Couple of suggestions for launch rails.
Instead of making them only reloadable in a hanger, make them take a specific number of action points to reload - based on the size of the missile being loaded, and location of the launch rail.
Eg 10 action points per load point of missile inside a hanger, 100 per missile load point outside of hanger (and this is to load or unload a missile).
Faster inside a hanger because more equipment is readily avilable, and distances involved are shorter.
At the moment the size of the launch rail is a factor. Larger launch rails take longer to reload. For game mechanic reasons I don't really want the ability to reload missiles outside a hangar, even if it takes several hours. At the moment, a ship cannot reload outside a hangar so if you want specialist ships with launch rails you will need to escort them with a mothership with a large enough hangar deck, which requires a considerable investment in terms of retooling shipyards, build time and cost, maintainance, etc. If you could reload without a hangar, you could fire a huge salvo then retire to reload your ship behind some convenient moon from either your own magazines or a collier. A few hours isn't a lot of time with the timescales of Aurora.
Then have deck crew to perform the load - and have them generate eg 1 action point per deck crew per minute. (may need to be higher or lower rate)
This allows you to put launch rails on a ship or a fighter, but unless you want to have a rather large crew, you wont be able to reload the external rails very quickly on a ship. Nor will you be able to land a couple dozen fighters and have them all turned around quickly unless you have a number of deck crew...
Using Steve's new campaign as a baseline, an Eagle class fighter has 3 launch rails of 4 points each.
It could thus carry 3 missiles of size 4 (the only size the carrier has). To load 3 Katana missiles on all 12 fighters will take 3x40x12 = 1440 action points. Meaning 144 deck crews could load all of them in 10 minutes (or 48 deck crew to load in 30 minutes).
Have a "Deck Crew" quarters (DCQ) component to represent the equipment and men involved in the process. Maybe 1 DCQ can have 5 deck crews and takes 1 space. Meaning the carrier would have to devote about 10 spaces to deck crews to get 30 minute reload time.
At the moment deck crews are assumed by the crew requirements for the hangar deck. Although I like your suggestion of including deck crews as a specific system, I probably would go for an simpler mechanic because I wouldn't want players to have to micromanage deck crew assignments. Perhaps DCQs could provide a general bonus to reload times instead.
To extrapolate to a ship mounting rails, assume a ship had just as many rails as the 12 fighters do combined (ie 36 rails). To load them with 50 deck crew will still take quite a while. 36x400 = 14400 action points. 50 deck crews would load this in 288 minutes (or almost 5 hours). To get it down to 30 minutes you would need 480 deck crews (using 96 spaces of DCQ + extra space for life support).
Fighters will generally have a speed advantage so they can pull out of range, reload on their carrier or mothership and come back. Take away the carrier and they are screwed. A regular ship would presumably fire and destroy the enemy, get destroyed trying to retreat or be fast enough to get away. If they are fast enough to stay out of range then reloading for 30 minutes or 5 hours is far less important than the fact they can reload their huge salvo without support. At the moment a quarter size launcher has 100x reload time (so 50 minutes for a 30 second launcher). If I made a 1/6th size launcher with a 500x reload, the game effect would be very similar without the complexity of deck crews. I want the Launch Rail to be something different and not just an even smaller reloadable launcher.
Doing this gives two advantages - the reason you don't use rails on an average ship, and also allows you some control over how fast your rails can be reloaded (the more DCQ you use, the faster you can reload. But the bigger your carrier will be...).
The current reason for not using launch rails on an average ship is that they are loaded externally, which can only be done in a hangar bay (conveniently forgetting landing on planets with breathable atmospheres
). If I changed the Launch Rail to reloadable without a hangar bay I am concerned it would become much more attractive to regular ships and lose its unique flavour. I do think that some type of DCQ is possible though but used as bonus to reload time rather than tracking individual deck crew actions. Perhaps something like DCQ / Hangar Decks * 10% bonus.
Steve
