In Progress Extend the DR Scale by one Tier Category

[Yuuki]

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?

 

[FrostJaeger]

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.

Tourism, in my opinion, would simultaneously be difficult to quantify and easy to exploit - and besides, megastructures like a planetary ring or a Dyson Sphere are large (and rare) enough to the point where they don’t really fall under the purview of the DR system, as any damage that occurs to them is going to be decided by the GM of whatever plot they’re being used in.

Edit: As for scales, let me do a bit of research; will edit the post again when I’m done.

Edit #2: Nevermind, made a new post.

 

[HarperMadi]

Fair points to the both of you, and completely understandable.

 

[Yuuki]

Also y'all be loving my post and not upvoting the suggestion smh lol nvm looks like ppl did

 

[Charmaylarg Dufrain]

You can’t guilt trip me, I was the THIRD person to upvote!

 

[Yuuki]

Actually I think I meant to post that in the Tanya thread lol

 

[FrostJaeger]

Was going to edit this in, but… it kinda grew into a post of its own. Anyhoo…

• Rok’Veru-class Carrier: 3.569 kilometers
• Rampart Fortress: 5 kilometers
• Ascendancy-class Flagship: 6.2 kilometers
• Iori-Class Star Fortress: 13 kilometers
• Zodiac-Class Star Fortress: 13 kilometers
• Izanagi-class Dreadnaught: 22.59 kilometers
• Origin Orbital Space Station: 40 kilometers
• Kōdaina Minato-Class Orbital Installation: 43.56 kilometers
• Big Green Starbase: 204 kilometers

Based on the above, I came up with the following proposed size “bands”…

• Tier 15, Heavy Capital Ship: 2.5-10 kilometers
• Tier 16, Light Fortress: 10-25 kilometers
• Tier 17, Medium Fortress: 25-50 kilometers
• Tier 18, Heavy Fortress: 50+ kilometers

…which would make the above vessels and installations read as:

• Rok’Veru-class Carrier: Tier 15, Heavy Capital Ship - no change, but a good baseline.
• Rampart Fortress: Tier 15, Heavy Capital Ship - rip birbs ;-;7
• Ascendancy-class Flagship: Tier 15, Heavy Capital Ship
• Iori-Class Star Fortress: Tier 16, Light Fortress
• Zodiac-Class Star Fortress: Tier 16, Light Fortress
• Izanagi-class Dreadnaught: Tier 17, Medium Fortress
• Origin Orbital Space Station: Tier 17, Medium Fortress
• Kōdaina Minato-Class Orbital Installation: Tier 17, Medium Fortress
• Big Green Starbase: Tier 18, Heavy Fortress

A couple of things to note:

• I know that having the iconic Zodiac placed at the “lighter” end of the scale stings, Wes, but I ran some numbers and found that the Zodiac can comfortably mount its 6 Remote Aether Shock Arrays and 24 Aether Shock Arrays assuming the former is rated at Tier 16 (which, in my opinion, is more then enough to eviscerate all but the largest of hostile vessels), as the latter have already been converted to Tier 13 weapons. Things admittedly become tricky with the Star Army Weapon Pods, as the Zodiac only has enough room for 128 of them assuming the Weapon Pods are converted to Tier 9 - unless you count the Weapon Pods as drones instead of, well, weapons, which I’d permit were I reviewing the submission as a NTSE member.
• Now for the Izanagi-sized elephant in the room. Even at Tier 17, it’s still over the weapon limit at 15.47949219 - but by changing its weapon loadout to the following…
  • 1x Tier 17 Ke-B5-W3900 Amenonuhoko-Class Main Weapon Array
  • 38x Tier 14 Type 39 Anti-Fortress Turrets - these would need to be renamed to something like “Anti-Capital Turrets” if the new tier ends up being named the “Fortress” tier.
  • 22x Tier 13 Type 39 Superheavy Anti-Starship Turrets
  • 28x Tier 12 Type 39 Heavy Anti-Starship Turrets
  • 36x Tier 11 Type 39 Anti-Starship Turrets
  • 300x Tier 5 Type 39 Anti-Armor Turrets
  • 8x Tier 10 Banks of 32 Type 39 250mm Heavy Anti-Mecha Missile Racks
  • 2x Tier 13 Banks of 9 Type 39 500mm Vertical Launcher Bays
  • 300x Tier 9 Type 31 Star Army Anti-Fighter Turrets
  • 200x Type 39 Defensive Countermeasure Launchers
  …it comfortably fits into the weapon limits with a score of 9.995117. Is the missile “maneuver” bending the rules somewhat? Yes - but this a) is the Yamataian “flagship” (akin to the USNC Infinity, in my opinion, hence there should be one instead of 15) and b) nearly twice the size of a frakkin’ star fortress, which is why I personally think it’s fine. The 250mm are rated at Tier 10 because that’s what their article says - as opposed to the Izanagi’s article, which lists them as Tier 9/11 - and because in my opinion it fits their anti-fighter role better.
• The term ”Fortress” is just a placeholder - if you all wish to use something else, feel free to do so.

 

[Alex Hart]

A very thorough post, but it should be kept in mind that we've got a few dozen Izanagis running around by this point in time so it's not exactly a UNSC Infinity situation. There's 20 just sitting in orbit of a fleet depot, and about 20 more spread throughout the fleets. Do people think we should institute some kind of limit on things of a certain scale and above, like a "You get one per star system" separate from the existing "one huge space station per system" limit that already exists? Purely spitballing at this point

 

[FrostJaeger]

A very thorough post, but it should be kept in mind that we've got a few dozen Izanagis running around by this point in time so it's not exactly a UNSC Infinity situation. There's 20 just sitting in orbit of a fleet depot, and about 20 more spread throughout the fleets. Do people think we should institute some kind of limit on things of a certain scale and above, like a "You get one per star system" separate from the existing "one huge space station per system" limit that already exists? Purely spitballing at this point

I’d go even farther and make it one flagship/titan/whatever per faction, though - and I mean no offense by this - that should probably be made as a separate suggestion to avoid derailing this one.

 

[Yuuki]

I think the bands should be much wider as it gets bigger. 15-25 km probably isn't wide enough for the uppermost difference. Orders of magnitude between is better maybe.

 

[Alex Hart]

Did we ever come up with a range band that's agreeable to everyone?

 

[Fred]

Mm. Going to dance around topics to catch up.

On one hand, I'm not sure how much this extension will actually be useful.
The thought "If they extend it this time, when's the next time this will be insufficient and will be extended again, rather than 'fudging' on the bigger things?"
This feels more for designers than the people roleplaying around with that. A bit more in the "my e-peen is bigger than yours" territory. That was often in the territory of setting submissions.

As for Tier 15 being able to destroy something much larger... well, Tier 9 weapons are already capable of lay waste to large swaths of terrain. Tier 12 is already in the realm of planet-ending weapons. How tough can something man-made actually go?

I don't get the complaint about 'critical hits'. DRv3 isn't a weapon description, it's just an indicator if if a tool is capable of doing its job. A gun is built to do the job of killing a living being, often humanoid. Will it actually do it on application? It depends on the weapon. It depends of the user. It depends on how many tries you get (a.k.a.: rate of fire, accuracy). It depends on what the GM in charge adjuciates.

How does gatekeeping apply in light of that?

I don't get the references to tourism scale. Is the context "something that grows exponentially"?

* * *

However, Frostjaeger really gets what DRv3 is used for, he's shown a good understanding of its objectives, and he seems to have a plan.
Given Wes says the idea is popular, and that Frostjaeger has an actionable plan, I'm moved further towards the "Eh, why not?" stance.
As an adjustment, this feels like it could be a nicely modular add-on with not that much dramatic impact to what was there before beyond stuff that would generally 'make sense'.

I do agree that some stuff should fall out of scope, as in the mindbogglingly large orbital rings/dyson spheres. I just drew that bar earlier, since I considered planets and some MegaMcHuge ships in that scope already. But again, I like Frostjaeger's plan (and he has a plan, so, I like this)

And yes, DRv3 is more the standard of description than it is standard for policy.

 

[Soban]

I'm not 100% certain we should do this. However, if we do we should note that anything above tier 15 is typically not mobile.

 

[Yuuki]

Tier 12 is more like tsar bomba, given the anti-ship torp description

 

[Toshiro]

My key question: Do durability, armor thickness, and shield strength scale with size increase in such massive structures past Tier 15? Or is it simply the fact that there is more to destroy and increased redundancy/compartmentalization that makes them more durable? If the latter, we may be looking at "a group of assembled Tier 15 compartments" as much as anything else. Still vulnerable to weapons in the same way as the largest of ships, but harder to destroy simply by merit of being huge. Load balancing of energy barriers might be possible in a pinch to help with RPing the defense of such a structure, but I am suspecting that armor thickness and barrier energy density will hit a point where they don't scale with increased size.

This would also allow a few more ships to be able to do some damage to such a structure, particularly with concentrated fire, where otherwise they might not even be able to scratch it due to being 4 tiers or more below. In the worst case, Something that was "Tier 18" as some are considering would be almost invincible against even a Tier 15 weapon if we simply applied it the conventional way.

 

[Locked_0ut]

more to destroy and increased redundancy/compartmentalization

I've kinda just assumed that it's like this. It takes a lot more catastrophic damage to achieve a mission kill than on a smaller ship where you might take out a good chunk of crew and important systems with a single big hit

 

[Andrew]

As someone who only uses DR as a reference, you will have to excuse how I see things. But I will try to look at this as if I would use it,

Toshiro is onto something here, I think. If we scale structures beyond Tier 15, does this then require us to tier up weapons as well? Also, this creates a dilemma as most of these structures are stationary (With the exception of the Izanagi), which means very few ships would be able to make a critical hit on these structures to do any serious damage. It's not like they will face each other. So maybe we need to do something where the above Tier 15 structures are still affected by the Tier 15 weapons.

 

[Alex Hart]

I do agree that some stuff should fall out of scope, as in the mindbogglingly large orbital rings/dyson spheres. I just drew that bar earlier, since I considered planets and some MegaMcHuge ships in that scope already.

I think this is a good idea in general, such things beyond the scale of tens of KM generally can't be mobile in the traditional STL sense at any kind of speed, and beyond that they're more story setting than 'starship' or "Starbase" so they shouldn't really even be considered in the same realm.

Toshiro is onto something here, I think. If we scale structures beyond Tier 15, does this then require us to tier up weapons as well? Also, this creates a dilemma as most of these structures are stationary (With the exception of the Izanagi), which means very few ships would be able to make a critical hit on these structures to do any serious damage. It's not like they will face each other. So maybe we need to do something where the above Tier 15 structures are still affected by the Tier 15 weapons.

I think that keeping tier 15 as the weapon maximum will help to make these structures and ultralarge starships more impactful, as it is more difficult to destroy them. However, even with only tier 15 weapons against a theoretical tier 18 station or gigadreadnought you can still hurt it, it just means that you're not going to be putting them out of comission quickly and I think that's the way it probably ought to be, given the rarity of these things (~1 per faction star system or so) they ought to be commensurately hard to kill.

 

[Charmaylarg Dufrain]

I'm not 100% certain we should do this. However, if we do we should note that anything above tier 15 is typically not mobile.

Only because I have a horse in this race even if it would be grandfathered in; Nep has an over T-15 in this category military station that is FTL capable even if it is canonically the slowest moving FTL capable object in the sector and can be detected across it when it does.

I dont want the wiki-Gestapo that sometimes pops up to correct the wrongs to try to mess around with my stuff.

As for andrew and toshis comments on weapons? I say leave weapons capped at T-15 as we dont need anything else. And if someone makes a superplanetkillingmegagun; It's T-15 for Dr purposes and whatever the hell it is in RP~

Make a stipulation in whatever DR article this ends up in about these tiers just existing for the sake of scale and size and not being a meta. Because we all know my Big Green is going to go from the largest military station in the sector to the smallest T-16 or whatever when the next person makes theirs and covers it with a boundary-pushing amount of weapons becasue of oneupmanship and people always needing to build the biggest, strongest, bestests, most powerfulliest thing than the last so it will be relevant.

Im going to ride this horse until I die but the more steps, categories, and stuff we add to create something the more into the wrong direction I think we're going and am really only giving my two cents every now and then here because I liked my relevant-to-this-thread megastructure that was unique and will soon be belittled in no time as the very drawbacks I made to justify making it so big are disregarded for the very next person wanting a meta instead of an RP tool that will just be argued over instead of actually RP'd.

 

[Andrew]

Like the way, you explained that @Alex Hart .

 

[Alex Hart]

Im going to ride this horse until I die but the more steps, categories, and stuff we add to create something the more into the wrong direction I think we're going and am really only giving my two cents every now and then here because I liked my relevant-to-this-thread megastructure that was unique and will soon be belittled in no time as the very drawbacks I made to justify making it so big are disregarded for the very next person wanting a meta instead of an RP tool that will just be argued over instead of actually RP'd.

I actually think that the Big Green qualifies as the kind of "Beyond DR system" type of thing that Fred was talking about, and isn't really quantifiable.
Edit: I also think that basically every above-tier-15 thing designed for combat is going to have to be heavily scrutinized.