Re: Planetary invasion ramblings (longish)

>Jeff spake thusly upon matters weighty:
>
>>Sure, there may be a few left behind and your point about SDBs
>> is a good one (though less so with the advent of the FB, I suspect)
>
>Why? I assume even with FB it is quite feasible to design a non-FTL
>capable ship which (by virtue of not needing the FTL drives) has more
>hull capacity (and maybe space freed up by fuel) to accomodate more
>armour, weapons and ECM.... and costs less.... therefore making
>a wonderful planetary defence option.
Just as a guess, not having seen the FB yet (sigh) from the discussion I
haved seen, the percentage of MASS savings for the ships may not be as
significant as in FTII (25%).  To therefore SDB's are still a valid and
effective option, but perhaps the advantage is not as significant as it
was
before.  A simple matter of degree.

SDB's could be truly frightening in Traveller (at least High Guard era)
where it was not uncommon for warships to dedicate 40% or more of their
total tonnage to jump fuel.  Think how that kind of sacrifice would
affect
FT ships.

One of my problems with FTII, is that for any ship, FTL is FTL.  One
cost,
so hard to justify differing performance characteristics.  Even just
throwing in Basic,Enhanced and Superior FTL would be nice in my opinion.
These can be more easily slapped onto other background fairly easily,
while
still giving flavor and variety to 'generic' ships.  For traveller
stuff,
j1 or j2 is Basic, j3 and j4 is Enhanced, and j5/j6 is superior.  In
starwars the millenium falcon is clearly superior, others I don't know -
but there is variety.  Tramp freighters are probably basic, while
couriers
(in the no-ftl universes) would be enhanced or even superior.

Don't get me wrong, I do understand the argument for keeping it general,
and FTL levels have no direct relation to the tactical game, but anyone
who
wants to support multi-level FTL has to roll their own.  Just building
these simple levels in the basic system leaves it easy to campaigns to
plug
into them.  One thought I had was effectively redundancy - Basic FTL is
destroyed with one hit, Ehnahced or Superior FTL is reduced 1 level per
hit.

Enough rambling, I'll shut up now.

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