I came up with a fairly simple system, at least on the surface. Here are the important points:
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- Choose a number of hull sizes. My first design had 4, plus a special 5th one thrown in for fighters, and missiles were considered a 6th. A newer option would be to have numerous hull sizes roughly analogous to D-tons ranging from 1 to 1 million, but represented with decibels, so you would have approximately 60 hull sizes to choose from.</font>
- There are always 20 spaces in each ship, no matter its size. This makes each worth roughly 5% of the total ship's available space. A given component will have a different amount of power/capability depending on what size of ship it's in. EG a laser in a small ship will not do as many damage points as a laser in a large ship, even though they take up the same percentage of the ship. If the smaller ship is half the size of the larger one, then 2 lasers in the smaller should be about as powerful as 1 in the larger.</font>
- There are no power concerns. It is assumed when you buy a component that you also buy enough powerplant to run it. Likewise, there are no crew requirements to calculate either, as it is assumed a fraction of the space for that item is for crew.</font>
- Things in the spaces are generic. It's up to you to determine if anything is special; the space just says LAB, not what kind of lab, or CARGO, not what kind, or TROOP TRANSPORT, not what kind.</font>
- The end result is not necessarily translatable directly to real-world stats, but by choosing small numbers to keep things meaningful, it becomes easy to digest a ship's stats.</font>
Starting with the 4 basic hull sizes (roughly 400, 4000, 40,000, and 400,000 Dtons) I came up with a number of damage points for that hull size, armor that acted as DR, shields that acted as additional hit points and refreshed over time, a chart of lasers, missiles, and spinal mount weapons, and a table of engines and ratings. Also added in some overhead for Crew compartments and such: at the lowest TL, you need 5 spaces for crew, but as tech goes up, this gets reduced, until at the highest TL, you need only 2. You can have additional Crew spaces, as hits against crew compartments detract from the ship's ability to handle itself.
Each space of maneuver drive increases the speed of the ship, and TL affects this as well. A jump drive takes up no space itself (originally I said it did, but that one space was just too needed for other things!), but each parsec of jump fuel takes up a single slot. I also incorporated a fuel-usage for maneuver drive, so you could run out of fuel if you didn't have enough. A single space devoted to maneuver fuel could power the ship for about 240 hexes, but having armor increases the weight of the ship, and each armor point counteracts a unit of maneuver, so if you had a drive able to do Maneuver 8, but had 3 levels of Armor, you could only do Maneuver 5, but you'd SPEND 8 fuel for that 5 hexes. (Armor doesn't take up space, btw.)
If you want to carry stuff, you could call it Cargo. 1 unit of troops carried in a Huge ship might be worth 100 combat points, if you can get it to ground, but that same troop-carrying capacity might require several smaller ships to unload it from the bigger one.
However, there are a couple difficulties. What if you want tankers? While you can certainly have them by designating spaces as fuel tanks, when transferring a quantity of fuel from one ship to another requires you to stop and calculate the number of actual units contained in each ship's space. If a large ship is 40,000 dtons, then each space on that ship is 1/20th, or 2000 dtons. A small ship at 400 tons, having tankage of 10 spaces, can take on 200 dtons, so that one large space could fill up 10 small ships' tanks.
Also, the model I use for movement isn't exactly hard physics; it's more along the lines of a Stutterwarp in the way it functions, and I have to use a bit of handwavium to allow ships to both fight in combat and travel through a star system without running out of fuel, but that's just MY problem: you don't have to design your movement system the same way. You might say each Maneuver point is a G of thrust, rather than a Movement Point, and that would do better, but I like the simplicity of MPs.
AAAaaanyway, I've got the thing about 75% done, and making ships takes about 1 minute or less. I still have to tweak the combat system, and sort out all the optional options from the core game. Damned details!