You are not logged in. Please login or register.
Play nice. (This means you.)
Logins from the previous forum have been carried over; if you have difficulty logging in, please try resetting your password before contacting us. Attachments did not survive the migration--many apologies, but we're lucky we kept what we could!
mj12games.com/forum → Posts by Christopher
Pages 1
I wish I had a dad like you 25 years ago. 
I second the recommendation of its predecessor, Dreadnought, although that book actually has less to do with the ships than it does with the personalities involved with the run up to the war like Fisher, Wilhelm II, Bismarck, etc.
I was just reading about coal bunkers in Robert Massie's "Castles Of Steel" last week.
The book mentions that it was the German navy's practice in the years leading up to and during WW1 for coal bunkers to always be kept at the very least half full. It does not, however, go into great detail as to why. Protection may have been a factor, but more likely it was to have a large enough coal reserve for sudden bursts of speed.
It should be noted that surface area is limited...a good portion being taken up by weapons mounts and such rudementary things like sensors and point defense. The larger the ship, however, the more available surface area there will be
That being said, there will always be more volume of a shape than surface area, at least so far as I've found, making it more cost effective from a numbers standpoint to carry fighters inside the ship rather than outside.
True, but then I don't think it's an either/or thing. Ships could be carried both within and on (which is why I arbitrarily made the amount of SU allocated to Carrier function at least double the size of the smaller ship's SU plus a constant of 100 SU, rounded up to the nearest 50). One always needs to be able to pull something completely inside for overhauling, after all. So to carry other craft with a maximum hull size of 2 the requirement is 600 SU set aside (247*2+100 rounded upwards). And since a not insignificant amount of interior space is now devoted to things other than the sensors and weapons that would otherwise be mounted on the ship that leaves even less call for surface area to be allocated to them.
And depending on the shape of a ship, surface area can be very large relative to volume. A carrier shaped like a flat, wide pancake has a lot of surface area when compared to a more compact spherical one of identical volume: 200m x 100m x 20m has (almost) the same volume as 75m x 75m x 72m, but its surface area is more than 50% greater. Big flat carriers and small cubic or spherical fighters makes Chris a happy boy. :mrgreen:
I've moved in this direction myself, so I'm not fond of the fighter rules. It got me to thinking: what if the smaller ship sizes (hulls sizes 1 or 2 or even possibly 3) are the de facto fighters (say a light fighter, heavy fighter and fighter/bomber), and they get carried inside the larger ships to battle. That way the larger ones have the Hyperdrive and the smaller ones can focus on more combat related equipment.
The problem is that the volume of a Hull Size of 1 and a Hull Size of what one would typically consider for a carrier (say 14-18) aren't so far apart what one could imagine even a larger ship holding a dozen smaller craft while still having a reasonable chance of moving and defending itself.
Solution: why do the fighters have to be inside the carrier? Since there's no "up" in space and no intrinsic requirement that that actually be stored inside, there's no reason why several little vessels can't be carried on the outside of the larger one like seeds on a strawberry. I still have to figure out the maximum the large ship can carry, or how much "carrier" space needs to be allocated to control, repair, arming, launching, etc., but I think the basic principle is sound.
I might just bite the bullet and get those Buck Rogers ones. I certainly can't argue with the price. Thanks for the link.
On the other hand, I just found out a couple of weeks ago that the 30+ pounds of Lego I had accumulated back in the '70s and '80s wasn't sold by my parents at a garage sale when they moved home, but instead has been quietly sitting in storage in a Rubbermaid bin. Perhaps I should use my imagination a bit - although fitting them in a 1.5" hex with any level of detail is going to be a task....
I've noticed that neither Google Documents nor the clunky MS Works program that came bundled with my Vista machine runs either the official or the alternate shipbuilding modules without errors (like an inability to properly display remaining SU) and lost features (specifically a lack of drop-down menus for selecting addtional weapons features).
When I've opened it on Excel I've not had these problems. Everything seems to work splendidly. Unfortunately I don't own Excel, so I'd be forced to do all my shipbuilding at work. Not something that would be looked upon kindly for obvious reasons.
Any suggestions on free or low-cost spreadsheet programs? I really don't feel like shelling out $150 to Microsoft.
The EM4 ones were the ones I did see that didn't appeal to me. I agree they look a little atmospheric. I just didn't want to name names. :oops:
I think the GW ones look intriguing, but are a little too OTT and are probably too big also - I couldn't find GW mentioning sizes on any of the minatures, but the large ones certainly don't look like they'd fit comfortably on a 2" hex.
Maybe I'll just print up some counters instead....
I just received my copy of the Starmada books in the mail (yay!) and have a Hotz mat I'm about to order. Now to find some miniatures of ships.
My problem: I don't like lead ones. It's just a personal thing - I don't plan on painting them, so something cast in plastic is more than adequate. However, I've perused what must be 20 or more sites that sell SF miniatures, but only one sold plastic ships, and those were (to me, at least) aesthetically unpleasing. I did a search in the forum archives, but other than 3D printing there seems to be precious little mention.
Can anyone point me towards a good source for reasonably priced plastic ones? They'll go on either a 2" or 1-1/2" hex.
Thanks in advance.
Never before in the field of human endeavour have so many sideburns been worn by so many....
Cheers, thanks for that. It seems quite logical.
I'm a "roll your own" sort of guy when it comes to vehicle design (back in the late '80s I probably had 150 pages of Car Wars designs in various notebooks), so it sounds like the SRA is the way to go.
Hi folks. I've been looking for a good space combat game (I used to play Star Frontiers Knight Hawks 20 years ago, but that was then and this is now).
A couple of newbie questions I'd like answered if that's okay.
What is the difference between the Imperial Starmada Sourcebook and the Starmada Rules Annex? Obviously I'd need to buy the Core Rulebook first, and both look like they cover the same ground, yet the "shorter" of the two (the SRA) purports to cover multiple supplements (including the ISS).
Needless to say this has me a little confused. Can anyone elaborate on what sort of overlap exists between the two? Does the purchase or one negate the need to purchase the other?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Pages 1
mj12games.com/forum → Posts by Christopher
Powered by PunBB, supported by Informer Technologies, Inc.