Idle Langston thoughts (was RE: Idle Full Trek thoughts)

G'day,

While on the topic of idle thoughts has anyone ever done up Langston field
rules for FT*, ok the Motie books don't detail too many spectacular space
battles but I can always play what if;)

Thanks

I think you need a referee to do Langston fields, since it operates as
sort of a reverse cloaking field - while it's on you don't know what's
going on outside, unless you poke a sensor out, which promptly gets fried.
(you might need a limited supply of sensors to keep things manageable)

Then there is the difficulty of energy absorption/release from the
field, you might be able to simplify it with a shield that has X amounts of
points and regenerates Y per turn. But this loses the flavor of "hot spots"
and rotation of those spots away from fire. You might be able to split the
shield up in to 2 or more sections, each with X points, so that concentrated
fire might be able to make a localized burn through.

--Binhan

> -----Original Message-----

> I think you need a referee to do Langston fields, since it operates

Sensors wouldn't necessarily get fried immediately, and if you have sensors on
the side away from the enemy, you could pick up relayed data from other ships
or your own small craft. IMHO a referee would not normally be needed.

You could treat the Field as armor-- stops beam fire but only part of
ptorp damage. Make it one section per facing of the ship, and any "damage" can
be repaired based on the number of sections which don't take fire this turn
(ie those sides can radiate excess energy). If any section is completely
burned through, half the damage coming through that section goes to hull, half
goes to Field in adjacent
sections.   When the entire Field is destroyed, so is the ship.

You could determine the ship state by how many sections are damaged...if none
are penetrated, you're in Red; if five are down and the sixth is going you're
Violet.

Oh, and if two ships pass close enough that their Fields contact, then the
total Field damage they had before contact is evenly divided between the two
ships. This is really nice if you're the one who was getting hit, it's not so
good if your ship had escaped attention thus far.

Beth:
> While on the topic of idle thoughts has anyone ever done up Langston

I've always been 'enamoured' with the idea of using some modification of the
old BattleTech heat chart to do a Langston field. Threshold points on the
chart would result in internal damage, localized burn throughs,
hot-spots, and
(finally) make the roll of have the field collapse and your ship take all the
remaining damage.

Never got around to figureing a good way to play the 'energy bleed'
(heat-sinks) but I still love the idea :o)

Randy

In message <11.1a18a33a.2cb6476a@aol.com>
> ShldWulf@aol.com wrote:

> Beth:
A similar idea I had for these a while back (bear in mind that I have only
read "A Mote in God's Eye" and "The Moat around Muchinson's Eye" of this
series, and so may be missing some of the subtleties):

As a ship without a functioning Langston field is pretty much dead, so I
decided to treat the majority of the ships hull boxes as representing the
shield capacity, crew fatalities and threshold checks represent the
effect of localised burn-throughs.

For CoDominion ships, I decided the standard design would be equivalent to a
standard Full Thrust ship with 4 rows of hull, and 1 row of armour with the
same number of boxes as the first row of hull. Only the last row of hull
actually represents the ships hull.

Motie 'Expanding' Ships could have the equivalent of Phalon Shell Armour with
each row of armour of the same length. This represents the
effect that the shield can absorb more energy and that burn-throughs
are less effective. They also have the effects of screen generators.

It has the advantage of not requiring new rules, and simplicity:)

As a digression, I considered either:
Treat _all_ human ships as civilian hulls for CF determinination &
treat _all_ motie ships as military,

or: treat human ships as civilian/military by role,
give motie's _lots_ more CFs.