Re: Gunboats in FT...

On Mon, 24 Nov 1997, Alun Thomas wrote:

> Er, where does it explicitly say that you can't have odd mass hulls ?

Hmmm... you are correct. It isn't explicitly stated.
 
> I've not seen it. However, FT does give clear formulae for deriving
> point cost and payload space from hull size - Ok, they don't give
> integer results for odd mass hulls, but they do give results.

Exactly. The correct roundings are never defined. As most ships (that
you 
are going to build in a game) are FTL capable military hulls, the 
rounding question is the often tricky case of exactly 0.5.

- If 0.5 is rounded down, you have nothing to gain by adding one mass to

an even mass ship
- If 0.5 is rounded up, it opens up a vista of optimizations. To wit,
you
should *never* build an even mass ship, because a ship with one mass
point
less has the exact same stats (bar mass itself) but costs less

Either way, one choice is ruled out. I prefer to rule it out explicitly,

not as yet another "that newbie was stupid enough to take a book design 
to a competition" feature.

> (actually, I think MT adds some systems which use a %age of mass,
> which could also give fractional results)

I've always rounded those up to the nearest integer. Even though FT/MT 
yet again fails to give a rounding method.

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