Re: Starting from the ground up...

Could you make it work by mulitpling the size of everything by 5 or 10?
This might make enough room at the bottom of the charts to tweak the
fighters and small ships.
Then you could introduce "fighter/small ship equipment".  This might
help
the "fighter based FT" game along.

Donald Hosford

Frongoid wrote:

> Hi, I'll delurk for a bit to ask for some help.  I've been working on
> rewriting the class and size systems in Full Thrust/More Thrust to
> allow more emphasis on smaller ships... fighters are going to clock in
> at between 6 and 18 mass, all the way up to dreadnoughts and
> battleships in the 180-200 region.  I know this would throw game
> balance out (as well as create real problems finding enough dice) in
> large fleet battles, but I plan on using the rules for much smaller
> engagements in a roleplaying game... a sort of hybrid version of
> Traveller and a lot of homebrew rules (can you tell I like tweaking
> rule systems?).
>
> Anyway, has any work been done in this area before?  I know there was
> a B5 game, but it doesn't quite sound like what I'm looking for.  What
> I need is some rules to apply to smaller ships to make them more
> manueverable (slideslips are a definite must... I am also looking at
> the Kra'vak manuevering rules), while creating rules to make the big
> ships more than just a bunch of extra damage boxes and weapon systems.
>
> Another problem I am having is with missile systems.	I am torn
> between using the existing fighter system for missile swarms (although
> with each salvo only taking 1 Mass and consisting of 2 "torpedo
> fighters") and using the missile system mostly as-is from MT with
> unlimited shots (but only one missile in the air at a time).
>
> Crew sizes are also a little hazy, although I have put some work into
> this.  Basically I'm using a sliding scale to represent the ships (1
> Mass is not a constant size... it gets bigger as you move to larger
> classes.  This is especially evident at the break points between
> classes).  Each ship can carry a certain number of crew per mass
> dependent on class, and then there are breakdowns for required crew
> depending on whether the ship is
> military/merchant/passenger/fighter/base/etc.
>
> As you may guess, since this is going to be plugged into an RPG, the
> point system is going out the window.  I am designing the ships with
> background in mind, not just filling every last "space" in... since
> I'll have space in the medium class ships to make them viable while
> still leaving room, players can refit and upgrade ships in their
> mini-fleet as the game goes on (sort of a Hardwar/Elite/Frontier type
> of game).
>
> Well, I should wrap this up before I start causing anyone's eyes to
> glaze over.  Thanks for any help... I'm really looking forward to the
> first adventure of this, where the players start their careers in a
> damaged Mass 2 Command Shuttle boarding a derelict alien craft...
>
> Frongoid
> frongoid@t-three.com
> BTW, I get the digest of gzg-l, so if you wouldn't mind CCing messages
> directly to me, it would help a great deal.