Our fleets are classic, with the biggest ships being DN or DN-sized carrier, the smallest being frigates. The cost of DN is usually on the 400-500 points range, whilst frigates cost about 150 points.

Marc

I actually agree with this philosophy.  Yesterday, I played a 1500 point game here in Jacksonville.  I had a CR450 BB, a CR251 CL, four CR151 DDs, and a couple of CR110 FFs.  My friend had a CR750 ship, two CR350 ships and three CR24 ships.  It was a fun, brutal slugfest, but I won.
:arrow: BTW, I will be in S.Fla. for a week and we are playing Starmada at Gaming Glenn's excellent gaming store Dragon's Lair in Davie on Tuesday @ 1pm.   8-)

maybe it could be donne on a fleet basis, ie, the designer says that this ship is rare, those are uncommon, etc, and decides about the limit on a fleet (no more than one rare, etc.).

Whatever, my frioend and I designed our own fleets, still from my Star Trek designs along the above lines (no more big ships compared to medium, no more medium compared to small) and we ended up with the same composition. For 1500, we have 3 destroyers (about 150 each), 2 medium/heavy cruisers (about 250 each) and a battlecruiser/dreadnought-like ship (about 500 points).
I took Kzinti with their heavy load of drones (Gid/Skr/Dx2/Acr) and fighters from a CVL, and he took a mix of Hellbore/Fusion with fighters ships.

1500 points looks a bit small for my taste, but it should be interesting, though.

Marc

I think fleet design would be setting specific.  Thus, you'd have one fleet design system for B5, one for SFU, one for Starmada Universe (whatever you call it), etc.

If one were to import the campaign rules that were in the core/supplement set for Admiralty, you might be able to design such a thing by stating that a given force will have X composition per Y (in other words, if you have X unit on the fleet map, it will be composed of certain classes of vessels).

I would have thought the best way to get a "realistic" fleet would be to emulate in some manner the forces that cause a real world fleet to be diverse. While mission requirements will cover some of that, the primary force that dictates your fleet not ending up composed of DN's and BB's is politics, time and resource availability (and partially your ability to move those resources around).

As a start point your ability to build ships is governed by yard capacity (the number slipways and the size of each slip), the number of yards and lead time to build things. Someone else on this board suggested measuring yard capacity in SU and that seems reasonable to me, although because I'm a bit of a perfectionist I'd go down to SU/slipway and allow each slipway to only build ship in a specific SU ranges. The total SU capacity is probably a function of overall resource availability and the breakdown of that into individual yard capacity is up to the user. Though would you really want all your yard capacity in one tempting spot?

Unless it's a specialist yard, I'd doubt you would have more than 30%-50% of each yards capacity allocated to slipways capable handling the largest designs - for example in a yard with 2500 SU of finished capacity you would probably only have two slips capable of handling ships of 500-700 SU and the rest a mix of 250-400 SU and smaller (though obviously at any given time the total finished SU under contruction cannot exceed that 2500 points). Assume a construction rate of something like 20 to 25 SU per month per slip (ie a 100 SU ship takes roughly 4 to 5 months to complete) and give each player 120 to 180 months of construction time.

Design-wise allow no more than say 2 designs of each class (FF, DD and so on) and perhaps only one of the large classes (carriers, BB, DN). Once the engagements have started allow each player one revised design at each smaller class and one revised design from the larger classes. Normal construction rates apply to new builds. If you choose to build on a war footing then you get a faster construction rate (say up to 35-odd SU/month/slip) for the older designs and maybe a liitle faster for the revised new designs (say somehwere in the 25-30 SU/month/slip range). For an extra wrinkle adapt the lemon-dice rules from Heavy Gear (especially if you go in for building at war footing rates - corners get cut to build faster...)

As a nice side bonus your campaign will now feature juicy logistics targets - afterall if your enemies cant build any more ships your life gets much easier. If you choose to build new yard capacity I'd say make it expensive, say every SU of new yard capacity ties up 2 SU of existing yard capacity while under construction and a whole new yard built from scratch would require you to build a mobile yard (10 SU/month in a single slip) or build at a colony (where you can say that the first 50 SU of capacity can be built from scratch, say at 5 SU/month) and thereafter extra space requires yard capacity in the normal manner. Yeas that does mean once you finally build that initial 50 SU yard at a colony (or wherever), it will be able to self-expand quite rapidly until you hit your ability to ship resources to it. This also makes cargo shipping enormously important to both the player and his opponents.

Hopefully thats clear and vaguely useful.

All these are interesting, I looked up the Battle of Jutland and this was the list of the Royal Navy ships involved:
Total: 151 combat ships
28 battleships
9 battlecruisers
8 armoured cruisers
26 light cruisers
78 destroyers
1 minelayer
There were 37 DNs, 35 Cruisers, and 78 DDs.  It seems as if Britian's Grand Fleet followed the ratio:
For each DN, one cruiser & two DDs... 8-)  8-)

I agree with Gaming Glenn. 
If players really want to restrict themselves with a arbitrary house rule requiring a certain number of different smaller ships for each larger ship, go for it! 
Me personally, simetimes I take DNs & DDs and sometimes I take along my one CL with the fleet, its an elarged version of my DDs. 
But if someone tried to tell me that I Must bring this many cruisers and/or that many destroyers per DN or BB, or that for every CR XXX ship I have to bring so many CR YYY ships and/or so many CR ZZ ships, I would tell them to go...to go pick their own fleet Not mine :!:
Cheers

My 2 cents .  I don't particularly like fixed fleet restrictions (there are enough other games that restrict what you can take).  The only point I could see them at would be in a tournament setting and I would expect any tournament organizer to set such restrictions themselves.

Phroggelator: Looking at ship design from a standpoint of current wet navy building trends is only one way of looking at things.  What about a case where a single fixed volume system (a drive or power plant) necessitates larger ships?  Multiple science fiction universes work on such a system and it forces certain design considerations.  The best example would be David Weber's Mutineer's Moon series (+Armageddon Inheritance and Heirs of Empire) where moon size battle planetoids are the ship design of choice and smaller ships are used only as parasites on the larger ships or as in-system ships.  The system in question in this case is the core tap (power source) and faster then light drive (a variation on an old traveller stutter drive).

Another area or discussion would be organic or partially organic ships.  Would there be a ship yard requirement for a ship that grows itself?  In such a case wouldn't it be likely for one or two sizes or species of ship to be prevalent?

What about species whose societal structure necessitates larger ships?  Races like the Borg from Startrek or the K'kree from Traveller.

I'm not fond of arbitrary restrictions either (though I will concede that they are very quick). I'm suggesting a means of avoiding this by generating a pool of available units that the player can pick and choose from for a particular engagement - which units they choose to take is up to them but at least they will have faced a level of constraint on which units are available.

The wet navy viewpoint is indeed, just one way of looking at things. I picked it because of the likely wide familiarity with most people, however it's just a wrapper around the underlying constraints - resources and time. There are other potential constraints as well as you pointed out but none of them remove the need for resources and time.

Single fixed/minimum volume system? Sure, you'll have a few more big ships with the critical system, but then I'd expect that they would carry smaller ships to mitigate the risk of losing such a resource. Note, though that each ship still requires resources and time to build - big ships just take longer and consume more resources.

Moon-sized ships? An extreme case, but again you still have find the resources and time to build something that big - although I'd argue that anything smaller is essentially so far out of scale that they're irrelevant to something that size (I haven't read the books though). Still if everyone has to build at that scale to be effective then you can also scale the build times and resources (assuming small ships can be ignored).

Organic ships? They fact they self-assemble/grow in no way removes the resource or time requirements for them to be finished. It may be that in place of a yard the action takes place in a gigantic birthing suite or surgery assuming any such is required. As for species variability, if we assume the species in question is totally artificial and therefore completely outside anything resembling an ecosystem, there is no reason to limit designs available and the reasons why you might want a different species become the same as why you might build differing classes of ships. If *is* part of a ecosystem (ie. a found species modified or adapted if necessary), then your variability comes from choosing a species that can operate optimally in differing environments. Basically a species adapted for deep/interstellar space unlikely to be operating at it's peak when it's too close to a star for example. In any case they still require resources and time to be finished.

I'm with Glen on this one, having a fleet with smaller ships like we have in our Navy seems utterly insane. It seems too easy to simply capsize them and instantly kill every single person on board.

FWIW, I don't believe anyone is (certainly I am not) advocating fleet composition "rules" that would prevent someone from populating his/her fleet with nothing but super-dreadnoughts. I think the discussion is more about providing "flavor" to some fleets...