Re: Ramming

On Wed, 4 Dec 1996, Hal Carmer wrote:

>   In conclusion, committing suicide in a game should be held to
realistic
> levels, not at some whim of the commanding officer of the ship.  Short
of
> refusing to play with the person who uses ramming capriciously, there
> should be guidelines towards when a ship would consider ramming or
jumping
> to their death.

Considering how hard it is to achieve a ram, I doubt if any extra 
penalties are needed... The same goes for FT jumps - you have one turn 
of warning while the other ship charges its jump engines, so you have
one 
turn of getting away from the jumping ship. Of course, the opposite 
applies too - if you see that wounded super-dreadnought preparing to 
jump, would you try to get a corvette or two close to the point of 
departure...?

>  So what takes up the other amount of volume? 

Normal-space drives, power plants, crew quarters, shuttle bays, comm. 
sections, cargo space (even warships need some place to put spare 
parts!), bridges, scanners, fire-control centers... and so on.

> How many people are involved in crewing the ship?

Does it matter? Divide the crew into 'personnel points' and refrain from

defining just how many people there are in each pp...

Specifying crew sizes reduces the genericity (...strange word...) of FT.

I'm very much against that.

Oerjan Ohlson

"Father, what is wrong?"
"My shoes are too tight. But it does not matter, because
 I have forgotten how to dance."
- Londo Mollari