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

Everyone’s heard the old adage about opinions and a-holes. Everyone’s got one. Well, so do I.
I usually hold my opinions to myself, but this one’s been bothering me since last night so I’m kind of getting things off my chest.
When you post a message on a social media forum such as FaceBook, for example, you are essentially, in my opinion (yep, there’s that word again), soliciting the opinions of others. You should, in my estimation, not expect all of those opinions to necessarily agree with yours. If you expect only agreement, perhaps you shouldn’t be posting that comment at all because people, being what they are, are different. Everyone’s got an opinion and they all stink. If you can’t accept an opinion that differs from yours maybe you need to grow up a bit and grow a thicker skin.
I get really upset with snowflakes sometimes who seem to think that only their opinion matters, that their posts are not necessarily inviting a difference of opinion or a differing viewpoint.
Case in point: I watched the SuperBowl halftime show last night and found the pole dance and the display of the Puerto Rican flag distasteful. Now, yes, I know she’s Puerto Rican and I know Puerto Rico is a US Territory. That’s not the point. In my opinion the SuperBowl is a family-oriented national event and that is the point. A pole dance is inappropriate for a family-oriented event. Display of any state’s flag is inappropriate.
That’s my opinion and you’re entitled to it or not. Your choice.
Some people I found to be rather self-serving and entitled jumped on me about it and attacked. They, of course, claim they were not attacking, but I know a punch in the nose when I feel one. Turns out the OP is a literary agent working out of Seattle so I expect he feels all entitled and superior. Literary agents are, after all, the self-appointed “gatekeepers” of traditional publishing.
Well, let me tell you a little something – they’re not and they’re not entitled to my money, my submissions, nor my work.
I have somewhere north of one million words in print right now. All of that is Indie via Amazon and Kindle Direct or Smashwords or via a 35 year career as a technical writer wherein I wrote reports for submission to Underwriter’s Laboratories, the USFDA, proprietary clients, and many others. I’ve written instructions for Machinists, Assemblers, Fabricators, and many other applications. I’ve written daily activity reports for security companies and advanced pharmaceutical companies. I’ve written games and game manual, 2 novels, and numerous short stories
My opinions are carefully-formed and well-educated and I seriously doubt the OP of the FB post referenced above has ever written a word of his own. He’s a gatekeeper, or considers himself one, and he thinks he is entitled to be one of the elite few and his opinions should be respected above all.
Guess what, opinions are like a-holes. Everyone’s got one and they all stink.
So, when I give my opinion it is exactly that – my opinion and mine alone and it usually stinks to someone else.
Deal with it – or don’t.
In that case, not my circus, not my monkeys. You are as entitled as I am, but do not try to wield your vocabulary and wit over me like a club. You may be surprised by my own.
And if you are an entitled a-hole and you think you have a right to post a comment inviting opinion without my expressing my own, don;t be surprised if I disagree with you.

Writer, editor, publisher of the 4X space empire-building and strategy play-by-email game Fire On The Suns, author of the novels Hatchings and Fire On The Suns and numerous short stories, ex-technical writer, and all around vagabond.

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