SV: Tenders, among other things

> Michael Sandy wrote:

> How important is fuel consumption in the game? I read that

Um... where did you read that? In FT, p. 27, it says "...FTL Tugs or
Tenders, which are ships with massively over-powered FTL drives ...
...When
building a Tug or Tender [snip about non-FTL systems] but the FTL drives
cost THREE TIMES the total MASS of the ship...".

Nothing about fuel consumption (not even about the size of the engines),
although it can easily be argued that an engine three times as expensive
should also be at least twice as powerful and require three times as much
fuel.

> How many FTL jumps can a ship make on a full tank?

Not defined in either FT or MT. It's all up to you.

> How expensive is having a boat bay?

As per More Thrust p. 16, a boat bay costs 1 Mass per Mass of the transported
boats.

> Tenders are useful, but the question is how much of your fleet

> I happen to like the Mother Ship concept.

No FTL range limitations are given in the rules, so how does a 15 hex range
drive differ from a normal one? (...I assume you're talking about FTL ranges
here, since that's the only place in the rules hexes are mentioned...)

> thrust 2 and Cloaking and you can build some pretty nasty

But once your tender buys it, your dreadnoughts are stuck where they are.
Yuck :-(
(...I've suffered that very fate in a Starfire:Akelda Dawn campaign. It's no
fun at all...)
A Thrust-2 ship, especially a freighter, is pretty vulnerable to
counter-attacks - depending on the campaign set-up, of course. Also,
your
damaged non-FTL ships can't retreat from combat very easily - and
certainly not without endangering the tenders.

> (Does a Cloaked Tender cloak the ships she is carrying? Does

Not defined anywhere. I'd say yes to both.

> Consider a comparison between non-ftl and ftl versions of a ship.

[snip]

> However, the cost of transporting these extremely effective ships

Yep. I'd go for them ASAP... preferrably with my fast escort craft, which
should have no problem hunting them down :-)

[snip]

> Note: If you are designing a scout ship, then for purposes of

Depending on the situation. In a campaign, I'd want _all_ my scouts to
be
FTL capable - I don't want to tie up my tenders with figuring out where
the enemy is.

> Ob silly ship: Coffin #583412 (You don't name ships this small,

No,.75 Mass rounds DOWN to 0 Mass since you rounded.5 damage UP to 1 damage.
The normal practice (not in the FT rules, but blessed on this list by Jon T.),
is to round one up and the other down; which to go where is up to the
designer.

> fcs

11 or 13.

> If anyone sneezes on one of these, it dies, but it just isn't

Don't you bet on that. I suggest that these ships be targetted immediately
- a SubPack is dangerous... and they can be destroyed at very long
ranges unless they close extremely fast. 1 point of damage to a loaded strike
boat, destroying it, is more worth than 1 point of damage to a
Superdreadnought IMO.

Regards,