Campaign Systems

Hi Guys

Some friends and I are trying to start up a long term FT and DSII
campaign. 
While the integration rules in More Thrust cover the direct technical
aspect 
of the mating of the two systems they don't (and admits it) go far
enough to 
lay a firm base for a campaign longer than the one given as an example
in 
FT.

Seeing as I'm only new to this Mailing list, please forgive me if I'm
trying 
to cover ground that someone else has covered recently. I'd be very keen
to 
see any material that people have posted here previously.

The first main question that came to mind was how to mate the two
different 
point systems. After having a look at the various equipment lists it
seems 
that a FT point could be equivalent to 100 DS2 points without too much
fuss. 
Is this a value that other people have arrived at or have I missed some 
vital ingredient? This point ratio means that a DS2 artillery piece is
with 
about the same as a single arc C Battery in FT. I used the reasoning
that a 
WW2 army typically used 6-8" guns as heavy artillery and the
corresponding 
navy used 6-8" guns as it main armament on cruisers and secondary
armaments 
on the larger capital ships. This argument isn't watertight but I would
like 
the point systems to have some sort of logical relationship.

The next point was repair of ships. There is a brief mention of ports in
the 
first FT campaign which covers placing ports near worlds and the
capacity of 
ship they can handle. What I would like to work out is how long things
take 
to fix once they are damaged. If you can't repair forces after a battle
in a 
long term campaign then you may as well not have saved the unit.
Especially 
if it has suffered damage like loss of fire control systems. I put
together 
a rough table of the basic equipment and how long I thought each of the 
systems could take to repair or replace. The values are arbitrary and I
have 
no real reasons for any particular value. The overall justification
again 
came from WW2 and the length of time it took the US to turn out a ship
from 
keel to commissioning. I believe it took roughly 3 months for a liberty
ship 
and about 12 months for a light/medium cruiser. I am using 1 week as the

length of a turn in the campaign.

Repair/Replacement times for damaged equipment

Equipment      Repair Time	   Replacement Time

------------------------------------------------------------------------
-

Structure Points	 (1d6 points per Week)	  N/A
C Battery	    2  Weeks	   1  Week
B Battery	    4  Weeks	   2  Weeks
A Battery	    8  Weeks	   4  Weeks
PDAF	       4  Weeks       2  Weeks
ADAF	       8  Weeks       4  Weeks
Screen Generators   10 Weeks	   4  Weeks
Fighter Bays	    2  Weeks	   4  Weeks
Fighters			   Immediate*
Needle Beams	    4  Weeks	   2  Weeks
Pulse Torpedo Tubes 8  Weeks	   4  Weeks
Pulse Torpedos			   Immediate*
Spinal Mount Nova Cannon 26 Weeks	20 Weeks
Submunition Pack			Immediate*
Minelayer System	 2  Weeks	1  Week
Mines				   Immediate*
Mine Sweeper System 8  Weeks	   4  Weeks
Fire Control	    8  Weeks	   4  Weeks
FTL Drives	    10 Weeks	   8  Weeks
Sublight Drives 	 (HV * Thrust) / 6	  (HV * Thrust) / 8

* Obviously this is subject to availability of the particular system at
the
port that it is being repaired at.

Given that this table pertains only to naval equipment, what about
capture 
and repair of Dirtside equipment? What sort of value should "holding the

battlefield" have? How long would it take a unit that has been beaten up

badly in an engagement to refit so that it is combat ready again? Where 
would this sort of activity take place? Does it matter how structured
this 
system is? Would it be better to think out the whole system and justify
it 
so that it works logically or would it be better to do a best Guestimate
for 
a few of the values and from those prepare a couple of lookup tables you

roll dice against to get the result?

Another problem is one of replacements. How do you determine what sort
of 
replacements become available? Just allocating a point value per turn
means 
that the player can always get the type of equipment they need. Is it
worth 
going to the trouble of determining particular equipment types for the 
replacements? It certainly would add an element to the game in my
opinion. 
Requesting 10 units of heavy tanks and being allocated 5 units of AA 
vehicles and having to cope with them has an appealing ring to it
<grin>.

There is a vast amount of stuff that needs to be done before I have a 
working system but the most important issue seemingly is Supplies. I
realise 
that keeping track of individual supply points is not in keeping with
the FT 
ethic of being fun and easy. But ships need equipment and troops need to

eat. I haven't yet come across a game that covers the constant need to
keep 
units supplied without being exceptionally arbitrary. FASA tried it with

Prefect but the system they used there is at the large formation level
and I 
can't seem to break it down to make it cover the unit sizes in DS2 as
well 
as the naval units in FT. If anyone has any really good ideas on this
issue 
I'd very keen to hear.

Sorry about the length of the post

Dan