Kind of a late hit on this topic. But it is a slow night and I got the next installment of my N.C done early, so I had some free reading time.
Nah, don't worry about it. I'm glad to discuss this topic!
Don't know where you are on the hull table, but the ES sort of looks like the odd ball on the list. The table has a really clean progression until you hit the 1/3 ratio for the ES. What would you think of changing it to 8 HS with a 1/4 to continue the table's feel. All the ship HS counts seem to give each one balance, and a clear role, but it looks like the ES and CT will kind of suffer the overlap that they have now. Too close to each other, with the CT being the heavier hitter. I've seen tons of CT swarms. Almost no ES swarms. A flat per HS cost is great but I think it will just accentuate the CT's dominance.
Procyon, the thing to remember about hull tables is (this may seem like a bit of hyperbole) that they're only as good as the engines associated with them. If you've seen lots of CT swarms but few ES swarms, then it's almost certainly because everyone's using I drives, because I drives always have the CT as the largest hull for a given speed. In 3e terms, the CT would have been the largest spd 8 hull, while the DD was the largest spd 7 hull, and the BC was the largest spd 6 hull.
I've used the same strategy as was used on the Ultra hull table in this regard... different engine types have different "largest" hull types at each speed. Thus, with my J drives, the FG, CA, and DN's are the largest hull types for for their speeds, while the CL and BB are the largest hull types for the P drive.
The point of this is that races that use a different drive type will quite likely end up preferring different hull types ... hull types that are the largest for a given speed.
If you were to drop it back to 8 HS, it would definitely fill another role that wouldn't be in competition with the CT, at least no more than the CT is now in competition with the FG in your table. 8 HS would be on the small side I admit, but so was the EX. After the first couple TL's ES just kind of disappeared in most of the games I played, while CT's hang on forever.
There are a couple of things that tend to hurt the ES.
First of all, when the EX is around, the ES isn't the smallest, least expensive hull type, and given the nature of the current non-Cosmic surveying rules, surveying is more cost efficiently done on the smallest possible hull because only 1 X is allowed per ship. This will no longer be the case in Cosmic. There will be certain limitations on the mounting of multiple instances of X type systems per hull, but multiples will be allowed to be mounted and function at the same time. This has been done because the Canon History made it clear that empires had a preference for larger surveyors, so it became necessary to ditch the 1 X per ship limitation because that limitation all but forced players to use the smallest ship possible to make surveying as cheap as possible, in terms of maintenance costs of the survey fleets.
Secondly, in 3rdR, you really only had I drives (for the most part, though some people may have used AD's J drives). And because of that, and the nature of the 3rdR hull table, the ES was not the largest speed 8 hull type. The CT was. But with multiple drive types available right from the start*, some people may find ES's more favorable to use. ... actually, I take that back... there may not be much reason to use ES's, as there appears to be no drive type that makes it the largest for its speed group. It sort of suffers due to its being the smallest hull type. Not much that can be done about that.
* You actually won't have
access to all of the new drive types at the start. You will get the commercial drive (Ic) and one military drive type, either the I, J, or P drive. Also, your selection of the drive type will dictate the type of LRW your race uses, because each type of drive technology is linked to a type of LRW technology. I drives to missiles (and sprint missiles), J drives to kinetics, and P drives to plasma torpedoes (and plasma guns). This happens because those drive technologies are directly linked to what makes those LRW tech's function. Missiles uses I drive tech to function.... J drives use "inertial spread" technology to do kinetic weapons. And (P)lasma drives use their plasma technology to do plasma torpedoes and plasma guns. It does eventually become possible to develop the systems outside of your own drive type, but not at the start. The idea was to create some historical flavor and some consequences to the choice of a drive type. (Note that the J drives didn't add an SRW to kinetics as was the case with I and P drives, because Kinetics function quite adequately as SRWs at short range.)
I think it would also go well with the advancing engine tech. If you increase the HS ratios by engine generation it will give a nicely proportioned advance if they are all based on some factor of 1/4th. The 1/3 is going to have lags and jumps against the others in I:MP ratios,....perhaps. A lack of info makes that hard to state accurately. But here is what I could see.
Actually, the hull size ratios were based on the following formula: 1 HS of engine would move 33.33 HS of hull at a speed of 1. Thus, if your I/MP is 3, then you're a 3 x 33.33 = 100 HS ship ... a BB. or if your I/MP is 1/3, then you're a 1/3 x 33.33 = 11 HS ship ... an ES.
I actually looked at other ratios ... 30-1, 25-1, 35-1, etc. 33.33 was the best and was the closest to the existing hull sizes. As I said earlier, I tweaked some of the sizes from the old sizes to the sizes strictly dictated by the 33.33-1 ratio because IMO a reason why certain hull types were less than favorable was that even with a drive type that favored the hull type (such as a J drive favoring FG's rather than CT's), a 20 hs or a 22 hs FG is simply undersized compared to other hull types that were closest to their "optimal" size according to the 33.33-1 ratio. By tweaking all hull sizes to the sizes dictated by the 33.33-1 ratio, hopefully all hull types will be favorable for their size, regardless of what drive they happen to use. (Oh some hull types will be more favorable than others depending on the drive type. But all hull types should be very well balanced for size, regardless of drive type.)
Give each generation of engine an increase of 4 HS in I:MP. A 'beta' engine gives a +1 HS to an ES/EX (at 8 HS), +2 HS to a CT, +3 HS to a FG, +4 HS to a DD, +6 to a CL, etc, etc. The next step up would double those numbers. The 1/3 is going to kind of have jumps and lags if this was the case though.
We use generational hull in our games, and they are popular, but we use an old EC rule on the engines instead of the 5e rules. With it a beta engine will move a beta hull at the same speed as the earlier engine/hull combo, and has the same turn mode as before. (There is more to the rule concerning new engines in old hulls and visa versa, but it wouldn't be necessary with your model) I would think this type of rule would fit well with what I think you are trying to do. The better engine will move a bigger ship as well as the older engine used to, turn mode and all. If you base the TM on the I:MP levels, it would make a nice steady progression for the new engines (and get rid of trying to keep track of which ship has a better/worse turn mode because you changed the hull/engine generation).
Just a thought.
Big sigh. You're just about the first person who has shown much of any support for the generational hull concept. I liked the concept myself (though not the 5e version). And I actually had worked on some generational hull rules. I liked the concept because it seems to me that as engines advance, the number of HS's per 1 HS of engine they can "push" should go up. I also liked the idea because it seems to be very well represented in sci-fi, with hulls of a given "type" gaining in size as technology advances. Think of the Honorverse, where BC's started out somewhere around 500,000 tons and by the most recent books are now up around 2.5M tons. (Same with other hull types as well.)
Another reason that I liked it conceptually, is that as TL's increase in Starfire, smaller ships become less and less capable because of an increasing need for secondary systems that the smaller hull types just don't have room for when hull sizes remain static. For example, in the ISW1/2 era, DD's were very capable hull types. But by the time of ISW4 (against the Bugs), true (30 hs) DD's were simply too small to keep up. If you mounted an installation of cloaking ECM on a DD, you effectively turned it into a FG or CT, in terms of the remaining space for weapons. This is why the CL sort of became the
de facto "DD" of ISW4... a CL, even at 40 hs, which was the CL size when ISW4 was written, when mounting cloaking ECM tends to have about the same remaining space as a non-cloaking ECM Destroyer.
Thus, the increasing need for secondary systems created a sort of bracket creep in hull types. But if you use a gen hulls concept, the additional hull spaces can offset this bracket creep and make the smaller types remain viable for a considerably longer time.
Looking at the EC56 article, I see that an embedded editor's note states that one of the "drawbacks" of generational hulls is "that you use less engine HS to move a bigger hull. This means that your weapons to engine ratio is improved." I have to utterly disagree with this statement. I see this as the primary benefit of generational hulls. It's what makes them worth using. I look at the 5e version of gen hulls and I think BLAH! What's so "good" about having a larger DD that is slower and less maneuverable? This is supposed to be
advanced technology!!! Gen hulls that slow the hulls don't seem very "advanced" to me.
My general view of gen hulls was that speeds and TM's would remain the same as hull generations increased. Actually, I should state that my version of "gen hulls" wasn't really "generational hulls", so much as I moved the concept into advanced engines. That is, a 2nd gen engine would have had the same speed as the first generation of the engine, but with a larger, 2nd gen hull size. This would have been the primary advancement mode for advanced engines ... larger hulls for the same speed/TM. However, the griping about this idea was deafening. So I just said "(bleep) it" and did engine advancements in the way that I'm currently using. (I suppose that I could change my mind and go back to it, but it seems unlikely. Pity.)
I really sort of wish that I could have kept the "gen hull" engine advancement model because it would have been a GREAT way of explaining why TFN/KON, etc. ships never got any faster all the way up to the Terran Civil War (aka
Insurrection).
There's another reason that I liked the "gen hull" style of engine advancement over other models... Some people suggested reducing I/MP ratings as a way of doing engine advancement. The problem with doing this is that the improvement in terms of HS's gained is very, VERY small unless the hulls are very, very large. If you reduce a BB's I/MP from 3 to 2.5, you gain a grand total of 2.5 HS (which would round to only 2). Big freaking deal. 2 stinkin' HS on a 100 HS ship. You might gain 1 HS on a DD. Again, big freaking deal. With the "gen hulls" advancement model, you actually gain
useful numbers of hull spaces when you advance, not these chump change amounts of freed up HS. A DD might gain something like 4 or 5 HS per generation, or a BB might gain 8 or 9 HS per generation. Those are
useful numbers... those are #'s of HS that can add a weapon or 2 or other useful things. Plus, another problem with reducing I/MP's is that it gets increasingly difficult to reduce those values for smaller ships that already have small I/MP's to begin with. Using the hull gen style of advancement, you are working with numbers that don't have "diminishing returns", because you're not using fractions that are getting increasingly closer to zero.
Sigh. That's all I have for now...
Crucis