Re: [FT] Crew Professionalism and Ship Quality

>From Laserlight:

> As far as the minors go, I'd say New Israel will be decent (because
> they have incentive to practice) ......--a few crews from either
nation
might perhaps make it up to
> NSL level. 

Bite your tongue, my friend. "Decent" indeed.

> Most minor nations--despite the "we're small but we can
> whip anybody our size" syndrome--simply will not be up to Big Four
> standards because they won't have the funds to practice or the variety
> of institutional combat experience.	

But _some_ of them will be. Any small nation that's had to struggle
since
day one has to be able to say that phrase and be right, or they wouldn't
be
around in the 2180's. I'd count NI and Japan both in that category
(maybe
Taiwan, if it survives), and would assume Alarish has, as with its many
and
varied populations, a wide cross section, from among the best of the
best,
to bucket-jockeys.

Here's my take for NI on Beth's scale. 
Crew Quality: 5 (only the top 2% of navy personnel crew ships of the
line)
Leadership Quality: Average 4, range 3-5 (Mercs: 5)
Professionalism: I think professionalism is a direct result of
Leadership
quality and the two should be combined. A poor crew can be whipped into
shape by a good leader, and a poor leader can undermine the quality of a
good crew.
Vessel Reiability: 2130-2150: 3; 2150-2170: 4; 2170-present: 5
Opportunism: This has got to be leader- or commander-dependent. I don't
think an entire fleet can be genearlized in this way.

Many of these qualities can be considered abstracted out by the point
value
system. The rest are basically up to the individual players. 
If you want to say an ESU ship is truly less reliable than a NAC
equivalent,
then you'd could rationalize the near equal point values in different
ways.
Say 1 out of every 4 ESU ships is down for repair at any given time, but
the
cost of any one ESU ship is in fact 3/4 what's shown in the FB. You just
need 4 of them to fulfill the roles of any 3 NAC ships. You abstract
that
out and get equivalent costs for effectively equivalent ships. This
plays
around with the ship data some in the FB, but allows you to tune things
to
the flavor you want.

Noam