SDNW5 Preliminary Discussion Thread

[Panzersharkcat]

I'm likely to do an all-battlestar arrangement, with my ships plucked from the Jedi Civil War era and pretending the turbolasers are big rail guns.

[Fenreer]

Thank you, gentlemen. I've been illuminated.

The explanation kicked the rules I've been reading into full clarity.

[Darkevilme]

Chamarrans have battlestar analogues as their heaviest warship class...and their lightest.

The Dominion is a massive ship of the line/carrier.

The Shadow is a tiny stealthed pocket carrier. Basically a way to sneakily move two squadrons of chamarran fighters anywhere they need to go that due to the general enthusiasm kitties have for weaponry just happens to be armed and dangerous in its own right.

The midweight ships are all solid warships.

The Hunter is a stealthed raiding cruiser.

The Predator is designed to back up Dominions in a fleet battle and to do some patrol work.

And the Carnivore is a long range missile ship that actually uses the human tech base of the republic of Makay. They had some serious supply issues regarding their own Chamarran tech parts towards the end of and after the initial crusade and so the Carnivore was built based on a "this is what we have" basis rather than a "this is what we want".

[Simon_Jester]

Descriptions of the roles and types of ships in my own fleet are already in the Nation Creation thread, down toward the bottom.

[Crossroads Inc.]

This is going to sound a silly question, but what are the ECM/ ECCM ships?
Which one is the "attacking jamming" one, and which is the one that defends against jamming?

Also A question on needing to spend points on ships... Is it considered "good form" to indeed spend points on every little service ship, and not just say "well those aren't really combat ships so no need to spend points?

As in, I should be working out allotments for:
troop transports, shuttles, mobile refueling ships, repair yards, resupply ships, etc?

EDIT:
Something I wanted to add to the ongoing conversation of "Points trump everything else"
I know this may seem a bit of a no braining, but don't be a "dick" with ship designs.
I would imagine that making a 500 point ship, and then saying it is the size of a golfball or something, wasn't there some problems with that in the last game?

[Simon_Jester]

This is going to sound a silly question, but what are the ECM/ ECCM ships?
Which one is the "attacking jamming" one, and which is the one that defends against jamming?

Electronic Counter-Measures are you screwing with the enemy's communications and fire control and sensors. Electronic Counter-Counter-Measures are you doing things that make it harder for the enemy to screw with your stuff. You need both.

Also A question on needing to spend points on ships... Is it considered "good form" to indeed spend points on every little service ship, and not just say "well those aren't really combat ships so no need to spend points?

As in, I should be working out allotments for:
troop transports, shuttles, mobile refueling ships, repair yards, resupply ships, etc?

If bringing them along into a fight wouldn't actually make you more likely to win the space battle (say, because the ship is unarmed and effectively a giant hunk of victim in a serious battle), then no it should not be worth points in combat. Also because I don't actually care very much how many repair ships you have; common sense dictates that you have them but unless you have something wacky like a Total Annihilation-style ship that can fly into the middle of a war zone and repair broken stuff right on the battlefield, it doesn't impact the part of combat we really need rules to resolve.

Use of refueling, troop transports, supply ships... that's all narrative. It doesn't involve my stuff directly pounding on your stuff, so we don't need the point mechanic to resolve it.

Combat would be narrative too- should be narrative whenever people can come to an honorable agreement about outcomes. The point system is there to resolve "I do this!" "No you don't!" arguments of the sort that are most likely to arise during wartime, on account of us having a board full of SDNers to do all this with.

EDIT:
Something I wanted to add to the ongoing conversation of "Points trump everything else"
I know this may seem a bit of a no braining, but don't be a "dick" with ship designs.
I would imagine that making a 500 point ship, and then saying it is the size of a golfball or something, wasn't there some problems with that in the last game?

Huh? Eh, not really. The size of a golfball could make things pretty ridiculous, but I'm not too worried about that.

Now, really, what I think people should pay attention to is this: Try not to be too specific about size and armament.

Because that can make you look silly if your idea of a "battleship" is something that has gigawatt lasers and pops off the occasional nuclear-tipped missile, while my idea of a "battleship" is something that casually punches holes in small moons. And we'll both look silly if some third party's idea of a battleship is an ISD-clone.

Really, no one needs to know that your ship fires 20-kilogram ferrous slugs at 0.013c*. No one really wants to know, either. If you can't write space combat without obsessing over the numbers that you yourself made up, you probably shouldn't be writing it at all. Concentrate on the narrative flow, not on the "fifty thousand missiles at point nine cee."

*Although if you want to quote that Mass Effect sergeant that could actually be hilarious.

[Skywalker_T-65]

I love how the SPACE VIKINGS have become a training tool now. Especially considering that they were very much a spur of the moment idea.

But on the other discussion, I have one Battlestar design. The difference being that my Valkyrie is based off of Pegasus instead of Galactica. And my super-dred is based off of the O'Neill from Stargate which is smaller than just about any other design that could be a Super-Dred in other navies (though it is 'only' 600 points). 'Size matters not' after all.

(Unless you are a technobabble king who feels the need to describe everything to the smallest detail that is )

[Steve]

Well, you're over the page limit, so I'm closing the thread.