[HG] Designing a TL12 fleet

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
By the way, was it FASA designed ships that had bays mounted in sub 1000t ships?

Could be, I never found the budget to grab the FASA stuff (except the day before the big fire at my FLGS when I decided to sleep on the clear out the used bin purchase and woke to find my mind made up for me ). They did do a number of interesting designs.

 

[The Oz]

FASA did have the Chameleon-class ship, a 500 dton commerce raider with a 50-dton missile bay.

It was in Adventure Ships Vol. I, IIRC.

 

[Whipsnade]

Originally posted by far-trader:
They did do a number of interesting designs.

Dan,

That they did. They had some downright silly ones too!

Adventure Class Ships Vol. II has I Sollie patrol frigate that looks like a flying pitchfork head; three long, narrow 'tines' extending forward from a flat central body.

The Endevour (their spelling, not mine!) as a particle accelerator barbette at the tip of the central 'tine'. Apparently, the PAW's gunner has to pass through - through mind you, not along or beside, but through - EIGHT staterooms to get to get to his control station. All with manual hatches too.

D'oh!


Have fun,
Bill

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
This rule should have been clarified

Sigg,

Until now, I have never questioned it. It always rang like crystal.

What the rules on HG2 p.23 and p.28/29 tells us is that when there is no armor, then you stick a 0 in the USP-line. Not that you stick a 0 in the formula as well, run the calculation, and follow through by adding tonnage and credits to the ship's design for a system that is not present on the ship.

If you leave out any other system, they receive USP 0 values, too.

Is the argument, then, that because you can put a 0 into the armor formula and get an above-zero number from the results of the calculation (even when there is no armor on the ship) the cause for why it is treated differently than all the other parts of the design sequence?

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
After all, you can fit two spinal mounts in MT by canon.

no starship may have more than one spinal mount

MT RM page 59.
Doesn't say battle riders can't have more than one though - they are non-starships after all </font>[/QUOTE]I can't really say, as I do not have the relevant MT book, and I would never make it through pasting in all the eratta.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
This rule should have been clarified

Sigg,

Until now, I have never questioned it. It always rang like crystal.</font>[/QUOTE]That's how it was for me, until Chris Thrash posted about his analysis of thrust versus structural requirements and mentioned the hull % needed for an unarmoured hull.
I even composed what I thought was a quite good reply - and then I read it again, and began to doubt my twenty four year interpretation of armour 0.
I now think he is right and I was wrong for all those years.

Is the argument, then, that because you can put a 0 into the armor formula and get an above-zero number from the results of the calculation (even when there is no armor on the ship) the cause for why it is treated differently than all the other parts of the design sequence?

Consulting the armour table is the very next part of the written design sequence, whether you allocate armour 1-15 or choose to leave the ship unarmoured and take a factor of zero
It does not say you miss out the armour table

The sentence:

The armour table indicates formulae for the computation of armour tonnage and cost, based on the factor selected.

is where the clarification is needed IMHO.
Should it say:
"After selecting an armour factor consult the armour table, which gives the formulae for the computation of armour tonnage and cost, based on the factor selected - including armour factor 0",
or,
as the above but with:
" - ignore the armour table for an armour factor of 0"?

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by The Oz:
FASA did have the Chameleon-class ship, a 500 dton commerce raider with a 50-dton missile bay.

It was in Adventure Ships Vol. I, IIRC.

That's the one.

Thanks Oz

 

[RainOfSteel]

I suppose, for the purposes of PCs and special NPC created vessels, you can say they can install whatever their hearts desire. And they'll get whatever headaches and "ship's stress" you can toss back at them.

But for solid military designs (unless you live at the nexus of Cardassian, Klingon, and Federation space), this is not practical.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:

I even composed what I thought was a quite good reply - and then I read it again, and began to doubt my twenty four year interpretation of armour 0.
I now think he is right and I was wrong for all those years.

You are trying to turn me to the Dark Side, but I have become a Naval Architect, like my father before me!

 

[Hyphen]

Dear Folks -

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Should it say:
"After selecting an armour factor consult the armour table, which gives the formulae for the computation of armour tonnage and cost, based on the factor selected - including armour factor 0",
or,
as the above but with:
" - ignore the armour table for an armour factor of 0"?

It has to be some amount, since HG AF 0 = Striker (and MT) AF 40.

That's some pretty mean armour to ward of micrometeorites, insulate against solar wind and 4 deg K, etc.

 

[The Oz]

Of course, if this "Factor-0" armor is needed for some purpose (whether for hull stiffening as Thrash says, or for some other reason) then I do have to wonder why I'm paying Cr100,000 per dton for my hull in addition to this "armor-0" cost?

And we peek back to HGv1 we see that hull armor-0 is available at all TLs, takes no tonnage, and adds no cost.

Given that I do not know of any canon HG design that did pay (in tonnage or money) for "factor-0" armor, and that HGv1 did not require paying for factor-0 armor I think that the intent of the HGv2 rule is that USP armor code 0 means zero, and it costs nothing and takes up no space.

But that's just my interpretation. YMMVIYTU.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by The Oz:
Of course, if this "Factor-0" armor is needed for some purpose (whether for hull stiffening as Thrash says, or for some other reason) then I do have to wonder why I'm paying Cr100,000 per dton for my hull in addition to this "armor-0" cost?

And we peek back to HGv1 we see that hull armor-0 is available at all TLs, takes no tonnage, and adds no cost.

Given that I do not know of any canon HG design that did pay (in tonnage or money) for "factor-0" armor, and that HGv1 did not require paying for factor-0 armor I think that the intent of the HGv2 rule is that USP armor code 0 means zero, and it costs nothing and takes up no space.

But that's just my interpretation. YMMVIYTU.

Why, thank you for pointing that out.

--------------------

What I'd really like to see is a redesigned sequence where the hull took up some volume, and so did life support, and the manuever and jump drives required EPs to operate. Where the EPs produced by the power plant could be distributed, as needed, to whatever systems the ship's operator desired; and the design sequence did not require enough EPs from the power plant to power every single installed system. Etc.

 

[Scott Martin]

Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
What I'd really like to see is a redesigned sequence where the hull took up some volume, and so did life support, and the manuever and jump drives required EPs to operate. Where the EPs produced by the power plant could be distributed, as needed, to whatever systems the ship's operator desired; and the design sequence did not require enough EPs from the power plant to power every single installed system. Etc.

You mean like Fire, Fusion and Steel?

OK, so it doesn't (currently) have power requirements for jump drives, but other than that it is as you have described. While the power allocation is currently troublesome, designing all of your Systems to use multiples of 10 MW (or 50 or whatever) allows you to use "EP's" in a Starfleet battles kind of way. Especially if you group all of your "base" systems (sensors, com, life support etc) into a clump during design: "Base systems operation uses 56.8 MW"

Scott Martin

 

[mike wightman]

FF&S2 does have power requirements for the jump drive - "the amount of energy required to initiate a jump is equal to 64MJ per cubic metre per parsec jumped. This energy must be provided to the drive in an hour or less (meaning that a starship must have 0.018MW of power plant per cubic metre per jump number)."
The same amount of energy is needed to maintain the jump bubble throughout the time in jump space.

This is similar to the T20 EP requirement for jump drives.

Thinking about what ROS has asked for it is mostly covered by T20 ship design except for power to life support, and the hull taking up some volume. Life support is still hidden in stateroom tonnage.

Now if you adapted the High Guard armour factor 0 rule...

 

[Scott Martin]

Hey Sigg

I don't think that the question of power for "jump bubble" maintenance has actually been addressed. If the "maintenance" requirement is small, then "jump" could be powered by batteries, while if the requirement is large then large powerplants are *required* for higher jump numbers.

IIRC HG required that power be put in to make a jump, and could be allocated *over 2 turns* which suggested that minimum PP rating could be 1/2 J-Drive rating. This will be an interesting question to be answered for the mechanics of T5.

There are a few implications, not least of which is what happens if you suffer a power failure during jump. If the "maintenance" level is fairly low, then this is not a big deal (and ships with CT/MT powerplants pretty much *never* need to worry about this, even after suffering combat damage) while if the power maintenance level is equal to the powering requirement, then a powrplant hit in the turn prior to jump would catastrophically jeopardize the ship. If you're jumping out while taking combat damage, chances are that you won't be aborting the jump as "unsafe"...

Further questions would be whether this would result in a misjump, or destruction of the vessel, and it would further suggest one possible mechanism of misjump due to unrefined fuel (power fluctuations in the "maintenance" levels) Of course an equally possible handwave would be that it's hard to calibrate a jump with unknown reactant density.

I personally like the idea of being able to power a jump with an enormous bank of batteries, which would allow a "steam" level society to repair and use the J-Drives from crippled jump-capable vessel. This type of scenario gets completely killed if there is any significant "maintenance" power requirement. (Note that getting the ship off the planet and to the 100D limit would be entertaining, and this may get inflicted on my latest set of players) Low "maintenance" requirements also allow you to do interesting things in a "TNE" like setting, since you may have ready access to Jump Drives (is it functional or not?) without any of the rest of the supporting starship.

Obviously while it may be *possible* to power a starship with an enormous pile of copper and silver coins in a vinegar bath, any regulatory body would have absolute kittens aboutthe thought, so don't expect this to be allowed in the Imperium anytime soon.

(Possible adventure surprise ending: the players make it back safe to "civilization" and get charged by the equivalent of the FAA for "unsafe operation of a faster than light drive")

If you want to continue this discussion, it should get its own thread (Imperial Research Station?) The current one is already badly fragmented.

Scott Martin

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Scott Martin:
If you want to continue this discussion, it should get its own thread (Imperial Research Station?) The current one is already badly fragmented.

A good plan, and done, go here:

Jump Theory 101

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Scott Martin:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
What I'd really like to see is a redesigned sequence where the hull took up some volume, and so did life support, and the manuever and jump drives required EPs to operate. Where the EPs produced by the power plant could be distributed, as needed, to whatever systems the ship's operator desired; and the design sequence did not require enough EPs from the power plant to power every single installed system. Etc.

You mean like Fire, Fusion and Steel?
</font>[/QUOTE]Well, yes. Except not for the TNE mechanics system (I found it interesting, but it's not what I play).

Also, I would like it to be reasonable free of errata, or at least not blanketed in it.

 

[Scott Martin]

Hi RoS

I share your attitude towards the goal of an erratta free product.

As proposed in a few places, I think that the FF&S type of architecture will work well if we can kick out a number of modular pieces for it so that people can build "HG-like" and "LBB2-like" ships without needing to get into the guts of a FF&S type of design system.

Unfortunately there are a lot of pieces to "stress test" before that becomes practical, and we still need to come up with the framework for designing those components. My first pass proposal would be that if you are building a "module" design for T5 it should be a multiple of 14 cubic meters, "structure" should support 6 G's and it should be within 5% of 10 tons (mass) per displacement ton of volume. With this as a base guideline, you can easily "snap" pieces into starships without worrying about recalculating their thrust capabilities.

Other constraints would be things like "what size are the basic modules?" This is (apparently) unimportant at the HG level, but if you're building the modules at the FF&S level, there is a big difference between dimensions of 5x6x7m and 30x2x3.5m. For HG these are both 15 Td, for bracing and hull materials cost they are radically different, and weapons systems that fit in the first may not fit in the second (and vice versa)

This also requires some decisions from MWM fairly early on in the process, since changing something like power output from fusion plants would throw a fairly significantly monkey wrench in the works if it happened "midstream". At the moment I am using FF&S as the "base" system, since what is needed is a proof of concept for discussion, not the "final" version.

I'll start a thread on this later, once I have some modules to demonstrate, and a basic design philosophy. It's a lot easier to look at something and say "this I like, This I don't like, and I can't understand these bits" than to try and visualize the whole thing at once. I've already had to re-think my basic approach twice, and I'm trying to figure out how to integrate pieces into various hull forms, since you should be able to use the same basic module in an "airframe" hull as an "unstreamlined" hull. This has interesting implications on the hull form design. This *does* work nicely if we use the proposed "cylinder slices" sequence for small craft.

Again, if folks want to run with this, it should be forked from this thread, and should probably live in the "fleet" forum, since it's only really applicable to ships. ("modular" ground / grav vehicles are probably easier to specialize with a complete redesign than try to design for "interchangability")

Scott Martin