I run a game called Fire On The Suns. I started designing this game back in 1995. From there it has been in more or less in constant operation for almost 25 years.
I originally designed game to be rather free and open-ended in regards to ship design. Since then I’ve been able to import ships and sometimes export ships and designs to other systems such as Starfleet Battles (SFB), Starfire, Babylon 5, and a few others. It’s much easier to import a ship from another system than it is to export a ship to that particular system.
However, a great many details and fine-tuning has gone into the system such that we’ve got a pretty good system pounded out today or at least I do.
This sometimes cause confusion among players which is only natural with a system that has a huge number of design priorities and choices that players can make. But FOTS was designed to be flexible as I believe it is. It approaches the design flexibility of games like Starfire without the restrictions of games like Starfleet battles. Certain games like Armada, A Call To Arms, Full Thrust, and a few others approach our ability to import and export our designs from other systems, but I don’t think any surpasses FOTS. Of course, I am somewhat biased in this regard.
A request was recently made that I explain a little bit about our design system, and so this post is partly the beginning of that explanation.
The first thing to be considered in importing a ship to the FOTS system is the actual size of the whole ship. All sizes have two aspects – 1) the hull size, and 2) the number of equipment spaces that hull can hold. Generally, a starting player’s race or species can build hulls that have 2 equipment spaces per hull point. For example, a fairly typical heavy cruiser with the whole of 12 has 24 equipment spaces.
Pretty straightforward, right?
The first thing to determine when trying to bring a design into FOTS then should be its hull size. It’s actually pretty easy to do this in most cases. You count of the number of boxes on the ship and divide by 2.
In the case of a system like Star Fleet Battles that’s not so easy. SFB is a bit more detailed in how they treat their ship system displays and how many boxes those SSDs have. We solve that by counting each weapon box as a separate weapon, and each set of lab boxes or cargo bay boxes as a single system. In the case of warp drive and impulse engines, we ignore the number of boxes in the drive system since FOTS uses a different movement system and number of movement points than most other games do. FOTS Tactical Comand uses a vector-based movement system and starships rarely move faster than speed 6 (20% light speed) and the FOTS Battle Engine does not take movement considerations in effect much at all. In addition, there is no power allocation in FOTS although there is thrust allocation. In essence then we just call warp drive and impulse drive “engines”.
Okay, now we’ve got all those internal systems counted upand we divide the total by 2. That is your ship’s hull size. Double that number is how many systems you can have inside ship.
In regards to shields, I usually count up the total number of boxes on the SFB SSD of the forward shield and divide by 3, rounding to the nearest whole number.
In most cases this will give you a reasonable number of shields. In FOTS shields exist outside the hull along with their generators so those are the first things to fall in battle. Shields do not have internal generators or systems inside the ship, absent certain special technologies which will be addressed later in this series, and also take up no space inside the ship although they do add cost to the ship.
The next step is to determine the ship’s armor plating and the layout of its internal systems.
Since 90% of SFB ships have no armor plating this is fair easy to determine and does not have to be notated. Armor is plated around the outside of a ship’s hull and also takes up no space internally since it rides outside the hull although it still adds to the ship’s cost.
It is important to note that several weapons systems can penetrate shields, armor, or both and some can penetrate and then randomly hit systems inside a ship’s hull, but that is getting into combat and weapons effects and is beyond the scope of this part of this series.
Everything else, from cargo bays to troop barracks to weapons to spinal mounts to long-range scanners to hangar bays, aside from external ordnance racks,take up equipment spaces inside a hull.
This completes Part 1 of this introduction to importing a design to FOTS from another system or game.
I will be continuing this introduction in future posts.
Your comments and thoughts will be considered and appreciated as well as possibly addressed in later postings.
Thanks,
Greg
The Rumor Mill 