Re: Nailing Dirtside/Stargrunt Chamber Pots (was Re: [GZG] More re: [OFFICIAL] Salute releases....!)

---- Ground Zero Games <jon@gzg.com> wrote: 
> >On Sunday 22 April 2007 16:02, Ground Zero Games wrote:
> >
> >>  I'd actually be quite interested to hear other peoples' opinions
on
> >>  this - unlike the Starships, for the ground stuff (whether it be
in
> >>  15mm, 25mm or 6mm) I've tended to keep away from saying "this mini
is
> >>  a UNSC (or NAC, NSL, whatever) tank", because I think it tends to
> >>  railroad SOME people into the "I don't do that army, so I can't
use
> >>  that mini" mindset. I'd rather that folks felt free to use just
> >>  whatever they like when they build their armies up. What do you
think
> >>  about it? Would you rather have everything tied down to "official"
> >>  stuff?
> >
> >Given the choice between as it is now, and going down the FullThrust
> >route of official models for each nation, I'd vote for the latter.
> 
> 
> The problem is the sheer quantity of designs needed; there are at 
> least 12 SG "nations" we'd need to do the vehicles for (otherwise 
> we'd be forever getting the "why don't you do them for MY favourite 
> nation" stuff, as I mentioned in another post) - if you just say that 
> each would need an MBT, a light tank, and APC/MICV and a fire support 
> vehicle, that's already 48 distinct designs, before you even start to 
> go down the route of support and specialist vehicle variants.... 
> sure, we could do this eventually, but it would take us a long time 
> to get these all done....
> 
> Maybe, with the benefit of hindsight, if we could go right back to 
> the start of everything and begin again from scratch we'd be better 
> just having two or three major powers making up the GZG-verse, which 
> would make it relatively easy to do specific but comprehensive 
> vehicle ranges for each of them.... but we've got a long legacy now 
> and we're not about to p*ss a lot of people off by changing it all. 
> ;-)

Isn't this the current situation though?
Would not a lot of the smaller nations get most of their gear from the
nations that can make it? You only really have to make vehicles for the
fleet book races, and maybe one unique vehicle for each of the smaller
races. 

Especially for the high tech gear chances are that everyone buys it from
either the NAC, ESU, FSE or NSL.

Recently the NZ defence force spent money buying LAVs from Canada, I
don't think they even have a defence industry in NZ or Aussie apart from
some electronics capabilty.

To cut down on the manufacturing logistics you could make basic hulls
with "conversion packs" to represent local adaptations. Different
nations might use different style of armour and if there were armour
packs and different stowage packs to put into the hulls these could
change the shape of the vehicle quite easily, As you pointed out, the
operall shape of a tank isn't that different from each other and some of
the latest Chinese designs look like they hired European styling
engineers (or photocopied the plans).

If you do make the vehicles the same for all nations, you risk the
armies suffering from the same look and feel problems as GW did back in
the early 90s. There were only 2 types of human vehicle so all human
armies were essentially the same in look and feel. 
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