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

>   = Robert S. Dean
> > = George William Herbert

> > 	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)

  I suspect that they are a way of representing the 'density' of the crew.
A ship with a high density of crew will loose more crew from each hit simply
because more crew is 'in harms way'.

  As for the effects of lost crew, the first effect IMHO should be large
penalties for damage control (wich don't really appear in MegaT so how could
it be penalized:(. This also highlights a related problem with the way MegaT
handles crew and similar things.
  MegaT seems to assume that all members of the crew has their own little
console with a cozy acceleration couch somewhere in the ship. I believe that we
should factor in watches (each person works only 8 hours per day) and damage
control crew (those 'off duty') in this. Only about one third of the crew has
a 'real' crew station and the rest are usually idle, except when at battle-
stations when they serve as the damage control crew.

  In combat, this should mean that the ship could operate without penalty until
it was below 1/3rd crew, but that damage control and repairs would begin to
suffer immediately.
  (This is also my resoning behind that I count each robot as three crew: robots
are active around the clock. But without the other 2/3rds of the normal crew as
damage control crew, you better hope nothing breaks!)

> > 	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.

  The net result is that all plants over a certain size will take the same
number of hits to destroy, regardless of how large the battery hitting and how
large the drive hit:(

> 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.)

  I agree with this. I am thinking along similar lines with drive damage in
Rebel Guard, shortly it is:
  A minor critical hit on the manuever drive resulting from a hit by a battery
that did 1000 damage points will do the minimum of full inoperable damage for
the drive and 1000 damage points.
  The performance of the drive is degraded with full performance on zero damage
and zero performance at inoperable damage (ie a 100/200 5G manuever drive will
loose one G for every 20 points of damage).

  I'm in two minds on wether using full inoperable or half inoperable as
maximum, or maybe base it on the ships displacement.

> Rob

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