Re: FFS: K'kree Lose Starflight

> Bundle: 623
> Archive-Message-Number: 7819
> Date: Mon, 30 May 1994 01:29:18 -0500
> From: [email removed] (Steven M Bonneville)
> Subject: FFS: K'kree Lose Starflight
>
> More troubles on the FF&S/BL front:
>
> Lately I decided to try to check out the boundaries of the starship design
> rules by building a K'kree Xeekr'kir! (Imperial designation "Merchant").
> Obviously, FF&S/BL is meant for Imperial ships only.  However, the only
> main differences were in accommodations, airlocks, and a few other details
> of ship design which were easily converted from CT rules.  (The changes
> can roughly be summed up that the K'kree require twelve times the space
> Humans do for movement and living.)
>
> The trouble came when I started calculating crew sizes.  K'kree usually
> travel in herds -- besides working crew, accommodations need to be set aside
> for wives, bodyguards, advisors, and so on.  Between this and their space
> requirements, they needed 5000+ ton ships in CT.  This allowed, in CT, a
> primary crew of ten or so, and about sixty or seventy family members, some
> of whom also had shipboard duties of various types.  The ship I designed
> had jump-2, one gee drives.
>
> But crew requirements have exploded in TNE.  This 6000 ton ship required
> some 4 engineers for the drives in CT/MT.  In TNE, my preliminary and now
> abandoned calculations indicate a requirement of some 64 engineers.  This
> effectively closes out K'kree star travel on this size class of ship.  My
> quick estimates suggest that the K'kree may now require starships in the
> battleship size class under TNE rules (100,000+ tons).
>
> Now, I don't know what the justification for the increases in crew size are
> in TNE.  If it's a reaction to the *#@$ virus, they neither say so anywhere
> nor provide alternative crew calculations for non-Virus campaigns.  Any
> input or comments on this business?
>
From what I recall of TNE's spiel on starships, you now have lots of
crew because you can't trust your computers any more (or maybe that's
the inference I drew). It makes things kind of difficult for
retro-designing old rules starships -- I bought FFS over the weekend
and tried to redesign the Fiery class GE using FFS. I *think* I'm
doing the design right but I still end up with a fast escort with less
armour than the Gazelle and a measly 17 G-turns of thrust.

I think some tweaking of the engineering/maintenance numbers for crew
sizes are in order. What I plan to do is compare the engineering crew
requirements in CT, TCS and MT and see how they look compared to
TNE/FFS. If anyone's interested, I'll report back to the list.

> Furthermore, this sort of thing sharply limits the size of the ships that
> human adventuring crews can run with the party.  And warships of significant
> size will have truly stupendous crew requirements.
>
> Somebody asked recently why so many old-time "classic" Traveller players
> are complaining about the rules changes, because they'd never seen AD&D
> players react like this when AD&D Second Edition came out.  Well, my friend,
> that's because TSR didn't do something that at times I could describe with a
> pungent four-letter Anglo-Saxon word to the rules.  Right now is one of those
> times, but I'm restraining myself.  AD&D 2nd Ed. *is* AD&D.  TNE isn't quite
> old Traveller.  So some of us who played for a long time with the old rules
> get upset sometimes when things we think had better work don't, again.  It
> doesn't happen so much over there, I hear.
>
You said it. I've been playing Traveller since 1983 or so and I don't
like the idea of using TNE rules for the Imperium. That said, I think
the new rules are failry good (except for the personal damage rules,
but I'm working on that :-). As a result, I'm working on a
non-Imperial background at the moment which has been stalled somewhat
due to getting FFS and discovering all those variant technologies ...

>   Frustrated Starship Architect,
>
>   Steve Bonneville
>   [email removed]
>