Re: (2742) MT Starship Combat rules...

In your letter dated Thu, 8 Aug 91 17:16:36 -0700, you wrote:
>
> 	This is probably whistling in the dark, but I have some questions for
> anyone who has actually used the MT starship combat rules, or someone
> with a recent printing of them (if the bugs were fixed).
>
> 	I've applied the erratta changes to combat tables, but have a few
> questions about the Explanation of Damage Results.
> 	One: do the 'crew sections' rules work, and if so, why? 8-) (they don't
> make any sense to me, esp. in terms of damage)

Well, I'll admit that they don't make much sense to me either--you realize that
your ship basically gets one crew hit point for each thousand tons of hull
displacement.  The actual number of crewmen per thousand tons of hull is
irrelevant.  This is a little more intuitive to me than the old High Guard
'exponential' crew factor, where each crew hit wiped out 90% of the remaining
crew.  Ships dead of crew radiation overdose were not uncommon in High Guard
combat.

> 	Two: For damage to Power Plant, the rules say 'reduce UCP factor',
> obviously a direct copy from High Guard.  Unfortunately, the craft design
> rules no longer _use_ the UCP for powerplant rating or design.  How do you
> handle PP damage?

You don't have both sets of official errata?  In the second one (I think) is
the part that says that you lose 10% of the 'disabled' damage point value
of the power plant for each hit, with a minimum of two points...so a plant
with a value of 4/8 would be disabled by 2 hits and destroyed by 4 more, but
a plant with a value of 600/1200 would be disabled by ten hits, and destroyed
by twenty more.

Personally, for both of these I would like to see things replaced by absolute
rather than relative damages.  (i.e. Crew-1 kills 10 people, if you've got lots
you're OK, and Power-1 does 4 points of damage, so the first example ship above
is scrod if hit.)  For that matter, I'd change things as they are now to say
that a Weapons-1 hit destroys a turret rather than a battery...with dynamically
reconfigurable controls, how can one hit wipe out ten turrets on a large ship,
or just knock out one weapon in a triple beam,sand and missile turret on a
small ship?

I can tell by your questions that you haven't looked at critical hits yet?
What is a bridge hit in the new game, and how do I designate the fact that
my ship has an auxiliary bridge?  Why should a computer system in triplicate
for redundant safety have all installations co-located so that a single
computer critical hit wipes out _all_ computer installations?  I think there
are a couple more of these, but I haven't got my rules with me today.

Rob