[Kestrellius]

So you guys remember my HoL campaign thing, right? Well, I've been working some on the first mission, which involves the hijacking of the GVD Canaan/HLD Ark. Thing is, destroyers have enormous crews. I have the HoL attacking with a couple fighters, an Aten-class cruiser (with an SVas or two), and a bunch of freighters and transports. The question is, can six Satis-class freighters carry the ten thousand-some-odd people needed to crew a destroyer?

I'm pretty sure they can only dock one at a time, so six is already pushing it. Any more than that and it'd just take forever. The other possibility is cargo containers holding personnel. However, I don't really see the HoL using Tritons, and those are I believe the only ones capable of carrying the TC-TRI. Plus it'd get confusing, because there are already some freighters in the mission grabbing supply containers from the drydock where the Canaan is kept.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Presumably just flying a destroyer does not require the full ten thousand crew; if you just need to steal it for now, and intend to put more crew on later in a safer location, then to just get it moving probably doesn't require very many people at all. It would take more to use the ship in combat, but without the need for fighters or their related crew, and accepting some losses of capability (reduced damage control capability, perhaps not being able to fire all of the ship's weapons), some measure of control over a destroyer could be had with only the people that can fit on six freighters, even assuming one or more of them is full of nothing but boarding troops to pacify whatever skeleton crew/maintenance staff is onboard at the time.

[NGTM-1R]

You can operate a warship for brief periods with extremely few crew. Most of the crew are there to provide relief shifts and the ability to fix things when they go wrong or regulate temperamental systems under high-output conditions.

As a rule of thumb, manning a vessel reasonably comparable to a modern one for minimal combat capability (i.e. the ship will move, shoot, and see enough you could actually pretend to be fully manned to an observer, but you best hope you don't get in a real fight) takes about 1/6th of the total crew. Simply getting a ship to move can well be done with 1/20th of the normal crew, but it will move slowly and moving is basically all it'll do.

[Black Wolf]

The reality of the situation of boarding in a Freespace context is.... almost nevcer shown ingame, and for good reasons. I mean, sure, the number of crew you can deploy from a transport might be relatively high - the Satis, in your example, is 100m long and has an internal volume in excess of around 200000 cubic metres. You can fit a lot of troops in that space. Obviously all sorts of other stuff would be competing for space, but even so, conservatively assume ten decks, 60 metres long by 40 metres wide, that's 24000 square metres of floorspace with 40% of the ship taken up by reactors or whatever. I don't doubt that, properly fitted out, you could put thousands of people into that space.

However, you then need to get all those thousands of people through what appears to be one docking port. You need to get them to all the relevant parts of the ship they're capturing (so that's presumably the bridge, the reactor, the fighterbay, the engines (assuming they're separate from the reactor), and external weapons control points and any internal weapons stores, so at least a half dozen different places) across a 2km plus ship with dozens of decks. And you need to do all this with the existing crew doing their best to resist at all times. Boarding and capturing a destroyer would be very very similar to taking a small city or a large military base, and these are military operations that take days or weeks to conclude. Even with advantages like internal sensors, a boarding operation would take far, far longer than the 10-15 minute timeframe of a Freespace mission.

That said, board and capture operations are cool. They let your campaign baddies obtain ships they could never, ever build, which means you get to have some cool missions with a credible threat without completely eliminating suspension of disbelief. And people will willingly suspend their disbelief if you give them a reason to. That's what you need to focus on - giving your players permission to suspend their disbelief by making the boarding operation seem legitimate without necessarily getting hung up on the details like "How many troops will fit in this or that ship?"

To that end, I'd say make sure you give some reason why the ship is vulnerable - maybe the crew has shore leave, or it's in a drydock and the crew aren't there. Or maybe there are sympathizers on board who have knocked out life support in key areas of the ship, or released a toxic gas, or even just straight up performing fifth column duties and shooting people in the back. Once you've established that, it's, well, still unreasonable to assume that one docked transport will result in a captured destroyer, but it's much less unreasonable, and that'll be enough for people, I think, regardless of the specific numbers of troops.

Oh, and take advantage of the fact that the Zods have the best small transport in the game in the Isis and have them fly a few into the fighterbay to pacify that part of the ship. That'd just be cool.

[Goober5000]

Silent Threat: Reborn took the approach that the troops that docked to the Repulse were special ops guys tasked with locking down the turbolifts and capturing the fighterbay.  Once the fighterbay was secured, multiple additional transports delivered the far larger assault force that was to capture the entire ship.  With the Repulse disabled, it wasn't able to jump anywhere while all this was taking place.

[Kestrellius]

It's a mothballed Typhon, in drydock. I mean, it's not like there are a lot of those in service at the time of the Second Incursion. Which is the main reason I went with the HoL to begin with; it'd make more sense for them to be using older tech. There'll be a few people on board -- repair people or whatever -- but nothing even approaching a full crew.

[General Battuta]

turbolifts

[Goober5000]

turbolifts

subspace

[Kestrellius]

Oh so I'm not the only one who doesn't understand half the things Battuta says without context?

[General Battuta]

We are all battutas

I actually wonder if vacuum trains would be a decent solution to moving around inside an Orion.

[Goober5000]

Oh so I'm not the only one who doesn't understand half the things Battuta says without context?

Battuta has an occasional tic of being unnecessarily obtuse about certain things, for reasons only he can disclose (though I have my own theories).  I'll expand the exchange for the benefit of spectators:

Haha, you used the term "turbolifts".  That's a Star Trek reference.  You're either being a fanboy or you're not imaginative enough to come up with a different term.

Star Trek is far and away the biggest user of the term "subspace", and none of us have a problem with incorporating that term into FreeSpace.  If a term is appropriate and understandable, we should have no problem using it.

A turbolift is more or less a one-car vacuum train, so it seems an entirely plausible mode of transportation.

[General Battuta]

My objection is just that the word's silly. It's like turbo laser. Turbowords. For turbonerds*.

I don't mind subspace but it would've been kind of cool if they stuck with freespace.

*I am a turbonerd

[Mongoose]

I actually wonder if vacuum trains would be a decent solution to moving around inside an Orion.

I'd like to think they go with straight-up vacuum tubes a la Futurama.

[Spoon]

Nanomachines

[General Battuta]

Turbo posts

[Spoon]

We need to get more sci fi here: Turbonanomachines

[General Battuta]

Please don't leak my work for Destiny

[Kie99]

Regardless of how many they can carry it's not going to be enough to conquer a destroyer from a singke chokepoint in a reasonable time frame even if the destroyer was empty.  Could you imagine getting even a large modern warship running in the time it takes to play a Freespace mission, let alone a two kilometre spacecraft.  Better to just have something drag it away like with the Taranis - maybe have a cruiser do this - and add a couple of lines in the debriefing about how the crew were all killed when the enemy deactivated life support or were forced to surre der.

[Kestrellius]

Just to be clear, the player is aiding the capture, not trying to prevent it. You're playing as the Hammer of Light.

[Snarks]

If you're worried about immersion and the time it takes to capture a vessel, you can try the following:

1) have the player jump in after the transport has already docked, leaving an undetermined amount of time in which the vessel has been boarded.

2) have the player get called away on an emergency mission and then have them come back. This will give you a few checkpoints to work with, so the player doesn't have to restart everything.