Re: [DSII] Heresy

--- John Crimmins <johncrim@voicenet.com> wrote:

> Well, yeah.  Frankly, I try *not* to build the ideal
> vehicle -- if that kind of thing was what I wanted,
> I wouldn't have purchased a whole bunch of wheeled 
> minis at ECC.  Everyone's got flaws.	Sometimes I

Wheeled units are ideal for some applications.	:)

> What I was getting at, though, is that when I *want*
> to design that Platonicly ideal tank for a given
> scenario, it's always the same.  There's a good bit

Yeah.  But most of the top-line modern MBTs are pretty
close in capability.  I mean, Brit Challengers and US
M1A1s vary mostly in fuel efficiency of engine and a
fairly marginal difference in top speed.  The only
reason the Russians do anything different is because
they don't have such good composite armor and have to
rely on reactive instead.  Oh, and their fire control
is less advanced so they have to use through-the-tube
ATGMs to get kills at 4k+.  I mean, most of NATO uses
the 120mm Rheinmetall smoothbore, and the Russians use
a 125mm smoothbore.  From a DSII standpoint, there
ain't much difference.

> of 
> variety at the low end of the scale, but not so much
> at the high end.  This may well be realistic -- it's
> not my area of expertise, by any means -- but I'd
> like 
> more possibilites for "flavoring" the high-tech
> guys.

All claw hammers look alike.

This is because if you're driving nails, the ideal
form is pretty simple.	It would be more "flavoring"
or "colorful" to use a 37lb device shaped roughly like
a waffle iron with holes to grab it with prehensile
tentacles, but it wouldn't make sense.

Things look the way they look because the laws of
physics and the principles of engineering derived from
the laws of physics don't change much.	

Pretty much everything someone has suggested as things
that they "can't do" that they wish they could has
been tried (multi-turreted tanks with an assortment of
weapons, huge guns on little tanks, open-topped
vehicles, etc) historically and found to not be
terribly effective, in many cases reducing combat
effectiveness.

Once Upon A Time, I played Heavy Gear.	I didn't like
the idea of Gears, and I didn't much like the vehicles
presented, so I used the open-ended design system to
make my own.  Fast, well-armored tanks with 1 big gun
and an array of secondary machine guns.  Kicked much
ass, but all the roleplayers decryed them as
"munchkin" or "unfair."

Life ain't fair.  Combat is considerably less fair
than the rest of life.	Not all ideas are equal, and
bad designs and bad tactics will not ever equal good
designs and good tactics.  A ruleset that doesn't
penalize bad ideas is a ruleset that is pointless--you
may as well play chess.

As for "Flavor Text" you're free to do this as well. 
Jon provided flavor text from which are derived the
names used in the rules (HKP, MDC, et al).  Life is
good for those of us who like that brand of SF.

If you prefer to run magic-using Dwarves From Deep
Space, then you might call your DFFGs "Lighting Blast
Generators" and your MDCs "Magic Blasters" or
whatever.  No one cares.  It's your damn scenario or
background, go ahead.

The reason (presumably) that the rules list HKP, MDC,
et al instead of "Generic Weapon 1, GW2, GW3" et al is
just for the purposes of keeping them straight.

John

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