Re: (1297) I'm SOOO confused

Peter L. Berghold writes:
[Describes building a 20T Fighter]
>          Item                Units           Volume            Wt
>       Manuever 6              3.4             45.9             119
>       Power Plant            80                7.2             160
>I arrived at the power plant figure by determining that the
>manuever drive would need 238 power units as input power for their
>survival.  I doubled that figure in the interest of maintaining
>excess power for agility.  SO far so good, but now comes the fuel
[Fuel calculations]
>What am I doing wrong?   What kinds of guidelines do other folks
>use in this instance?

	Trying again - very brave :-)  Two problems with the design.
First - scale efficiency (from the same page as the powerplants, near
the bottom) will triple the output of any powerplant 14 kl or larger, giving
a total output of 18 Mw per kl of powerplant (assuming TL15).  Another
way of looking at it is that any TL15 power plant providing more than
252 Mw of power will have a size of Output/18.  This mistake has been
made by so many people (including whoever designed the fighter in the
Rebellion Sourcebook!) that I think they should either reformat the table
of powerplants or at least put asterisks by the numbers in the "Power Out"
column to refer people to the scale efficiency table.  Note that this does
not increase fuel usage, so this will reduce the fuel used in your fighter
by 2/3, as well as freeing up space formerly used by the plant.
	Second - the "30-day fuel supply" is a suggestion, not a
requirement, and I believe was meant to primarily apply to starships.
The fighter in the Rebellion book had a 5 day supply, and the one in
Fighting Ships even less.  It is also possible to run a powerplant at less
than full capacity, saving fuel.  Thus you could build a ship that has a
30-day supply of fuel for manuvering and life support, but only 3 days
for the weapons and agility. (I don't think many ships will fight more
than 3 full days before refuelling - especially not a fighter with no jump
drive.)

>Boy I miss High Guard!
Me too. :-)
	I hope this helps. Good luck.

					W. Dow Rieder

 	When the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems
start to look like nails...