Re: Small Alien Empires

Tim Bancroft wrote:

 >As mentioned, I've pulled the bits'n'bobs together on the "sideline"
 >aliens and put them up.

That doesn't stop me from commenting the rest of the page as well though
<g>

Interesting briefing on the Kra'Vak. Sounds very much like something the

military intelligence community could come up with... then again,
whether 
or not it has any connection to the *real* GZGverse situation is another

question entirely, of course ;-)

The .gifs showing the VOC ships seem to have been re-sized a bit too 
harshly - eg., all the 'f's show up as indistinguishable from 'l's, and
the 
'5's in the "P" space boxes on the Utrecht look like '1's as well.

 >There is also (yet another, I guess) basic shipcalc spreadsheet -

Which unfortunately doesn't allow you to recreate all of the FB1 ships, 
since it doesn't allow for 2-arc B4s :-( Not quite sure why you consider

single-arc P-torps to be "non-standard" equipment, either?

 >which also includes alternate Beam weapon costs
 >and MASS based on calculations similar to those done for KV railguns
in
 >FB2 (I did it to balance forces a bit).

I'd be quite interested in seeing these calculations, both on the K-guns

and on the human beams. (The "appears to..." phrasing you use on your
web 
page suggest that you haven't actually seen the calculations which were 
made for the K-guns during the FB2 development; I'm a bit curious about 
what you think they looked like <g>)

(BTW, "railgun" is the original More Thrust weapon type, "K-gun" is the
FB2 
one. The only place where the word "railgun" is used in FB2 is where Jon

explains why the weapon's name was changed :-/)

 >**Warning** the alien ships and costs are still being tested. The
 >points are based on what's around on the net and working it out by
trial
 >and error.

Hard to say if the points costs for the individual systems are OK or
not, 
since I can't find any such costs specified except for Streamlining :-/ 
Depending on exactly how the FTL torps work (see below) the ships could
be 
anything from very powerful to complete wimps.

The FTL torpedo rules are not clear exactly when in the turn sequence
the 
FTL torpedo *jumps* are done. I suppose that they're *launched* (ie., 
dumped out of the ship) after order writing but before ship movement,
just 
like other missiles are, but do they (attempt to) jump immediately (ie. 
*prior* to ship movement), or do they wait until after all ships have 
moved? (If the latter they'd be fairly similar in overall effect to 
single-shot PBL2s; if the former - or if both jump and launch are done
in 
the *ship's fire* phase - they'd be very powerful indeed, since the risk
of 
missing with them is very small.)

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

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