[email removed] writes:
> "Excess Power": Is the amount of power left over after all systems have
> been powered (Sensors, Weapons, Drives, Environ, Comm, etc. etc.)
In any ship I designed under High Guard, "excess power" by your definition
was zero, or slightly positive - I tried to make the power plant just capable
of powering everything on the ship, usually adding a few more lasers if I had
spare power available.
My problem is that I have too much experience in High Guard, and keep
forgetting that some people (not you, Scott! :-) are trying to design
MT ships with no prior knowledge of High Guard. I suspect that the MT
authors have the same problem.
> (Power req for maneuver drive + "excess" Power)
> Agility= -----------------------------------------------*10
> Loaded Weight
This could finally give the ship's engineer something interesting to do in
combat - some sort of task roll to arrange the power distribution to the
various systems demanding power. Let's see ...
To distribute power among the ship's systems:
Routine, Starship Engineering, INT, 6 seconds
Referee: Exceptional success means that the engineer has 1% more power
available than the power plant's normal output; perhaps he has been clever
with the timing (route power to the sensors, then route power to the weapons)
or perhaps he has managed to coax the power plant into operating a little
more efficiently. Exceptional failure means that the engineer has 1% less
power to use; he has been clumsy, or the power plant is playing up.
I leave it to experienced MT referees to alter such things as difficulty level,
time increment and results of exceptional success/failure.
"Robert S. Dean" [email removed] writes:
>
> > > Agility may not exceed maneuver drive rating.
> > > (No more agility=6 1-G drive ships...)
> >
> > Perhaps they should have stated that explicitly. This was certainly the
> > case in High Guard.
>
> Ah! But they didn't, because they didn't intend for it to be the same. That's
> why we've got Joe Fugate explaining that the agility rating is your ability
> to 'alter your heading' for pity's sake, rather than the ability to alter
> your maneuver vector. Since you can rotate all you want (with three degrees
> of freedom, no less) and still end up presenting a 'ballistic' rather than
> a maneuvering target, I reject this view utterly.
I don't know where Joe Fugate says that, but the book in question should
probably be scrapped. As you say, he can spin all he like, it won't bother
my meson gunner! :-) At least, not unless he also turns on the drives and
changes his course.
> > > Note that if a ship is powering weapons the "excess" power can be negative
> > > thus subtracting from the ship's ability to maneuver.
> >
> > Not by the above definition. Excess power = power output - power used by
> > systems other than manoeuvre drive. If this is negative, you need a bigger
> > power plant or smaller systems. If it is zero, the ship's agility is zero.
>
> I use this terminology to make it explicit that I mean exactly what High
> Guard meant, as opposed to certain folks around here (-8, who feel that
> the power used _by the drive_ should be included, leaving excess power as
> anything over and above that normally used by the drive (overloading!).
Now I'm confused again. Scott seems to be the "certain folk round here",
as his definition was:
> "Excess Power": Is the amount of power left over after all systems have
> been powered (Sensors, Weapons, Drives, Environ, Comm, etc. etc.)
In any ship I designed under High Guard, "excess power" by this definition
was zero, or slightly positive - I tried to make the power plant just capable
of powering everything on the ship, usually adding a few more lasers if I had
spare power available.
MT's definition of "excess power" is a bit vague: "power left over from the
power plant after all of the craft's other components have been powered".
It doesn't define "other components", though. If that includes the manoeuvre
drive (as in Scott's version) then it's useless. If it doesn't include the
manoeuvre drive (which is how I interpreted it, being a High Guard veteran)
then the equation in the manual works just fine.
- - --
"Keyboard? How quaint!" - M. Scott
Adrian Hurt | JANET: [email removed]
UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian | ARPA: [email removed]