[geeks] SFB (was Re: [rescue] Biggest drives (and SVM) in a U60?)

[Phil Stracchino]

(redirected from Rescue)

Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> What is amazing is how some things can circulate through a group of
> people. 
> 
> For example, when I was in high school, I played Starfleet Battles,
> Starfire, and other games like that.  One of my friends had a set of
> manuals, SSD sheets, and other game materials from Starfleet Battles.

I fondly remember Starfleet Battles.  But some of the ship designs,
particularly Federation, were *terrible*.  No Klingon ship in the game
could bring more than 50% of its armament to bear on a target directly
ahead, and the situation off the bow to one side or the other - or off
the beam - was even worse.  There wasn't a Federation ship in the game
that could fight its way out of a wet paper bag.  MANY ships didn't have
enough power available to make better than half speed with all shields
and weapons fully powered up, and quite a few were worse than that.


So a friend of mine and I analyzed a whole bunch of SSDs from different
ship classes and different races, and reverse-engineered the starship
construction rules until we had a set of rules that we could use to
build a copy of any ship in the game and come out within a few percent
of the listed BPV (build point value).  While we were at it, we wrote a
damage allocation table program that ran on a HP-80 (iirc).

Then I took those ship construction rules and designed my own complete
new race, with a few of its own special technologies and quirks.  (For
instance, they didn't use drones or fighters, because they weren't good
at building small warp engines.  They were, however, very good at
building very BIG warp engines, and they had a workable - though highly
limited - intergalactic drive.  For another example, their primary
direct-fire weapon didn't hit quite as hard at close range as a
comparable phaser or disruptor, but had a slightly longer maximum
range.)  They were more than a bit racially paranoid, as a consequence
of evolving on a world with some VERY nasty natural enemies, and they
were involved in a long-running hot war with the "Andromedans" (who
weren't Andromedan at all), so all their ships were designed first and
foremost to be optimally efficient warships for their size.

Then we held a play-off.  We learned that a Chakkra heavy cruiser could
take on a Federation dreadnought and cripple it without taking serious
damage, and at least hold its own with any other race's dreadnought.  A
Chakkra dreadnought in a melee with three other dreadnoughts, all
modified up to the Chakkra's economic BPV, pounded all of the other
three into scrap metal, starting out by crippling the Federation
dreadnought in a single salvo.  (A return salvo, at that; the Federation
captain fired first, and failed to breach the Chakkra's shields.)

And then we matched up a Chakkra Arrowhead battleship against a Klingon
B10-B, almost point-for-point identical in cost.  There was no
sophisticated strategy to the way it happened; we just closed head-on,
metaphorically waiting for the other to blink or flinch, and let fly
with everything we had as we passed at point-blank range.

The Arrowhead's front shield went down, and it took about 80 internals.
 It was definitely hurt, but was equally definitely still combat-capable
and ready to continue fighting.  The B10-B was an expanding cloud of
plasma; it took something like 260 internal hits in that single salvo,
AFTER its forward shield collapsed, and it only had 245 internal systems
spaces.


It kinda brought home just how BAD some of those SSD designs really
were.  Warships designed by people who frankly had no real idea how to
design a warship.  We found that we had to apply a 50% combat BPV
modifier to all the Chakkra ships because they were so effective in
combat.  (e.g. a Chakkra heavy cruiser with an economic BPV of 180 got
assigned a combat BPV of 270.)



Ahhhh, gaming nostalgia.


-- 
 Phil Stracchino                     Landline: 603-886-3518
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net         Mobile: 603-216-7037
 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater