Power Plant "Rating"

[Dr. Gizmo]

Under "Small Craft and Starship Internal Damage Locations" (p. 167) it says that for power plant hits one should reduce the "power rating." What is that "power rating?" Is it the same thing as the old USP code for power plants from High Guard? Is it the number of power plant "units" purchased? Is it the EP output of the power plant? If it's one of the two latter, doesn't that make the power plan kinda a huge "damage sink," since either the EP rating or number of units is likely to be a large number? In the old days it was the High Guard power plant USP code, but I can find no way to calculate that in the new T20 rules.

Doc Gizmo

 

[snrdg082102]

Hello Dr. Gizmo,

A while back there was a discussion on the fuel purification plant, Hunter indicated in his post that HG was the basic model for T20 Ship Design. My guess is that power plant damage is similar to HG rules.

Originally posted by Dr. Gizmo:
Under "Small Craft and Starship Internal Damage Locations" (p. 167) it says that for power plant hits one should reduce the "power rating." What is that "power rating?" Is it the same thing as the old USP code for power plants from High Guard? Is it the number of power plant "units" purchased? Is it the EP output of the power plant? If it's one of the two latter, doesn't that make the power plan kinda a huge "damage sink," since either the EP rating or number of units is likely to be a large number? In the old days it was the High Guard power plant USP code, but I can find no way to calculate that in the new T20 rules.

Doc Gizmo

 

[mike wightman]

The effect of a High Guard powerplant 1 hit is to reduce the number of energy points available to the ship by 1% of the hull tonnage, i.e. a 100t ship loses 1 EP per powerplant hit, a 500t ship would lose 5 EP per powerplant hit.

Just use the same system in T20.

Hope this helps.

 

[far-trader]

Ah, good job Tom, I meant to answer this but got busy and now this cold/flu made me forget it entirely.

I too think it would be the old HG power plant USP number. The whole USP thing was either forgotten in the final edit or dropped without fixing all the references.

I think you can reverse engineer the HG power plant USP from the EP by the following formula:

1 - E/0.01M = P

Where:

E is the power plant EP output
M is the total displacement of the ship in T
P is the power plant USP number

 

[far-trader]

The way Sigg Oddra puts it works even better since you know from hit to hit just how much power plant EP you have available without having to recalculate. Nice.

 

[Dr. Gizmo]

I also like Sigg's approach...very simple. The only hitch I see is that T20 power plants are pretty powerful beasties, putting out 2x the EP output of a classic traveller power plant. That means the power plant USP codes will also be double that of a classic ship, making the power plant rating a bit of a damage sink.

A little playing around with the High Guard Shipyard beta reveals that the author calculates Pn (power plant USP rating) this way:

Pn = EP/M * 50

Where,
EP = EP output of power plant
M = overall ship tonnage

High Guard uses Pn = EP/M * 100

I think I like the approach HGS takes, and rationalize it by remembering that EPs find more uses on a T20 ship--to drive the weapons, shields and maneuver drive.

Thanks everyone,

Doc

 

[Pop]

Can anyone confirm whether the doubling of the power plant EP output of T20 is intentional?

I seem to recall either Hunter or MJD saying the vessel design sequence was supposed to be identical to High Guard.

Note that it isn't simply a doubling of EP output; the other feature is that the number of EP-months a power plant gets from ton of fuel is Tech Level dependant.
(I noticed this first when trying to find a conversion factor between a vehicle EP and a vessel EP, so batteries could be scaled up for use on vessels. IMTU I revised the Ship Power Plant table to be consistent with High Guard, so that the wealth of ships built to High Guard rules could be used.)

 

[BetterThanLife]

Originally posted by Pop:
Can anyone confirm whether the doubling of the power plant EP output of T20 is intentional?

I seem to recall either Hunter or MJD saying the vessel design sequence was supposed to be identical to High Guard.

Note that it isn't simply a doubling of EP output; the other feature is that the number of EP-months a power plant gets from ton of fuel is Tech Level dependant.
(I noticed this first when trying to find a conversion factor between a vehicle EP and a vessel EP, so batteries could be scaled up for use on vessels. IMTU I revised the Ship Power Plant table to be consistent with High Guard, so that the wealth of ships built to High Guard rules could be used.)

Actually in HG it was also Tech Level dependent. The doubling is important as you need actual EP for your Maneuver and Jump Drives. (In HG that part was overlooked.) Don't bother trying to convert between Ship and vehicle EP. It is too inconsistent to work.