Why not transports as casualties?

AAA guns are a combat unit, Transports are unarmed.

In battle the navy never took Transports and ‘made’ the enemy hit them first.

In The Falkland War, the British didn’t enlist Princess Cruises liners to take hits.

The whole concept was always a scam and finally fixed.

I’m pretty sure the initial reasoning behind not taking transports as casualties was the ability to have ONE battleship (at 24 IPC’s) and a dozen transports (mostly empty) in order to soak up hits on the cheap.  Essentially they were being used as a shield for your expensive, powerful naval pieces.

And being a defensless non-combat unit it really doesn’t make sense for them to be used in a combat role (imho).

transport were being abused. bought as cannon fodder and used to suck up hits so fighters and battleships could do the real damage

And it was allowed in MB 2nd edition because that game had no Destroyers and Cruisers. Once the game got populated with different combat vessels, the Transport gig was up.

Now Destroyers are the “Infantry of the sea”.

UK and Germany did develop a number of armed merchant vessels. In UK’s case it was to counter U-boats. For Germany it was a long range threat to Allied shipping. Most Transports were not armed and relied on Destroyer escorts.

Transports faced another real problem which was speed. In naval combat warships increase speed to help defend against getting hit ( making it harder to track a fast moving ship). Transports move at least 50% slower even at their top speed. So in naval combat, you would never bring them because they are pretty much defenseless and slow vessels. If for whatever reason the navy decided that it needed them, the requirements of combat would quickly separate the fleet into two groups and the enemy would never concentrate fire against anything except the engaged warships. In few cases, ( Letye comes to mind) was the purpose to destroy transports with any priority.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-ship

I still find it hard to believe transports did not have a weapon of any sort on them, when their designs allow them to have aa guns equiped at the very least.

@Cow:

I still find it hard to believe transports did not have a weapon of any sort on them, when their designs allow them to have aa guns equiped at the very least.

Why is it hard to believe? You want to maximize Cargo capacity and dont want to take away max wieght from the cargo areas. Also The US especially was pumping out a liberty ship in a week. Adding armourment takes time that they were using to mass produce these vessels. Why waste it as you had escort vessels to limit the losses.
As far as the top speed they were using outdated for the time triple expansion drives because they were cheap and can be produced quickly.
However back to the OP, I agree with you that it is flawed not to include transports as casualties. In many surface battles higher value was put on sinking transports than combat vessels. We(USA) did it in the pacific, The Japanese did it, the Germans consistantly did it. Preventing troop or suppliesa from making it to thier destinations was often more important that sinking the enemy combat vessels.

since most transport and supply ships were armed for defence purposes (water bombs, small canons, aa), i would like the rule of defending transport with 1 but with the restriction of choosen last as casualties. this mix would satisfy most players and couldnt be abused (i guess).

maybe i try this next session as a house rule.