Travellers Needed! High Guard Updates

[Anstett]

(Yes, Matt, I'll be working on it... soon as we get our one remaining cat back from the vet... after that bill, I'd better write a couple of books this year...)

Happy to buy a couple more books for the cat.

 

[mavikfelna]

Batteries (not the power kind...)
I'm supposed to be putting together an outline for the Compendium, which should include rules not in Core, Highguard, or the Companion... I think the battery rules are in Elements? They should be tied to crew size and I think I can be a little creative... once I find the rules.

Unrelated to Highguard, but not the Compendium: Will also try and pick some useful bits out of Mercenary... and see if I can sneak in a Snapshot rule while I'm at it.

(Yes, Matt, I'll be working on it... soon as we get our one remaining cat back from the vet... after that bill, I'd better write a couple of books this year...)

Work on a Fusion Fire & Steel unified construction system maybe, please?!

 

[Terry Mixon]

Happy to buy a couple more books for the cat.

Write some cat (Aslan) themed books and we can support your cat in a meta way.

 

[Geir]

Batteries and Crew Sizes: found it the third place I looked. Imperial Navy p. 113-114. Needs to be a little scrunched for the Compendium, but... this Book is going to a be treasury hunt with my memory and mediocre organization skills racing my aging brain. Fun!

 

[tytalan]

As I was supposed to be doing something else, I decided to take a look at updating the Spinward Extents books to the 2022 High Guard standard and then decided to do the entire Corellan League Star Fleet and one thing I really noticed: Ships between 2000 and 5000 tons are not optimal: You need to be 5001 tons to get a crew size reduction (which actually is a bit silly - making the minimum exactly 5000 tons would be better. Same applies to Military Hulls and Distributed Arrays. All the ships I started at 4000 tons ended up being much better designs at 6000 tons, with about the same sized crew. And exactly 5000 tons really sucks. Also, the sensor operator thing for 7500 tons seems unnecessarily one-off - making that 5000 tons as well would be less obscure.

(Didn't go though all 19 pages of this thread, so I apologize if these issues have already been brought up)

Yea I found if you use Barracks for ship crews you go a long way in fixing this problem especially with ships under 2000 dt which often can run military crew levels.

 

[Geir]

Another thing that I think is just a misplaced sentence: p.72 Weapon Disadvantages:

The sentence: "Not Applicable to turret weapons." applies 'Energy Inefficient', but makes much more sense if applied to 'Increased Size' instead. Not only does this avoid 1.2 ton turrets, but it matches the logic of the weapons advantage above.

I'm going to assume that the suggestion above is true and incorporate it into my overly complicated ship spreadsheet.

 

[wintertraveller]

Batteries and Crew Sizes: found it the third place I looked. Imperial Navy p. 113-114. Needs to be a little scrunched for the Compendium, but... this Book is going to a be treasury hunt with my memory and mediocre organization skills racing my aging brain. Fun!

I miss the 1980 HG Batteries Bearing mechanics a bit. I think they added a flavor dynamic to hull configuration.

 

[wintertraveller]

This is true. I just don't want to build 5001 ton destroyers. But a way to potentially balance it would be took look at the cut-offs holistically. If the same breakpoint gives a bonus and a penalty, then the 'advantage' of wonky 4999 and 5001 destroyer classes will decrease.

So, giving it a little more thought. Each breakpoint should have a pros and cons chart (and they should be 'round' numbers and match so it wouldn't be a case of one entry saying 'less than than' and another saying 'more than' leaving a sliver of confusion). So target size, bridge size, crew size, feature size, armour /hull point mods, should all line up: 5000+ gets you this, 25000+ gets you this, 200+ gets you this, etc.)

Although, I've experimented with Mongoose 2e ship designs in these weird non-standard size, I've started to constrain my ship designs to just sizes found in the 1980 HG ship codes for Chartered Space 3I ships. I am overall happy with the state of our modern HG, but I figure these standard sizes work cleanly and perhaps make sense from a standard size components perspective. This helps me avoid munchkin tendencies.

One old HG design rule that might be of value bringing back is the limit of no more than one weapon bay per 1,000 tons. With the effectiveness of modern bay weapon multiples, this would help maintain balance. It would also enhance the value of turrets for ACS ships. It also introduces new break points for 1,000 and 2,000 ton ship designs. This would make a 2,000 ton ship better than a 1,999 ton ship in my mind. A two-bay Frigate would hit hard at wide range of conflicts.

In general, more ship designs in the 2,000-5,000 range would be great. The Spinward Extents books does this well. The Sred'Ni Fireship is a Spinward terror. It's the reason a Spinward travelling adventurer to want a Meson shield. The Murian ships are big and full of flavor. The Aslan Yurletyashi is a dominating Spinward Frigate that you seriously don't want to find among the ihatei bands. It would be like finding a troll among the orcs.

 

[Condottiere]

In the spacecraft gunnery hierarchy, turrets are south of tertiary armament.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Another thing that I think is just a misplaced sentence: p.72 Weapon Disadvantages:

The sentence: "Not Applicable to turret weapons." applies 'Energy Inefficient', but makes much more sense if applied to 'Increased Size' instead. Not only does this avoid 1.2 ton turrets, but it matches the logic of the weapons advantage above.

I'm going to assume that the suggestion above is true and incorporate it into my overly complicated ship spreadsheet.

Reduced or increased size should not be an option for turrets, barrettes or bays. The other possibility is building bespoke weapon mounts of any size you want - The FF&S method.

 

[Sigtrygg]

I miss the 1980 HG Batteries Bearing mechanics a bit. I think they added a flavor dynamic to hull configuration.

A better rule is to use surface area for hardpoints - GT ISW shows how this can easily be incorporated.

 

[Galadrion]

Reduced or increased size should not be an option for turrets, barrettes or bays. The other possibility is building bespoke weapon mounts of any size you want - The FF&S method.

I disagree about bays - they absolutely should be able to have size modification. Turrets, yes, those should not have size modifications available; barbettes, I don't see it being particularly effective. But bays are large enough to make size modifications a reasonable tradeoff for the advantage/disadvantage slot.

 

[Condottiere]

If you feel that a twenty five percent rebate is worth a twenty percent wasted volume.

 

[Sigtrygg]

I disagree about bays - they absolutely should be able to have size modification. Turrets, yes, those should not have size modifications available; barbettes, I don't see it being particularly effective. But bays are large enough to make size modifications a reasonable tradeoff for the advantage/disadvantage slot.

The whole point behind bay weapons originally was they were modular and swappable. You could replace any 100t bay with any other 100t bay. You can't do that with variable size bays. It would make a lto more sens for a high TL bay to be limited to increased rabge, damage etc.

 

[Condottiere]

Navies, can still make them swappable, if they mandate that disadvantage for any particular, or all, size categories.

Since customization is now either/or, not a worthwhile universal option.

 

[Geir]

And another thought: Advantages and Disadvantages for sensors.
Mostly thinking about prototypes and early prototypes, to make some sort of sensors possible on low tech spacecraft. Wouldn't give the higher tech ones DMs (well maybe DM+1 for two advantages), but things like longer detection ranges and better energy consumption (more like decrease by 1pp to no lower than 1pp, but not percentages) would be reasonable.

 

[Sigtrygg]

There needs to be a sensor package explicit at TL7, currently we have to raid Vehicles to find the TL7 sensore. HG rules allow for ships to be built at TL7, yet they fly blind...

as to sensors in general they need to be completely re-written.

 

[hopsnbaer]

There needs to be a sensor package explicit at TL7, currently we have to raid Vehicles to find the TL7 sensore. HG rules allow for ships to be built at TL7, yet they fly blind...

as to sensors in general they need to be completely re-written.

I would be happy with all the sensor rules in the same chapter.

 

[collins355]

There needs to be a sensor package explicit at TL7, currently we have to raid Vehicles to find the TL7 sensore. HG rules allow for ships to be built at TL7, yet they fly blind...

as to sensors in general they need to be completely re-written.

Agreed, but actually it is pointless just tweaking the sensor rules. The sensor rules, the combat rules, the in-system movement rules, etc all need to work together as a coherent whole. Design decisions need to be taken about what aspects to emphasise, and what to downplay for the sake of playability (for example, are you going to strictly adhere to "no stealth in space", or, are you wedded to rangeband movement mechanics, or, are you going to rationalise the ever-growing MGT list of spce combat weapons).
Then you look at your design sequences and make them produce results that allow meaningful impacts from design tradeoffs when constructing vessels - while keeping consistency.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Personally I would scrap the lot and start again from first principles and look at how the parts are meant to work together.