New ships ideas...

I suppose I wanted to restart the 'groundlings with Spelljamming'
thread again, but I wanted a discussion about it with some new
perspectives.

Obviously, if a ship isn't going to be more than a day from replentishing
its air, perhaps only leaving the atmosphere to get to the other side
of the planet it can have a _much_ larger crew.  A ship that expects
a 2-3 month journey between replentishing the air will have a much
greater ship mass/crew ratio.

Now I'll call a ship which has a ship mass/crew ratio sufficient to have
good air on 2-3 month voyages a WildSpace ship, and one whose crew/lift
weight of helm ratio is maximized a groundling ship.

If you give the Wild Space shipwright only a slight edge in materials
and magic, but give the Wild Space crews all the proficiencies
necessary to operate a ship well, what would happen when you put
equal tonnage of Wild Space fleet vs groundling fleet?

I would think that the larger the fleets involved, the greater advantage
to the Wild Space fleet would there be because the advantage of
mobility, ability to defeat in detail would go up.  The Wild Space
fleet would still have to deal with the fact that it is outnumbered
10 or more to 1.

There are a number of skills which would help the Wild Space fleet,
like zero-g fighting, the NWP Spelljammer proficiency, and skill
with ships weapons.  The most important ability they would have
would be the ability to break off into Wild Space where they
couldn't be pursued, and so they could choose the time of their
engagement, if they didn't have anything they _had_ to defend
within the reach of the groundlings.

Anybody have any ideas for how a WildSpace fleet could beat a
groundling fleet, given the requirement of the WildSpace fleet
of sailing 2-3 months before the engagement, (and presuming that
the fleet _might_ have to turn around and sail three months back home
immediately after recharging their air).  Assume the engagement
takes place less than a day from the groundling planet, and that local
moons _could_ be used as a staging area, but not necessarily a _secret_
staging area.


As I am also on a US Civil War discussion mailing list, the topic
seems similar to one about what the British navy could've done
if they'd decided to try to lift the blockade of Confederate ports.

The English had the best open sea navy in the world, including the
deep water ironclad, The Warrior, which was extremely powerful.
However, the English would've had great difficulty projecting
their power up rivers, fighting Monitor-class ships, which, though
they were unseaworthy, could retreat into shallow waters.

There was a military cost of having a fighting ship capable of ocean
going voyages in that time period, ironclads like the Monitor didn't
need to set aside a place for 3 months stores, and so was as small
as was necessary to support its guns.

Michael Sandy