Uncle Snake's Starship Building Tutorial

[Tobian]

The Video version of it is much funnier! I can't remember where I got that from though sorry.

[Snake_Plissken]

Gnarley, Aslan- you make valid points- and frankly I'll admit that given its military-oriented role giving it extra structural strength makes sense, especially since we have all that extra space lying around. I guess I didn't max out structural strength to put an emphasis on NOT spending all of the given space (as some people have the unfortunate tendency to do)- Some elements in the CODA ship-building system can easily be abused.

So here, I'll "officially" amend the design: let's say that a "Mk2" version exists with reinforced bulkheads (giving it a STR value of 40)

One note however: I've ran a lot of ship combat combinations (I'll get a life one day, I promise) and one minor oddity with the very awesome CODA system is that on average ships sytems go down much faster proportionally than the ship's structure, especially on the larger vessels (sizes 7+). I've seen ships with almost all of the systems down but with a decent amount of structure left- turning the ship into a dead hulk in space. Again, the most vital bit of stat I've found to be was the shield treshold rating. A difference of only 1 point can make a HUGE difference. Obviously having a high shield protection rating is also vital- a ship with 12 protection is much easier to hit than a ship with protection 17. Another very important stat (it seemed to me) was the helm modifier- as I've found that the ability to move across the movement track was paramount. Obviously a good tactical modifier is also important, when combining attacks and such- a ship like the Galaxy combining its phaser fire with its torpedo fire can be quite powerful. OTOH, I've found that ships with very high weapon penetration ratings are not that much advantaged because regardless of penetration value a weapon type (except for the Cardassians' spiral-wave gizmos, which makes them much more powerful than it would seem at first glance) will damage the shields at the same rate as any other would; a type II phaser can bring the shields down just as fast as a type X would- with the EXCEPTION that when a succesful hit occurs, a weapon with a higher penetration value has more chances of bringing down the shields more quickly IF enough structural damage is caused to trigger a damage roll- and the shields are hit.

And yes Aslan, we can go for ice cream now The only thing is that I gotta watch what I eat around here, I've been ordering too much Dragon De Chine lately (don't ask )

It's funny BTW I started that thread long ago and someone resurrectd it (!) Back then there were a lot of complaints about how Decipher had left out this or that design out of Starship... the complaints puzzled me to say the least and that's why I came out with that thread.

[Gabe Mitchell]

Hehe, I'll have to take a look-see.

I wish I'd been so lucky, but I had too sheltered of a life growing up, and didn't stumble upon roleplaying until my third year of college (my first two years were at a two-year school), and started playing seriously for about 16 months in a 2nd edition D&D campaign. Haven't found an RPG group locally though, so I'm in slow withdrawal from playing RPGs.

I have to admit, to a certain degree the reason I've got the RPG books I have now is because I'm working on being a writer. Originally, I'd written a first-draft novel about the Tomed Incident of 2311, based aboard the Enterprise-B, but got too bogged down in revision to actually get it completed and polished, much less send it in. However, Serpents Among The Ruins (part of the new Lost Era series) did what I'd originally attempted... did it a lot better, too. So now, I'm considering a post-Nemesis setting with Riker, Troi and some others on the USS Titan, but I've not completely decided on it just yet.