Re: [Ft} OU & IC & FB3

Bell, Brian K (Contractor) wrote:

>I agree. The tug/tender rules need modification.

The main problem is tugs *vs* tenders - there's essentially no reason
to build tenders (internal carrying bays) rather than tugs (tug FTL
drive).
 
>I do think that 10% is a little low however. If you build a FTL ship
with
>the same equipment as a non-FTL ship (including same number of >hull
boxes, or 10% of ship mass, whichever is greater), you end up >with a
12-30% increase in point cost for the ships.

The 12-30% is... somewhat debatable :-/ More on this below:

>Here are some of Laserlight's IF ships as example:
>Ship	       Non-FTL	   FTL	  % increase
>		 m/c	   m/c	  mass/points
>Ahdath FF	20/72	  23/81   15.0/12.5
>ash Shaulah	 8/30	  11/39   37.5/30.0

Should be  8/30   10/36   25/20

>Hasan as-Sabah 31/107	  37/125  19.3/16.8
>Qaws CLG	60/212	  70/242  16.7/14.1
>Saber CL	50/168	  58/192  16.0/14.2
>Sala ed-Din DH 34/118	  40/136  17.6/15.2
>Turcoman CL	50/172	  58/196  16.0/13.9
>Turs DD	24/88*	  28/100  40.0/13.6
>
> And take the following FB1 ships if converted
> to non-FTL:
> Ship		Non-FTL     FTL    % 
>		  m/c	    m/c    mass/points
>Maximillian	87/294	 100/333  13.0/13.2
>Tsiolkovsky   129/519	 150/584  16.3/12.5
>Ark Royal     171/708	 200/798  17.0/27.1

Typo; last entry should be "17.0/12.7".

>Foch	       216/805	 250/909  15.7/12.9
> 
>The above averages to 16.33... % increase in points.

If you use correct values, you get an average increase of 14.33% for
the above 12 ships. 

Your sample is a bit small though. If you include all the FB1 warships
(the 57 main entries, not every sub-variant) as well as the 8 IF ships
above, you get an average of 13.6% (with extreme values 6.7% and 20%).
Averaging over the thousand or so FB1-tech ships I currently have
archived gives 13.1%. Or at least it gave 13.1% a couple months ago; I
haven't checked since early November :-/

A 2-3% cost difference is generally too small to have a noticable
impact; the initiative rolls tend to have a bigger impact than this (at
least for battles smaller than ~5000 pts per side). If you fight to the
last ship and/or count ships that FTL from the battle as "killed", +15%
works about as well as +10% - the inaccuracy is drowned by the effects
of initiative rolls (and maneuvering, lucky/unlucky threshold rolls,
etc.).

If OTOH you score more points for killed/captured enemy ships than for
cripples which escape (cf. the "Striking colours" thread) then the
sub-light ships have a distinct disavantage: they can't withdraw into
hyperspace, so they tend to die (or surrender/be captured) more often
than FTL-capable ones. This lowers their value a bit further, pushing
the cost increase down closer to 10% than 15%.

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry