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In Progress Extend the DR Scale by one Tier Category

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15 can't go into infinity. Suggest we add a category of 1-3 tiers for Megastructures in size category only. I do not suggest extending weapons tiers above 15. Can be anything from a single "15+" tier in the category, up to 3 full tiers. Forget the Izanagi, what is a Dyson Sphere? What is that crazy ringworld thing Baron Gello Kordoon is building in Kimirthro?
 
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For that, what would Turassiel be? Shurista? Mobile megastructures in the 9300 kilometer diameter range with mass equivalent to a moderately sized moon?

Sorry, but no single ship, even an Izinagi could bring something like that down on its own. That's a fleet operation. Just as it took to kill Turassiel.

The scale currently puts them at Tier 15, but that, I feel, is even small for a generational home that's been continuously built for half a million years, constantly growing and expanding. It'd still be dwarfed by a dyson sphere or a machine moon, but hot damn, it'd be nearly impossible to portray the sheer scale of these things standing on it.

A modern Nimitz class aircraft carrier's a big boi, but you could still ride a bicycle across the flight deck. An izanagi is big enough to have its own transit system, but there are still very few people on the crew who have not been to every major section at least once.

There are very few people, who have lived their entire lives on Flotillas, who have seen every sight or been to every landmark of their home Flotilla. And for those who live on a Dyson Sphere... Even fewer.
 
I think a single Tier would work well - it's a tier where something is so large that it can't really be quantified as reliably on a weapons level, so keeping it simple would be ideal in my opinion.

This also means fewer questions will get asked about it, since it essentially becomes "it's very, very, very big. No need to figure out if it's an inch too long to be classified as an even bigger thing."
 
I like this idea, though in my opinion to prevent another “arms race” from occurring it should not be possible to create starships that are larger then Tier 15; star fortresses and defensive structures, after all, are meant to fight off more then one equally-sized (or smaller!) opponent at a time - yet under the current weapon limitations are forced to do so with an arsenal equivalent to one of the aforementioned opponents.

GM fiat and “titans” (like the Izanagi) should also be an exception to this; the former is so that GMs have creative freedom in their plots, whereas the latter is so that factions can have a single vessel to embody their faction as a whole, lead their fleets into battle, and so on, similar to Star Trek’s Sovereign-class assault cruiser, Star Wars’ Executor-class super star destroyer, and Imperial Japan’s Yamato-class battleship.
 
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I think the best way to handle the scale of a "megastructure" tier would be to base it on what percentage of the "native" population has ever personally seen every major landmark.
For something like a Zodiac, that'd be close to 90% You spend enough time on a Zodiac, you run out of things to see.

A Senti Flotilla, maybe 30%. In 300 years, you'd think they'd have time, but how many landmarks on Earth have you seen?

A dyson sphere, or a planetary halo less than 10%. Between work, school, and time, most people may never leave their home sector.
 
You know, I suggested something similar a while back and it got shot the heck down. Would these have a smaller limit compared to normal starships, like one per system whether that's a "Supercapital" or a "Massive space station"? People obviously won't want to get rid of the two or three dozen Izanagis floating around, so whatever limit these have needs to accommodate that.
 
I think just no one voted on it, or it was a deadlock tho. Upvote if you want it. I liked Wes's idea in that thread too
 
I would've voted for it but that was when I was away
 
On one hand nep has the largest (iirc) military starbase in the sector and if you got off of DRv3, despite its size and capabilities of it the Big Green can be destroyed buy a shot or two from a starship several orders of magnitude smaller than it like it has a deathstar magic gem weakspot, and it would be nice to have a megastructures category like what alex mentioned before in another thread.

On another, I just hate DRv3 now and how its gatekept on every little bit in there. Im even more against adding anything to it that someone will come along later and try to brow-beat someone over it when I feel more strongly we should re-visit the damage rating system and shift into a more just RP kind of system but keep the sizes and stuff for reference and not as something to kneecap over.

I still voted Yes tho despite those reservations.
 
I don't agree with this idea. I feel tier 15 already is the mega-structure tier, we don't really need a second one. I think getting rid of the DR and just letting people use their own judgement would be best. That said, if we were to implement it, which given the current votes seems likely. We should extend it three teirs into a tier group. Anything routinely mobile and weapons should be capped at 15. I think Izanagis should be downsized to the top of tier 15. Which would roughly be around 5 km long, which is in line with a lot of the other larger ships. I also think that the three tiers should be spaced out more than the typical roughly doubling. So perhaps 10 km, 100 km, 1000 km would be good top ranges for 15, 16, 17, with 18 being anything bigger.
 
I will bring up, in responses to what Soban and Char have mentioned:

I would absolutely support a more roleplay-focused system for handling damage. The more ways we can funnel players into actually roleplaying, the better. I also generally dislike that DRv3's power is effectively based on "critical hits" rather than "normal attacks". Further compounding that is the "per bullet" method which makes fast-firing weapons fundamentally overpowered, stressing out NTSE and players when someone really just wants a space minigun. I wouldn't mind if these aspects of DRv3 were looked at and adjusted/rewritten to be more flexible and consistent.

I also think the biggest "gatekeeping" issue with DRv3 is that we have this whole, weapons-assigned-to-size shenanigan, and all things associated with that. Loadouts, I guess, is the word to use.

There is, however, an issue I can see, if we decide to remove DRv3 - if we don't have enough structure at all, it will result in weapon/armor power inconsistency, and a lot of questions of "how powerful is this supposed to be? What happens if I shoot it at that, or if those shoot at this?"

We should make sure that if we make a better Damage Rating system, that said system allows questions like that to be answered without getting in the way of the roleplaying itself.
 
This suggestion is very popular so I will implement it. The only question is the limits of each new tier. Hmm...
 
Here is my perspective, Tier 15 should go to 10 kilometers. Tier 16 to 100 Kilometers, Tier 17 to 1000 kilometers, Tier 18 is everything more than 1000 kilometers. If you are in tier 16,17, or 18 you aren't routinely mobile. Weapons don't go above tier 15. Things in tier 17 and 18 should be rare.

There are two things I know of which we may want to 'grandfather' with the rules. The Senti flotillas and the Izanagi (which TBH is wildly out of scale and should be shrunk to something more reasonable.)
 
I think the best way to handle the scale of a "megastructure" tier would be to base it on what percentage of the "native" population has ever personally seen every major landmark.
For something like a Zodiac, that'd be close to 90% You spend enough time on a Zodiac, you run out of things to see.

A Senti Flotilla, maybe 30%. In 300 years, you'd think they'd have time, but how many landmarks on Earth have you seen?

A dyson sphere, or a planetary halo less than 10%. Between work, school, and time, most people may never leave their home sector.
Click to expand...

I'll just reference this one here.
 
I have a military station in setting that’s 130-ish miles *long*

And to justify that I wrote it took nep five years and the cost to build an assault fleet of almost a thousand ships. It is also mobile if the slowest thing fll capable in the setting and can be detected from light years away when it is.

While I care less about the realism anymore I think the big green should be an outlier at the high end at that size and not an example of a barely *mid size* megastructure.

Maybe a scale of 20 < 50 < 100 with anything larger needing input or permission like some things do since arguably the only ones with the resources capable are nep and yam and nep I at least canonized not being able to easily. And 1000km even for the first proposed highest limit seems a bit too extreme~
 
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Fair. The Big Green is quite the engineering feat, yes. 130 miles long is huge for a spaceborne single structure. Kinda hard to simply imagine. But in truth, and when compared to even some modern Earth metropoli, fairly small. It's like nose to tail about the distance from the south side of Pueblo, Colorado to the north side of Denver.

When I hear megastructure, I hear remember the sheer scale of a Dyson Sphere, which encapsulates an entire star, or a planetary ring, with a a radius of about 1 AU. I'm seeing structures whose mass and population numbers so high the human brain simply isn't equipped to imagine them. I'm talking jump gates capable of swallowing systems or of artificial planets at the smallest scale.

Which is why I suggested the tourism scale. How many people on Big Green have ever seen all major landmarks of it? Like percentage of the population.
 
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