Re: This 'A' battery is as good as any other 'A' battery. (LONG)

On Sat, 18 Apr 1998 01:40:09 -0700 Donald Hosford
<Hosford.donald@acd.net> writes:
>> Again, in FT/MT we don't care about these differences in the current
>> system. I wonder if crew quality or weapon quality will vary at all 
>in FT3?
>>
>> --Pete
>
>One way to vary things a little would be to randomly adjust the mass 
>and cost
>values up or down 1 point on
>every item.
>
>Roll 1d6:
>
> Roll	  Result
>   1-2     -1
>   3-4    Same
>   5-6      +1

>I would put a lower limit of 1 on the results.
>
>This would be great for campains where the players are building their 
>own
>ships.  This way every thing would
>not seem the same.
>
I did something similar, I think it was when I was doing Traveller ships
many years ago. Each time I did a new class of ship, I generated two
modifiers. The first was the "class" modifier. This represented how well
the class as a whole performed compared to the designers' plans. Some
classes were real dogs, and others exceeded expectations. The roll was
heavily biased towards the class performing as expected however. Then,
for each ship in the class, I had a similar roll, but instead of the
baseline being the design specs, the baseline was the actual result of
the class as modified by the first roll.

I had some interesting results from this. Two examples I can think of: I
had a class of battleships (4 ships) that failed to achieve design
speed.
Then two of these failed to even make it up to class standard! On the
other hand (I had rolls for separate systems, rather than one roll for
the entire ship), they were very stable gun platforms (bonuses to the
gunnery).

Then there were the heavy cruisers that were faster than expected, but
turned out to be a bit fragile. One of the three, however, made up for
the damage point penalty with a bonus, so it actually got back to design
spec. (I guess she was the third one off the ways, and the designers
rectified the earlier problems with her sisters. :-)

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