Hi Mike. I noticed the same thing when I started trying to do my own conversions as well. The SFU to Starmada Conversion is a bit "fudged" in KA and RA. The intent of the designer was to make sure the ships had the right feel rather than having an exact point for point conversion. If you plug the designs from KA or RA into the shipyard or Ship builder spreadsheets you'll find oddities in CRs and especially in SUs. If you wanted to be consistent across all the races from the SFU I would suggest doing your own conversion using the rules/weapons from KA & RA. In the end you will have to adjust a lot of designs, and you will see which ones are just flat out "broken", but they should all play nice together. I would also recommend possibly "downsizing" the SFB designs to fleet scale from FC (a simple explanation of this is available on ADBs site). I have played around with this, and it seems to work a little better for Starmada. Since Starmada is a more fleet oriented game anyway I was actually surprised that the FC Fleet Scale wasn't used as a baseline (although some of the small ships do get very small).
Anyway, I hope through my rambling I have actually managed to help, somehow.
Cheers,
Erik

The Fleet Scale from Federation Commander basically halves everything on the SFB sheet, therefore making it possible to play a lot more ships at once (fewer rolls, fewer numbers of systems, ships go "BOOM" faster). I think that if you want to play big fleets it might be worth a look. Personally, I have played around with simply reducing the number of weapons from the SFB designs by half (rounding up) when doing conversions to Starmada, as without power constraints teh Starmada versions seem a bit "overgunned". Overall, the ships have much less crunch power and fights should last a little longer. Considering most of the games I have played have been more around squadron sized rather than fleet sized, that is fine with me.
Erik

KLA and RMA are based off the Federation Commander game and are not a direct port of SFB (if I remember my discussion with Dan back in June 09).

Further, in my own humble opinion, the problem lies in SFB. I enjoy SFB. But  Starmada is internally consistent in ship construction, while SFB is not. As Cole said way back in 1979, it's a little hard to create a real-world battle simulation off a 100+ hours of television film and a few blueprints by an architect. As far as I know, SFB never had a published design system, so shoehorning more and more weapons  and systems into the same basic hull became a way of life (in real-world navies the term is "squeezing too many quarts into a pint pot"). Steve Cole himself mentioned in early designer's notes that he liked smaller ships with more weapons and that's the way SFB headed.

In SFB, turning a D6 into a carrier D6CV involved removing two phaser 2s and adding 6 shuttle bays. No SU calcs, just a fiat. (Does a phaser 2 installation REALLY consume the same volume as three shuttle bays? How about a Phaser 1? And if a Phaser 3 can fit on a shuttle craft leaving room for 8 people, a rest room, galley, and transporter...why does it  consume even one system box on the SSD of a 500 meter long starship and take a half power point to fire? And just why is a Phaser 4 restricted to starbases? Because it's too big? But 14 phaser 1s and 8 disruptors have no trouble fitting on the GomperStomper dreadnought?)

Want a Constellation-class command cruiser? Well, add a couple flag bridges, couple all-arc phaser 1s, and bang, you're done. There  was no real consideration how you fit all this extra stuff into the same size hull. I guess they took out the swimming pools and discos (swimming pools were actually mentioned in the original Designer's Edition (tongue in cheek, I'm sure)).

Anyway, since Starmada (and Full Thrust to a lesser extent) starts with the concept that Things consume Space, and Things' functionality is proportional to Space consumed, you're bound to have some misalignment with SFB's "wishlist" ship design.

I'm not sure why Dan felt it necessary to "fudge" the ratings for the Starfleet ships. I'm guessing essential Starmada calcs ended up having the core "cruisers" (Fed CA, D7) being very unbalanced while SFB maintains they are roughly equal. Anyone tried making a Fed CA vs a Klingon D7 using plain vanilla Starmada construction rules?

Okay, you didn't "fudge"-you applied "undocumented" tech levels.

And there was this post from somebody named "cricket" back in Oct09
"...Yes, the values are "wrong", and yes, it's frustrating to those of you trying to recreate the ships on your own -- ..."

This cricket dude seemed to imply that we unwashed masses couldn't reproduce the KLA combat values using the essential Starmada construction rules, where Tech Level is an option, not a core rule.

So I assumed Dan had to shoehorn some calcs.

So far as SBF/FC SSD boxes not directly relating to Starmada SUs, I understand that. SFB gave the player predesigned ships and "rolling your own" was not part of the game system. I consider that ability to design your own ships in Starmada to be a HUGE advantage for the Starmada game system.  And now I can, with some "rationality", refit my Fed CA with a Type R Plasma torp while trying to figure out what equipment to ditch. And for that, Dan, I thank you.

Is there somewhere online the actual Shipbuilder spreadsheets that you used to work up the SFU ships?

I don't think there's a reason for starting to fudge. Using the calculators available in the "files" section of this forum I get points values very close to those in KA when I type in the ships. The combat values are only off by a few points, hardly anything that would upset the balance of the game (5-6 points deviation on a 300 point ship is not really a problem at all)

This wasn't an admission that I fudged any CR values -- it was related to an error I made when computing the ships for Klingon Armada.

Ok, I see that. Sorry to rant all over your thread    I guess KA & RA represent a departure from the "norm" of Starmada where the system trumps the setting and I have let that get under my skin.

True.

http://www.mj12games.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2187