Annatar, thanks for the info. If and when I get interested in designing big ships with the 2e rules that sounds like a good buy. For now though those modules are bigger than the little 2,000 dT huscarle cruisers I'm working on! :lol: Until I feel I have a better mastery of the rules for small ships I don't want to tackle big ships just yet.
Re: Merc Cruiser: Then its 4 dT over tonnage, add up the listed components and its already at 800 dT, you'd have to reduce the common space by 4 dT to make room for it (which makes sense to do and I can't see using the ship without at least one medbay space. For a platoon I'd prefer two (10 beds) given soldiers tend to get hurt and that ship likely is the only form of medical that may be available.
Dilbert:
I'm still getting used to the new drive options, too many decades (gulp, I'm getting old... :? ) of being used to 6 Gs being the top end for anything other than a fighter. I'm still finishing up the marine pinnace carried by the Voshtar (it carries two custom built pinnace, well it did... before it went boom!) which pulls 9 Gs. Its primary purpose it to transport the marine platoon and possibly some additional personnel from ship to planet quickly, with boarding operations being a secondary function. Short of it being, 12 pts armor, 9 Gs acceleration, carries 32 marines in fold up benches and has a further 6 chairs for additional passengers (perhaps a noble, medical personnel, scientific personnel, depend on what the "away team" needs... except my "red shirts" show up in full battle dress!
) The other designs I'm working on are TL 12 or 14 and tend to be slower, so the Voshtar would have had a significant edge over them (which still didn't save her in the end).
As for the Scouts... I dunno what they're doing with it, but I'll think twice about dissing anyone in the Scout service ever again! :lol: But seriously, yeah I could see them operating some light to heavy cruisers, even a battle ship, with reduced gunnery crews and weapons but more science and so forth, in other words... they do the Federation thing; that actually makes sense to me. (A rebuilt Kokirrak class battleship on a 5 year mission to boldy go... :wink: Could be a campaign idea in that)
Condottiere:
I was working under the assumption we could still do that. That was part of my concept in designing the FCC for the Voshtar. The way I've set it up in emergencies all her guns could be operated in batteries by as few as 5 gunners. If that's no longer the case I may need to step away from the computer and scream for a bit. Cause that would make NO sense at all to me.
Re: Fading Suns and big turrets.
Appreciate all the advice. Here's some more info to help clarify what I'm struggling with.
Fading Suns has specific ship "classes" for hulls rather than tonnages. Its a bit odd and abstract but that's what I have to work with. I want to do a conversion where ships are built by tonnage using Traveller rules so I'm having to approximate a lot of things. Each "hull size" has a specific volume associated with it presented in a somewhat clumsy way. Instead of giving us a volume to work with or a tonnage as in Traveller, we have a listing for X meters long by Y meters wide, by Z meters high. But its more abstract than that, that's actually only the internal volume of the deck plans and does not necessarily reflect the exterior volume, size or shape of the ship... so... lots of handwaving going on there. What I first did was just calculate the volume, the approximate that in Traveller dT and finally I did a bit of rounding and adjusting to come up with my finall converted tonnages for each class. You can see that below (I hope the table is legible):
Fading Suns
Shuttle............1...........10x5x7..........2/2 shields..................350 m3...............25 dT..................20 to 50 dT
Explorer...........3..........30x10x7......... 2/2 shields................2,100 m3.............150 dT.................100 to 200 dT
Raider.............4..........35x12x10........2/2 shields................4,200 m3.............300 dT.................300 to 400 dT
Escort.............4..........40x13x10........2/2 shields................5,200 m3.............400 dT.................400 dT
Frigate........... 6..........60x20x15........4/4 .......................18,000 m3 ...........1,300 dT ............1,200 to 1,500 dT
Galliot ........... 7 .........70x23x17....... 4/4 .......................27,370 m3 ...........2,000 dT .................2,000 dT
Fast Frtr ........ 8 ..........65x33x25.......4/4....................... 53,625 m3 ........... 3,800 dT ................ 4,000 dT
Small Frtr ...... 10 .........90x38x30 ...... 6/6.......................102,600 m3 ...........7,400 dT .............6,000 to 8000 dT
Asst Lander......10........100x33x25 .......8/8
Destroyer.........10........100x33x25 .......8/8........................ 82,500 m3 .......... 6,000 dT ............5,000 to 6,000 dT
Cruiser............14........140x47x35 ...... 9/9 ...................... 230,300 m3 ......... 17,000 dT .............. 20,000 dT
Large Frtr ....... 15 .......150x40x38 ...... 6/6 ...................... 228,000 m3 ......... 16,300 dT .......... 16,000 to 20,000 dT
Lux Liner ........ 15 .......140x50x38 ...... 6/6 ...................... 266,000 m3 ......... 19,000 dT .......... 16,000 to 20,000 dT
Dreadnought ..... 25 ......250x80x62 ......12/12 ...................1,240,000 m3 ......... 90,000 dT ............ 100,000 dT
So first column is the ship type, 2nd column is the FS "hull size rating" third column is the FS internal size, fourth column is the max energy shields for that ship type (FS uses energy shields instead of armor generally so I've been looking at those rules in the High Tech chapter, still tinkering with that), fifth column is the FS volume in cubic meters, six column was my first "approximate" dT equivalent, and finally the last column was my final "converted" tonnage equivalent which in some cases was a range of tonnage.
Now we come to the turrets, FS has spinal mounts that work pretty much the same way as Traveller spinal mounts, so that part is easy. FS also tends to mount most of its weapons in broadsides bay style, so for the larger ships mounting bay weapons port or starboard, again pretty simple conversion. But, they also allow a certain amount of "weapons" to be mounted in turrets and certain ships can have a certain number of turrets of differing sizes. There's no easy ratio here between the number and type of turrets and the hull volume / tonnage which is my biggest sticking point. Here's a short list of ships an their turret allowance
Frigate ......... 1 "medium"
Galliot .......... 1 "medium"
Destroyer ...... 2 "medium"
Cruiser ......... 2 "large"
Dreadnought ... 3 "large"
Note that their medium and large weapons have no direct coorelation to medium and large bay weapons in Traveller. What I've semi-concluded is that for Frigates, Galliots and Destroyers that would actually be a small bay weapon. For Cruisers that would be 2 medium bay weapons, and that leaves Dreadnoughts king of the heap at 3 large bay weapons as "big turrets". Now here's the rub that's giving me headaches. If I said that in the setting that if you want to build a ship of that class it has to fall within the designated tonnage and then it just is automatically allowed that number of bay weapons to be mounted as turrets, that would work... easy and done. But, then I got the bright idea (which is where things usually start going wrong) of trying to come up with a more flexible system that includes some sort of setting rule involving tonnage as the basis for what type and how many turrets can be mounted on a hull. That's where I'm stuck.
Note: FS has jump gates so jump drives are not needed on ships, meaning most of that tonnage can be used for drives, weapons systems and crew compartments. Despite this Hollistic got a little wonky and I have official deckplans for more than one ship that allocates tankage for jump fuel even though they don't use it! But perhaps not surprising considering I'm given to understand that long ago, Fading Suns started out as someone's Traveller campaign setting.
Anyway, that's where I'm at with the FS thing.
I may post the Voshtar ship stats (and maybe some of the others once I get further along with them) in another thread soonish, I want to muddle over a couple design choices first and maybe finish the pinnace designs. My plan is once I finish the stats to draft full deck plans and then 3D model the ship (including some of the interior). As a side note, this all partly began because I've been in a creative funk lately about 3D modelling projects and I got the idea that maybe designing some Traveller ships and then 3D modelling them might get me going again. I seem to work better when I creating things with more context (ship history, purpose, etc.), so far so good.
). On the other hand it just seems to fit the concept of the ship very well... wealthy noble, wants the best of everything, its their flag ship so they want a over the top bridge, etc. even if that tonnage might have been better applied elsewhere. Maybe I'll just leave it to sticking a 4 dT briefing room on the back along with a few other extras.
