Steve wrote:I don't care how an alien civ might define or classify its ships, because whether they do so by potential power output, crew size, or desired role, all three things will be determined by the hull size. If you need a specific power output for a class, you need ship volume to provide the room for the damned power plants; if it's crew, you need volume for the crew's living quarters and crew support capability. If a role, any specialized equipment needs the room!
And since this is a sci-fi setting that has a certain tech level expectation, you cannot magic up just any size ship to perform a specific function or crew capacity or power output; it will be a specific size.
Therefore the Hull Size system works just as easily for the clever, imaginative writer conceiving of such an "alternate" designation system and, in the process, still gives us the ship's relative value compared to everything else.
Again, you are operating from a humanocentric viewpoint. While physical law will always determine the maximum theoretical possibilities the engineering of a human ship will be done to human tolerances and human ethical standards. Xeno-races have no necessity to share these. A species that is highly resilient compared to humans or one that has extremely low value for its crewmen (say insectoids or robots) can run reactors very "hot", strip out lots of life support and strip out shielding for fission and fusion based weaponry. This could result in power outputs and by relation weaponry output and shield strengths many times what a human vessel of the same size can do. You can of course represent this by simply buying it as a bigger vessel but it looks a bit disingenuous.
But we can keep going and it gets worse. A species that does not need sleep to continue functioning at top shape (robots, cyborgs, insectoids) would have no necessity for crew quarters at all. Even worse what if they are vacuum resistant and internally powered (batteries, chemosynthesis, etc.)? Now they don't need any life support systems or food preparation. What if they have g-tolerances above what the ships engines can produce? Now they don't need artificial gravity or inertial compensation. That opens up a hell of a lot of room to make a ship smaller. On the other hand, what about species from planets with very short days or odd solar patterns and thus weird sleep schedules? They may need to field far larger crews than human ships and thus need far more crew quarters and thus more space. Should they buy a larger hull and have us magic their cruiser equivalent up in power or buy the cruiser and have us Tardis away the extra space?
And it will continue. What about damage control? This is a very important aspect of human ship building, but why do we assume general equivalency among the myriad aliens that could exist. What about our resilient, tech-using bugmen. They don't need air, don't need inertial compensation, need only have pantry areas to store the chemical reagents for their metabolic processes and are ultimately just tools for the hive. Why wouldn't they build a ship that is just a cheap, unshielded "hot" reactor, a large, unshielded fusion cannon, a point-defense system so they can fire as many times as possible and a tissue thin command cabin? They save a bunch of weight and industrial capacity by putting no crew protection on and what does the hive care if the soldiers come home with 6 months to live because of radiation poisoning? They are just going to wash the worst of it off, grind them up and mix them into a few million gallons of slurry and feed it to the next crew. Do we buy the ship based off of its size, how much it costs them to produce or its relative firepower? What about a race of techno-scavengers? They will expectantly have ships that run at far lower efficiency for their hull size but may be more willing to jury rig or overcharge equipment. Should they buy it at its highest theoretical ability and play it down, buy it at its general ability and occasionally get to pull something out of their ass, or split the difference?
And the worst, what about ships run entirely by AIs. They don't need life-support, inertial dampening, food supplies, crew quarters, safety equipment or even any internal compartmentalizing beyond maintenance spaces. The ship can be a block of weapon studded armour with redundant systems out the wazoo. Such a ship will obviously be incredibly powerful for its size compared to one crewed by fleshy beings... and can be built by any faction with the computer technology.
Steve wrote:
And the idea of assigning specific quantities and qualities of troops or spaceships with point values to determine relative effectiveness contradicts this how?
We'll use bugmen again because space bugs are so common as to be a cliche. Specialization is for insects and man do these guys specialize. They have jungle bugmarines. In a jungle or wooded area these guys are Rambo, Arnold, and the predator rolled into one but in taiga or tundra they are redshirt popsicles. We have urban warfare bugmarines, underwater bugmarines, boarding action bugmarines, etc. Are these elite units because they are elite in their element? Does buying the elite unit get us a couple of every type? Or do we have to buy a few of each? Do we have to track them as they are transported around? And what if all of the bugs infantry works this way? Do we buy all their infantry as elite (seems to make them not as elite if everyone is) or do we buy them as normal and then have the possibility to ass pull the situational correct unit if we are feeling like pouting?
Or what about troops who have controlled but variable competency? What if Bob wants to have techno-berserkers who dose up on a chemical cocktail of stimulants and mental and physical enhancers when entering heavy combat? Of course when the dose runs out they withdraw hardcore and become near useless. Do we buy these as elite and just assume that the dose lasts in any battle they are going to win or buy them as normals and try to set up upsets with RP?
And what about droids/drones? They are exactly as competent as they are programmed to be and exactly as capable as they are constructed to be. They are also fearless, pitiless, and untiring. Even total retards like the SW "roger roger" droids have abilities and advantages that put them outside the human paradigm of troop classification.
Here you again show humanocentricism, assuming that armies will be composed of warriors who can be separated into tiers based upon training and their kit. But they can just be some caste programmed by electronics or genetics to kill their enemy and protect their home. They could be good at combat because of natural advantages like incredible regenerative abilities (flatworm style not wolverine) or perhaps they upon death unleash a gas that is generally toxic to other species. They may use heavily genetically or cybernetically engineered combatants who make up for lack of training and poor equipment with ferocity and toughness. There are a wide variety of ways that a non-human species could be good at combat that isn't related to their actual training or equipment.
Steve wrote:How do you have a single hull but multiple ships? What the fuck are you talking about? Some kind of modular vessel? Star Trek's Prometheus perhaps?
If so, you state that it's a X value hull that can separate into Y number of parts for specific operations. Big god damned deal.
I was pointing out that species with much greater instinct to cooperate (such as hive minds or empaths) or those possessing far greater than human coordination may utilize groups of ships very differently from how human and generally human-like species would. Singular ships may have functions that are unthinkable to a human engineer or tactician but make perfect sense to the alien species. Our bugs may not have any battleship analogous singular ships in their entire navy. But they may have a combination of four ships that always operate in concert and in concert are of battleship power, capability and survivability. This is perfectly plausible psychologically and (unless we specifically write our physics to disallow this) "realistically" plausible. Should we represent this with a singular battleship hull? Seems ok, but is a bit goofy and it gets goofier if we assume like other specialized insects that individual components of this bug-battleship are also components of other ship analogues. We could buy them as individual ships by dividing the battleship cost between them, but this seems strange if the ships always operate in some synergistic grouping.
In general, I feel that attempting to assign any type of qualitative properties or restrictions to points values is a bad idea. There should be no need to differentiate hull sizes or carriers from non-carriers and no need to make attack and defense their own statistics. Doing so imposes a clear framework of naval hierarchy and usage that is unnecessary and implausible when dealing with the vast variety that alien civilizations could present. Same with military. Just make a $ = a $ and let fluff do the rest. Other than this I am actually quite satisfied with your rules Steve. I just think from past experience that it is far better to get all the bad air about them out before the game starts. Sometimes we see some little loophole we need to fill or an area that can be abused we need to fix. Other times we just get our griping out so we can go into the game with a clear head.
My rules ideas are quashed, I am content with this and I won't dissent and look forward to a fun game with you guys.
But one final thing Steve, you may want to get used to the whole (x,y,z) gobbledegook. I hear it is pretty good at telling where things are in three dimensions.
A teenage girl is just a teenage boy who can get laid.
-GTO
We're not just doing this for money; we're doing this for a shitload of money!
(well I kinda actually do) for the reasons I've listed previously and for sharing an opinion with Seige and Hellion (go figure on that one). The reason STGODs worked in the way back when is that there basically was no rule except for the "don't be a dick" rule and THAT was enforced more commonly as follows:
