Re: [GZG] Monster ships

Eric said:

Well, a lot of this comes down to what kind of game you want to play.
I generally like to play custom games (and have been doing so long
enough that fleet book ships just feel worse and worse to me when I
have to go back), but I also like being able to play on a living room
floor.	I mean, if I really wanted to I could go twist the IJN rules
around like a balloon animal and make sure that my dreadplanet is
covering the entire play board in three meter diameter wavefronts from
a class 97 hyperspatial distortion cannon fired from the next house
down every other turn for about 40 turns before it even shows up at my
end of the board... but I'm not convinced that's a game I still want
to play.  There does come a point _somewhere_ where I think the
general weapon types in the game ought to stay at least somewhat close
to what's provided in range and firepower.  The game plays better that
way.  Sprinkle in PSB for why nobody does it as necessary.  (Active
scanning range is only 36

MU in most versions, so it could be as simple as, "if you can't scan
it, you can't fire control accurately on it either.")
-------

Tom:

The 36" limit doesn't work for me based on the weapons already in the
game with more than 36" range.

To me, scanner range and deceleration or course alteration capability
should also serve to limit board speeds (I'm talking about vector
here). No one not suicidal (general a trait frowned on in ship
captains) is going to fly blind (moving too fast to be able to see a
potential hazard and avoid it with surety).

I sort of agree with your 'somewhere there has to be a limit' and I've
always taken that limit around roughly what the major powers did. If
I'm going to take that limit as being X size of weapon when the rules
would more or less allow me to build bigger ones, I think I should be
doing the same with mass. If nobody is building mass 300+ ships, there
is probably a good (perhaps campaign universe related
economic/logistic/technical) reason.

To each his own, but to me, once you throw the doors open to custom
fleets with unique weapons combinations of alien and human tech,
soapies, and ships of unusual sizes (mandatory Princess Bride
reference), then I would expect people to also want to build big
weapons with looooong ranges as well. That's why I generally avoid the
whole custom home-brew thing. It's Pandora's Box.

But as long as a group enjoys a given set of implicit or explicit
constraints, that's good enough for them!

Tom
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