FT III Wishlist

FT III Wishlist

1. ELECTRONIC WARFARE
Better use of electronic warfare, ECM and sensors. Maybe I'm just   
pining for 
GDWs Star Cruiser, but this should be really important,
you can't shoot what you can't see. I have seen some nice ideas on this
posted 
here.

2. SIX FIRING ARCS
The diagrams are really easy to do, draw two concentric circles, write
the 
Battery letter in the middle (A, B ...) and draw six lines from the
centre out 
to outer circle, This leaves the six sectors, shade in any you CANNOT
fire into. 
The inner circle and letter should be on top.
   By hand it is a bit of a bitch but on a decent vector graphics
program it is 
easy (I like Draw Plus, c. 1991, for the Archimedes, I have yet to see
any PC 
package that comes close and it is free!).

3. SHIP STRENGTH
In warships (WW I/II vintage) there were roughly four different    ship 
strengths:
Merchants	Hah!
Light	Weak and cheap (escorts, small cruisers, Fisher's freak BCs)
Medium	Cruisers and Battle Cruisers
Heavy	Battleships

These were a measure of armour and strength as well as
compartmentalisation and 
damage control.
   A small ship could be heavily built (monitors) or a large one lightly
built 
(Courageous).
   I am not sure how this could be handled in the game but I think it is
an 
important concept.

4. ENDURANCE
A ship could trade endurance and range for protection or weapons.
   In FT non-starships go some way to display this but I would like to
see the 
ability to vary a starships range, I believe the fleet train and support
should 
be an important part of campaign games.

5. SHIP COSTS
I agree that balance in scenarios should not be based on price but for
campaigns 
I could not work without costs. So DON'T KILL DESIGN COSTS.

6. ARMOUR
Armour stops damage penetrating, it does not stop hits.
A (bad) suggestion:
Armour adds hit boxes at the end of each row of hit boxes, use a
different shape 
(round). For each row after the first there is one less armour box, so a
ship 
with 3 levels of armour has 3 might look like this:

[][][][][][] OOO
[][][][][][] OO
[][][][][][] O
[][][][][][]

   The armour does slowly degrade.
   Each time the ship is hit no damage penetrates unless it exceeds the
AV, eg. 
with lvl. 2 armour a hit must do three or more damage to penetrate at
all.
   Armour should be very expensive and heavy, I liked the NSL variant
armour 
idea where it reduces acceleration (author forgotten but you can get
there from 
the Unofficial Hame Page).
   Three should probably be the maximum armour level, small ships should
not be 
capable of carrying significant armour without making great sacrifices 
(monitors...).

   I like the idea of sensors and weapon mounts being scraped off the
hull but I 
am not sure how to model this.
  Armour should affect all damage except needle and EMP hits, maybe
other 
weapons could be given this 'soft' damage capability. Maybe some weapons
should 
be armour piercing, reducing the effective AV or ignoring it (eg.
torpedoes).

Thank you for listening.

By the way, the code for super dreadnaughts should probably be DNS, not
SDN. the 
latter does not seem to fit the naming scheme, and I'll be damned if
I'll change 
now just to suit the rest of the world! Then of course I'm from Ulster
(Northern 
Ireland) and being thran (bloody minded) is one thing we are all good at
here.

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