Re: [FT\DS2] Fleet and Army sizes for games

On Thu, 17 August 2000, stiltman@teleport.com wrote:

> My way of thinking would be that building a reconfigurable ship would
always
> involve a premium regardless of whether you charged an extra
percentage,
> because you'd have to always build more parts for the ship than the
ship could
> ever use at one time.

It's an interesting idea. I hadn't followed much of the discussion
either as I usually try to avoid the various homegrown system design
discussions. I've seen too many that are either too specific for me, or
are just silly.

The "system rack" idea sounds interesting. One thought, though... all of
the systems that go into each rack would have to either be the same mass
or multiples of the same mass, wouldn't it? Reconfigurable systems would
have to fit in the same size bays. I suppose you could have multiple
sized bays, though.

I would think you'd need some minor mass for the bay, plus systems of
that mass or smaller would be all that could fit in the bay.

Again, I'm with the others as to whether the logistics would be
worthwhile in a campaign game. To restock, the ships would have to be
out of commission for a certain amount of time, even if they didn't take
damage. I suspect that a lot of ships would have to fight in a less than
optimum configuration.

Note, this isn't necessarily bad. It's a neat idea and could work well
in your universe. Not all systems have to be optimum. In fact, I happen
to like backgrounds where less than optimum design decisions were made
by one force or another. My own homegrown background has one force
without FTL capability, giving them a ship by ship advantage mass wise.

Out of curiousity, do you know of any sci-fi backgrounds that use this
idea? 

Allan Goodall - agoodall@canada.com
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