I'd like to put my fairly moderate two cents on Fighting Ships.
First: you can't deny that a lot of work went into it. Fifty plus ships,
quite well done, indicates that Marc Miller did indeed put effort into it. I
like the idea of tracing the evolution of combat vessels over time, and some
of the comments are quite telling.
Secondly: it corrects a longstanding discrepancy between estimated imperiumwide
naval budgets [simple calculation, everyone ought to have done this a long time
ago] and depicted naval force levels. The ships shown make naval fleets that
are bigger and more expensive by about the right amount to correct the
differences.
Third: despite the number of ships that are in it, it lacks depth in a lot of
ways. We are asked that imperial naval development produced no more than three
ships in the same size range [BB, Cruiser, whatever...] per tech level...about
a hundred years. That, and a total abandonment of previously designed fighting
starship designes...[Marc! Where'd my Tigress go!?!? :-) ].
Fourth: there are some production and design flaws. A lot of typos, most
annoying to me being the appearance of a lot of spurious '300,00 tons is fuel
tankage for distribution.' lines, particularly irritating in 30kton Battle
Riders... :-)
Things like using spinal PA's can be forgiven; note that those are the 'light
battleships' not the mainline ones. The armour factor violations...well, in
my humble opinion it's a) not the first time [check out 101 Vehicles, which was
approved] and b) a silly rule to start with. now that mass _counts_, armour
is really its own penalty.
And a couple of observations...
{SIGNIFICANT} almost ALL the main line ships have a Def DM of 7. I
have a feeling that this means something. The gaming that GDW does internally
must (speculation) have shown that this is the best balanced level. Note also
that most of the ships have agility=0 to not exceed that level. This is counter
to my personal intuition, and someone should ask inside GDW and try and see
if i read this right.
{FOR NORMAL PLAYERS, PERHAPS MORE SIGNIFICANT} the imperial navy is now
WAY out of reach when it comes to 'player resistance to/attacks on' naval
vessels.
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George William Herbert JOAT For Hire: Anything, Anywhere: My Price
UCB Naval Architecture undergrad: Engineering with a Bouyant Attitude :-)
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