On 27.06.2011 19:22, Onno Meyer wrote:
Johannes replied to me:
I had first understood the question as, what reasons would there exist for
making small ships, independent of what ships exist as well.
Hello Johannes,
my question was how one would adjust, adapt, or mutilate the 3E rules
so that typical starships can be crewed by player characters, without
a need for non-player characters to fill the ranks. This is not for a
specific game -- I want to organize my thoughts to talk about vehicle
design systems in general. If things work out nicely, you might see
some 3E vehicles over the next months ...
It is relatively easy to get a setting with small and large ships. I
wrote some examples as my Vehicle of the Week 864 to 867.
So now I'm looking for a solution where all the ships are relatively
small, from a few dozen tons to perhaps a thousand tons, and with an
endurance measured in days or weeks, not just hours.
For my scifi setting, the answer was fairly simple; 'Tekroids' (short
for technical maintenance droids) cheaply massproduced in vast
quantities with freeware industrial blueprints and freeware basic
software/simplistic neural net 'personality' (maintenance skills at 12,
with +2 for using the right tools). Tekroids are decidedly
non-sapient, and do not have any human rights, they cost something
like 2500$-5000$ apiece with a campaign average starting wealth of
75000$. Almost everyone owns a droid or a few.
Tekroids can do all of the 'boring stuff' 24/7 like routine maintenance,
cargo handling, mopping the floors etc. - while the player characters
can concentrate on all of the more interesting and challenging/heroic
shipboard tasks like captaining, piloting, chief engineering,
sensors/ECM/ECCM, weapons and so on..
..So this basically means that a starship, small or large, does not
necessarily require a large sapient/human crew. Nobody really
considers tekroids crewmembers, they are just a part of the shipboard
machinery - Number of tekroids onboard is just a mere statistic for
the ship.. A robotic ship could of course operate autonomously without
any sapients onboard, but it would do so with notably lesser skill
levels/lesser reasoning abilities than a 'command bridge' team of well
educated/trained sapient specialists working together (like the player
characters).
In my setting, small starships are far more numerous than large ships,
and nobody, not even the galactic military superpowers, never bothers
building ships larger than about a mile in size - There's no valid
reason to put all eggs into the same basket, better to have several
carrier battlegroups with more strategic/tactical
flexibility and operational volume than one stupendously humongous ship
which can only operate in a single star system at a time. Too large
ship sizes could stretch an interstellar empire's forces too thin to
survive a widespread invasion by many fleets of more reasonably sized
vessels.
-Pauli
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