Hard Fast Rules?

[Captain Zymmer]

Aside from Spacedock, are there hard fast rules for Icon ship building?

And if not, should we try and hammer some out?

[Captain Leana Craig]

I don't think so. I assume that Steve's Spacedock would have been the de facto King of the Hill in that regard for LUG.

As for an ICON construction guide I suggest reading the conversion rules in SD and use them. You will just have to look up the compoments mentioned and ignore SIF, IDF etc.

[Captain Zymmer]

But what if you don't like Spacedock or don't use it? I mean why build a ship in Spacedock to then return it to ICON...not trying to be mean or anything, but it seems like going 3 miles one way to go 1 the other.

There must be some sort of guidlines out there for ICON ships?

A shame that there isn't.

[Publius]

There isn't.

Spacedock is an excellent resource. It is complex, but then so is ship design in general. Before Spacedock it was all guesswork, now there is a logical framework to use. Myself, I prefer to stay with Spacedock, I like the complexity and just retrofit it back when I need to.

[Captain Zymmer]

Yeah the problem is that my players are not big fans of it and to be honest neither am I...too much detail overwhelms me.

I can see how many wouild liek ti though, I just have never bee a starship-ophile in that way. I prefer the way they look more so than their systems.

But seriously, how hard would it be to make guidelines for ICON?

Shjips of this size usually have X for power systems, etc...

Just guidlines, not a whole construction manual.

[Asdeed]

I think guidelines for Icon ship construction is a great idea.

Soooo, any idea where to start?

How about a breakdown or chart of some kind of all the ships available, and then do a comparison?

[Lancer]

Originally posted by Asdeed
How about a breakdown or chart of some kind of all the ships available, and then do a comparison?

I think the best way to handle this would be a comparison for each class of ship, eg. cruiser, frigate, explorer, etc.
From that you could derive a range of stats for each type of ship, telling you something like:
"Science Ship, Weapons - Science ships usualy carry no more than one torpedo launcher (maximum spread=5) and have phasers ranging from Type IV to Type VII", or something along these lines.

That's the way I usualy start designing basic ICON ships, figuring out what kind of ship I want to build and then choosing systems accordingly.


Apart from that you should IMHO seriously think about including the following systems from Spacedock:

• Quarters: how many of what type
• Medical facilities: A rating from 1-10 and a bonus this gives for medical, first aid and life science checks
• Recreation facilities: A simple rating and maybe number of holodecks and lounges
• Autopilot: Flight Control skill and Coordination attribute
• Strength of Communications, Sensors and Transporters
• Rating for Security Systems
• Rating for Science Systems and number of Labs
• Number of Probes carried
• Captain's Yacht: Yes or No

All the above would IMO go a long way to make a difference in a game, without being too complicated to realy require Spacedock construction rules.
And under the basic rules ships built for very different purposes can still look very much the same stat-wise, something easily avoided with inclusion of some (or all) of the above mentioned stats.

[Asdeed]

Originally posted by Lancer
I think the best way to handle this would be a comparison for each class of ship, eg. cruiser, frigate, explorer, etc.

Exactly, which is why I rewrote ten federation ships in a series of charts (different classes of the ships so I could do the comparison)

Of course, I haven't done the comparing part yet, but once that's done i'd definitely like to add in those additional ship systems you were talking about.