Orion
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 16 May 2008
Posts: 146
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 Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 2:27 am Post subject: Starship Power rules (under construction) |
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Reposting in the proper section an idea originally posted in this thread.
http://www.rancorpit.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2494&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
In reading the thread on variable power blasters, Gry Sarth made a reference to the Power Control rules in Far Orbit and Vong expressed a desire to see power rules for starships.
| Gry Sarth wrote: | | The only applicable example from the official rules I can think of is the Power Control optional rule on page 25 of The Far Orbit Project. It describes rerouting power from one system to make the other more powerful, such as taking power from the engines or shields to add damage to your lasers. |
| vong wrote: | yea, ive always wanted to see what a setup would look like where a ship has 10D in power.
Then you distribute it to guns / engines / shields as you see fit. not sure on how it would work though. |
These two things gave me the following idea outline.
| Orion wrote: | The easiest place to start seems to be with the Power Control rules in Far Orbit. They state that a ship has enough power to power all of it's systems simultaneously and enough carrying capacity to pass an extra 2D to any system. They also suggest that the reason a ship going all-out cannot fire is due to power limitations and even suggest that they may not be able to use shields either. So this gives us some limiting factors.
First we add up all the weapon damage dice and shield dice, this is the easy part.
Next we need to come up with a power expenditure for movement perhaps converting space movement back to dice using the chart, I seem to remember someone mentioning somewhere on this forum, or by simply assigning X number of space to 1 pip of power. This will require looking at a broad number of ships to get it balanced. A ship needs enough power to reach it's maximum speed, but not have a lot left over.
Now we can think about tertiary systems, such as Life Support, Nav-Comps, and Inertial Dampers. Including these systems will mean we will have to come up with penalties for under powering them.
- Life Support probably uses more power than you think, because it's not only providing air and water, but more importantly heat in a vary cold environment. Lowering the heat could cause other systems to fail, since electronics are very temperature sensitive on the whole.
- Nav-Comps and computers in general don't use vary much power at idle, but the more they do the more power they need, so a Nav-Comp making calcs for lightspeed is going to be using a fair amount of power as those calcs are very complex. Under powering it will at least prolong the time it takes to make the calcs and may even cause errors in them. We might even consider power requirements for fire control computers.
- Inertial Dampers are for undoing G-forces, so you can make the argument that they require more power the faster you go, because the G-forces will be higher when preforming maneuvers at those speeds, for simplicities sake we will say that need to be powered up to the appropriate level, ahead of time, in order to undo those G's on demand. This allows us to use them to limit power usage for other things at higher speeds and under powering them can mean stress damage to other systems.
As you can see it's very basic and rough, and will require a lot of reasearch into the various ships to fine tune it, but it's a place to start if someone wants to look into it. |
Now I have too many projects going to get to this anytime soon, so I thought I would post it, to see if anyone would like to run with it. This thread can be used for discussing the ideas in the outline, expanding on them or even presenting alternate methods of accomplishing the idea and anyone is welcome to refine this into workable set of rules. If no one picks it up, I will post the rules I develop in this thread when I finally get to a point that I can work on them. |
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The Magician
Cadet
Joined: 25 Oct 2009
Posts: 1
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| Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2009 8:45 pm Post subject: |
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I actually did something very similar back in 1999. Running a smugglers campaign (which is still going, after a few years break) I implemented power core rules to help keep everyone busy on ship.
I looked at the millennium falcon's exploits in the films, then looked at the WEG stats for various ships. The resulting rules are here.
I also have the "theory" pages somewhere on my hard drive, if anyone is interested. |
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