Welcome to the boards.
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Originally posted by ema nymton
I’ve had the coda books for a while but haven’t done much with them to date, but have been going though them again and have a few questions/suggestions for ships in coda. I would be interested in hearing people’s thoughts on these as I don’t have any experience of how the system works in practice.
I had the same thoughts but it does work in practice.
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1. With ship systems that say add ½ size, do you round and odd numbers up, down or lave the .5 lingering.
It's not explicitely clear but I round down and it doesn't seem to have had a detrimental effect.
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2, One thing I dislike about the coda rules is the difficulty in representing a ship that is focused on science rather than battle. There are two ways of doing this, one is to give it highly rated sensors (but warships need good sensors to) or to not use up as much space as allowed so it simply has less weapons.
You must remember that the starship creation rules have a lot of bases to cover and as such are very abstract. But I find this is a minor quibble. I've created a recon vessel (Blackbird Class) that had primarily sensors (had the best available) and fairly average weapons systems. It depends on your opinion of starship design really. Some would argue that science vessels have to be well armed as they are more likely to encounter hostile aliens (being exploratory in their nature). Warships with all the kick butt stuff tend to arrive later. Also don't forget that even in the real world warships tend to be much larger than exploration ships. Using this approach means you can fill your warship with all the big bang stuff and good sensors whilst you can also create smaller exploratory stuff with weapons. It's all a matter of taste I suppose.
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3. I have two problems with the ship combat rules. The size of a ship has no direct impact and the speed of a ship has no impact. The first of these is pure personal taste I simply feel that small ships should have some advantage. I was thinking of applying a penalty equal to the size difference when a large ship fires on a target smaller than itself. I would like to know how people feel this would affect the balance between large and small ships. That may be just my taste but faster ships should defiantly have an advantage over slower ones. Again I have a suggestion, a +1 bonus to helm maneuvers for ever .2c speed advantage. Again people’s thoughts appreciated
The combat rules for starships are again rather abstract but I do see your point. But don't forget the miscellaneous modifiers. These can round out your designs quite effectively. If your creating a behemoth of a ship I wouldn't stack loads of mod points on the HELM modifier stat but I might stick them on TACTICAL and/or COMMAND. However, if you create a zippy little escort (like the Defiant then I'd stuff all or most of the modifiers on HELM and maybe TACTICAL but not COMMAND. This could be argued as mainly aesthetics but I feel the miscellaneous modifiers go quite a why to describing what kind of ship you've designed.