etc.

Peacetime can really change military procurement priorities. When a war starts, unless you are the aggressor who has been up-arming for it, usually you are on your back foot, faced with better ships than you have, and wishing the peacetime bean counters had built newer, better, more capable ships to fight the new adversary.

Then if the war drags on, both sides tend to optimize their ship classes for war (less fat, more lean lethality and units built for attritional warfare).

On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 11:44 PM <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

This is interesting. A deniable strike to punish either a greedy noble or a greedy corporation or the like. Nice!

The one thing that would make this even more reasonable as a scenario would be this:

If everyone is in the middle of active fighting, they're going to know very quickly that this omission is a glaring gaff. Hell is going to be raised right then and there.

If, on the other hand, these ships were built in peacetime, and nobody really had figured they'd have to go into main line of battle anytime soon (show the flag, chase pirates, hammer smaller vessels, etc. but no serious fleet actions with similar sized classes), then the shortcoming, while known to the crews, might not be as big of a deal as long as none of the ships of the class got gutted by a hostile combatant.

Then along comes a real fight, bang goes the ship with the scion, and now you have 'the ancient Rite of Canly' as Duke Leto Atreides would have called it.

Something like that might make the omission's existence for a long period sort of 'it ought to be there, but the ship still does okay in its uses' during peacetime followed by.... real fights and real heavy damage or ship losses.

TomB

On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 11:14 PM Ethan McKinney <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

Ken Burnside asked me to post this:

While kvetching about the canonical lack of Meson Screens on certain classes of warships I have to make scenarios around for Squadron Strike: Traveller... I came up with the idea for a campaign arc. I bounced it off of my Traveller line developer (Michael Llaneza) and...
We got this: Justice by Design A doctrinal error by the Imperial Navy has led to the death of a scion of a noble family. The gallant young officer went down fighting in the finest traditions of the Imperial navy, but might have survived victorious if their ship had been equipped with a meson screen. It was supposed to. Despite the master construction plans and bills of material clearly stating “put a Mk8 Meson Screen in this compartment”, those compartments were used for PO berthing on every single vessel in the class equipped for a humaniti-majority crew (Vegan Confederation destroyers of this class used it for a high-humidity rec area). Someone made an ungodly sum of money on this deception. Someone highly placed, able to interfere with the distribution of construction blueprints for a major class of Imperial warship to dozens or hundreds of naval yards. These people will pay in blood and in the destruction of all their works. The contract specifies seven generations worth of damage. Every effort will be made to provide (deniable) assets as required. You have been offered the job. What do you do?

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