AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
CT Striker, B1, p8:
Still peanuts in HG. Whether it costs MCr 10 or MCr 50 per year to crew a MCr 100 000 warship with a MCr 10 000 pa operating cost is irrelevant.
Trillion Credit Squadron, the 1981 tournament!
- Thread starter Ron Gianti
- Start date
CT Striker, B1, p8:
Still peanuts in HG. Whether it costs MCr 10 or MCr 50 per year to crew a MCr 100 000 warship with a MCr 10 000 pa operating cost is irrelevant.
Ya, it doesn’t work that well for TCS/Pocket Empires. It works for Striker because the ticket payouts are low margin vs cost to maintain just the core cadre during no contract times.
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
Note also that for all of the examples in Fighting Ships with non-standard “digit” meanings, they started with Z and worked their way back—all of those examples have non-standard Z and Y “digits”; the Tigress- and Plankwell-classes also have a non-standard X “digit”; and the Plankwell-class also has non-standard W, V, and U “digits”. This is not the case for the Eurisko-class, which has a V “digit” rather than a Z “digit”. (If any ship classes in Lenat’s squadron had undocumented non-standard “digit” meanings, it would be the Queller-class or the Wasp-class, which are the only ones with Z “digits”.)
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Kakistocrat
SOC-12
Perfectly normal fighters with an agility of zero? (Perfectly normal as compared to the “reasonably standard” 50-ton heavy fighter on p. 26 of Fighting Ships ?)
I still see no reason to view their existence as anything other than a result of budgetary “use it or lose it”.
Having 75 Eurisko-class ships between them and those weapons helped on that score—the Bee-class wasn’t likely to be the opponents’ first choice of target.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
You do have limitations on pilots, and minimum performance parameters.
Pay for extra pilots, or get a rebate for using less.
Pay for extra pilots, or get a rebate for using less.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Perfectly normal Armament for a fighter. Don't compare it to a TL-15 fighter...
Agreed, I see no use whatsoever for a fighter with agility-0. And that worries me, what have I missed?
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
It is not described how to handle that by the rules in HG'80.
S9 does it very neatly for each ship, as each ship is presented separately. My guess is that Lenat attached a similar note to the entire fleet, and that fell off in the JTAS print.
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
I was comparing the Bee-class to a fighter with an agility of six that happened to be TL-15.
That Lenat might have simply accepted the Bee-class as it was, because that was the best use which the EURISKO program came up with to spend 0.04% of the TCr budget?
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
No, but it is demonstrated how to handle them quite clearly by the several examples in Fighting Ships, even without the description on p. 47.
It’s a possibility, but if Z had a non-standard meaning for one or both of the Queller- and Wasp-classes, why pick a different “digit” to have a non-standard meaning for the Eurisko-class?
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Everything else in the fleet has a purpose, the Bee is just waste? It could easily (and more cheaply) been a better "unhittable lifeboat".
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Was S9 published before the convention? Had Lenat read it?
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
Lenat was letting EURISKO do all of the designing, only pruning when he thought that a heuristic was either invalid or undesirable (or rewarding a heuristic that he understood and liked). The purpose of the Bee-class might have been just as inscrutable to Lenat as it is to us, and he could have left its evolution alone to see where EURISKO was going with the design.
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
I don’t know when in 1981 it was published; it wasn’t in the list of “games” to be released at the 1981 summer conventions in the ad in JTAS issue 9. I also don’t know if Lenat had read it or not.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Agreed, we don't know if Lenat had looked at S9, hence we can't assume he would have used the notation from S9.
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
In my view, assigning a non-standard value to the Z “digit” that is greater than the standard Z value is more likely than assigning a non-standard value to the V “digit” that is greater than the standard Z value, even without access to Fighting Ships.
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
Sure, but Z was already used in the Wasp-class USP.
But look at the ship itself, do you really think Lenat's main attritional ship would leave most hardpoints empty? Recreate the ship yourself and see if it make any sense with 29 batteries?
Kakistocrat
SOC-12
Since your guess was that Lenat had an explicit note about non-standard “digit” meanings in the ship classes which didn’t get published in JTAS issue 10, that note could easily have stated that a particular non-standard “digit” meaning only applied to a certain ship class, so the Eurisko-class and the Wasp-class could have had distinct non-standard “digit” meanings for Z.
I haven’t tried to recreate all of the ship classes in his squadron; a limiting factor to the complete squadron that EURISKO created was cost. (The Eurisko-class by itself comprised over 97% of the TCr budget.)
AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
You don't need to recreate all of them, just Eurisko.
I can do it for you:
Which is more like it:
Code:
BA-K952563-J41100-34003-0 MCr 12 923 11 100 Dton Ag=2
BA-K931363-J41100-34003-0 MCr 12 923 16 650 Dton
bearing 1 11 V Crew=133
batteries 1 11 V TL=12
s=35 Cargo=60 Fuel=555 EP=555 Agility=1 DropT=5550 (V=54)
Code:
Dual Occupancy 61 12 923
USP # Dton Cost
Hull, Unstreamlined Custom K 11 100
Configuration Buffered Plane 9 3 885 8
Armour 18 J 2 886 4 329
Drop Tanks 5 550 Dton 6
Total tonnage 16 650 Dton
Jump Drive 5 1 666 2 664
Manoeuvre D 2 1 555 389
Power Plant 5 1 1 665 4 995
Fuel, #J, #weeks J-5, 4 weeks 5 555
Bridge 1 222 56
Computer m/6 6 1 7 55
Staterooms 5 20 3
Staterooms, Half 163 326 41
Cargo 61
Triple Turret 2/bat Missile 3 54 108 243 108 turrets organised into 54 batteries.
Triple Turret Beam 3 1 1 3
Single Turret Fusion 4 1 2 2
Triple Turret Sand 4 1 1 1
Nuclear Damper 1 1 50 50
Meson Screen 1 1 90 80
Nominal Cost MCr 12 922,89 Sum: 61 12 923
Class Cost MCr 2 713,81 Valid ≥0 ≥0
Ship Cost MCr 10 338,31
Crew & High 0 Crew Bridge 11
Passengers Mid 0 133 Engineers 29
Low 0 Gunners 70
Extra SR 0 Frozen Service 23
# Frozen W 0 0 Flight 0
Marines 35 Marines 35or
Code:
BA-K952563-J41100-34003-0 MCr 12 804 11 100 Dton Ag=2
BA-K931363-J41100-34003-0 MCr 12 804 16 650 Dton
bearing 1 11 V Crew=108
batteries 1 11 V TL=12
=35 Cargo=160 Fuel=555 EP=555 Agility=1 DropT=5550 (V=29)
Code:
Dual Occupancy 161 12 804
USP # Dton Cost
Hull, Unstreamlined Custom K 11 100
Configuration Buffered Plane 9 3 885 8
Armour 18 J 2 886 4 329
Drop Tanks 5 550 Dton 6
Total tonnage 16 650 Dton
Jump Drive 5 1 666 2 664
Manoeuvre D 2 1 555 389
Power Plant 5 1 1 665 4 995
Fuel, #J, #weeks J-5, 4 weeks 5 555
Bridge 1 222 56
Computer m/6 6 1 7 55
Staterooms 5 20 3
Staterooms, Half 138 276 35
Cargo 161
Triple Turret 2/bat Missile 3 29 58 131 58 turrets organised into 29 batteries.
Triple Turret Beam 3 1 1 3
Single Turret Fusion 4 1 2 2
Triple Turret Sand 4 1 1 1
Nuclear Damper 1 1 50 50
Meson Screen 1 1 90 80
Nominal Cost MCr 12 804,14 Sum: 161 12 804
Class Cost MCr 2 688,87 Valid ≥0 ≥0
Ship Cost MCr 10 243,31
Crew & High 0 Crew Bridge 11
Passengers Mid 0 108 Engineers 29
Low 0 Gunners 45
Extra SR 0 Frozen Service 23
# Frozen W 0 0 Flight 0
Marines 35 Marines 35Look at e.g. crew or free space = cargo.
Rule Book 1 (Basic Rules) Rules #5 and #7. There is a secondary rule for experience gained (Rule #67).
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