Re: Thoughts on FT

On Tue, 8 Apr 1997, David Brewer wrote:

> If a sci-fi game doesn't have flavour, it doesn't have much at all.

I don't know... There's flavour wrt other games and there's flavour 
within the game. I meant the latter.

> Well, they slavishly follow each other in every design decision...
> explaining the lack of flavour in ship design.

Ach, but that's only until you buy the FleetBook(tm) ;-)

> That's a fair comment. Serves you right for playing with Kra'Vak
> rules, though.

I don't play with them. I'm trying to make value out of the pages I paid

money for.

> At least by levelling down to all RG-1's there's a
> speed-up. Roll handful of dice to-hit, pick up those dice that hit
> and re-roll for damage. It saves distinguishing between Class 3's,
> 2's and 1's.

True.
 
> ...but how does armour work in this system? The benefit of armour 
> is tied into the damage roll. 

Hadn't considered that, but I think a straigth penalty to hit is
easiest,
-1 per armor level, 6's hit anyway. Note that the beams already
effectively do this. The problem is that the d6 doesn't give much range
for modifiers... 
 
> > Next: Scatterguns vs. Submunitions packs.

> Can anybody tell me why scatterguns are just so much better than 
> submunitions packs?

I'll bite ;-)

Who knows? It's a good thing the Kravvies fight among themselves, or
they 
might not have bothered to invent any other weapons!

Let's compare:
	Subpack  Scattergun
Mass:	    1	    1
Price:	    3	    5
Arc:	    one     all
Anti-ship:
 Avg.Dmg at
 6"	    2.00    3.5
 12"	    1.33    3.5
 18"	    0.66    0
Antifighter: none   3.5 avg dmg

Hmmm... the scattergun seems only 2-3 times as effective as
submunitions. 
I think upping the cost to 10 pts. might suffice. That would also be a 
fairer trade-off with fighter squadrons. Or maybe 15 pts.

Next: The Price of Weight

What does mass cost? How to compare two systems with different masses?
Well, good thing the ship costs are linear, makes this easier.

Let's assume FTL ships only. Let's assume a basic Thrust cost of 2xMass 
(seems to be prevalent among the designs).

Thus, enlarging the hull to make room for 1 Mass of equipment (weapons),

costs 2x2 (Hull cost) +2 (FTL cost) +2x2 (Thrust cost) or 10 pts.
Ofcourse, you earn 1 damage point in the process. So, unless this pushes

you over a size class limit, we might say one mass is worth about 5
points.

Thus if we have two otherwise identical systems, the one massing more 
should cost 5pts. less per mass point difference.

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