Lurenti class battle tender

[Antony]

I am converting a Lurenti over to TNE. I have got the design to work (mostly). As per usual the problem is with hull surface area. I have used the Open Frame configuration in FFS1 as the equivelant of HGs Open Structure. The major problem is the surface area of the grapples for the 7 Nolikian class battleriders. Per the rules grapples require area equal to the square of the final length of the craft that will use the grapple. With 7 20,000dt battleriders this gives a surface area for grapples of 280,000 sq m. Unfortunately the total area of the hull of the tender is less than this. (In actual fact the total surface area of the 7 battleriders is 210,000 sq m only part of which would be "grappled"

What I have done is taken 10% of the calculated grapple as surface area on the tender with the battleriders not butted against the tender (which from smaller grapple designs seems to be the case) Is this acceptable? It does look like the rule is broken re surface area for grapples carrying larger vessels.

Any thoughts?

 

[Badbru]

Hi Antony.

I allways just thought the rules on Grapples were/are broken. They cant possibly take up twice as much space as the carried craft surely! Especially when you also have cannon craft such as the modular cutter not even using grapples and the Gazelle not using grapples for it's dropable fuel tanks.

My fix for this was to say "square root" of the length not "square" of the length. That's just for IMTU but hey maybe it was a typo and that's what they meant

 

[aramis]

Have the riders grapple the tender...

 

[far-trader]

Hmm, its been a while but I don't recall it being twice as much. More like less than half the area of the carried craft iirc, which stands to reason since that's how much of the carrying ship is in the "shadow" of the carried craft. Of course I could be misremembering it

Ah, there it is. The formula as is (FF&Sv1) only requires about 1/3 the area of the carried craft, which feels about right for a simple averaged shape. I do note that in my copy I penciled in a change from final length squared to basic length squared. Probably to make it more generic and simplify, as well as reducing it a little. Besides a ship of the same tonnage but longer is not going to require more area imo.

Was I doing it wrong all those years or am I futzing something up now in my haste? I'm only getting a total of 44,800 m2 required (albeit based on my house rule of basic length) for all 7 riders (6,400 m2 each).

As for the Gazelle (and drop tanks in general) as well as modular designs like the Cutter the way I've always made it work is to build them as the full tonnage. For example the Gazelle is built as a 400 ton hull (which is why it has 4 hardpoints) with the ability to dispose of 100 tons (the drop tanks). Similar idea with the Cutter, though I've done it a couple different ways over the years. Sometimes designing it to operate as a 20 ton ship with the module detached (as in my T20 version, so that it is 4g, like the CT verison, without the module and 2g with). Come to think of it I recall doing a TNE/FF&Sv1 version of the Cutter that did use the grapple model for the module, well actually I fudged and based the grapple design on the smaller of the two parts (the 20 ton primary hull) and installed it in that part. Anywho...

Like Aramis suggests I've also built a few designs where the carried craft has the grapple instead. I think its a valid variation.

 

[Antony]

According to my calculations each Nolikian class battlerider at 20,000 dt with a Wedge configuration has a final length of 80x2.5=200m

FFS1 states "Grapples require area equal to the square of the final length of the craft carried by the grapple"

On this basis grapple area is 200x200=40,000 sq m
So for 7 Battleriders 7x40000=280000 sq m

Each Nolikian has a surface area of 30,000 sq m Which implies to me that this is another broken rule (Was it changed in FFS2?)

I have used a figure of 10% of the calculated grapple area. This allowed me to fit everything bar an EM Mask onto the surface using an Open Frame configuration. Though the silhouette in the Spinward Marches Campaign looks more like it is based on a sphere. But the only configuration which will aloow everything to fit was the open frame.

I do find it interesting that many of the larger ships designed for MT (which are usually broken in some way) work better in TNE.

 

[TheDS]

It seems to me that the original rule was meant to discourage long ships, which are typically easier to steamline, or to state that another way, to encourage unstreamlined ships.

However, as everyone here seems to agree, the stated rule is a bit unrealistic.

As a stop-gap measure, I use FFS2's dimensions to tell me what the other two dimensions of a ship should be, and then I decide which way the docked ship is going to be mated to the mothership. Often, if the parasite ship is moderate in comparison to the mothership, you will multiply the two largest dimensions together (length and width) to get the surface area used. This would be a belly-up orientation. When the parasite is especially large, you may need to multiply the length by the height, giving you a side-to-side kind of orientation, but if the parasite is especially small, you can get away with multiplying width by height, respresenting docking by the tail or nose.

There will of course be exceptions here and there as to how you dock.

So the worst you're likely to see a grapple take up is the parasite's length x width, which is always less than or equal to the length squared.

I would not put it past some one who wants ONLY a specific ship class to dock to come up with a custom recepticle, such that it takes up only about 10% more than the actual facing area.

 

[ganymede]

Oh c'mon guys! That's the surface area of the HOST SHIP, not the grappled ship... pay attention? if you're running out of room on that, increase the size of your tender!

"Sounds like a case o' Tender-envy..."

 

[TheDS]

Speaking of paying attention... maybe YOU should. We ARE talking about host surface area, but the amount of it taken up is a function of the parasite's size.