Starship Design
In reply to #365 Starship Design by Michael Francis Polis
>... 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]