I had an idea about the new engine as soon as I logged out
Instead of making it smaller but retaining the same power, I could make it the same size with 2x or 2.5x more power (and the 10x fuel use plus a high explosion chance) and have a maximum of one per ship because of 'instability problems'. Suddenly it becomes perfectly reasonable to only use it on small, short-ranged ships. I have to go out for a while but I will look at this again when I get back in.
Steve
Hi Steve,
I was actually thinking more along the lines having a "gunboat item" property for engines, weapons systems, power plants, etc. that gives a 50% size reduction. For every gunboat class, there would have to be a special "gunboat rack" design, which would have the coupling device (i.e. the boat bay or external rack) PLUS the mass that was left off the gunboat items (plus maybe a mass penalty, so e.g. 75% the mass of the non-gunboat systems). This gunboat rack would be a system that could be added to a "tender", which would either be a ship or PDC design.
For example, let's say I had designed the following non-GB systems (sorry I'm not using your design conventions):
MHD engine - 5 HS, crew = 25
24pt Power Plant - 4 HS, crew = 10
Recharge 4 Laser - 6 HS, crew = 5
I could then design equivalent GB systems that would have masses of 2.5, 2, and 3 HS respectively. I could then design a GB class with the components (assume GB components require 1/5 crew):
GB Avenger
1 cockpit - 1HS
4 MHD engine (GB) - 10 HS
1 24pt Power Plant (GB) - 2 HS
6 Recharge 4 Laser (GB) - 18 HS
crew = 1 pilot + 8 engineering + 2 power + 6 weapon = 17
For an overall mass of 31 HS. If I assume the actual coupling for a GB rack costs 1 HS for every 10 on the GB, then I would have to design a rack for this GB:
Avenger GB rack - 34 HS (4 for couplings + 50% original systems size = 30), crew = 64 ( 32 engineering + 8 power + 24 weapon)
or
Avenger GB rack - 49 HS (4 for couplings + 75% original systems size = 45), crew = 64 ( 32 engineering + 8 power + 24 weapon)
As you can see, the basing facilities (tonnage, cost and crew) for GB are VERY expensive. I view this a similar to aircraft carriers - there are a couple of thousand air wing crew and a big chunck of the tonnage of a CV to support maybe 1000 tons of aircraft with crew of 100-200.
The nice part of the above is you don't have to worry about putting a bunch of hand-waving in (e.g. artificially limit to one engine due to "instability"), and you don't need to worry about someone putting a lot of them into large ships (they can, they'll just need a REALLY big tender to support the GB). In other words, the difference between a GB and a "blue water" combatant is that the GB has offloaded a LOT of its tonnage/crew to a basing facility.
You could even have a line of "GB size reduction" tech e.g. 15%, 30%, 40%, 50% offload so that the advantages of having GB wouldn't all accrue from day 1.
As for jumping, GB would work just like any other ship without jump engines, i.e. have to go through with a jump ship or jump gate. I prefer Erik's view of the tender having external racks (just like sub tenders, where the subs tie up alongside) rather than internal boat bays so as to keep the tender's mass down (so it can make it through the jump point) - the GB can be escorted through since they've got the same engines as anyone else. In principle I suppose you could even allow jump engines in a GB, except it wouldn't make much economic sense since the size of ships it could escort would still depend on it's (smaller) mass and the total cost of the jump engine (including the tender) would be the same or greater.
Is that clear/does that help?
Thanks,
John
PS - I think you've posted since I started this post, so I'm going to go ahead and hit "send" rather than trying to adjust the above.