Although the addition or subtraction of mass for a system or the leaving of a
few percent of waste space is one way to represent inefficient design, it
comes up lacking in one or two particulars.
One way it falls short is that their are qualitative differences between
technology levels. It isn't just that a modern missile system is lighter for
the same effective punch, it also probably has more range. And the sensor
suite backing it up, in addition to being smaller, is far more sensitive.
What does this mean? Lower tech in FT (and to one extent or another in DS2 and
SG2) ought to be reflected in a way that represents varying capacities, not
just heavier (for oldtech) or more costly (for newtech) systems.
Things such as
- reduced or increased range
- reduced or increased efficacy (damage for weapons...)
- reduced capability (slower launch rates for fighters, lower
thrust for engines).
Some of these things give themselves to being modelled mass-wise. Some
don't. Sensors strike me as one example of a system whose limits change
dramatically as tech changes. A ship with sensors say 10 years out of date
might have half the effective range of a modern one.
I'm not saying I have the answer (cuz I don't just now), but the idea that
just omitting a few percentage points of mass is sufficient strikes me as
incomplete. It's a reasonable starting point and it'll do until we can think
up a better method, but it isn't the full picture.
> What does this mean? Lower tech in FT (and to one extent or another in
I agree. IMC we have "disruptors" for example which are identical to normal
beams except that screens are twice as effective vs. them. These represent the
"original" technology and are in fact the only legal beam tech that
non-military ships can mount... I also use old vs. new versions of the
Pulse-Torps & Needle Beams in the same manner in addition to other
home-brew
items.
> > What does this mean? Lower tech in FT (and to one extent or another
Ought also to have "military" and "civilian" eg FTL drives for merchants.
> On Wed, 20 September 2000, "Barclay, Tom" wrote:
> One way it falls short is that their are qualitative differences
Good comments, Tom.
If you look at artillery pieces today, you'll find that the guns themselves
aren't radically different in size compared to WW2, yet the capabilities in
the range finding equipment and the actual projectiles are far more advanced.
Or take a look at modern tanks. They are actually more massive than equivalent
WW2 vehicles, but the capabilities are far different.
One suggestion I was given for my homegrown universe was rather simple and
easy to adapt: change range bands. Change beams in a lower tech level from 12"
range bands to, say, 9". Or 6".
In a way, of course, tech levels are somewhat "built in". Another easy thing
to do is to simply limit the types of weapons a ship can carry. Don't allow
lower tech ships to have class 3 beams, for instance.
Once you start changing mass and ranges for weapons, be prepared to playtest
everything. You'd be surprised what ends up becoming "unbalanced".
> On Wed, 20 September 2000, "Barclay, Tom" wrote:
> Good comments, Tom.
> If you look at artillery pieces today, you'll find that the guns
> One suggestion I was given for my homegrown universe was rather simple
Actually, I would suggest that there might be a couple of different ways to go
about this. If it's the beam itself that is lower tech, then sure, change the
range band. But if the targetting equipment is what's lower tech, then keep
the maximum range the same but decrease the sub ranges that it takes before
you have to roll higher to do damage with it.
Possible example: a low-tech society has managed to get beam emitters
that are equivalent to a modern B3, but their targetting for the distances
that the weapon can fire is inferior. To play this out, the first two range
bands are, say, 9" and 18", but the third range band goes all the way from 18"
to 36". For pulse torpedoes, it might well be that you use the same hit tables
as the old ones, but the furthest band simply goes from 18" to 30" rather than
18" to 24".
A society with bad beam emitters might simply have the range bands reduced
altogether, as you say. One with bad emitters and worse targetting might
have non-linear range bands as well as shorter bands to boot.
A society with inferior metallurgy might need two or three hull mass to get
one integrity point.
A society with yesteryear's point defense might only be able to use PDS that
fires against fighters as though it were a B1, or worse. Similarly, their
fighters might be unwieldy monstrosities that take a lot more maintenance
(i.e. the bays can only carry half as many as a "modern" one can) whilst their
weapon miniaturization is weak enough that they can only fire at ships and
other fighters with a handicap (e.g. treat everything as having one more
screen than it actually does).
At the same time, the cost it takes to build them in raw materials and
resources would be at least as much as it would take for a "modern" society to
build something better. After all, just because it sucks doesn't mean it's
just as hard for a bass-ackwards civilization to build it as it is for a
modern one to build a ship of similar or even _less_ mass that could
kick it from here to February and back again.
Throw all of these things together, and simulating the kind of technology
difference that you might see putting a WW2 battleship against a modern
aircraft carrier wouldn't be _too_ hard to pull off.
One other thing is to look at is that different cultures may solve problems
differently. One race may invest more time and energy to solving a problem one
way, while a different group goes back to the drawing board and comes up with
a unique solution.
[quoted original message omitted]
> On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, you wrote:
One thing I'm experimenting with at the moment is changing the
number needed for roll-ups. A high tech beam weapon for example,
would rollup on a 5 or 6, rather than just a 6.
I posted a KISS method of varying tech levels a while back. It condenses
everything into a simple overall ship tech level, so it doesn't account for a
vintage 2100 destroyer mounting KV advanced drives, but it simplifies things
to the general granularity of FT:
Vary the size of an MU. If you're using inches as "standard", the "advanced"
tech can have 3 cm MU's (or better), and "inferior" tech can have 2 cm MU's
(or worse). Parking up a straight edge or ribbon would be pretty easy, and the
method is simple enough that games set in specific eras (like a 2120 border
war where all ships have "inferior" tech, could simply use the standard MU.
Relative costs of ships should generally scale to the square of the percentage
difference in MU sizes. i.e. 3cm vs 1 inch MU ships cost ~1.4x as much; 2cm vs
1 inch should cost ~0.6 times as much.
That said, I do like some of the specific low tech systems people have posted
already. The above method is more general purpose.
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> Actually, I would suggest that there might be a couple of different
Depends on how you visualise the way the weapon inflict damage.
What FT calls the "maximum range" of the FT weapons isn't the *real*
"maximum range" - K-gun slugs don't magically evaporate after moving
30mu, for example, and beams disperse with range (IIRC in a fairly
linear fashion) but won't just "stop" (unlike certain hand-to-hand beam
weapons featured in a series of well-known SF flicks :-/ ). Their
probability to hit something beyond that "maximum range" hard enough to
inflict FT-scale damage (scarring the paintwork doesn't count!) is
small enough to be negligible though, so the rules ignore the very remote hit
chance they do have.
I visualise the beams and Pulsers as firing large numbers of
individually low-powered shots, slightly dispersed over the
cross-section area of the volume you expect the target to be in when
the shots arrive. If you roll high on the damage roll you hit with many of the
shots so you inflict lots of damage; if you roll too low to inflict any damage
whatever you either missed completely, or didn't hit with enough shots to
inflict enough damage for the FT damage system to notice it (blackening the
paintwork etc. isn't enough to count as a hull box <g>).
With this image, it doesn't matter much to the game mechanics if your
targetting gear is poor or if it is your beam projectors which are primitive
so the beams themselves disperse and "lose power" (or at least lose focus, so
get less able to inflict damage on the target). The former forces you to
disperse the shots more to get a hit pattern (so the distance in which the
potential number of hits, and thus the potential damage, is "constant enough"
to count as a given number of FT
beam dice gets shorter - ie., the range bands get shorter); the latter
weakens the beams themselves so even though you can get the same number of
*hits* as the "normal" weapon the beams themselves weaken faster range where
the potential damage is "constant enough" to count as a given number of FT
beam dice gets shorter... in either case you end up with shorter range bands,
and in either case your "maximum range" goes down as well as the "inner" range
bands.
But, as I said, it depends entirely on how you visualise the weapon
effects :-/
Regards,