Anthony replied to me:
> Unless your characters control resources comparable to the GDP of a
> planet, that's going to happen no matter how you design your ships; it's
> a problem of scale that's very common in all modern and future RPGs; can
> PCs really be *that* relevant to what happens to a polity of hundreds of
> millions?
Imagine two situations:
(A) The player characters are the five-man crew of a 400-ton recon
starfighter. The battle is fought between dozens of 10,000-ton
cruisers and 100,000-ton battleships, with a few fighter crews
watching in awe how stupendous energies are released, and
calling in a sensor reading every now and then.
(B) The player characters are the five-man crew of a 400-ton heavy
cruiser. The battle is fought between hundreds of ships in the
200 to 800 ton range.
In neither case, the player characters would have paid for their
ships, and they could not decide the battle on their own. But in
case (A), it is more difficult to take the actions of the PCs as
typical for their side than in case (B).
In this "pars pro toto" approach, the player characters' ship
would have to face a slice of the enemy fleet -- if the enemy
has more, smaller ships, perhaps the 400-ton cruiser has to deal
with three 200-ton destroyers.
> I would probably favor a carrier-type scheme (something like Macross);
> the main point is to make sure every player has a counter to move about.
It would be a good thing if all players have something to do in a
space battle, but if all characters have to be fighter pilots,
that reduces variety for non-combat adventures.
Pauli replied to me:
> 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).
I used that assumption for my TL15 starships.
Clinton wrote:
> To get armor levels capable of surviving this kind of attack the destroyer
> would need more than 3/4 of its mass in armor alone. A far better
> solution would be of course more point defense and blowing the littler
> craft away before it can launch.
A cruiser could have many tertiary batteries for missile
defense. But you note the problem with that:
> But this could easily encourage smaller craft with as little crew per ship
> as possible due to the inevitable lucky missile hit.
The offense has to get lucky every time, the offense has to win
only once. A 99% chance to stop any one missile means a 50%
chance that at least one in 69 goes through.
> And I agree that the solution for maintenance would be some form of droid
> or self-repair system on the vessel itself. A couple of LAI computers
> could maintain/administer the drudge work onboard.
I like cyberswarm hives with maintenance swarms. That meand the
routine maintenance is handled, but no single robot is smart
enough to steal the limelight from the players.
Regards,
Onno
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