Supporting continuing development for Empyrean Challenge / Cluster Wars
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I have a thought to eliminate MRG for ships. This would be because it doesn’t really make sense to be able to join a captured alien SHP to yours and really expected to be able to fly. I would also change the construction of ships to have templates for ship construction and the ship would have to be completed before he could launch. This way when you saw a SHP you can give it a name for the class and when you would see similar ships you would know that they were of similar construction. Ships would no longer be infinitely modifiable and generic. You could of course re-purpose the ship by junking it and then using the components to build a different class of SHP. It would add to strategy because at some point you would have to decide whether to keep making older TL spare parts for existing SHP classes or just abandon them in favor of a new type of SHP class. If we choose to make cargo holds an integral part of the ship design then maybe we can also make the benefit with regard to transport capacity additionally increased.
To summarize, you would create a ship class template for all the assembled items including maybe the size of the cargo hold. Then you would use your standard ADN orders to add the assembled components until the ship was completed which point you could fly. If I ship took damage you would see it on your scans as a certain percentage of the original assembled items. For each ship class each player can independently give it its own name to be able to recognize that the ship design when I saw it.
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I like this idea. Make it so ship hulls can't be modified once they're built. Only the contents can be changed. This idea of merging ships (in one turn!) is a big abstraction.
I would combine it with my idea of hull-types, so some hulls could be more maneuverable (improved SPD performance), some would be more combat-focused (sleek, thin, harder to hit) but more expensive, and some would be slow and bulky but cheap (dispersed structures).
I also like the idea of ship-classes. Or hull-classes. Once you've built a given hull once or twice, you get a discount on building that exact hull again. Or hull-and-cargo-hold designs. Or complete ship designs, where the only thing that varies from one copy to the next is what you put in the cargo hold.
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OK. Think about what the different SHP hull types might be called and what advantages/disadvantages each one might have. The basic type would simply be the way to ship hulls are currently working. That SHP hull type might have a bunch of exclusive radio buttons for selecting Base, sleek, bulky, etc. and maybe a checkbox for indicating whether the ship was capable of atmospheric landing. If a SHP and could not land it would be unable to dock with the OPCs or ESCs. There might be some other advantage to this giving up this ability.
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Here's a link to a PDF for Traveller book 5 - "High Guard". This book was an early expansion off the base game, focusing on careers for characters in the navy, ship construction, and combat. One of the characteristics of ship design is hull configuration.
http://www.devansoft.co.uk/devansoft-fi … hGuard.pdf
I would simplify their list somewhat and propose something like this:
- streamlined (can dock with OPCs, harder to hit/damage in combat, harder to detect, more STUN for less volume)
- compact (spherical or box-like, standard ship configuration)
- dispersed (dispersed-structure, SPD less effective, easier to hit, harder to damage, less STUN, can be reconfig'd)
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Update to 3 proposed ship hulls:
"Streamlined":
- can dock with OPCs and ESCs on all worlds
- harder to hit/damage in combat
- harder to detect
- STUN cost is much higher, per unit of volume
- can't be merged
- SPD more effective, per unit of thrust
- can have ARM (armor)
"Compact"
- standard rules for STUN, SPD, combat, etc
- can dock only with ESCs -- not with OPCs (they can withstand gravity, but not atmosphere)
- can't be merged
- can have ARM
"Dispersed Structure"
- STUN cost is much lower, per unit of volume
- can't dock with any OPC or ESC -- only with OBCs or other ships
- easier to detect, spy on, have sensors attached, etc
- SPD less effective, per unit of thrust
- easier to hit (bigger target)
- harder to damage (a single beam or missile will hit less)
- can't be armored
- can be merged with other ships that have dispersed structure hulls
thoughts?
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