Re: [FT] IF Ship Design

John Atkinson wrote:

> Oerjan Ohlson wrote:

[On System Defence units]
 
> > Not nearly as big a problem in FTFB as it was in FT2. The FTL drive
is
> > only 10% of the hull and it isn't very expensive in points, so you
don't
> > gain that much by removing it. Still, unless you actually pay for
the
> > tender there'll be a problem in one-off battles.
> 
> Actually you loose a bit--weapons are all more expensive than FTL. 
For
> a System Defense conversion of most of my ships, I'm considering
adding
> armor in place of engines.  Same cost.

Not what I was talking about. To get a fair comparision, you need to
compare ships with identical combat capabilities (ie, same number of
damage boxes (hull and armour taken together) and same armament); in
this
case the non-FTL ships are cheaper than their star-faring siblings. You
compare ships with the same armament but different capacity, or the same
damage capacity but differently sized payloads; it sounds a bit like
comparing apples with melons to me :-)

Example:

Assume that you want a ship with Average hull, Thrust 6 and 20 Mass of
weapons, armour etc. With an FTL drive, this ship is 67 Mass (and costs
roughly 221 pts); without FTL you get by with a Mass 50 hull for roughly
170 points, but you've lost 5 hull boxes. If you want to regain the lost
hull by adding some armour, you need a Mass 58 hull (with 3 extra
armour)
costing about 192 points. You've saved over 10% of the ship cost without
losing any combat capability (unless you count FTL as a "combat
capability", of course!).

In FT2, OTOH, you needed a Mass 40 FTL ship to carry those 20 Mass of
weapons; (costs roughly 420 pts - Thrust-6 capitals are expensive...)
while a non-FTL ship would have to be Mass 27and cost roughly 195 pts.
You lose damage boxes in this case too, of course, but you also lose the
requirement to take a third treshold check (in this case, that is). The
cost saving, however, is over 50% of that of the original unit - quite
impressive even when you factor in its lower damage capacity. Depending
on how big the ships are you get different ratios, of course - much of
the saving in this example comes from the break point in engine cost
between Cruiser and Capital classes in FT2.

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry