Originally posted by Anthony:
Well, HG drives behave as if they're volume-based. If we assume drives and weapons are 1T/m^3 (14T/dton), a Tigress weighs 50-60 tons/dton, an unarmored Fer-de-Lance weighs 7-8 tons/dton, and both need 17% maneuver drive for 6 Gs.
It behaves that way for the same reason my contrived B2 sytem behaves that way -- the system designers didn't change the drive tech, they assumed some standard average density for all ships. They simply didn't want to expose the player to that detail.
Obviously, the system let players get out to some pretty wide parameters, if the same drive can accelerate 50t/dt as well as 7 t/dt.
Changing the drive tech also allows bypassing some historical problems such as near-C rocks.
The only way that's going to happen is if you change the tech dramatically or limit the duration of acceleration. Stutterwarp goes the first route, since the ships really aren't moving at all in normal space (thus no C rocks), or with HEPLaR where you simply run out of fuel.
But as far as I know they're sticking with Thruster Plates.
Complexity and incompatibility with High Guard.
The complexity is only within the higher end FF&S system, not in the simple system. When creating the simple system, you can impose rules that prevent the player from inadvertantly creating a ship that's too heavy: limited armor amounts, more powerful "military" drives, or "if armor > X, reduce G performance by Y". There are all manners that can be used to hide that complexity and still create ships compatable with the FF&S sytem.
And I don't know if HG compatability is a driving force anyway.
The complexity in FF&S comes in several places. One, its formulae -- it uses cube roots I think. Hard to do cube roots with a pencil.
Two, is in its presentation (and I'm talking FF&&S 1 here, not even FF&S 2 which I feel was a complete disaster). A "cheat" sheet documenting step by step the ship design process (vs the vehicle or weapon design process), along with page numbers would help early designers simply navigate the book.
Three, they need to provide an "ironmongery" of pre-built weapons with set performance, power, mass and volumes that designers could readily plug in to their designs. A table of laser turrets, energy weapons, some spinal mounts, etc. For a combat vessel that relieves a large burden from the designer, who can then later build their own weapons. But for a first time designer, it can be a non-starter having to design EVERYTHING.
Finally, I do think that they can create a more HG like system on top FF&S. Basically that's done by focusing on a starship design (vs vehicle or aircraft design -- I don't want to read about propellers and jet engines when I'm trying to look up Maneuver Drives, but they're stuffed together in the book under Sub Light drives) and adding yet again some more tables to free up some of the math.
I mean, the tables have to come from SOMEWHERE, so they may as well come from the forumlae in the FF&S books. As long as you stick with the numbers and are judicious with the round off errors, the end results will inevitably be compatable throughout all of the design sequences.
Finally, I think it's unfair to burden the new system with trying to be compatable with HG. Yea, there are a lot of designs out there, but it's not like HG didn't have problems of its own and I see no reason to keep that albatross.
I don't necessarily suggest that FF&S 3 be perfectly compatable with FF&S 1 or 2 either, but since they're based more upon and expose more fundamental aspects of design, I think they'll be widely compatable.
FF&S (in some form) is basically a collection of engineering and materials formulae used to design all manner of things. With its flexibility come complexity, but also power. One of the powers of theses fundamentals is creating simpler design systems that have built in assumptions pre-calculated in to the various tables.
As long as those assumptions are documented (like, say, PPlants include Life Support and G Compensation), then you have mobility of designs across the various system. Where you have aerodynamic and smooth flowing ships designed with FF&S, they get a bit more blocky and pedestrian and you move towards an B2 system, but at the core they're the same.
So, if you want a "volume" based M drive, supply constraints to the simpler system where its difficult to violate the mass/volume assumptions determined at the begining. Then you have a mass based M Drive that behaves from a designer point of view as a volume based one.
