An SDNW Proposal

[Darkevilme]

What they lose in armour strength, maximum weapon strength, stability, visibility profile and durability they gain back in coolness.

[Setzer]

Well, why don't we just post a link to the HAB vs Mecha threads, and if players still want mechs, well, they can't say we didn't warn them.

[Starglider]

I find it amusing that the only way to start a new sci-fi STGOD is to brand it as an SDNWORLD product.

I'd like to play but there is no way I am going to have the time for it.

[Steve]

I find it amusing that the only way to start a new sci-fi STGOD is to brand it as an SDNWORLD product.

I'd like to play but there is no way I am going to have the time for it.

Mostly because I intended it to be the new incarnation of SDN World. "SDN World in SPAAAAAAAAAAACE" was my thought.

[Dave]

Alright, since we have a basic outline in place, I thought I'd try rolling a straightforward IntraGalactic Civilization:

Because I'm not especially imaginative (creating new things "whole cloth" has never been my specialty), I'll be drawing from other works for fiction for inspiration.

Anyway, the biological race I will be using is The Race[1] from Harry Turtledove's Worldwar and Colonization series (4-foot-high bipedal carnivorous mammals with reptilian skin), with some changes to their societal, governmental and religious structure. Yes, ginger is still a narcotic.

The ship design will be similar to those in the Honorverse created by David Weber[2], but with modifications made to meet the appropriate tech levels for this universe. (fusion torch out the back end for propulsion, no gravitic impellers; not fore-and-aft symmetrical; full, ship hugging shielding, not sidewalls; etc.)

The overall empire approximates a collection of city-states, each roughly self-sufficient and self governing but banded together in a loose confederation for defense against the empires that seem to be springing up around them. As such, the sectors are not especially wealthy, so there are no Home level sectors, and only one of the sectors even grazes Core status.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you my initial rendition of the Loose Confederation of the Turtle:

Government: Confederation consists of a single house parliament; most city-states are constitutional monarchies.

Economy: Inter-sector economy is only moderate, as each sector is generally self-sufficient. Tourism is a notable industry. Raw Materials is a major export, and there are some worlds/sectors that are easing immigration restrictions, trying to encourage scientific, economic and technological progress.

Species: 80% The Race, 7% human, 13% other

Religions: No official, confederation sponsored religions, though some of the city-states have their own official religion.

Languages: The Race's tongue, Standard English.

Currency: Mark (or MK for the lazy). Standard SI prefixes are used for fractions or multiples of this.

Technology: Lags somewhat behind the galactic average, as with small city states scientific work ends up being compartmentalized. Also, given the Race's penchant for safety, that has tempered the rate of scientific progress, though the humans in the populations have been pushing the Race along so that they're not hopelessly slow. The tardiness in technology is made up for somewhat in the use of extra-redundant systems, so the ships can take rather more punishment before failing.

Foreign policy: Neutral, with rather intolerant views of criminal activity (out of the Race's uptightness), though many humans are engaged in less-than-legitimate activities.

Sectors: Assume a dice roll of 21 (I'm a pessimistic person)
1 Core sector
4 Midrange sector
5 Colony sectors

The Core sector inherits the Warp Gate and Hyperspace Junction that would have been granted to the Home sector had I had one.

Population: ~ 220 billion inhabitants
Total GDP: 39 kilo-marks.

Military:
Navy:
Note that due to the state of the politics of the Loose Confederation of the Turtle, the government cannot come up with the political drive needed to fund the creation of anything bigger than a Heavy ship. Nor are these numbers going to make sense, ship-ratio-wise, because I haven't taken that into account (yet).

40 Heavy warships
200 Medium warships
300 Light warships
400 UltraLight warships
100 Yachts
1,000 Gunboats
2,000 Fighters
500 Hyperlight Shuttles
1,000 Shuttles

Dirt-Eaters (I mean Army):
1,000,000 Elites with elite equipment
7,500,000 Regulars with regular equipment
12,500,000 Conscripts with base-line equipment


Brief History: After the humans developed warp drive and put The Race's ego in its place simply by displaying their technological prowess, many factions arose in the Race, each with their own ideas on what should be done. The political infighting got ugly (relative to the Race's usual politics) and came to a head in 2038 when a tactical nuke was used on the Race's Imperial Palace, killing all inside, completely eliminating the entire hereditary royal population, and effectively beheading the government. Outright civil war ensued, raging for a decade across all the planets the Race inhabited. In the end, most planets formed new governments inheriting characteristics from both Race and Human governmental procedure.

Comments welcome! And I'll probably change the numbers up before we get started.

[1]For more detail, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Race_(Worldwar)
[2]For an example baseline image, see http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/File:C ... ace_01.png

[Steve]

Hrm. An interesting writeup, and the willing refusal to forgo a Home Sector is interesting. Though perhaps... misguided.

[Teleros]

Though the capacities might simply be expressed in cash figures to reflect the logical yard capacity of an interstellar state for its actual productivity and needs.

Not sure what you mean here, given I gave shipyard capacities in cash figures per unit time, like your list of ship designs .

What else... ground forces rules & transport ship purchasing rules look fine to me. I assume that $1 worth of ground forces is roughly equal to any other $1 of ground forces (multiplied by gear quality? Eg 50,000 elites + elite gear = 3 x 500,000 Screaming Horde with old gear). If so, it should be fairly easy to add in other types of ground forces (like mechas and such). Also, if this game is going to focus mostly on space combat then overly complicated ground forces rules may be a hindrance. "$100 of invaders & their gear vs $200 of defenders & gear = uphill fight for the attackers, all other things being equal" sounds okay to me. The "all other things being equal" meaning things like orbital bombardment support or a concentrated invasion on one part of a planet, etc... tactics & strategy basically.

How we handling interception of fleets?
Is it possible to force a ship out of hyperspace?
Or are you limited to engaging ships only when they choose to drop to sublight?

Latter and there's no such thing as borders.

So i suggest we come up with a workable solution for interception.

From the setting idea I came up with:
"Hyperwall generators create shockwaves in nearby hyperspace, preventing ships in the affected area from entering hyperspace, and forcing those already in hyperspace to exit. Hyperwall generators powerful enough to force a sizeable enemy fleet out of hyperspace are necessarily bulky, and typically only found on battleships and larger vessels, although they can also be based on planets."

If you don't want to use them as a specific ship system, perhaps make them work as a side-effect of large hyperdrives. Return to normal space, swap to the hyperwall setting, and ta-da. In the mean time, people could build big versions to stick around their star systems / sectors to act as borders... not that this would stop sneaky sublight attacks by well-supplied ships .

Hrm. An interesting writeup, and the willing refusal to forgo a Home Sector is interesting. Though perhaps... misguided.

Extra NCPs for foregoing a Home Sector?

Dave - if the LCotT needs friendly businessmen, the Altacar Empire will be happy to oblige . Which reminds me, I think I'm going to work on putting a few ideas for an international body or two down onto paper pixels. I'm thinking of a free trade organisation to start with, although ATM it looks like the only benefits to trading are for espionage purposes .

[Dave]

Hrm. An interesting writeup, and the willing refusal to forgo a Home Sector is interesting. Though perhaps... misguided.

I was trying to make the planets fit the story, not the story fit the planets. That, and my playstyle: I generally don't have the balls or the interest to go off on the jingoistic military path, and so I developed an empire to suit that.

Extra NCPs for foregoing a Home Sector?

Would be nice, but I'm not going to beg for it.

Dave - if the LCotT needs friendly businessmen, the Altacar Empire will be happy to oblige . Which reminds me, I think I'm going to work on putting a few ideas for an international body or two down onto paper pixels. I'm thinking of a free trade organisation to start with, although ATM it looks like the only benefits to trading are for espionage purposes .

Oh, man, that takes me back to the original threads for SDN World 1, with the League of Unaligned Nations and the International Sea Commerce Agency. I still have the budgeting spreadsheets sitting in my Google Docs folder...

Where was I going with this? Oh, yes... *clears throat*

The Majority of the Members of the Foreign Policy Committee of the 134th Session of the Parliament of the Loose Confederation of the Turtle are interested in the Altacar Empire's proposal, but would like to wait until after galactic spatial positioning and ruleset finalization is complete.

[Steve]

LOL

I'm doing conceptual playtesting now. I'm pondering if army troops are too expensive and if troop transport capacity is too retrained.

I'm also generally opposed to hyperspace interdiction ATM, but I'll think more on it since it might ruin the concept of using the Shoal regions as piracy havens.

[CmdrWilkens]

I'm so absolutely tempted to see if I could actually import my faction from the old ASVS STGOD Mk 2. The big issue is the whole worship of Sauron and the cult of Wilkens that goes along with it may be a tad more difficult to manage.

Adapt it into some esoteric religion that popped up?

Yeah maybe, the bigger problem is that a lot of the ship design and build specifications were based on the particulars of that setup (it was a 22 planet, 17 system power) where my longevity in the ASVS STGOD allowed me to basically get away with a slightly larger power because it was presumed I wouldn't abuse it (and I didn't, the first and only war we fought I managed to lose one of my key outworld systems). If I did import them I'd probably need to re-work things.


Anyway I went back through some of the old ASVS posts and found probably the most concise posting of the "ruleset" we used:

Keep initial ship counts low. Say 400 or so. You can expand your war
machine to be competitive with the other older powers depending on how
active you are and how long you stick around. Expansion is pretty much at
your discresion but if I see a new order of magnitude on your fleet count
with each post then there'd better be some good justification

Tech level.

When the STGOD2 started it was meant to be around ST:Enterprise level
tech but that's not entirely feasible given that we had to artificially
adjust the speed to make galactic travel possible and I don't think
anyone's really stuck to Enterprise tech either,

I mean that was it, and we had a pretty good game, some folks were more powerful but the good ol fashion "Don't be a douche" rule works pretty well. I know we probably need a few more rules for this game but I think actually quantifying out start forces, build rates, build slots, etc...for as much as its right up my alley I think its more likely to make the game inaccessible. The reason I proposed the minimalist system earlier in this thread is that it makes most of the game fluff aside from how you actually write your nation in motion and I think the closer we are to "create an Empire, don't be a dick" the better the game can be.

[Steve]

I dunno, I'm not doing much more than what was done for SDNW2's starting rules (basically replacing the pre-made power tiers with a nation-generation system) and the naval unit purchase system is pretty flexible since you can spend whatever you want for a specific ship class by unit, the cost just says what it is in terms of size.

[CmdrWilkens]

I dunno, I'm not doing much more than what was done for SDNW2's starting rules (basically replacing the pre-made power tiers with a nation-generation system) and the naval unit purchase system is pretty flexible since you can spend whatever you want for a specific ship class by unit, the cost just says what it is in terms of size.

I'm just advocating for my super-minimalist system because I think it will let those who want to flesh out their forces more (e.g. ME) to do so without hindering those who just want to say "I have 200 Battleships." Obviously the more minimalist the system the more likely it is that someone would run afoul of the "don't be a douche" rule which means more mod work but I don't care if you have no time to sleep

[loomer]

The Mari are one of the alien races in the Outlands. They lost their world a couple of millenia ago and took to the skies in a large 'mothership' fleet of sorts. Most of them settled worlds far, far away or were destroyed, and only one still roams the Outlands. It's only lightly armed and is genuinely more of a home and factory than a warship - same with its attendant vessels. Homes, factories, farms.

Hrm.

*ponders*

How "mobile" is this Worldship? Is it more of a massive space habitat?

It's pretty mobile as far as gigantic space stations go, but nothing next to a normal ship. It takes it a couple of months to go between systems and normally a year or more to cross a system (i.e to reach Earth from Pluto, whatever).

[Steve]

The Mari are one of the alien races in the Outlands. They lost their world a couple of millenia ago and took to the skies in a large 'mothership' fleet of sorts. Most of them settled worlds far, far away or were destroyed, and only one still roams the Outlands. It's only lightly armed and is genuinely more of a home and factory than a warship - same with its attendant vessels. Homes, factories, farms.

Hrm.

*ponders*

How "mobile" is this Worldship? Is it more of a massive space habitat?

It's pretty mobile as far as gigantic space stations go, but nothing next to a normal ship. It takes it a couple of months to go between systems and normally a year or more to cross a system (i.e to reach Earth from Pluto, whatever).

So it's hyper-capable?

[loomer]

Yeah, but to a lower degree than just about any other vessel out there. Like 4C max.

EDIT
vv
That works.

[Steve]

Yeah, but to a lower degree than just about any other vessel out there. Like 4C max.

Why not just say they have an old Heim drive attached then, which can only manage about 4-10c?

[Master_Baerne]

I like playing with rules as much as the next denizen, so here's my preliminary attempt. I'll be playing your basic Space Aristocracy, complete with an ominously simple name and a fascination with naval affairs. Residents are primarily human, but immigration has leavened the nation with everything from bug people to dinousaurs and space turtles.

The Ascendancy
The Ascendancy came about three hundred years ago after a bloody civil war led to the dissolution of its predecessor, a depressingly corrupt republic of sorts called the Cluj Hegemony. Founded by a naval officer of unusual ambition, the Ascendancy has maintained a strong naval tradition ever since its founding. The population is generally happy, though many immigrants from more democratic regions of space find the web of hereditary privelieges afforded the nation's aristocrats a bitter pill. The Ascendancy's native humans make up most of the aforementioned aristocracy, while the insectoid Formics operate under their own little-understood system.

Government:
Constitutional Monarchy; the Lady (or Lord) Ascendant controls military and foreign policy, with domestic issues being the province of the Parliament. The Parliament is composed of the House of Lords and the House of Commons; the Commons' decisions can be vetoed by the Lords, but the Commons has control over most government funding. Sector and sub-sector governments operate on much the same principle, with an aristocrat being advised and checked by a council of elected commoners.

Religion:
There is no state religion, but many ethnic Ascendants adhere to the worship of an abstract concept of safety and security called the Darkness, which evolved on the capital world of Firmament.

Racial Makeup:
70% Humans, 25% Formics, 5% Other

Languages:
Ascendancy English; a form of English that differs from the Galactic Standard only in minor ways, such as substituting an 'f' for the 'ph' in the word phonetic. Formics share a limited hive-mind, and converse using a combination of this and a language of clicks. Other inhabitants may speak other languages, but English and the Formic click-tongue are the only official ones.

Currency:
Ascendant Mark, nicknamed the rose noble due to the Firmament rose on one side of the ten-mark coin and the portrait of a Lord or Lady Ascendant on the other.

Economy:
The Ascendancy mainly imports raw materials to feed its factories. These could be extracted locally, but it is often cheaper to buy abroad rather than locate and mine resource-bearing areas on planets or asteroids.

Technology:
As befits a nation built by a naval officer, Ascendant technology often has a very low safety margin for a modern state. This is not to say that Ascendant goods are inherently dangerous, but certain levels of common sense are expected of the consumer - for example, self-heating beverage cups do not carry a warning that their contents will likely be hot after being heated.

Sectors:
24 NCPs - The dice were feeling happy with me.
1 Home Sector (Firmament Sector) Has a Hyperspace Junction and a Warp Gate
2 Core Sector (Sleighbell Sector, Isabella Sector) 11 NCP; Sleighbell has a Hyperspace Junction
3 Midrange Sector (Zephyr Sector, New Oslo Sector, Lorica Sector) 10 NCP; Lorica has a Warp Gate
3 Colony Sector (Vizigot Sector, Domain Sector, Forge Sector) 3 NCP

280 Billion Citizens
56,000 Marks GDP


Military:
Ascendant Navy - The most prestigious service (and close to the most prestigious career, period, thanks to the nation's naval tradition), the AN performs such varied duties as spacelane patrol, pirate suppression, deep-space rescue, and gunboat diplomacy. Though in this case, 'superdreadnought diplomacy' may be more accurate, as the AN is extremely well funded.

8 Ultraheavy Hulls 4,000 Marks
12 Superheavy Hulls - 3,000 Marks
72 Heavy Hulls - 9,000 Marks
216 Medium Hulls 15,120 Marks
Capital Hulls = 31,120 Marks

300 Light Hulls - 12,000 Marks
400 Ultralight Hulls - 6,000 Marks
Subcapital Hulls = 18,000 Marks

AN Total = 49,120 Marks


Ascendant Army - Much less prestigious and only a fraction as well supplied as the Navy, the Ascendant Army is still a professional force with a reasonable success rate in its operations.

12,000,000 Elite Troops with Elite Kit - 720 Marks
44,000,000 Regular Troops with Elite Kit - 440 Marks
Troop Strength = 56,000,000; 1,160 Marks

80 Medium Hull Transports - 5,600 Marks
Lift Capacity = 7,000,000 Troops
AA Total = 6,760 Marks

Total Expenditure = 49,120 + 6,760; 55,880 Marks

[Darkevilme]

Would it be a good idea to invest in Hypermissiles?
That is missiles with hyper drives.

[Steve]

Would it be a good idea to invest in Hypermissiles?
That is missiles with hyper drives.

On one hand, I don't want to dictate terms. OTOH, I'm not sold on hypermissiles.

Edit: Wait, NM. No hypermissiles.

[Ryan Thunder]

Would it be a good idea to invest in Hypermissiles?
That is missiles with hyper drives.

ATTN: STEVE: I am vindicated.

[Steve]

Would it be a good idea to invest in Hypermissiles?
That is missiles with hyper drives.

ATTN: STEVE: I am vindicated.

In that someone else asked and had to be told no?

[Steve]

I dunno, I'm not doing much more than what was done for SDNW2's starting rules (basically replacing the pre-made power tiers with a nation-generation system) and the naval unit purchase system is pretty flexible since you can spend whatever you want for a specific ship class by unit, the cost just says what it is in terms of size.

I'm just advocating for my super-minimalist system because I think it will let those who want to flesh out their forces more (e.g. ME) to do so without hindering those who just want to say "I have 200 Battleships." Obviously the more minimalist the system the more likely it is that someone would run afoul of the "don't be a douche" rule which means more mod work but I don't care if you have no time to sleep

That's so nice of you, Wilkens.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm somewhat interested, but I need some more time to think it over. And come up with a race concept.

[RogueIce]

What about mecha? If players want them, how do we balance it gameplay wise?

Here's an easy solution: treat them like any other armored unit. Unless you want personal mechs, in which case I'd say make 'em elite or whatever.

Or, the easiest way: mechs, people with guns, futuristic M1A1 Abrams, whatever...it's all just fluff and it doesn't really matter.

I mean, if we're rolling with FTL and pew pew lasers, who gives a fuck if people want to rip off Star Wars and have AT-ATs? Just make 'em roughly equal to similar armored units and be done with it.

[Steve]

Well, I was trying to give us all a ruleset that would allow lots of flexibility but still have some standards in it. And you all would want this, I think, because the alternative is making me the wrathful, merciless God of SDNW4 who will smite you at the slightest provocation.