That's what I did as an option in my heavily modified VBAM/SX spreadsheet I am using in the Solar Federation campaign. I called it "Weakened Hull Plating" or something to that effect. It works as you described above, and returns a percentage of SUs comparable to what Armor Plating usually takes away.

So far it has not been used too much, though in the testing I did it made it viable for the very primitive low tech powers (my TL -3 guys) to build actual starships. Otherwise they were having a hard time building anything worthwhile.

-Tyrel

I hope to possibly zip everything up and upload tomorrow sometime, after I get Starlight turns finished and a few other things done. At about 55 pages so far, and the Secrona War has both started and ended since the last update.

I am probably going to tweak the Macro tech research increase from 5x normal to 4x. 5x is a little much, but still much better than the 1x from the Starmada Edition book (as far as my play style and assumptions on the tech system go).

Researching weapons separately as directed research projects has worked well. It forces you to think ahead, which is always good. It also keeps a players from deploying wild new gadgets or weapon variations without putting some investment into it.

I will likely implement a prototyping system for them, too, just to make things interesting. Probably something roughly like Jay's main prototype rules from the book, but with any positive effect being an A-OK result, and the others just meaning that the research project failed to be achieved and needs several more turns to actually complete successfully.

After talking with Charlie, I also decided to change the main prototyping chart for this campaign around a bit. Basically everything gets shifted down one spot, with the 1st slot now being a perfect result, plus a maintenance bonus (woo hoo!) and the 9th slot (now 10th) requiring a re-roll (d10); on 1-5, you get the current 9, on 6-10 you get the current 10. I am just really sick of that 10% chance of my prototypes exploding effecting almost every unit I try to prototype. This has happened across three campaigns, usually on prototypes that cost 10+ EP to build and/or take years to complete. Bah, I say, bah!

Things are getting interesting. So far there have been two more alien contacts, one IND-2 (but nearly IND-3) and another IND-3. So it could get pretty interesting in the future.

Unless something else comes up by the end of this campaign year I will probably introduce a new INT-1 power into the campaign on 2206.1 just to liven things up a bit and add a third wheel to challenge Terran and Secrona domination of these lesser species.

-Tyrel

Thematically, I think such options are good to have around.

I did something similar with a piece of "Exposed Engines" special equipment I needed for a set of lower tech ships that needed to capture the essence of the aft-mounted engines found on some Babylon 5 Wars ships I was converting over. I forget what values I used, but it works along the same way that it gives up some space (based on size of engines in this case), but each Engine hit makes a roll, with another engine being destroyed on a '5' or '6'.

But for fitting a specific racial theme it is excellent. It would also be good in a campaign, since it would allow some younger races to get away with a little bit better ships, but at the risk that a good hit is going to make them crumple like tinfoil.

-Tyrel

Guess what? The Solar League made its tech advance. The array looked like this:

1    Halves Shields
2    Ignores Shields
3    No Range Modifiers
4    Fighters: Assault
5    Shield Resonant

Gess what I rolled? Yes, a '4'. No shield tech beaters for me! Not for another two years! Sigh.  I could *possibly* get one as soon as next year, but it is doubtful.

-Tyrel

It is nice to have a tactical system directly integrated, and one with a tight ship construction system to boot I thought this would probably be the only way I would get well-aquainted with the S:X rules

So the vote seems to be for the deployment of an Extra Hull Damage + Increased PEN weapon with high ROF. Unfortunately for mounting options, a heavily refitted Sun Quan CL is looking like the only legitimate prospect, which isn't a good sign. I think prototyping a new ship is going to be in order to get this done, especially if I want to slip a Stealth Generator onboard, too.

As for stripping off hyperdrives... well, you see, that is another problem with my fleet now. Only my Repulse BCs, my Prometheus EXs, and one old class of CA have hyperdrives. Which is going to make things dicey, as that means that the only travel is now by jump gate, unless I can get Mitch Pileggi and the UES Daedalus back from exploration in Ross 154 (or wherever it is he is out passed Alpha Centauri).

I have loaded the chart with all of the options, so in three months I should (crosses fingers) hopefully have at least one of them, which will help me out immensely. Though prototyping a new ship with the weapon is probably out of the question, and building refits of other classes can get extremely expensive (and I am even using a modified version of the VBAM: SX refit rules, so things are a bit costlier besides).

The situation with the Altairians would be funny if not for the fact that it is happening to me. As far as AIX statistics go, they are AG 32, IN 26, XE 73 (stats are Aggressiveness, Integrity, and Xenophobia in that order, for those without the Companion). So at AG 32 the Altairians shouldn't be all that hostile towards me. They really should love me. But I ended up with a starting relationship of 16 with them, and then the Altairians rolled a negative Critical Diplomatic Shift and instantly declared hostilities and decided to come and gobble me up. Our current relationship, influenced solely by the NPE rules, is -2. Yes, a negative relationship. Sigh.

I have a feeling that is going to be the case. I had hoped to find a backdoor into their empire so that I could open up another front, but that is looking unlikely. It is just really sad that Barnard's Star was my largest, most heavily populated system outside of Sol itself (5 Census in Barnard, which based on population densities would be about 150,000 to 200,000 people).

Did I mention that the Altairians have jump-capable stealth fighters?

Oi.

As for the other suggestions...

Yes, min-maxing is bad, but I am weeping for the security of Earth so I just got desperate! So a large number of less effective weapons (as Dan posted) might be preferrential to loading up on smaller numbers quality weapons? I might have to give it a try on the Tribal Hull and see what comes out of it. I might even prototype a new Tribal successor with some of those technologies onboard. I also have a newer frigate design, but I am not sure how well it would have faired since its nearly-complete final prototype was destroyed by the Altairians when they took Gibraltar.

Yeah, the Eagle CA is undergunned, but its defenses have made it extremely difficult to crack, especially for our largley Energy beam armament coming into the war. We are transitioning towards a Kinetic/Ballistic mix at the moment. But with the PDS systems even that doesn't help us out all that much.

Bombers? Yeah, that would be nice. But I don't have any *weep* I have Arrow light fighters that, while minimally effective, have suffered outrageous attrition rates against the enemy Nighthawk Stealth fighters. I am just waiting for the Altairians to go all Strak'ha on me and develop a successor Nighthawk that adds Ballistic capabilities and can load some sort of killer torpedo weapon as special equipment. Then I most assuredly will cry.

I will see what I can do with these options. The Repulse will likely be refitted heavily and outfitted with some of the weapons that have been proffered on possibilities.

-Tyrel

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I just thought I would check on the cover issue. I don't know if it is the laminant that they use on the covers or what, but the covers on our books just seem a bit washed out or lightened compared to what they should be.

The book is 8.5x11. Lulu only does two or three sizes, to they either scale up or down as desired. I have noticed that the books that we had printed through another printer for distribution print at the smaller size, so it is an oddity.

-Tyrel

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I believe that the 1/4" variation is only in relation to bleeds. So you could put up to 1/4" bleeds on whatever project you submitted, but not anything more than that. Otherwise, yes, the book size is limited to 8.5" x 11" or 6" x 9".

I know there are some issues with Lulu as far as their instructions go. The covers were one place where I wasn't quite sure what the green bar that went around was trying to tell me -- whether that was the bleed, or would be chopped off, or what. But you live and learn! Part of the reason it is good to setup a secondary Lulu account just to test some of the things out to make sure they will work right when RPGNow gets around to inputting the information (I hope that goes smoothly).

One other benefit in a roundabout way of setting up a separate Lulu store is that you can also offer alternative printings for the customers, be it spiral instead of perfect bound or full-color instead of just a greyscale printing.

Like any printer (POD or offset), it takes a little bit of time to get used to how they want files processed. But in Lulu's case, you can at least get a reasonable idea of what they *think* they have to print off of!

-Tyrel

Phew! I was hoping there wasn't a problem there. I know that the Boltian/Kuissian book originally had a cover error through Lulu (pre-RPGNow/Lulu going public, when we were doing some side testing), but I didn't know how the main book ended up turning out from them. I bought a copy of each of our source books through them, just to check those, but haven't went and ordered the Guide itself yet.

One thing I noticed on our books was that the covers seemed to be washed out a bit, likely because of the laminant, but that is fairly minor. That and where the VBAM look is the drab, industrial motif (complete with diamond plate!), it kind of fits

I am very interested in seeing how that Grand Fleets cover turns out to be honest, as it will let me see whether it is a CMS problem on my end with the VBAM books. That and I really wanted a copy of that came in print for reference

If Dan ever gets the other core books (S:X or SX: Brigade) available through the system, he is guaranteed at least one sale -- though he has hard copies sitting around already, so it will probably be awhile (and I am too lazy to hunt the other copies down!).

BTW, though it is not really consistent with the thread topic, it is nice getting an e-mail digest of the forum messages forwarded on to the Yahoo Group, as then I knew that someone had replied to this thread. Of course, Dan is giving me forum-envy and I will need to figure out more about phpBB to compete!

-Tyrel