Starship Design

A thread of 2 messages, 15 May 1989 to 16 May 1989, in the order they were sent.

#365 Starship Design

Michael Francis Polis · 15 May 1989

[I reformatted this article, before it was distributed, to make it more
readable--James]

This is in response to Ameer Sulaiman's response to Jim Cunningham's
article about starship design.

After all the kinks, I don't like the system.  I liked the High Guard
design rules the first time I saw them.  That's why I bought the book.
It takes time to design a ship in High Guard, but it's worth it.  You
get something that you couldn't have made before.  When I saw the
MegaTraveller design rules I was suprised by their length and by how
little they add to play.  Every goodie except sensors was already
available, either in Robots or in Striker.

In High Guard it is easy to preplan.  You find the total of the fixed
displacement components and the total of the percentage based
components.  You only need to allow a few extra power points for weapons
and agility.  This is enough to tell you the size of the hull.  In
MegaTraveller, one must consider control points, mass, volume (in kl),
and power ranging from Kilowatts to Gigawatts.  The best you can do is
take a guess at how big it will be (not easy for someone designing their
first ship).  Then come the goodies, pages of them.  How can you resist
the latest technology? What do you need on your ship? Is the neural
activity sensor really good for anything? How many forms of radios do
you need? What about a robot arm? Can I get my ship to load itself?
After those pages, the margin built in to your guess (assuming you were
lucky enough to have a margin for error) can dissappear, making you
recalculate every volume dependent component.

The design of any small craft under 20 tons has become a special case
under the new rules.  This is important as it is not possible to build a
fighter like the one in the Imperial Encyclopedia.  To see one of the
more obvious flaws, note that the power plant generates 186 Mw, while
the 2 beam lasers consume 250 Mw each when they fire.  Keeping track of
volume and mass while trying to shove enough components into a tiny
package to make a decent vehicle is not a task I enjoy.  Anybody try to
build a special grav vehicle to go with that custom ship?

Combining Striker and High Guard was a mistake.  It is the source of the
problems with (very) small craft, and it adds little of use to the game.
 The weapons and electronics that go into a starship are very different
from those that go into tank.  I doubt I will ever have occasion to
mount a howitzer on a starship, and I don't even want to think about a
tank mounting a UCP T particle accelerator.

#367 Starship Design

Adrian Hurt · 16 May 1989 · reply to #365

>...						  The best you can do is
>take a guess at how big it will be (not easy for someone designing their
>first ship).  Then come the goodies, pages of them.
>...
>After those pages, the margin built in to your guess (assuming you were
>lucky enough to have a margin for error) can dissappear, making you
>recalculate every volume dependent component.

Now you know why the F-16 and F-18, originally supposed to be cheap, light
fighters, got to be big and expensive!

>Combining Striker and High Guard was a mistake.

No, that is a good idea. It is their implementation that may be at fault.
In fact, I always did dislike the High Guard assumption that mass and volume
were always the same; that density is constant for all ship components.
There's another thing I don't like, though. If your ship is big enough, why
can't you have more than one major weapon? Alright, so the main spinal mount
forms the "keel" of the ship. But what's wrong with a battleship having two
factor T meson guns on that keel? Come to that, what about a catamaran-type
design? Or, at the very least, a factor T meson gun and a couple of factor
J guns as secondaries.

> The weapons and electronics that go into a starship are very different
>from those that go into tank.

Not necessarily true. For one thing, according to Mercenary, at high TL's
gunships and SDB's become virtually indistinguishable. And I did design a
vehicle which took the standard starship turret-launched missiles - that
way, it could be re-armed at any starport of adequate TL.

One thing I do like about the new design system is that you can now have
spinal mount, bay mount and turret versions of the same type of weapon in
one ship. In High Guard, you could not have bay mount particle accelerators
and particle accelerator barbettes on the same ship, for example.

 "Keyboard? How quaint!" - M. Scott

 Adrian Hurt			     |	JANET:  [email removed]
 UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian     |  ARPA:   [email removed]