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

Allan Goodall wrote:
> On Thu, 17 August 2000, stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
 
>>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.

[snip]

> The "system rack" idea sounds interesting. One thought, though... all
of the
> systems that go into each rack would have to either be the same mass
or
> multiples of the same mass, wouldn't it? Reconfigurable systems would
> have to fit in the same size bays. I suppose you could have multiple
> sized bays, though.

Possibly.  I probably wouldn't enforce a rule that says you've always
got to
stick same-mass modules in the same spots every time.  For instance, for
the
submunition bomb, you might want more raw ordnance in one case to
concentrate
on a single target, or you might want more fire controls to be able to
fire
at numerous targets in a spread (e.g. against soap bubble carriers), or
you
might want to put on less of both in order to fit an extra drive module
onto
the thing so that it can run down a faster target.

For my "submunition bomb", I'd keep something like the following sitting
around
ready to fit to it:

A mass-3 drive module (to bring it from MD 4 to MD 6).
A mass-4 drive module (to bring it from MD 6 to MD 8 -- rounding forces
this
	piece to be larger for a mass 34 ship).
About 30 submunition capsules, and/or...
About 30 MKP capsules.
About 10-20 scattergun charges.
About 6 FireCon capsules.

Ordnance stockpiles could be divided amongst several bombships over
time, but
ultimately what I'm looking at here is enough ammunition to be able to
carry
the bombship through three or four attack runs against a variety of
enemies.
For instance, if was using these things against Noah's B6 skirmishers,
I'd
stick the drives on it, use only one FC, and fill out the rest of the
mass
with MKP's.  For soap bubble carriers, I'd use more firecons, some of
the
scatterguns, and the submunitions.  For "swarmer" escorts, I'd arm it
much
the same way as for soap bubble carriers except substituting more
subs/MKPs
for scatterguns.  For targetting enemy shipping, just about any sort of
ship-to-ship fittings will do... although for shipping it'd probably be
a bit
meaner if I used a Needle Shrike variant with FTL tug capability and
elected
to disable the freighters' drives and popguns and haul them off
altogether
rather than destroying them.  (That _really_ is not a nice thing to do.
:)
 
> Again, I'm with the others as to whether the logistics would be
worthwhile
> in a campaign game. To restock, the ships would have to be out of
commission
> for a certain amount of time, even if they didn't take damage. I
suspect
> that a lot of ships would have to fight in a less than optimum
configuration.

I agree.  You'd have to build quite a stockpile of ordnance to keep the
ships truly reconfigurable for all the missions you have in mind.  It
might
well be more efficient to just keep lots of variants of the ship without
any spare ordnance and just send whichever kind you need.  The flip side
to
this is that the various fixed pieces may be more expensive and you may
get
caught with the wrong configuration, as you say.  The submunition
bombship
is basically designed to be combustible anyway, so the spare ordnance
might
not even do you much good.

The main reason I'd even bother making the submunition bombs
reconfigurable
in the first place is because (a) they're very small, (b) all of their
weapons
are one-shot so I probably need to have extra ammo ready to reload for
them
anyway, and (c) building a few of these wouldn't make much of a dent in
the
macroeconomics of a starfleet, but they can pretty cheaply eliminate the
many forms of fragile-hulled gimmicks that an enemy might think to
invest
in (soap bubble carriers, B4+-and-PDS snipers, etc) at a very favorable
cost-benefit ratio.

> Out of curiousity, do you know of any sci-fi backgrounds that use this
idea? 

If you're talking about reconfigurable systems, the only one that I can
really
think of off the top of my head is the Clans' OmniMechs in the
Battletech
system.  
-- 
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