Good point Spence. However I do believe tehre are some universals as well.

Let's use the fleets from the Imperial Starmada Sourcebook or ISS as a point of reference.

ISS includes sample ships from 5 factions, three of which have 7 ships listed, the others having 4 and 5 ships listed. I assume it is safe to guess that these ships serve as models for the factions' ship design style and represent the most commonly encountered vessels.

I find it difficult to believe that an interstellar power would have only a half-dozen ship classes in service. I can believe that there might only be a handful of ship types, frigate, carrier, battleship etc, but would expect at least ome of these types to contain multiple classes of ship depending on the role the ship was to play.

Beyond such military types as troop transports, fleet support vessels and long range scouts, also missing are civillian vessels.

System Defense Ships seem largely absent as well. Local system control and exploitation would not require hyperdrive equiped vessels. Some defensive requirements could be met by stationary weapons platforms be they on planets, asteroids, moons, or space stations. However, unless all interstellar visitors arrive via a common entry point at least some mobile forces will be required as well.

If your Starmada universe uses "jump points", "gates", "wormholes" or other known system entry points then system defense is easy. Just build a very large weapon and point it at the door...

If not, you are stuck covering a very large sphere of potential entry points. This type of defense will need to deal with problems of detection and interception.

Detection could be by centralized very long range sensors, a network of short range dispersed sensors, localized sensors focusing on approaches to points of strategic interest or a blend of these.

Interseption could be accomplished by very fast global interceptors, or by slower localized interceptors at points of interest.

These problems are universals that fleet design will have to repond to.

Also universal are the problems of the attack. Range, damage inflicted, accuracy, rate of fire and amunition supply all must be factored in.

A race that favors short range, low accuracy, high damage potential weapons will have a very different fleet structure than one which favors long range, precision attacks with lower damage yielding weapons.

Let me get a little time with ISS under my belt and I'll be able to add a few concrete examples.

I haven't had time to write a good response, but I wanted to make a quick point.  If you really want to design a Fleet Organization that "makes sense" you can't make it militarily balanced. 

What I mean is a fleet composition will be the bare minimum needed to scrape by.   dave-the-lost mentioned his surprise at the limited types/classes for a interstellar power.    It should actually be looked at as normal.  A successful power that has won or prevailed will migrate to being a paper tiger because of politicians.  The politician will divert funds to his pet projects and needed fleet developments will be sporadic or non-existent until there is an actual possibility of the politicians suffering harm.  Then they will throw funding at the fleet until the danger is passed.    I don't remember and haven't ha a chance to read it again, but IIRC the fleets in question hadn't fought an actual war for a while up to the point of the OOB.  Skirmishes don't count.    So Senator Crooked most likely wouldn't support the construction of a System Defense Ship in system B  unless there was a very lucrative kickback or the enemy actually attacked and succeeded in hitting the local system.  Or of course said Senator had insystem assets he wanted to protect.

Think of Rome.  Things were great until they were the undisputed Great Power.  Then they started selling command positions and turning chunks of their troops into ceremonial armies.  When things started to fall apart they could not unify, the commanders they had were not true leaders and the troops were shadows of the original hardened troops that carved out the Empire.

In the end a "realistic" fleet for a "realistic" space faring civ will not be a well balanced self supporting fleet.  It will be composed of the last generations cutting edge with "just enough" to get the job done.

I'm just saying...

Absolutely.   

That is a problem with many published universes for various games.  I still need to re-read the actual ISS book so I didn't remember the details and was just responding to the mention of ship types and classes.    One of my pet peeves for gaming has always been that game fleets tend to always be “squeaky clean” in the design and balance arena.  I'm sure there are exceptions, but that is a tendency I have noticed.

I would love to see a supplement for ISS or HAC that had stats and OOB for the “Old Fleets”.  But I don't think we will see them.  Most players of games want their ships to be tough and well designed, not design mistakes built by the lowest bidder on half the promised budget.

Well, of  course not every stellar power is going to be some Keynesian democracy with well fed bureaucrats codling pet projects with soft hands.

No sir, in some stellar empires there's one big head man, he wears gauntlets and his pet project IS the military :twisted:

And when those guys are around, it affects everyone's perspective.

I always like to look at much earlier Europe as a model for space opera ideas, the modern model is not the only one that exists and really is something of a historical anomaly.

Or the military might have incredibly awesome lobbyists.

"Well, I think that we can farm this contract over to this bidder."

"Sure. If the honorable senator from Epsilon Eridani would like his constituents to become Valkyrian breeding stock."

I really want to be able to sit down and write a real post, but I am snatching a minute here and there.

Barmey mentioned one leader organizations as opposed to Democracies and such.  But I have a monkey wrench for that one.  In our own history we see that during the 1850-1940's, even with major powers being unified and directing their energy at building up naval power the fleet compositions were the some of the best examples of what we now know as a cluster*uck.   Not only were various fleets burdened with obsolete vessels (some obsolete even before they were launched) but Naval authority would actually ignore real world proofs in favor of ‘Proven Doctrine'.

While right/wrong is an endless debate with no real (in my opinion) winner.  I think that this lack of cohesiveness in fleet composition is something just doesn't happen in gaming (as some have pointed out).  Mostly because gamers just don't want to lose advantage by wasting points (which I don't blame them for).  But this outlook doesn't allow you many of the really cool battles like we can find in the early dreadnought era.  Or at least I think they are cool.   Yalu(SP?) River and so on.

The ship sups like ISS tend to be snapshots of the fleets with the selection trying to be ‘balanced' to enhance game play (also pointed out buy others).  But I took the thread to be a discussion about fleet compositions compared to a more realistic model, not fleet compositions based on maximum point efficiency base on a games ship building rules.  So that is the direction I will continue until someone says to go away

I need to sit down and write up what I really mean, so that people can understand me.  At least I hope they will understand me  :shock:

Or have them design 25-35% of their fleet at one tech level lower than standard to represent the "older designs"...which will by default make them marginally less capable.

Well, yeah. It's not like it would actually change anything. you might as well just give each side 30% less hulls, because the analytical tendencies that create min-maxed vessels would be redirected to creating the most useless vessels possible under whatever rules you happen to use. If you're assuming munchkin tendencies, I don't see how anything that comes out of that particular ruling would be any more "realistic". Most of the dogs that came out of naval procurement (such as the Omaha) at least managed to look good on paper, whereas any max-min'd vessel probably wouldn't even pass that muster.

Which is one way to do it - but means the amount of work needed before you get to the campaign goes up.

What we do right now for SS is that you spend your Resource Dev Points in two rounds.

The first round is defenses, fighter technology, generalized technology, and technological infrastructure.  (Colonies, shipyards, repair yards).

That first round gets revealed, including how many points weren't spent.

The second round is the cost to set a class of ships, and defining what weapon traits your empire knows how to use, on the three families of weapons in the game.  Plus other weapon related caps, and how much you're devoting to developing ECCM.

That second round isn't revealed until combat happens.

Now, in theory, it could be broken into three rounds - defense parameters, weapons parameters, and then ship designs.  But I'm not sure that two rounds of file swapping prior to the start of the campaign won't be seen as "too much work".

The weapon parameterization would, in Starmada terms, be seen as "OK, he's building a weapon of X spaces, and has these four weapon traits available, but I don't know which ones are going on which weapons."