[House Rules] Overflying Transport

Correct. I continue to protest how dumb the transport rule is. You can have 1000 transports and 1 fighter can destroy them all because transport defend at 0.

@Bjn:

And the number of transports is irrelevant I guess……they will all die in one turn because they are defenceless?

Indeed. So never leave them unescorted.

@Caesar:

Correct. I continue to protest how dumb the transport rule is. You can have 1000 transports and 1 fighter can destroy them all because transport defend at 0.

I don’t think it is dumb. If they have no defensive weapons why would you expect a different outcome?

Another good thing to point out here is that even killing a defensive transport is a combat, so no bombardments are allowed from the same SZ, even though the bombarding ships may not have been needed to do the killing.

You are free to change the transports back to 0/1/2 but I’d change the cost as well, and probably let destroyers carry an infantry.  Maybe that defensive power could be chalked up to having DEs seaplanes etc guarding every fleet, major and minor, because they aren’t otherwise featured in the game.

@simon33:

@Caesar:

Correct. I continue to protest how dumb the transport rule is. You can have 1000 transports and 1 fighter can destroy them all because transport defend at 0.

I don’t think it is dumb. If they have no defensive weapons why would you expect a different outcome?

Without changing balance too much, the simplest way to introduce TP with 1 hit value is to keep them as taken last casualty.
But each TP must be destroyed with a successful hit.
And any number of defending TPs can only roll 1 dice @1 per combat round.
So, it will take 1000 successful hit to sink them all, but 1000 TPs would have get 1 roll @1 per combat round.
It is minimal, and showed that Convoy are harder to sink them all and take more time.

I believe it might help to give a few facts:

Use in battle
Seamen during shell loading practice aboard SS Lawton B. Evans in 1943

On 27 September 1942 the SS Stephen Hopkins was the first (and only) US merchant ship to sink a German surface combatant during the war. Ordered to stop, Stephen Hopkins refused to surrender, the heavily armed German commerce raider Stier and her tender Tannenfels with one machine gun opened fire. Although greatly outgunned, the crew of Stephen Hopkins fought back, replacing the Armed Guard crew of the ship’s lone 4-inch (100 mm) gun with volunteers as they fell. The fight was short, and both ships were wrecks.[26]

On 10 March 1943 the SS Lawton B. Evans became the only ship ever to survive an attack by the German submarine U-221. The following year from 22 to 30 January 1944, the Lawton B. Evans was involved in the Battle of Anzio in Italy. It was under repeated bombardment from shore batteries and aircraft throughout an eight-day period. It endured a prolonged barrage of shrapnel, machine-gun fire and bombs. The gun crew fought back with shellfire and shot down five German planes, contributing to the success of the landing operations.

But Liberty was not the main troop Transport ships.

In September 1943 strategic plans and shortage of more suitable hulls required that Liberty ships be pressed into emergency use as troop transports with about 225 eventually converted for this purpose.

Probably troop transports were much more heavily equipped by Anti-Aircraft guns than standard Liberty ship.

For instance attack Cargo ships, or AKA:

A total of 388 APA (troop) and AKA (cargo) attack transports were built for service in World War II in at least fifteen classes. Depending on class they were armed with one or two 5-inch guns and a variety of 40 mm and 20 mm anti-aircraft weapons.

As amphibious operations became more important in World War II, planners saw the need for a special kind of cargo ship, one that could carry both cargo and the LCM and LCVP boats with which to attack the beach, and that carried guns to assist in anti-air defense and shore bombardment. Specifications were drawn up, and beginning in early 1943, the first 16 U.S. attack cargo ships were converted from Navy cargo ships that had previously been designated AK. During the course of the war, 108 such ships were built; many of them were converted from non-military ships, or started out as non-military hulls.

Attack cargo ships played a vital role in the Pacific War, where many were attacked by kamikazes and other aircraft, and several were torpedoed, but none were sunk or otherwise destroyed. Nine AKAs were present at the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_transport
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibious_cargo_ship

OOB G40 includes Convoy Disruption zone to affect Power economy.
So, the TP ship sculpts is no merchant ships, it is a military troop transport.
It still make more sense to provide TP unit a kind of combat value.

It’s dumb because we have historical context of transports not only being armed but also even taking their cargo and putting it on there decks just to have extra firepower.

@Caesar:

It’s dumb because we have historical context of transports not only being armed but also even taking their cargo and putting it on there decks just to have extra firepower.

That may be but I don’t think you’ve played classic. That had defending transports and the result was that they were used as fodder.

As someone said, so long as you keep the taken last part you could do whatever else you wanted. I personally would rather they just increased the power of other ships like a combined arms at sea.

@simon33:

@Caesar:

It’s dumb because we have historical context of transports not only being armed but also even taking their cargo and putting it on there decks just to have extra firepower.

That may be but I don’t think you’ve played classic. That had defending transports and the result was that they were used as fodder.

As someone said, so long as you keep the taken last part you could do whatever else you wanted. I personally would rather they just increased the power of other ships like a combined arms at sea.

Yeah, I remember classic where you only had three ships to choose from back when transport actually defended at 1. Which I believe they should.

@ShadowHAwk:

The defenceless transport rule is just an optimization rule, take it out and it changes nothing for the game.

Giving transports defence @1 makes them way to powerfull again, although not as bad as in clasic and revised where they had defence @1 and effectively where the escorts of battleships and carriers.

Transports had some form of protection in the real war but that was hardly worth mentioning in the scale of this game.
If a Battleship only has a defence and offence of 4 how bad would the defence of a transport be?  1 would mean 1/4 the strength of a battleship.
If i have to chose between a battleship and a complete convoy of transports i would go for the battleship even all ships ramming it would not sink the battleship.

You might as well give subs AA defence as a sub had a deck gun that could shoot at aircraft.

@ShadowHAwk:

The defenceless transport rule is just an optimization rule, take it out and it changes nothing for the game.

What do you meant Shadow Hawk by “just an optimization rule, take it out and it changes nothing for the game”?
“Take it out” and you radically change outcomes in naval battle.

Can you explained it a little further please?

He’s referring to the rule that you don’t need to keep rolling dice until the attackers hit. I think you should just ignore his first paragraph.