Re: FT-Starfire conversions

----- Original Message -----
From: Oerjan Ohlson <oerjan.ohlson@telia.com>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 3:57 PM
Subject: Re: FT-Starfire conversions

> Hm. Thought I had posted this already, but appearently not :-( Sorry
for
> the delay.
>
> Coming mainly from the Starfire game direction here:

These helped a lot, being just getting into starfire, and finding the
notation hard to keep track of .

I`ll reply to just some of the things you raised, to try and keep the
length
of the reply down <G>.

> >Forts-Use ship construction rules, with them having a drive of 2%
mass
for
> >station keeping only (not thrust).
>
> Why bother with engines at all?

I thought they would need some kind of station keeping drive and a power
plant, or do other FT`ers consider these payed for in the hull mass?

> >Gunboats-This I am trying to go along the lines of a
heavy/interceptor
> >fighter that can be targetted by ship to ship weapons, but can carry
more
> >missiles than a fighter (2 fighter missiles, or 1 SML missile each)
and
has
> >no endurance (but is slower, 18 MU per turn ). If rearming, must be
rearmed
> >by a shutdown ship, and if shutdown ship is hit by weapons fire,
takes
> >doubble dammage.
>
> Gunboats generally get slaughtered by an equal number of fighters, so
> Heavy/Interceptor doesn't sound all that likely. I'd make them
Heavy/Attack
> or just plain Heavy, in either case assuming that the "fighter
missile"
> above refers to AFHAWK (not sure, it could refer to a torpedo
fighter-style
> weapon as well).
>

I did mean the fighter torpedo`s and AFHAWK. A gunboat can carry 2
fighter
torpedos, 2 AFHAWK or 1 SML (standard). We took your sugestion and used
them
as a heavy/attack, with standard fighter Vs fighter roll. Also, could
intercept incoming missiles just like a fighter, and if targeted by
SM`s,
the number of missiles after interception was the number of gunboats
destroyed.

> >Must be carried on external racks (10 mass for a squadren),
> >and if hit by enemy fire while onboard their racks, are considered
> >destroyed.
>
> The reason to carry the gunboats on external racks was that they
*don't*
> take up much internal Mass aboard the mothership...

Hmm, I was trying to have something different from the 9 mass fighter
bay,
and a 10 mass gunboat rack was the same mass as 2 ER SMR`s (replace the
SMR`s on the bug capitols with a gunboat rack). The one thing we did
find
out about the gunboats is that they can be killed by normal ship to ship
weapons, but a ship will not be able to kill them all before they get
within
range, due to overloading the firecons of the targeted ship. With the
gunboats having no endurance, they would use the secondary move
everytime,
making them too fast. We have since reduced the movement of a gunboat to
15
MU per turn.

We have played 1 game, and just a couple of turns into the second using
these conversions (I only used the defensive bit for the advanced
datalink).
We are getting different results, depending how the humans play.