Starfleet Museum Ships - Romulan War Era [WIP]

(ohai - newbie, well to the board not to the game, or at least the pile of books back home begs to differ xD )

I've been a fan of Masao Okazaki's Starfleet Museum for a while (I had a conversion for one of the ships done in Spacedock but I never bothered to do the whole lot - I think it might still be in my old RPG binder even) and although I'm not running a Trek game atm, I figured it might be interesting to try doing a conversion. For now I'll only be concentrating on the Romulan War era ones. I might try to fill a few small gaps with the 21st-22nd century sections of the JAT. Some of them nicely bridge the gap between the Museum/the Daedalus and ST:Enterprise, even.

One of my problems right now is the deal with ship sizes. Every large ship in the SFM is well over the size for the 2150s as put in the srmv4. The models in the Museum also assume that fusion is the only source of power for starships until 2153, but I'm not sure that would be a problem. I'm unsure how to deal with turrets (probably hotlink two weapons but put the full cost for each mount), and the different missile types. I'm also not sure how to deal with the m/am fuel cell equipped boats, namely the corvettes and the pt boat-style fighters the Yorktown carries. Maybe make it a very very low endurance warp drive and stuff and have a special rule/item. I quickly hit a point where every ships has the same "max SU" which causes some problems really. The only ones that are small enough are the Powhatan (class 4), the Torks (class 4), the corvettes (class 3) and the fighters/pt boats (class 3), after that everything is, well "class 5 in large body" - I'm thinking of trying to put together an optional rules expansion that would be slightly more simulationist and make a difference between structural strength and volume taken up. Probably just a short PDF or something covering the main races, trying to bridge some of the gap between FASA's ship construction rules and spacedock.

I'll probably also think about maybe slipping in This design by Rutger Warrink, which according to what I've been told was supposed to be an ancestor to the Galor - of course this kind of leads to the question of "how old of an ancestor" - I somehow doubt the Union has been running the same ships for 2 centuries, although they are supposedly strapped for resources (and presumably don't have the massive asteroid concentrations the Sol system has to solve their problem with strip mining) so they might be about as bad as the feds with reusing hulls (after all the Galor upgrade was basically a Galor with more superstructure, Starfleet and the Cardies sure love their modularity). It at least gives lineage hints to what they might have looked like then.

Oh, and I'll likely also try to cover the Andorians, Tellarites and Vulcans somewhat (thanks to this old but hardly updated website, Vintage Starships).

EDIT: I'll likely revise Impulse Engine types for the listing. It's not terribly official but I kind of wanted an evolution between "rocket" and "impulse engine".
I'm not quite sure on the stats yet but the principle is an evolution from
- Ionic Propulsion, hits a dead end sometimes around the 2070s; it's "good enough" though, and it takes until almost the 22nd century for the terrans to give it up. The Coridanians are more or less last in the close region that's the CoP in ENT to give up Ionic propulsion, in the 2100s.
- Gravimetric Propulsion, this one might be contentious, basically it's a "propellant-less" drive - actually not so much propellant less as it recycles its propellant, using gravity as a form of pistons (exhaust I tend to assume is leftover helium from fusion, I doubt any starfleet ship could manage to even do 1g on the exhaust they have). At some point in the 22nd century it hits a similar snag of fleet command wanting more, especially as somehow the klingons, late in a lot of fields, somehow have better impulse than starfleet). I see it as the predecessor of the Impulse engine. But fuel demand makes it such that without using M/AM, it can't do more accelerating, and the fleet doesn't want to make every system dependent on the warp core just quite yet. A few ideas are floated around, including maybe using a more powerful fusion system than deuterium/deuterium and derivatives (with He3 as one of the residues of deut/deut, it's likely that if they can do the first, they already figured to do H-2/He-3 too, which would probably give a bigger oomph than just running H-2/H-2 and throwing out the He-3 (Helium is also a residue there but He-4), but that's out of the abstract realm of RPGs and I'm not a physicist (and my basics in chemistry won't cut it if I'm wrong since that has nothing to do with gene expression) ;) ). A few universities have realized this independently, Starfleet itself has a lot of commanders who are also aware they can do it (and a taskforce that even has it mentioned in part of their internal regulations; here begin a few assumptions that may be contentious too), that the preparation time for a short warp jump gives them a very small window before and after to "cheat" on the ship's mass and have rapid and much greater acceleration and deceleration than without (in short I take for granted that jumping on and off warp does not affect your velocity in realspace). The main problems with this method, however, is that it's subject to the same limits as warping in general (no jumping within a planet's magnetosphere or closer, takes a bit of time), and that with even a single second warp 1 jump, you're still moving a light-second, so it has to be extremely well timed. So in 2204 a few suggestions come up, but the one that ends up being taken is Loraxial's (an Andorian company from the FASA game) Impulse Engine, which essentially produces a weak warp field that manages to work even close to a planet, and can have significantly more powerful acceleration by reducing the ship's mass in the same process for much less power than just accelerating forever. The chronology is far from set in my mind (I'm thinking of potentially tying it to roughly the time period around the launch of the Kestrel, i.e. the Aryabatha refit, which also coincides with a major Klingon success against the Romulans, immediately followed by a civil war after which the romulans recover quickly; this is still almost 50 years before the MAM/cloak tech exchange), but the impulse engine is, anyway, about 30 years past my scope).
I'll have notes for a few alternate/optional rules in pdf form, too, including slightly more realistic acceleration.