"Starships" Questions

[Tobian]

Actually I think the reason that the Cardassians have been listed as not having Photon Torpedoes is because of the several advantages they have been given with the spiral wave disruptors and monotanium hull plating. The Spiral Wave disruptors can lower a shield two notches on a successful hit - and the monotanium armour means they have a +4 against ships trying to target them - which represent huge tactical advantages, and belie the fact that the Cardassians were supposed to be slightly less technichally advanced than the Federation.

Basically it's a game play ballance thing and makes the Cardassians have to use different strategies.

At the end of the day you can just add a photon torpedo launcher to them if you feel the need, but be careful as it could make them overpowered!

[Snake_Plissken]

Actually I think the reason that the Cardassians have been listed as not having Photon Torpedoes is because of the several advantages they have been given with the spiral wave disruptors and monotanium hull plating.

exactly, but that's in terms of gaming mechanics- my explanation was in terms of the 'real-world' (in the Star Trek universe, of course!) considerations. In terms of gaming mechanics you'll notice that the Cardassians seems to have lower shield protection values- something I took into consideration when doing the Cardassian SRM conversion- but they make up the gap for it partially with monotanium plating. So a Cardassian ship on average is easier to hit as is but harder to lock into; and the lock-on maneuver is a major pre-requisite for many other maneuvers.

Same goes for the wave disruptors. On average Cardassian ships have lower penetration values but they have a much better ability, again as you pointed out, to reduce shield strength faster. That's why I consider a Cardassian ship with beams at, say, 5/5/4/0/0 to have the phaser equivalent of 6/5/5/0/0 if not 6/6/6/0/0. That was also a carefully considered when I did the Cardassian SRM conversion.

[Tobian]

With a good tactical officer - their spiral wave advantage could become quite lethal actually. While the Federation ships are harder to hit, even a sovereign class ship would be at a big disadvantage because if the Tactical officer could hit 18's each round - say bye bye sheild in a flash.. but then as you say - it only takes maybe a couple of courage points or a lucky roll on the dice and suddenly you have a good success and your Cardassians sheilds are likewise.

From a technical note, I'm not sure if the Cardassians did use Photorps before the Dominion war? Yes the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian order teamed up and shared technology, and lets face it the Cardassians are good at espionage so they could steal the designs if they wanted them!

One other disadvantage the Cardassians do have as you pointed out is that they have relativelly low damage and fairly small ships. A larger Federation ship is likelly t be able to take quite a bit more punishment than the Cardassian one!

[Snake_Plissken]

While the Federation ships are harder to hit, even a sovereign class ship would be at a big disadvantage because if the Tactical officer could hit 18's each round - say bye bye sheild in a flash

provided that the Cardassian ship manages to stay in between pt-blank and medium ranges of the Sovereign, which would be better off trying to stay out of the Cardassian ships's beam range and pummel it from afar with quantum torpedoes. While the Sovereign's shields would be diminished quickly at least in the meantime it would be very unlikely that the Sovereign would sustain any actual hits going through the shields, given its extremely high treshold value (6). On the other hand it is quite likely that any hit on a Caradassian ship would result in structural damage and critical damage, which would have a good chance of lowering the Cardassian's shield strength as well. The Sovereign according to Starship is the hell of a monster (!). Granted, Cardassian ships are much more tougher than the stats would seem to suggest at first glance.

[Tobian]

Actually one thing that does work in nicelly is that it does fit in well with the way that Cardassians tactics are to travel round in threes. So that one ship would dive in, take a peck at a larger ship and then dive out again. The difficult thing to do is to keep outside of the vessels missile weapon range as well. It also makes me think that if the Defiant class also acted like this, it could be extremelly deadly!

[Mad Ork]

It may have been mentioned before (if so, i'd be happy to receive some pointers) but what about the Starship separation systems?
Is there any rule whatsoever to determine the size or structure ratings of the subships? Or do I have to resort to the good, old-fashioned human judgement ?

[Sea Tyger]

Originally posted by Mad Ork
It may have been mentioned before (if so, i'd be happy to receive some pointers) but what about the Starship separation systems?
Is there any rule whatsoever to determine the size or structure ratings of the subships? Or do I have to resort to the good, old-fashioned human judgement ?

There are no rules on the size of seperable components of a starship. Whether you're adding a standard or emergency seperation system or the MAM system, the abstract nature of starship combat makes the need for determining the size rating of the various components irrelevant.

You can obvisouly extrapolate the physical dimensions of your seperated section for RP purposes, but you need no other information for gameplay (just assume that the section has all of the components of the main vessel, unless specifically noted (like impulse/warp drives and weapon placements).

[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.

1. With ship systems that say add ½ size, do you round and odd numbers up, down or lave the .5 lingering.

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. Both these are fine and work well but I feel something else is needed. The idea I’m playing with is adding a fourth ‘maneuver’ modifier for science which would apply to any rolls to use sensors out of combat and to science tasks in the ships labs etc. While this would be a grossly different use to the other 3 and fell it could work well, reflecting the priorities of different ship types. It would also be easy to modify existing ship designs.

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

Hope that all makes sense
Thanks

[JonA]

Welcome to the boards.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Snake_Plissken]

Having tried all kinds of different scenarios with the starship combat rules I can tell you that the helm modifier is very important, especially for those ships (like the Romulans') who must get close to their target to maximize the penetration effect of their weapons. The idea of having fast ships (with impulse engines at 0.9c etc) having supplemental bonii is iffy at best- you have fairly large ships like the Galaxy or the Negh'Var that can travel up to 0.9c- giving bonii to that kind of ships kind of defeats the purpose of them having low (negative) helm modifiers in CODA.

[Tobian]

Well having any ship travel at .9 c is 'iffy' because 'full' impulse is still only 0.25 c (Source TNG technical manual) and for very good reasons - E=mc2 - unless you are in a subspace field (at warp travel) time will slow down relative to the external universe, so you really should have negative modifiers to any reactions because time inside the ship is slowing down!

yes the impulse engines have a spacetime driver coil which lowers the effective mass of the ship (to make the dirves more effective at pushing the ship and therefoe conversely lowering relativistic distortion) it's still significant enough for them not to push the ships much past this!

I generally just take the figure as an acceleration vector - like in commercial sports cars, which can travel at 180 miles an hour (on the test track) but can only go at 70 miles an hour legaly on the roads! - it just signifies you have a powerful engine and can also converselly get a good acceleration in the field.

[Snake_Plissken]

Yeah that's another good point. But didn't the TNG tech manual describe some provisions about going above full impulse (0.25c) for exceptional situations like combat? That's something I've always wondered about the shows... at what impulse speed do they travel (?) For instance when they say "half impulse" do they mean half of 0.25c of half of the upper impulse limit the ship is capable of (like 0.9c)? Also warp travel seems to offer little problems regarding time-dilation issues (in the ST universe... and IIRC the TNG tech manual discusses how they go around the problem, or lessen it at least), so why would impulse engines be more problematic? Not arguing, I'm just curious.

[Snake_Plissken]

... and as a side note... that's why IMVHO the CODA starship system rocks: they managed to keep it full of flavor yet abstract. Otherwise going 'by the numbers' they would have encountered all sorts of problems (like the stuff we're discussing!)

[Tobian]

Yes I agree with regards to the combat system. Your engines make little difference in combat, the only thing they contribute is their reliability, the manouvers make all the difference when it comes to combat, and the ability to break away from another ship - which is far more realistic!

With regards to the technical manuals, as stated 'full impulse' is 0.25 C - half impulse is therefore 0.125 C. Yes the ships are capable of going faster, but to use my analogy 'full impulse' is like saying 'drive at the speed limit'.

The reason why Warp drives present less of a problem is because, bizarelly, when you are traveling at warp you are not moving. The Warp engines warp space around you, but you yourself, are not moving. It is like, for example, sitting in the eye of the huricane; Outside the huricane, everything's fine; inside the huricane, it's moving fiercly and belting allong the land; and in the eye it's perfectly calm. Or another way to put it, simply, is that the warp drive moves in a way which the laws of relativity do not apply.

Impulse engines move in a way in which the rules of relativity does apply, hence ... they do!

Technically you could design your warp drive to allow you to travel at speeds below the speed of light, but, from everything we've seen in the show, that rarelly happens. It's probably like using an earth mover to plant a daisy. Genarating the distortion field which allows the ship to travel in warped space takes up larger quantities of energy than a simple fusion thruster.

[ema nymton]

Thanks for the replies guys.

After reading through your posts I’m thinking I might tone down some of my suggestions. I’m now thinking of giving the faster ship in any combat a +1 bonus to any Disengage Maneuver and applying a penalty of -1 to hit any ship more than two size’s smaller than the firing ship. As I said originally this reflects how I feel ship to ship combat should be. I should probably say that I think the CODA rules are possibly the best I’ve encountered in any RG I’ve tried in terms of catching the feel I want.

I’m still interested in what people think about adding a science maneuver modify. jona I understand what you’re saying but I find it had to design a size 8 warship that looks different to a size 8 explorer. I feel this could be one way of doing it without making any drastic changes to the rules.

Thanks again