After spending the better part of 15 years bemoaning the lack of a 'simple alternative' craft design system in MT, I've finally decided to stop whining and do something about it.
My idea is to re-High Guardify the MT craft design system, allowing small craft and ships up to, say, 5K tons to be designed with minimum hassle.
Here's the preliminary plan:
1) Eliminate mass: just remove that whole column from the computation. AFAICT for space vessels it's only used once (in figuring Agility), which IMO doesn't justify having to keep track of it.
2) Ignore Small Numbers: Volumes smaller than 1.35 kl (i.e. 0.1 dton) will be ignored, as will power consumptions smaller than 25 MW (i.e. 0.1 EP). The only possible exceptions are for areas like life support or control panels where hundreds of individually small units will be combined.
3) Pre-figure packages: Hulls will be pre-figured at Armor Factor 40, and in additional steps of 3; power plants will be pre-figured in blocks of 250 MW*; life support packages will be pre-figured.
4) Remove the Extremes: Eliminate table entries that only apply to vehicles and ground craft or very large ships, and eliminate extreme Tech Levels (<9, >15).
5) Return to Formulas: Where possible, HG-style formulas will be used instead of the equivalent tables in MT. I like working with formulas better, it makes the results seem a little less arbitrary.
With these changes, I think I should be able to devise a simplified design system that is not significantly more complicated than HG and retains rough compatability with the Full MT system. The main problems I can foresee are with Armor and Agility (both due to dropping the mass calculation). I'm planning to use HG concepts for both (Armor takes up volume space, Agility figured from volume) but if that seems to do too much damage to compatability I might grudgingly include mass after all (but only in significantly large (1 ton?) increments).
Has anybody else bothered to do something like this? Did it work? I'm pretty sure a big portion of my problem with MT craft design is its appearance (all those tables, all those tiny decimal numbers) and that if it just LOOKed more like HG I'd be a lot more comfortable with it -- after all, most of the concepts are essentially identical.
*Interestingly, I calculated that each 250 MW of PP capacity @ TL 15 takes up approx. 1 dton, requires approx. 1.5 dtons of fuel/week, and costs 2.8 MCr. The size and cost are very close to HG (1 EP =1 ton = 3 MCr), but the required fuel is half-again as much (1.5 dt/wk vs 1 t/wk in HG). Does anyone know why this change was made? Or did I perhaps miscalculate something?
My idea is to re-High Guardify the MT craft design system, allowing small craft and ships up to, say, 5K tons to be designed with minimum hassle.
Here's the preliminary plan:
1) Eliminate mass: just remove that whole column from the computation. AFAICT for space vessels it's only used once (in figuring Agility), which IMO doesn't justify having to keep track of it.
2) Ignore Small Numbers: Volumes smaller than 1.35 kl (i.e. 0.1 dton) will be ignored, as will power consumptions smaller than 25 MW (i.e. 0.1 EP). The only possible exceptions are for areas like life support or control panels where hundreds of individually small units will be combined.
3) Pre-figure packages: Hulls will be pre-figured at Armor Factor 40, and in additional steps of 3; power plants will be pre-figured in blocks of 250 MW*; life support packages will be pre-figured.
4) Remove the Extremes: Eliminate table entries that only apply to vehicles and ground craft or very large ships, and eliminate extreme Tech Levels (<9, >15).
5) Return to Formulas: Where possible, HG-style formulas will be used instead of the equivalent tables in MT. I like working with formulas better, it makes the results seem a little less arbitrary.
With these changes, I think I should be able to devise a simplified design system that is not significantly more complicated than HG and retains rough compatability with the Full MT system. The main problems I can foresee are with Armor and Agility (both due to dropping the mass calculation). I'm planning to use HG concepts for both (Armor takes up volume space, Agility figured from volume) but if that seems to do too much damage to compatability I might grudgingly include mass after all (but only in significantly large (1 ton?) increments).
Has anybody else bothered to do something like this? Did it work? I'm pretty sure a big portion of my problem with MT craft design is its appearance (all those tables, all those tiny decimal numbers) and that if it just LOOKed more like HG I'd be a lot more comfortable with it -- after all, most of the concepts are essentially identical.
*Interestingly, I calculated that each 250 MW of PP capacity @ TL 15 takes up approx. 1 dton, requires approx. 1.5 dtons of fuel/week, and costs 2.8 MCr. The size and cost are very close to HG (1 EP =1 ton = 3 MCr), but the required fuel is half-again as much (1.5 dt/wk vs 1 t/wk in HG). Does anyone know why this change was made? Or did I perhaps miscalculate something?
