Midboss57 |
Hi everyone.
As part of preparing some factions for a campaign, I began going through the ship design rules in order to build some warships. The rules are mostly ok, save for one aberration that doesn't compute with me: hangar bays take 4 expansion bays, yet only house 8 tiny ships.
Am I reading this right ? Because going by my math, that means a carrier hull can only hold 16 fighters top, all the while being gargantuan scale (2000-15000ft). Meanwhile, in real life, aircraft carriers smaller than this can carry between 20 (Cavour, 800ft) and 80 aircraft (USS Gerald Ford, 1092ft).
Am I reading the book wrong ? Is it a typo or did the designers really intend to downplay the Imperial Star Destroyer with its swarms of Tie Fighters trope ?
Hithesius |
From a logical standpoint, starship scaling is a mess; fighter capacity is merely one example of this. For more, you need merely look at the listed size and mass ranges provided for size categories, where you will find no pattern or relationship other than larger numbers for larger categories - certainly nothing that respects things like the square-cube law. Or you could look at the possible cargo capacities, or crew capacities. Those are erroneous, certainly, but more deeply so than mere typos.
For hangar bays specifically the numbers are still frankly absurd given real world benchmarks and expectations - your upper estimate is quite conservative, since the Nimitz class can carry up to 130 - plus things we could reasonably be expected to want to replicate from other sources. However, there is some possible reasoning behind it, beyond the inconsistent and typically quite low numbers that emerge in the rest of the system. And it's very simple.
Do you want to actually run a battle with a Vindicas Tyrant and the full 16 Maulers it has now? 17 ships? Adjusting the numbers to allow for your example, would you actually want to run a battle with an Imperial Star Destroyer faithfully recreated with its full 72+ Tie Fighter wing?
That could be the reasoning behind the numbers for hangar bays specifically, though I think it could have been handled better.
Shadowcat48 |
the whole ship design system is badly flawed, along with assorted issues with the components going in a ship.
they could have been a far better job by at least borrowing or stealing from other game systems and filing the serial numbers off
go with a volume based system[Traveller, Space Opera, among others]
go with something akin to what they have now, but at least do a better job of defining what can fit in a given space.
default |
you can build a fighter to be a tier 14 or 15 ship, it can only take a couple light weapons to shoot with, but with a high attack roll and high AC and TL, high speed, and Heavy Shields 320, 360, 420 even. a few fighters flying around might be harder to deal with then you think
But where are you getting all those tier 14 or 15 pilots? I understand an ace may have a tricked out ship, but why can't the party just buy a high-end fighter rather than puttering through upgrades then?