FT-UN starships, and improved hulls

Another idea for the skunk works I proposed a while ago, and heard nothing
about, is improved hulls for the UN ships.

Reenforced hull

I heard a lot of discusion about UN ships having a strong hull for the mass of
a normal hull. Because a hull now has no set strength other than a
minimum of 10%, how about this system instead?-
mass/dp as normal, but a cost of x3.
1 dp removed from 2nd row and added to the first row, +2cost
2 dp removed from 3rd row and added to the first row, +3cost
3 dp removed from 4th row and added to the first row, +4cost
This would make the ships harder to threshold check for the first threshold,
but more vulnerable as the dammage increases. For example-
Normal ship-40DP hull, cost=80
1st row=10DP 2nd row=10DP 3rd row=10DP 4th row=10DP
Reenforced ship-40DP hull, cost=129
1st row=16DP 2nd row=9DP 3rd row=8DP 4th row=7DP The cost are just a rough
guess off the top of my head, but you could have double the DP`s moved to the
first row for x4 hull cost etc.

I`m reposting this because I don`t think I got any replies the last time, and
I want to see what people think. Also, the weapons archive has caused me to
dig up some of my older or wakier ideas.

In message <007c01c08ee1$25c30ee0$e8b5893e@inty>
> "Bif Smith" <bif@bifsmith.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:

> Another idea for the skunk works I proposed a while ago, and heard
Hmm... you could get a similar result with replacing some of the hull with
armour, for example:

40 MASS of Hull, cost =80 all rows have 10 boxes

33 MASS of hull, + 7 MASS of armour, cost =80
7 armour boxes 1st row is 9 hull boxes (16 in total to 1st check) 2nd row is 8
hull boxes 3rd row is 8 hull boxes 4th row is 8 hull boxes

Of course, the behaviour when hit by armour penetrating weapons will be
slighly different. This will be most noticable for high class K-guns.

On a related note, something I've considered (largely for conversions from an
old PBeM run by a friend) is varient strength hull materials.

For instance, a cheap hull material could cost only 1 point per MASS, but only
provides 1 hull box per 2 MASS of structure, while an expensive hull material
could cost 3 points per MASS, but provides 2 hull boxes per 1 MASS of
structure. (the actual figures would need checking, these are just a quick
guess). Likewise for armour.