Re: Planetary invasion ramblings (longish)

At 02:04 PM 6/15/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Jeff spake thusly upon matters weighty: 
>
>Sure, there may be a few left behind and your point about SDBs
>> is a good one (though less so with the advent of the FB, I suspect)
>
>Why? I assume even with FB it is quite feasible to design a non-FTL
>capable ship which (by virtue of not needing the FTL drives) has more
>hull capacity (and maybe space freed up by fuel) to accomodate more
>armour, weapons and ECM.... and costs less.... therefore making
>a wonderful planetary defence option.

According to Schoon's spreadsheet (which is all I've seen of the FB so
far)
the difference between FTL and non-FTL ships is 10% of the ship's mass
rather than the 25% is used to be under the FT II rules.  Or, coming at
it
from the other direction, an SDB used to have one and half times the
payload of a FTL ship (75% vs 50%) for all classes and/or speeds of
ship.  

This was a very significant advantage.	Now (assuming average hull
integrity) the difference is 20% more payload on a thrust-2 ship, 25%
more
on a thrust-4, 33% on a thrust-6 and 50% more only on thrust-8 ships. 
In
most cases, that extra space will probably go into drives or hull
instead.
In this context, the non-FTL option is just one of many design
trade-offs
available rather than the "across-the-board" bonus it used to be.

So, yes, they are still a viable option...just less so, as I said.

Jeff