Post
Tue May 20, 2014 8:34 pm
#65
by Alcazabedabra
Maybe I should explain myself better?
In my mind, a ship is made up of a lot of parts all mounted on a basic frame. The frame has all the mountings for all the various components of the ship. Hardpoints for weapons, brackets for engines and power generator, and so on.
If you want to make the ship bigger, you'd have to cut apart and extend that frame, so that would require a specialized machine shop. You'd have to use the facilities of a shipyard or something.
That frame is what I call a "Chassis", which might or might not be the right word but it's the best I've found so far.
The chassis ought to be modifiable, and you should even be able to design a new one from scratch and make it whatever shape you want, with whatever-size mountings of various parts you want. I mean, if you want to make a fighter with battleship-size thrusters, well... fine! Just don't expect to be able to power the things with a fighter-sized reactor.
Okay, so this lends itself to all kinds of nuance in ship design. Bigger frame means more weight, and also more armor plates to protect it (which means even more weight). You want fast? Well, you'll have to optimize between engine size, power facilities and the size and design of the chassis. Small, compact ships will be lighter and thus faster, but won't have room for a lot of cargo, weapons, ammunition and whatnot.
Let's say you want to make the ideal frigate-size brawler of a fighting ship. Here's how I'd think with it:
I'd be thinking with compactness and power output from the start. I'd put a slightly oversized reactor in it, and large-ish engine mounts. I wouldn't give it too many hardpoints, I'd want a limited number of hard-hitting guns so I'd use one or two very large turret hardpoints, and a couple of small ones just for point defense (don't want to be pecked to death by fighters).
Cargo space? Hell, no. Every inch of cargo space is another inch I've got to put armor on. I'd concentrate on keeping crew quarters and the command deck small, compact. As much as possible I'd cut it down to just reactor, engines and that couple of big guns.
The armor itself would be some compromise between good protection and not so much weight that it's going to kill me. But since I've limited the surface area of the ship, I can lean a little on the heavy side and put some really good armor on this thing.
Now I've got a fast, flying tank that can brawl with anything in its size class and win.
There's probably multiple ways to get around to this kind of ship-design gameplay so I'm not really married to having the things all built onto a frame and enforcing some kind of gameplay mechanic this way. I'm just really hoping I get to get into that sort of detail when I design and build my own ships.