building ships at a larger scale, the numbers and features dont add up


Advice


so i was challenged by a friend to build a replica style (didnt have to be exact) form of a large spacecraft. so i started doing the math. and figured a large tier ranking to have plenty of build points. but as im building i noticed a bunch of inconcistancies in regards to ship that are larger then medium. particularly when approaching the huge and gargantuan size. i was looking at the battleship frame, wanting something that was more of a armored carrier, think battlestar. and im noting 8 expansion bays only. true the colossal has 20 but im considering colossal to be larger station like application or planetiod ships.

So minimum 100 crew needed... escape pods, 6 per expansion bay? seems kinda low, perhaps a scale up 6x scale size? so a large ship might get 12 pods to accomsdate everyone or mostly everyone.

Hanger bays, require 4 expansions slots to carry 8 vessels. now i realize that for a player 8 vessels is enough. and when you look at medium ships its all great, but scale up. hundreds of crew.. sorry folks on this carrier we only have 2 hangers with 8 each.. oh and if you want a shuttle bay for a larger ship, we cant fit anything else.. maybe 8 for a battle ship and 10 for a carrier seems a little low when you expect a carrier to have at least some basic fuctionality ( shops, medical, crew, half of the other items, including cargo space) i would call this another scaling issue. with it being 8x scale of ship gargantuan 2, colossal 4.

the drift engine setup. it says minumum frame. so no drift engines for anything larger the huge.. but i can put a basic in for 2x gargantuan for example 6 or 7 and its far cheaper then any of the other drives.. wouldnt a drive that size cost more, not less, since as far as i can tell the only cost your paying for is fitting a drive into a medium frame really. doesnt change the 1 minute drift engine rule or the functionality of the drift effects.

in short these are 3 of the big items i have found, i maxed out many of the items on a build list. and for a build list at the higher end you cannot literally give away the bp points to spend it on. there isnt anything to spend it on. nothing else fits. 1000 bps points. even with literally all vortex cannons and updrades its very hard to understand the end game build setup. or even building npcs ships for long term campaigns. its kinda disappointing to not see a ship book on the horizen either. it needs alot of things that many ships in many scifi take for granted. including things like exterior docking collars or ablative armor options. imo its a case of steamlined too far with hope that no one gets to the high end levels till the revised books make it out *some time late next year*


If you check the ship scale table on page 294, you will also notice that there is no particular relationship between ship size and mass, nor is there any particular pattern to distinguish where one tier ends or begins compared to the length or mass of the others. Compare this to creatures in Pathfinder, where the upper end of a size category capped somewhere near a rounded off double of the lower end, and weight fairly reliably followed the square-cube law. You are also not the only one to notice, either.

There are a number of issues with ships right now - not just building them, but also in the DCs associated with operating them. The latter have been acknowledged as a problem that will be addressed. To my knowledge, there's been no word on the former and the problems associated with it like you've found.

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