What is a Safari Ship?

[AnotherDilbert]

Just as an aside, that whole "finding design singularities" is basically what *I* do with my character/vehicle/starship designs, regardless of game system.

I call it reading the rules, rather than designing to prejudice.

Fun fact.
It is perfectly "rules legal" to build a starship with ZERO tons of internal fuel tankage ...

Only jump fuel, power plant fuel must be in regular internal tanks.

TCS, p13:
Enough fuel for the power plant must be carried in normal fuel tanks; jump fuel and additional fuel may be carried in one of the additional tankage types outlined below.

When you take a fuel hit during battle, you lose fuel in 1% increments (minimum 10 tons).
If your integral fuel tank holds 2000 tons of fuel, each 1% fuel hit loses 20 tons of fuel.
But if your integral fuel tank holds 1000 tons of fuel, each 1% fuel hit loses ... 10 tons of fuel ... and you've got a containerized reserve of ANOTHER 1000 tons of fuel, in increments of 10 tons each, occupying your cargo hold.

No, each hit takes 1% of your total fuel capacity, regardless of tank type.

HG'80, p49:
Fuel-n: Current fuel is reduced by n% of total fuel capacity (at least 10 tons).
Fuel Tanks Shattered: All fuel on the ship is lost and the ship may not be refuelled. No ship systems requiring energy points may operate.

 

[Kakistocrat]

The tournament rules involved a “push button to reset fleet” after every battle.

This is “good” from a tactical standpoint, since allowing “fresh fleets” to duke it out highlighted the design choices that went into each fleet. It’s also “bad” from a strategic standpoint, since doing that means that all a fleet has to do is win ONE battle (repeatedly) at full strength, without needing to bother with sustainability over multiple combats. […]

That outcome basically highlighted that the setup of the tournament was flawed.
The fleets were “legal” under the rules of the wargame … so it was the rules of the wargame that created the conditions for that outcome.

Lenat himself recognized the tournament as being a battle of designs rather than of squadrons (another snippet from the same article):

EURISKO has by now [1981] spent 1300 CPU hours on a personal LISP machine, the Xerox 1100, managing this heuristically-guided evolution process. The author culled through the runs of EURISKO every 12 hours or so of machine time (i.e., each morning, after letting it run all night on one or more 1100’s), weeding out heuristics he deemed invalid or undesirable, rewarding those he understood and liked, etc. Thus the final crediting of the win should be about 60/40% Lenat/EURISKO, though the significant point here is that neither party could have won alone. The program came up with all the innovative designs and design rules (i.e., the loopholes in the TCS formulation), and recognized the significance of most of these. It was a human observor [sic], however, (the author) who appreciated the rest, and who occasionally noticed errors or flaws in the synthesized design rules which would have wasted inordinate amounts of time before being corrected by EURISKO.​

​

Most of the battles are tactically trivial, the contest being decided by the designs of the two fleets; that—and the 100-page thickness of the rulebooks—were the reason this appeared to be a valid domain for EURISKO. It is also important—for EURISKO to have a good chance of finding new results—that the size of the search space (legal fleet designs) be immense: with 50 parameters per ship, about 10 values for each parameter (sometimes fewer, often an infinite number), and up to 100 distinct ships to design and include in each fleet, any systematic or monte carlo analysis of the problem is unlikely to succeed. In fact, the designers had done a detailed linear programming model of the game, and their computer runs convinced them that a fleet of about 20 behemoths was the optimal design. This was close to the starting fleet design the author supplied to EURISKO, and it was also close to the designs that most of the tournament entrants came up with.​

My most recent “hobby horses” of this type of endeavor have been regenerative biome life support and external load towing enabling containerized transport in Traveller … but I’m assuming you knew that already if you’ve read my posts in these forums.

Yes, it’s nice to see the design process laid out, and how flashes of inspiration can overturn a given design’s guiding principles in an instant.

 

[kilemall]

Eliat explodes to OSA missile boats the world didn’t see coming. The next war, new missile boats towing EW decoy sleds beat the OSAs. It’s always a conceptual evolutionary race with large scale consequences for navies.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Yes, it’s nice to see the design process laid out, and how flashes of inspiration can overturn a given design’s guiding principles in an instant.

We make every pretense of competency around here.
Slightly more seriously, though ... ... I'm doing the entire "creative endeavor as an open book" for precisely that reason.

Despite appearances, I don't have all the answers ... although I do have more than my fair share.

By posting everything for peer review, I have to be "intellectually honest" both with myself AND for the benefit of anyone reading my rantings and ravings (and endless pontificating about the most trivial of details). By laying bare the thought processes involved and demonstrating where they meander off to and result in, I'm able to get a more holistic grasp on how everything comes together ... and being able to see that happen in real time successive posts can be illuminating for other readers of these forums.

After all, one of my personal catch phrases is ... Knowledge Shared Is Knowledge Multiplied.

I'm not expecting to inspire anyone else to pick up what I'm doing and run with it (in their own direction, obviously) ... but if someone else IS inspired by what I'm doing (and posting) enough to want to try their own hand at the same lines of thought that I'm working on, it's a lot easier to do that if you've "seen the sausage get made" and have a fair idea of what the end product is going to taste like (so to speak).

Starship construction ISN'T "rocket surgery" ... but it can be a fun sandbox to play around in and try out new ideas and new business models of operation (especially in the merchant space). Things start getting interesting when you begin exploring the second order effects of design choices and the "emergent behaviors" that can result from "not operating exactly the same as everyone else who has come to the naval architect's office" before you showed up.



And just like with so many inventors and researchers who made discoveries that changed we understood the world around us, sometimes you need to have a REALLY MASSIVE ACCIDENT happen in order to understand how to make something work properly!

There are no experimental failures. There's only more data.
- Bryce Lynch, Head of Research & Development, Network XXIII

If you aren't failing, you aren't innovating enough.
- Solomani Industrialist who was hated in his own time

 

[Jame]

A safari ship? Is that why we're on this hunting expedition?