Re: [GZG] Monster ships

Well... the way I see it, there's an implicit series of limitations
that's being placed just by the size of the table and the way this game
is played.  Namely:

1.  The size of the table represents the maximum useful range at which
one may detect enemy ships at sublight speeds.
2.  The size represents the maximum fire control range that a fleet may
engage and fire upon enemy ships.
3.  The size represents the maximum distance at which a carrier may
exercise command and control of its fighters, and furthermore, the
carrier must do so directly and may not use its escort ships sent ahead
with the fighters as a proxy.  Otherwise, there'd be no reason to ever
put the carrier on the table.
4.  The size represents the navigational limits of ships at sublight
speed, and a greater speed than one could take and still stay on the
table is not safe.

Further extrapolating this reasoning to the Fleet Book ships, you have
one more critical implicit limitation at least as it pertains to the
GZGverse powers:

5.  The GZGverse powers do not possess the technology and/or capability
to build and/or logistically operate larger ships, faster ships, longer
ranged weapons, or more fighters/missiles than what they show in the
Fleet Books.  All of these things represent material advantages that at
least one of the powers could have made use of to exploit obvious
weaknesses in all the others, and they haven't.  If they haven't, the
only reasonable explanation is that they can't.

So if you play custom games, it depends greatly on how you apply
limitations to whatever fictional powers you're playing.  Namely, you
should have answers to the following questions...

1.  How big can they build ships?
2.  How fast can they drive them?  At what size is their ability to
build drive power to move their ships at any decent speed going to start
to taper off?
3.  How much carrier command and control do they have?
4.  What fighters are they capable of using?  (Standard fighters are the
basic stuff... interceptors, torpedo bombers, long range fighters, heavy
fighters, and swing-role fighters are all different levels of
protection, weapon optimization and miniaturization that not all powers
might have.)
4.  What, if any, advanced armor/drive/hull/screen technology do they
possess?  (If they have any at all, it should be either because they're
an advanced power or they have highly optimized research in these areas,
and only very, very advanced powers should have access to more than one
of them, or advanced screens at all.)
5.  What kind of fire control limitations do they have?
6.  What point defense capabilities do they have?  PDS only? 
Scatterguns (or something like them)?
7.  Given the answers to all of the above, what is their fleet doctrine?

For each GZGverse power, and for each custom fleet I've built, there's
an answer to these questions.  For any custom game, I would recommend at
least implicitly having an idea of what these answers are.  You _can_
theoretically go completely munchkin, but the story and game is usually
more interesting if you don't.

E

-----Original Message-----
>From: Tom B <kaladorn@gmail.com>

>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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