[FT3] Keeping the generic nature of FT.

As I've been reading JMT's "new ideas" thread I've become more and more
convinced that FT is better served by a descriptive rather than a constructive
design system.

It comes down to FT's pleasing generic quality. The current design
system for FT is semi-descriptive. Choose your systems, add up the
mass, take a hull of twice that size, give it a thrust rating. This is a
descriptive process.

Describe some Star-Trek-like ships and you play a Star-Trek-like
game. Desribe some B5-like ships and play a B5-like game. Describe
some Traveller-like ships and play a Traveller-like game. The list
goes on ad nauseum.

If the design system moves more towards constructing ships along seemingly
rational engineering lines I fear that this generic nature will be lost, and
much of FT's appeal will go with it.

FT is a tactical game. Jon's working proposals, 5% of mass per thrust number,
plays to this tactical nature because thrust is
tactically very important. But take a Traveller-style setting as an
example background. Here it is the FTL capability (jump distance) that is the
largest component of the ship, with FTL fuel occupying
10-60% of the ship, despite the FTL drive having no tactical
function relevant to FT. In the current, more descriptive, system we fudge
this sort of trivial engineering detail, but if FT becomes more constructive
in design and we stop fudging this, then it is becoming much less generic. I
would not like to see this.

What I would like to see is for FT to be broken down, even more strongly than
it is, into a generic core component and a set of customised components that
constrain the core and give the core some context. I think that this will
cover almost every shade of opinion in the "new ideas" thread.

The core would consist of:
-the basic game rules, much like they are now
-a purely descriptive design system where mass is not a relevent
concept at all.
-how to assess a ship's tactical points value.

The context would consist of:
-constraints on the basic game, eg. specifying when/if you can
shoot in the rear arc.
-constraints on allowable designs, eg. specifying how much mass
each system will take up, how much mass is needed for thrust, how
much for the FTL system, whether you are allowed 4-arc weapons,
trivial things like that.
-how to assess a ship's strategic worth (FTL ships should be
considered more valuble than non-FTL ships, cargo ships will have
much more strategic value than tactical value as will ships carrying
ortillery, or ground troops) and how to translate this strategic value into
some rough victory conditions.

This is essentially how FT is currently, only more so.

So you can have a "Full Thrust Universe" context which constrains you to buy
enough damage points per ship to cover the masses outlined by Jon for thrust
and weapons. Maybe some nationalities will have the technology to be able to
make smaller ships with the
same thrust/systems and consequently buy fewer damage boxes.

You can have a Star Trek context where Federation ships are big fat knackers
with a big damage track because of all the unecessary family quarters and
science facilities, while Klingon ships are stuffed with weapons but can take
little damage and are allowed cloaks.

You can have B5, "Age of Iridum", or whatever. Or you can have no
context at all. Do you want A-batteries to mass 4? Pair them off
with four boxes. Or with three. Mark Kochte can pair his A-
batteries off with one box for that mass-1 A-battery that he
wants... pity his ships will be so brittle.

Somebody let me know... does this make any sense?