The Commander's Energy Point system for MGT

[cmdrx]

I've seen alot of posts about ship design, and now I see MGT:HG has been pushed to September so I figured I got plenty of time to share...

This is the system I kludged together for my MGT game. It draws heavily from Classic High Guard.

Power plants generate power for the M-Drive and/or J-drive, minimum plant being equal to the drive letter of the largest drive in question. It also produces Energy Points (EP) equal to the cross index of the drive chart. A 100dt ship with a Type A plant produces enough power for the type A drive and 2EP.

EP can be used to power weapons or grant agility. Agility is used in my house rule system to grant a bonus to initiative and a measure of how many dodges or shot line up attempts a ship may make per round. This is seperate from manuever. If a ship has no agility and needs to dodge or perform a manuever, he'll have to burn it from the remaining manuever points.

Example: Ship with M rating of 2 and Agility of 2 can dodge twice and use thrust of 2 this round. A pig of a ship with manuever 1 and 0 agility may move with thrust 1 or save that point to put into emergency agility and get a dodge action.

(I am still working the kinks out of shoehorning Agility for MGT, but right now there have been no complaints)

Power requirements for weapons are per Classic High Guard.
Turret Weapons
Lasers 1EP
Plasma Guns 1EP
Fusion Guns 2EP
Particle Beams 5EP (and yes I am keeping the 3dt turret and 5dt barbette)

Small ships have no problem with this system. Example:
A Beowulf upgrades its Power plant to a type B, giving it 2EP. it can power a Type B drive and if it does so gets full agility (agility is limited to the max thrust). It can have 2 Agility, power a laser and stil have 1 agility or power two lasers and have no agility, save for emergency agility from burning thrust.

But lets look at some bigger ships:

Bay Weapons
Meson Bay 100EP
Particle Bay 30EP
Fusion Gun Bay 20EP

Now, how the devil do we get that kind of power from a table that only goes up to 6? Easy. MULTIPLY!

A 1200dt ship (sorry, still going with 1 bay per 10 harpoints) will need a Power Plant Zx5 to power a PAW bay and will take up 365 tons. Fueling this sucker will take 240dt for 2 weeks operation. This will take up over half the ship! 50+365+240 = 655dt

Classic HG only required a Power Plant with a rating of 3 (3 x (0.01x1200)=36EP) 36dt@TL15, 72dt@TL13, 108dt@TL9, 144dt@TL7
What's going on here?

This system works well for the small ships, but gets horrendous for big ships with big guns. I am hoping MGT:HG will come out with Tech Level variants for power. Until then I will assume the current Book 2 based system are 'Civilian' models available at lower techs. I may just rip Power Plants from Classic HG and use them for now until MGT:HG comes out

This is of course to keep the feel of Classic. If you want smaller ships with big guns, go for it.

 

[simonh]

It's a nice system in that it avoids the awkward calculations I've seen in other proposals and makes a lot of sense.

I don't see why the weapon systems need to have enough fuel for a continuous 2 weeks worth of uninterrupted fire. A day or two should be more than enough.

The main problem isn't tonnage though, by having strict old-school limits on weaponry by displacement, you're already guaranteeing most warships will otherwise have plenty of spare space, so you might as well pack in the power plants.

No, the main problem is cost. Each of those five Power Plant Zs costs 192 Million Credits - in total just under One Billion Credits (cue Dr. Evil). That's almost the cost of an entire Gazelle class close escort - per power plant.

Personally I'll take the 5 Gazelles, armed just with Missile Launchers and sans the ship's boats. Not counting however many 'Gazelles' the rest of your ship costs.

Simon Hibbs

 

[simonh]

Another problem is that a huge drive in a big ship produces fewer EPs than a little drive in an even smaller ship. A 1200 ton ship with all it's drives at rating F produces 1 EP, while a 200 ton ship with all drive Fs produces 6 EPs? You're encouraging designers to pack big weapons into small ships so they can take advantage of the much more efficient drives you get in a small hull. Bizzare.

I'd disassociate EPs from hull size. Power plants produce 1 EP per drive letter. Power plant A gives 1 EP, power plant B gives 2, etc all the way up to Z which gives 24 EPs. That should pretty much solve all your problems.

Simon Hibbs

 

[EDG]

Actually, why not just rip the EP system straight from CT HG and put it into MGT? That way there'd be no need for multipliers - all we need are the EP costs for all the systems and that's it.

The thing about Bays in CT HG (as far as I can understand, I'm a bit rusty on this) is that you just can't put them in a small ship, period. The absolute minimum size that a ship that can power a 100EP, 50ton Meson Gun Bay can be is 1700 dt (0.01*1700*6 = 102EP), and that'd have no power for anything else. If we assume that most ships would have a maximum of 33% of their EP allocated to weaponry, then you'd been a minimum of a 5,000 dt ship with Power-6 (producing 300EP) to be able to run that one Bay and have enough Energy to power everything else. In practical terms if you want multiple bays of big weapons you need a ship that's over 10,000 dt and has a big power plant (and you have to be closer to 100,000dt to have the bigger spinal mounts).

The EPs left over after energy allocation are then divided by (0.01 * volume of the ship) - which actually gives you the power plant number that would produce the EPs that remain - and that gives you the Agility which is a -DM on the hit rolls against the ship.

 

[cmdrx]

Actually, why not just rip the EP system straight from CT HG and put it into MGT? That way there'd be no need for multipliers - all we need are the EP costs for all the systems and that's it.

The thing about Bays in CT HG (as far as I can understand, I'm a bit rusty on this) is that you just can't put them in a small ship, period. The absolute minimum size that a ship that can power a 100EP, 50ton Meson Gun Bay can be is 1700 dt (0.01*1700*6 = 102EP), and that'd have no power for anything else. If we assume that most ships would have a maximum of 33% of their EP allocated to weaponry, then you'd been a minimum of a 5,000 dt ship with Power-6 (producing 300EP) to be able to run that one Bay and have enough Energy to power everything else. In practical terms if you want multiple bays of big weapons you need a ship that's over 10,000 dt and has a big power plant (and you have to be closer to 100,000dt to have the bigger spinal mounts).

The EPs left over after energy allocation are then divided by (0.01 * volume of the ship) - which actually gives you the power plant number that would produce the EPs that remain - and that gives you the Agility which is a -DM on the hit rolls against the ship.

This is assuming that the Power Plant number is maxed out at 6, in Classic HG it is not. I've seen Fighters with PP numbers in the 20's and 30's. The constraint of course is power plant volume in dt, cost and TL. A 1000dt ship can power the 50dt Meson bay with a power plant 10 (10*(0.01*1000)=100EP, and could power a M6 drive, if so equiped. (PP number being greater than M drive) Volume of the plant would only be 100dt, assuming a TL15 design. I've actualy designed ships of this nature back in the day. 1200dt with a 50dt bay and two turrets for point defense. Give them M6 and Agility 6 and they could be nasty. Ah the possibilities at TL15...

Actualy in retrospect, I am considering just using Classic HG and taking the best parts of MGT (No computer volume, 10dt bridges on small ships). The question then becomes using HG ship designs with the MGT ship combat rules...

 

[cmdrx]

I think I have it now.

Before I was using the Drive Table to determine the EP of the Power Plant, but what if we treated that number as a Classic High Guard(CHG) PP number(Pn). EP is then generated by the CHG formula of (dt/100)*Pn.

The classic Scout, 100dt with a Power Plant A would have a PP number of 2. (2 x 100/100 = 2EP)

The classic Free Trader would have the same EP using the same Type A Power Plant. PP-A is Pn1 (1 x 200/100 = 2EP)

On the higher end of the spectrum, that 2000dt ship with the Type Z Power Plant (Pn=6) would have 120EP to play with. (20 x 6). Here's a ship that can carry that energy eating Meson Bay (using CHG it eats 100EP).

I have noticed some weirdness using this system (a 300dt ship using Type-B PP (Pn=1) has 3EP, while the 400dt ship with same plant would have 4EP?) Perhaps a separate power chart is needed? But for now, its a work around until MHG comes out.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Assign the Mdrive and Jdrive with EP costs and figure the PP that way.

Say an 'A' drive needs 2EP, so the 'A' PP gives you 4EP (2 for the drive and 2 for weapons). Yes, that means that you must pick either the Jump or Maneuver drive to power, not both...

Now, if you choose to a higher PP, you get the correspondingly higher EP output.

So, M=A, J=A, P=B gives you 8EP, 2 of which will be used by the Mdrive, 2 by the Jump drive and the rest for weapons. This ship COULD maneuver and prep for Jump and fire weapons all at the same time...