On Fri, 12 Oct 2012, Onno Meyer wrote:
Johannes replied to me:
[...]
I am thinking about a setup like for a flash for photography. You have 2
batteries there, the proper battery and the capacitor. Needing only one
would be preferable, but technical restrictions make it impossible for
either to be used alone. You could use some technobabble explaination for
having powered FTl modules.
Contemporary ground cars have lead acid batteries too, if built with
vehicles, even though with regards to vehicle stats, they are only dead
weight. You can have the same with sf scenarios, as long as you are
consistent about it.
The more complicated the FTL and power setup, the more likely
it seems to me that you'd put it into the main ship. If it is
such a fragile thing, should you couple and un-couple it all
the time?
The premise was additionally, that FTL drives break down at unpredictable
times (convenient for game terms, roll against a fixed malfunction number
for every use) and reparing them requires highly specialized workshops,
that are only available at important core worlds.
Whatever an FTL module exactly contains (power being part of it is a
possibility, but not a requirement for the concept) it should be small,
compared to the ship it can move.
So for timecritical or other priority transports, the solution would be to
carry a few spares. Important ports, that are still not important enough
for their own FTL workshop, will store spares.
If a drive fails, you mail it to the next workshop.
It would help if you had things like "parts of the FTL drive
must be mounted at the end of a long boom" or "FTL drives
can't be armored", but that is not covered by the 3E rules.
You could intoduce something like that as optional rule. You already have
to note, if you did not include a certain component, because you designed
the vehicle for a background, where that component does not exist, or
because you wanted to save space or costs, if adding that component would
suggest itself.
Coming up with new such rules is IMO in the spirit of the system. Vehicle
rules are a basis for making vehicles that fit your background. It should
not be a requirement to bend your background to fit vehicle rules. Finding
the right place to bend vehicle rules, that the results fit the
background, have no unintended consequences, and that the amount of rules
you need to rewrite is minimal, is IMO the right thing to do, though it
can be difficult.
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