Re: [FT\DS2] Fleet and Army sizes for games

Tony wrote:
> I wrote:
> > Since my email yesterday, I've been going over some of the math in
my head.
> > The submunition bomb design I've generally settled on would probably
be...
 
> Do you charge a points premium for reconfigurable ships ? In campaign
terms
> they have to be more valuable, mass-for-mass, than an equivalent sized
ship
> of fixed design.

Haven't really thought about it.  Good question, though, so I'll give
you
an answer with a little bit of thought behind it.  :)

My way of thinking would be that building a reconfigurable ship would
always
involve a premium regardless of whether you charged an extra percentage,
because you'd have to always build more parts for the ship than the ship
could
ever use at one time.

For instance, for my submunition bomb design, you'd have to have a spare
set
of drives for MD 6 and MD 8 to add on to the core drive systems, and
you'd
have to buy about two or three times as much mass in fire control and
expendibles as the thing could actually carry at a given moment, just so
that
when you had to stick it all together for a given mission, you'll have
whatever
you need.  After all, if you don't have the ordnance to use with it,
then
you're stuck with whatever you _do_ have.  Because you'd always need to
build
more pieces than you'd ever use at once for the actual ship, the extra
unused
pieces themselves probably would be the premium in question.

This is all assuming that your production phases and your strategic
movement
phases are seperate.  i.e. you produce ever now and then, and you have
to
work with what you've built for a little while before you can correct
any
procurement mistakes.  For a ship to be both reconfigurable and useful,
this
means you'd have to build all the ordnance you'd anticipate needing for
_all_
of its missions, rather than just building the weapons once and being
ready
to send it into drydock if it gets damaged.  Conversely, a
fixed-equipment
ship only needs to have the one set of weapons built for it.  The gap
gets
even more pronounced when all of the ordnance is expendables.

> [I haven't followed this thread too closely, so excuse me if I've got
the
> wrong end of the stick].

No prob.  I'm not really a meanie, I just play one in games.  ;)
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