Should we adopt a resource point system for shipbuilding?

[Yangfan]

What's stopping people from cheating on their ship size?

Also, shouldn't a large freighter cost less than a small gunboat?

 

[Millia]

Yang has a point there.

A minivan is less expencive than a sports car. But probaly not more espencive than a tour bus.

 

[OsakanOne]

What if there were an event or object which stops Nodal devices from working or diminishes their quality or perhaps makes them unscalable?

A rule of thumb is that when you work in tiny groups, numbers aren't quite so important.

You've hit a barrier: This isn't tiny groups. This is plotships, full campagnes, all out war, civilizations, nations and industry.

You've hit a singularity point in terms of tech with Aether and Nodal.

I feel they're devices placed so the good ol' empire will never fall and it bugs the hell out of me since it makes the game painfully unfair to other nations and biases them towards going down the Yamatai path right off the bat.

Burn-out is obviously on it's way but you're clearly willing to march through it and out of the other side so it's not really my place to talk of it.

My two cents.

Finally...

If the points system is difficult as tax, is anyone going to bother with it?

 

[Karma Mechanic]

What's stopping people from cheating on their ship size?

::blinks::
Having a layout in somewhat of a scale, we fixed the size of the Vampire patrol craft being one example. Also the size of the ship should match the discription of its insides, a massive ship shouldn't only describe what would effectively fit into one of its 15 or so decks, and a tiny craft shouldn't have massive cargo bays capable of holding several shuttles and a few tanks. To some extent it would be by the administrators judgement.

But trying to go ethier way with it is illogical, trying make the ship larger than it should be costs more, and making it smaller than it should be makes it so a greater percentage of the ship is damaged when it is hit by weapons in battle, therefore making the ship more vulnerable to weapons fire, and more expensive to repair(because a larger percentage of the ship, and its systems will be damaged). Besides that I'm hoping that the players hear are mature enough not to cheat.

Also, shouldn't a large freighter cost less than a small gunboat?

Yes it should, that is if the materials that it is built from, and its systems are cheaper. The modifiers would there to adjust for certian problems, such as it currently costing the same amount to shield a small craft such as a scout or corrvette at say level 6 as it would to shield a command cruiser at level 6.

Yang has a point there.

A minivan is less expencive than a sports car. But probaly not more espencive than a tour bus.

In car terms my point is that yes a Mini-van would be cheaper even though it is larger; because its body is made out of thin low grade steel panels instead of high strength carbon composites and fiberglass; it has a 6 cylinder engine that produces 150hp and costs $1,500 dollars to manufacture, instead of the sports car that has a 12 cylinder engine that produces 650hp and costs $10,000 to manufacture; the mini-van also wouldn't need the other things that the sports car would, high grade sports tires, complex fuel management systems, aircraft aluminum grade frame, road sensors...ect. The tour bus would be expensive because it has to have a fairly powerful engine to move itself, its generally made of high grade materials, decked out with all the latest gadgets, probably a kitchenette and bathroom, and it can probably tow that Sports car along behind it, along with some mountain bikes up top, it also carries lots of passengers and a fair amount of cargo while its at it. So you can see how the logic works there too.

/automobile metphor

Finally...


If the points system is difficult as tax, is anyone going to bother with it?

I don't think its that difficult it only took me 5 or 10 minutes to figure out the point value(in the current system) of a standard Lorath Zahl Class. Besides the few people that are keeping track of ship contruction(which is pretty simple if you have the point values for each ship), the average player won't notice the difference, except for the setting being slightly more realistic in numbers.

 

[Abwehran Commander]

Plus, using this system to actually create test sheets between the Sakura Gunship and a random freighter (let's use the Odori), you can see that the freighter would be cheaper than the Sakura.

See example for Sakura

Odori Freighter
FTL Engine - 1,500
Hyperspace Drive - 0
Sublight Engine - 7,768 (six sublight engines from what I read)
Main Starship Super-weapon - 0
Main Gun Battery - 150
Secondary Guns - 100
Point-Defense Guns - 50
Main Generator - 800
Secondary generators - 200
Environmental Systems - 250
Computer - 100
Armor (per section of the ship) - 1350
Stealth Armor (per section) - 0
Sensor/Communications System - 200
Shield Systems - 1000
Nanotech systems - 200
Total: 13668
((Warning: The above chart may not be totally accurate, if anyone wants to test it out they can go ahead and do so.))

So in the end, the Sakura is about 16302 while the Odori is 13668. This means the Gunship is still more expensive than the freighter, even with the Odori's higher amount of sublight engines, main generators, and larger max. capacity.

 

[Karma Mechanic]

Actually I think an Idori is a lot less than that, because the STL cost is based on its speed primarily, and counts the STL as a single unit(as far as I can tell). So only about 971 cost for the STL on an Idori, that makes them very afordable at about 6871 each(if the rest of the data there is correct).

 

[Abwehran Commander]

On the little chart I was using, the top of the column said "Point Cost (Each)". So naturally, I took that 971 and multiplied it by the number of engines the Odori had. But now that you mention it, the STL drive seems to be counted as one unit.

This would make the Odori 6,871 to the Sakura's 16,302 and thus totally solidifying my arguement.

 

[Wes]

I still agree with Zakalwe in thinking we need to take into account the size of ships before we can move ahead with the point system (see my last post for some reasons).

The size and class of ships is already classified into levels in the damage rating scale.

This would make the Odori 6,871 to the Sakura's 16,302 and thus totally solidifying my arguement.

Right on. That's the whole purpose of this system. Now, battleships are more valuable than small cargo runners and such - before, it was just "copy-paste whatever you need" for fleet commanders. Now, it's "figure out what you need and invest in it."

They effectively own no planets, other than a barren planetoid which nothing more than a shipyard. All their shipbuilding resources comes from asteroid mining.

Asteroids belts orbit stars, though - that makes them part of a star system.

 

[Karma Mechanic]

The size and class of ships is already classified into levels in the damage rating scale.

Not really there are only a few vaguely if at all defined classes, none of which seem to be based on size all that much. In fact I would be unsure on where to put most ships in that, especially non-KFY ones.

...That's the whole purpose of this system. Now, battleships are more valuable than small cargo runners and such - before, it was just "copy-paste whatever you need" for fleet commanders. Now, it's "figure out what you need and invest in it."

I thought the whole idea was to stop people from coming up with ship out of thin air(no offense to the nodal system), effectively making ships a commodity based on their size and components.

If you hold to the system as it is now the CDD(150,000c) of a Jilanth Shuttle costs more than the CFS(110,000c) of a Takumi Command Cruiser, a ship over a hundred times the size of the shuttle at least(and over a thousand times the displacement). Under that logic if I swap the Jilanth's CDD into the Takumi it should go 150,000c. The same problem with its hyperspace fold also, the hyperspace fold on the shuttle(5ly/min) costs the same as a one from a capitol ship that does the same speed.

A similar problem come when ships of different sizes have the same power shields, which I might point out is very likely to happen in contacts between different spcies and factions. As it is now the cost of small craft are going to be higher than they should, and the cost of large ships is going to be far less than it should. If thats the case I recommend that everyone only build capitol ships because anything else is a waste when you can build a capitol ship for only what it takes to build a couple of patrol ships(which are only a tenth the size).

You've already done something like a size modifier by saying there are different numbers of armour sections for different ships; but there are a few flaws in that system; a ship the size of a Sakura (which has 8 armour sections according to you) might only have 5 or 6 large armour sections even though being the size of a Sakura, though that ship probably has a similar amount of surface area and raw amount of armour material, then again that same ship might have 18 smaller armour sections. It would be easy to convert this into a true modifier system which not only affects armour, but also shielding, and drive systems.

 

[Doshii Jun]

Karma/Scribbles has a point here. We want to restrict ship building and quantify it with a point system.

But before we do that, we need to have clear guidelines on how to build and rate a ship. Right now, there are no answers to the following:

• How many armor sections in a given class?
  
• How big can a ship in a certain class be before it crosses the line into another class?
  
• How do systems translate from a ship made by one race to another? (Yamatai civilians mixing Elysian tech with NDI tech or something.)
  
• How do we account for people (such as Millia, bless her soul) coming in and creating their own vessels? You teach them the system, sure, but how will they get it built?

The point of this exercise has always seemed to be, "Let's quantify ship building and stuff so we have an objective system that eliminates OOC squabbling." A fair goal, but it would be just as easy for The Man or a subordinate to just come by and say, "No, you get this many and that's it." Once you go down this road of building a system, you're inviting loopholes and galactic gerrymandering for resources. To some extent, that's part of the point, as right now mining only matters in a vague, ethereal sense. But doing things this way is just going to invite more trouble.

 

[Wes]

How many armor sections in a given class?

How many make sense given its make-up. Remember, ships with more sections will be more expensive, but also tougher.

 

[Zakalwe]

For enviromental systems shouldn't there be some allowance for how long they can sustain someone?

A small ship might measure it in days ... another ship in years or decades. So I'd have thought some system should be in place - altough x number of days seems rather ... extreme.

 

[Fred]

How many parts can you have added to a ship anyways? If you go that way, then the damage scale that's been worked up before gets a whole lot more complicated because I am certainly not buying that the Sakura gunships - as powerful as they are - actually can stand up evenly to a Irim. The heavy gunship ought to be able to soak in a whole lot more punishment... and simply because it's larger.

And no, I don't think you can add all that many parts to an Irim than the Sakura already has. Some things need to be generalized.

Wes, I understand that the subsection thing was a holdover from those board games you've played (I forget the brand, but I know Robotech on tabletop used it, and I know it was very convulted because I tried playing it) but I don't think - after seeing it in action for awhile - that the SARP can actually support this. The damage scale was an optional aid, not something to base off a whole lot of other things on.

I needed to have a better idea of how weapons handled and about how much some stuff could stand up before that sort of harm - so, I'm happy. However, putting everything in zesuaium (or close) and giving everything around nearly maximum values seriously gimps whatever advantage there would be from this.

Anyhow, to cut a long argument short, it remains my belief that the size comparison through subsections is a bad idea.

 

[Zakalwe]

Wes ... under the current system my fairly simple Velcoir shuttle costs half as much as a Concordia scout ship. Even though the scout ship could destroy dozens of them without breaking a sweat.

I put this partially down to the system not acounting for size - even one piece of armour leaves you with a lot of points for a 15m long ship.

Partially it's computer - should all computers really cost the same? Even when one on a shuttle is essentially a navigator and data collector only compared to the might of MEGAMI?

Should all power generators cost the same amount?

 

[Wes]

Well, I agree that the power systems and computers should be scaled.

 

[Karma Mechanic]

Classifying the common KFY ships wasn't too hard, in fact I can automatically do that with a simple Excel sheet. I thought of a few ways to judge the size of a ship, and for the most part I think I got a fairly good judgement of each ships size in relation to the others with the ones I already did.

If we to come up with a modifier number for each size class we could easily work it into the formulas we already have, so prices would be scaled better. I'm willing to help work on the numbers with someone or a few people (Wes? Thomas? Fred? Jake?) until we have a system that works out well for all size classes.

As for computers, maybe a short list giving cost values for common computers, from cheap armour computers up to a PANTHEON core.

 

[DocTomoe]

While I was figuring out some costs for small fighters and power armor, and finding them to be far too expensive to produce in significant numbers, I have come up with an idea.

I think it would be a good idea to apply the resource point cost for fighters, bombers, power armors, and other small craft as a cost for a certain ammount made.

If the system is used as is, a single power armor unit such as a Mindy would cost around 1500 resource points per unit, considering the number of Mindy fielded by the YSE, the Empire would be in severe debt.

Thus a system where a fee of 1500 resource points would be used for the building of 500 units or some numbers like that would be more useful.

 

[Karma Mechanic]

It might be a good idea to think about, along with the modifiers. But I still wanted to work with modifiers so we have a scale that will adjust for each size level.

I was thinking that the modifier for power armour(and probably shuttles and the like) wold be a decimal number(like 0.01 for example) that would be multiplied in the formula somewhere. Even with the modifiers though we might still have the cost be for a number of units.

 

[Derran Tyler]

If the system is used as is, a single power armor unit such as a Mindy would cost around 1500 resource points per unit, considering the number of Mindy fielded by the YSE, the Empire would be in severe debt.

Either that or you consider the components of a Mindy to be only a fraction as capable as their counterparts on any warship.

That way you can have more reasonable prices because they won't cost as much.

 

[Karma Mechanic]

...consider the components of a Mindy to be only a fraction as capable as their counterparts on any warship.

That way you can have more reasonable prices because they won't cost as much.

Basically that's what the proposed modifier system would do, most of the cost would likely be multiplied by the modifier to scale them according to their size. Armour would have a very low modifier, almost certainly on that is less than 1 (somewhere in the decimal range).

On another note though, is there anyone that wants to try to work out these numbers with me? I could do it myself and then propose it, but I was hoping for some input on it, particularlly from some of the very influential members of the site.