Re: Size Class Escalation -- How high in Mass?

Roger Books wrote:

>How about this?  Hull cost is the square of the
>number of hull boxes?

The armament of the big ship is as important as its many hull boxes, so
if 
you use the square of the number of hull boxes you'll just shift the 
advantage to large ships with Fragile hulls, lots of armour and enough 
weaponry to take out a ship their own size in one salvo :-/

Haven't tested it thoroughly, but someone's (lost my saved mails in the 
recent email troubles so can't check who) suggestion to use the "basic 
structure = TMF" cost with "basic structure = (TMF^2)/100" seems to go a

fair way towards solving the problem for one-off battles.

Example:

The NAC Valley Forge-class SDN costs 642 pts under the normal FB1 rules:
Basic structure = TMF = 190
Everything else = 452
Total = 190+452 = 642

Under this proposal it would instead cost 813 pts:
Basic structure = (TMF^2)/100 = 190*190/100 = 361
Everything else = 452
Total = 361+452 = 831

A Ticonderoga-class DD, OTOH, currently costs 100 pts:
Basic structure = TMF = 30 pts
Everything else = 70 pts

but under this proposal it'd only cost 79 pts:
Basic structure = (TMF^2)/100 = 30*30/100 = 9 pts
Everything else = 70 pts
Total = 9+70 = 79 pts

Of course, the suggested formula breaks down for extremely large ships.
The 
infamous "Dreadplanet Roberts" (TMF 1200) would go from a measly NPV of 
5000 (incl. fighters) to a rather more respectable ~18000 (again incl. 
fighters), and since I've narrowly defeated that ship with 5000 points
of 
Kra'Vak ships (vanilla FB2 cruisers) I'd confidently expect 18000 points
of 
just about anything to rip it apart fairly easily! OTOH the DPR is a 
product of the very flaws in the FB1 design system which the suggestion
is 
intended to rectify, so maybe it isn't unreasonable that it makes the 
über-sized ships overpriced <g>

The downsides with the suggestion is that it is rather more complicated 
than the current formula, it has nothing whatever to do with "real" 
construction costs, and it works better for human ships than for KV or 
Phalon ones. It does however seem to give a better indication of how 
powerful the ships are in one-off battles than the current design system

does. I'd still use the current FB1 system for long campaigns (ie.,
those 
where repairs and new construction have time to become important).

Later,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

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