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

[Phil Stracchino]

Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> For example, the Federation had the best build quality, and their designs
> minimized internal damage on hull hits by only allowing damage in the hit
> section. They had redirectable shield reserve generators, and torpedo overload
> ability. They also could use probes as huge torpedoes. You lost most of that
> if you didn't use the complex advanced rules.
> 
> I admit, it was really hard to play for long with the advanced rules,
> but it sure was a better game if you did.

That's why we automated a lot of stuff like damage resolution.  :)  It
saved time.

> Klingon firing arcs: that was deliberate. Klingons focused on forward
> firepower and boarding capabilities. Most of their ships have a large
> rear blind spot. It would have been wrong for SFB to do otherwise.
> Their construction methods were inferior to the Federation, and their
> philosophy was expansionist and warlike.  They were belligerants.

Sure.  That's why it was so incomprehensible that their ships, as
warship designs, were so bad, and their forward firepower so relatively
poor compared to what it could, and should, have been with only minor
changes to the firing arcs of the existing weapons.

> By contrast, the Federation vessels were optimized for long range
> combat, defensive shielding, minimization of internal damage, and large
> firing arcs instead of forward firepower.  Again, it would have been
> wrong for SFB to correct that.  The Federation's primary strengths and
> philosophies were exploration, research, diplomacy, and expansion of the
> UFP territory.  They were defensive by nature.

Sure, the Federation wasn't in the business of building warships.  But
if they were as badly unbalanced as they appeared to be in SFB, the
Klingons and Romulans would have rolled up the Federation like a rug.

>>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).
> 
> That's a neat idea.  
> 
> However, it doesn't take into account limitations not covered by a
> purely materialistic view of BPV.  Or at least, your description doesn't
> appear to.  It looks like you did a pure optimization without regard to
> wether or not such a ship could have been built.

Depends what you mean my "materialistic view of BPV".  We took into
account just about every factor we could think of -- including firing
arcs, torpedo overloads, damage repair capabilities etc.

> SFB didn't provide a way of tying BPV to the technology and build
> capabilities of the various races. At least, that's how I remember it. I
> didn't have my own copy of the Designer's Rulebook. It might have
> covered that, I can't remember.

Even in the Commander's Ruleset (the only one we used), the only BPV
rules provided were for minor modifications to add or upgrade a weapon
here or there.  That's why we had to put so much work into
reverse-engineering them.

> Optimizing ship designs purely based on BPV is really only realistic if
> you assume equal capabilities among the factions, something which is not
> true in the Star Trek universe.

Oh, we weren't assuming equal capabilities.  It came out fairly clearly
in what we reverse-engineered that the different races were *not* equal
in capabilities.

> In the ST:NG TV series, the writers completely forgot the variations in
> ship capability, and also stopped having any moving battles.  Instead,
> in ST:NG the ships simply faced each other a few hundred meters apart
> and slugged it out.

Most of the time, yes.  Though there were really comparatively few
significant starship-to-starship engagements in ST:TNG.  Combat in DS9,
on the other hand, was very dynamic.

> Ironically it was the orignal series where you got to see more realistic
> high speed combat that took ship design into account.  I'm thinking of
> the meeting with the Romulans and their slow ship but powerful mauler
> gun, or the high speed fight with the Gorn warship.  

I actually haven't seen those episodes.

> Large fleet engagements: I could see them being slower affairs, simply
> because of the logistical problem of organizing a large fight.
> 
> More irony: the whole point of the Galaxy class phaser array was to give
> a large firing arc without sacrificing power, and yet the ST:NG writers
> never used that in any show that I'm aware of.  The ship had rear
> defense and a big firing arc with a lot of power, and the writers only
> used that in one, maybe two episodes.  Otherwise, all battles in ST:NG
> were ship-of-the-line broadside combat.

There was only about one episode that I recall which showed the
flexibility of the Galaxy Class's phaser array, and it was against
pretty minor targets.

Personally, I'm disappointed we never saw more of the Excelsior class.


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