stDarNES1: Stars! Preview Thread

Not really. You don't need a lot of material to stop a laser. You can easily survive a ground-zero nuclear blast with a few millimeters of plastic if you build it just right. With advanced materials designed to dissipate and defract energy, you could very easily just include a thin sandwich of ablative armor into kinetic armor to defeat energy weapons (at least initially). For more protection you just add more layers. No muss, no fuss.

Having something which projects a constant, omnidirectional forcefield along however large a vessel, and however far away from it, without frying the crew or the internal systems, not to mention the absolutely staggering power supplies required for such a thing (which totally ignores weapons, propulsion, etc.), now that would be heavy.
 
A bit to Simplified. and somewhat inaccurate. Let's see.

Ranges: Close(less then 10km), Short(10km-1000km), Mid(1000km-.5Ls), Long(.5Ls-10Ls), Extended(10Ls+)

Mount: Secondary(a Ships Secondary Araments. smaller, cheaper then Primary, but a bit weaker), Primary(a Ships Primary Weapons), Fixed(anything Attached to something that isn't moving, weather a Space station, a Planet, or in a free floating Orbit(I.E. Mine).


Kenetic Weapons: rocks, Mass Drivers, handguns. these Weapons Deal Damage by pure Kinetic force.
-Advantage: Simple, Small, Cheap.
-Disadvantage: Energy Cosumptive, Easy to Dodge at mid-long range(unless they don't know it's coming).

Missiles: a Rock With a Drive. these Weapons rely on warheads to deal damage instead of kenetic force. while not as powerful as Kentics, the fact that they can alter there course means they are much more likely to hit at Longer range.
-Advantage: Low Space Usage, Acurate At Long Range.
-Disadvantages: Limited speed, can be shot down, Limited Supply.

Beam Weapons: your Standard energy Weapon, Beam Weapons are the Standard weapons of your typical SiFi Starship.
-Advantage: Unlimited shots, easy to hit with.
-Disadvantage: Weak, Energy Consumptive.

Par tical Weapons: THEE Weapons you want when Going head to head at Close Range. From Plasma Cannons, to Ion disrupters. but at Longer ranges, these weapons thend to suffer problems from dispersion.
-Advantage: Suicidal to Engage at Close range, heavy damage at short.
-Disadvantage: no damage at Long Range, Limiter Damage and Midium range, Energy Consumptive.

Fighter Craft: Fighter Craft are Separate, smaller ships who hitch a Ride on their Interstellar Counterparts. while they Lack their own Star Drives, they Excel in maneuverability and can be very hard to hit.
-Advantage: Excellent at All Ranges,
-Disadvantage: Large, Limited Supply, Expensive.

Gravitational: Weapons that Cause Damage due to Gravitational Sheering Forces.
-Advantage: Hard to Stop, Large Area of Effect, Powerful.
-Disadvantage: High tech Requirement, Expensive, dangers to User, Very Massive

Dimensional: weapons that Break or at least Severely bend the Rules of Reality.
-Advantage: VERY POWERFUL
-Disadvantage: Uber-Expensive, VERY high Tech Lvls, Dangerous to Use.


No I know these Categories don't cover every Weapon, but they can cover Almost any we can think of when Combined. Ex: Beam+Missile=X-ray Warhead, Beam+Dimensional=Wave Motion Cannon, Kenetic+Missile=Inirtial Warhead.
Fightercraft will have to be combined with another weapon, Unless you want them to be just manned missiles.

Gravitational weapons should be limited, and Dimensional Weapons should be Outright banned, because they would Serious Unbalance the Game.


now On To Defensive means.
This, is a Bit Simpler. it can be put into 3 categories. Point Defense, shields, and Armor.

Point Defense is basically shooting down a weapon before it can hurt you. it is quite efective Vs. Missiles and Fighter Craft, it's not so efective Vs. any other Weapons.

Sheilds: Your Basic All Around Defense. There is no Piticular Weapon it is weak or strong at, but it Is an All or nothing Defense. If they are brought down, you will be forced to fall back on your other defenses until they can be brought back into play.

Armor: the Primary Defensive Measure. Be it Abaltive, Chermtric, or just Plain Steal, Armor simply Shrugs off the blows Directed at it and absorbs the damage delt to it. But the amount Damage a Certain area can deal with is limited, and unlike Sheilds, once the armor is gone, it's going to remain gone until repairs can be made.


Power systems, engines, drives, and sensors should be pretty much Standard. they would take up a set amount of space, but improvements in technology would increase their performance and decrease their size, opening up more slots to by used for defense and weapons. the Number os SLots a weapon required would vary among them, being determined by the weapon type, and weather it was a primary or a secondary weapon system. defensive systems would be one slot each.
 
Hmm, seems like complicated is the word of the day. Why am I getting the feeling that what is wanted is more of a board-game type NES, than a story based one?
 
Symphony D. said:
I like how people ask for realistic tech and then go off on random and overly sophistiscated crap like forcefield generators to deflect energy weapons, when ablative armor is far easier to use, requires far less power, etc.

One word: Homeworld. ;)
If by "ablative" you mean "sacrificial", then where will you get repairs? :rolleyes:

Anyway, it depends very much on your interpretation of "forcefield generators". For the sake of game balance I put up Weapons A-1, A-2, B-1, B-2, and Armors A, B. We can put a black box around their precise function.
According to one of my novels at home, forcefields are impenetrable; require reasonable power; but the projector has to be outside of them.
 
At a stardock / spaceport, obviously. Modern armor is all "sacrificial". Your goal is to kill the enemy before he kills you, and this is unlikely to ever change no matter how technologically advanced one gets. Armor is just there to keep you alive long enough to do it, not render you utterly invulnerable or fool you into some damnably stupid move like diplomatic hailing at short range.

You're not going to sit around playing of laser rochambeau with the enemy to see who stands up the longest. You're going to drop out of hyperspace / warp / whatever and unload 200 nuclear warheads on him or frag him from 10,000 clicks away with a particle beam.

Most forcefields are only good as plot devices to keep Federation types who ask questions first and shoot later alive and safe from the people who actually know what they're doing.

Furthermore, it'd be hard enough to get a shield to stop even simple, singular attacks. A determined enemy is going to be dropping multiple weapon types on you simultaneously, many of them quite ugly (eg: Directed Energy Nukes - mrm, X-Ray lasers). The fact you can miniaturize weapons very easily means you can dump even more of them, making it easy to focus an attack along multiple vectors and easily overrun any sort of shield technology which isn't highly advanced. Basically, a shield isn't going to save you in warfare unless it's very, very good, or very, very powerful, and both of those would take a lot of R&D or ship space allotment. The novel Pandora's Star was pretty good about depicting such things, with a few hundreds to thousands of DEW warheads being exchanged every battle. You just aren't getting out of something like that unscathed unless you're just pumping the energy of a small star into your shielding system.

Furthermore, since the civilizations in this game are apparently just returning to interstellar travel, it really doesn't make sense for them to possess such exotic technology if they've just barely gotten back to working an FTL drive.
 
Symphony D. said:
Furthermore, since the civilizations in this game are apparently just returning to interstellar travel, it really doesn't make sense for them to possess such exotic technology...
This sort of contradicts the rest of your post.
  • At a stardock, obviously.
  • You're going to drop out of hyperspace / warp / whatever
  • The fact you can miniaturize weapons very easily
  • a few hundreds to thousands of DEW warheads being exchanged every battle.

Now, for the sake of game balance, force fields are equal but different to hull plating. I have no idea how they work and I'm not going to ask.
 
Not really. If you're going to have spaceships, and a game about interstellar domination / trade / conflict, whatever, the following must be true:

- FTL Drive is available

Whether that's warp drive, hyperspace, whatever, is irrelevent. Any space game which spans more than one star system which does not assume FTL will suck, period. Furthermore, anything likely to mount FTL is likely be big. Therefore:

- Ships will require orbital / spatial docking

Which pretty much guarantees starports of some sort, or some sort of orbital ring / array. Because beyond a certain point, you ain't landing a ship on the surface.

Furthermore, weapons do miniaturize easily. We have nuclear bombs which are 6" in diamater for crying out loud. If you can jump light years at a time, odds are you can fit an x-ray focusing array of comparable size to such a warhead. Now, assuming your spaceship is at least 100m in length, how many such warheads can you hold?

For comparison, a C-5 Galaxy could transport roughly 500,000 in its cargo bays. Admittedly, that's with no delivery system or anything, but still.

So no, nothing I said is really self-contradictory. Even simple, primative humans such as ourselves can make miniaturized nuclear warheads, focusing arrays, guidance and delivery systems, simple ablative armor, rudimentary cloaking of a sort, and so forth.

FTL itself is beyond us, but we have a few theories. There are no theories on force fields of any combat utility. You could have localized magnetic ones at most, I suppose, but those won't do crap against anyone with any brains. So for a civilization just regrasping the fundamentals of interstellar travel, they seem wholly out of place. If you're going to argue for hard sci-fi, stick to your guns. FTL is an exception since it's pretty much required, but forcefields are an unnecessary blackbox invention no different than Star Trek's "particle of the week" for early / reemergant space travel.

A good black box technology later on maybe, but as a starter item? Come on. Then you fall into MoO's trap of "Mk. N" shields anyway. Introduces a nice gameplay mechanic in that it represents a serious combat edge to whoever gets them first as well.
 
Spoiler venomous post :
the following must be true:
anything likely to mount FTL is likely [to] be big
That collapsed quickly. :rolleyes:

Now, if you re-read the introduction, you'll find that humanity didn't have a technological collapse, they only detonated their spaceships and starports. So space tech such as FTL drive would have been lost, but weapons, armor and shields would not, seeing as they can be useful planet-side.

FTL itself is beyond us, but we have a few theories. There are no theories on force fields of any combat utility. You could have localized magnetic ones at most, I suppose, but those won't do crap against anyone with any brains. So for a civilization just regrasping the fundamentals of interstellar travel, they seem wholly out of place.
Point me at the FTL theories of utility, please. I know of the Alcubierre Drive, which we can't start or stop; wormhole travel, which requires precision and energy orders of magnitude that themselves are orders of magnitude beyond us; and tachyon teleportation or similar effects, which scramble information to randomness.
For our theories, how about plasma windows? Those can plug a hole between atmosphere and vacuum while allowing specific radiation through.

FTL is an exception since it's pretty much required, but forcefields are an unnecessary blackbox invention no different than Star Trek's "particle of the week" for early / reemergant space travel.
Don't be ridiculous. First, you're confusing black box with the exact thing it's meant to prevent - poor explanations that don't stand up. Second, you're presupposing that early space travel is a prerequisite for forcefields.
Ok, enough flaming for one day.

"Laser Rochambeau"??? Are you referring to the South Park version, where you take turns kicking one another in the crotch? :lol:

Let's wait for Darwin420 to return. I want this to start soon.
 
Second, you're presupposing that early space travel is a prerequisite for forcefields.
Why the hell else would you build them? :p There certainly won't do you any good on a planetary body.

And nah, I just pretty much just made laser rochambeau up, though the idea of two ships hiding behind shields trying to break through the other's shield and kill him first is pretty much the same thing; all boils down to who goes down quicker, and it's just as pointless and foolish. ;)

But yeah, since I'm mostly a lurker anyway, I'll stop. I just think forcefields are stupid is all. ;) Damn you, Guardian of Orion...
 
Symphony D. said:
But yeah, since I'm mostly a lurker anyway, I'll stop. I just think forcefields are stupid is all. ;) Damn you, Guardian of Orion...
WHAT??? FORCEFIELDS ARE STUPID??? how dare you, burn this heretic!!! :mad: :mad: :mad: :p
 
Well, I posted a bit above with no reply (I dont think anyone noticed with all the forceshield discussion going on).

To reiterate.. it looks like, from all the posts, the primary interest is in something that more resembles a board game, and not a partially-abstracted story-based game. When I set up this preview thread, I was (and still am) determined to not do this if it will only cause me massive headaches trying to keep 100's of technologies straight, and socketed-shiptypes tracked, and so on and so forth.

I'd like to keep technology to as close to realism as possible; I'd like to have some variation in ships and have technology be important. And I'd like players to have the opportunity to bring their faction to glory.

So, all those interested in this in one way or another, please answer this: what kind of NES are you really looking for? Lots and lots of complexity? or something more abstract?

Not trying to be rude here, just trying to make myself clear. ;)
 
Darwin420 said:
Lots and lots of complexity? or something more abstract?

Not trying to be rude here, just trying to make myself clear. ;)
Well,what i'm looking for this NES, is to be classic sci-fi, like photon torpedos and energy shields (realism is not the first priority). Ships should be fully customiseable, so that each nation would develope their unique fleets.
 
Darwin420 said:
I'd like to keep technology to as close to realism as possible; I'd like to have some variation in ships and have technology be important. And I'd like players to have the opportunity to bring their faction to glory.

So, all those interested in this in one way or another, please answer this: what kind of NES are you really looking for? Lots and lots of complexity? or something more abstract?

Not trying to be rude here, just trying to make myself clear. ;)
Make it abstract. In the words of some game designer, "complexity should be hidden from the players by default". Attach a huge Excel spreadsheet to the update giving the data on ship models and planet/star/sector stats, but don't make it mandatory. Run it in the background, pull it out when you feel like it, but allow players to send simple orders. If someone wants to design specific ship designs, that's when you send them the shipbuilding interface.

In short, make it abstract, but allow us access to the underlying structure.
 
Darwin, i'm a board game player, and wont play in your game because you want it to be a story game, but here is my advice:

dont listen to most of what has been posted here.
the players will always want to make the posibilities as complicated as possible (slots on every ship, different weapons for every civ, various weapons better against various shields and so on).

as a mod, and especialy of a story game, you have to SIMPLIFY as much of this as possible.
my suggestions would be along the lines of:

Decide if you're having individual units for military or just a simplified "navy is strong in this one, but army is weak" type thing. The units thing makes borders realer (as in you have to keep some units on each border cause you dont know which side you'll be attacked from). But it means you as the mod have to keep track of a bunch of units. The "military power=4" type sistems are easier to handle in the sense of who's stronger then who, but it will make for a stronger player basicaly saying that he has his uber army on every border at once, and battles will have to be VERY abstract, which makes for worse story possibilities i think.

If you go for the units aproach (which you seem to be leaning to), simplify the units themselves, so atleast you have to keep track of a bunch of simple units, not a bunch of overly complicated units.
something like: Ships have size and a Fighting strength. that's it.
The players can write up pages worth of descriptions for their ships (mine would have green lasers and purple missles that make a loud humming sound in space) but the ships are still size X and strength Y. And that's all YOU have to keep track of. Makes battle resolution easier to figure out too, as you dont have the players claiming that the technology they invented 13 pages ago makes their ship dodge things better, so their crappy little ships should beat the big ships of their opponent becuase they'll dodge all the lasers. All you have to do is just total up the ship strengths on each side, maybe throw in a small random "luck" factor, and figure out the outcome and post it. Then if you want write up a narrative about how that outcome came about (or let the players do it even, as long as their stories end with the end result you already posted, it doesnt matter how the battle got there).

For the economic systems (all of them, the food, industry and so forth) i would suggest this:
1. the research costs are screwed up, your increase in cost goes: 2,2,3,4,3,5,5,5,5, pick a progression and stick to it, even if the values dont come out round. even a simple 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 progression just to keep things easier. Then just spread the tech effect increases to more levels to compensate for the cheapness of each level. People will dump more into techs if they're cheaper, even if they have less effect.

2. increase the "economy" production. a player who only has 1 "point" to spend each turn, wont be able to write much about the one ships he built that turn. but if you just split that one point into say 10, then he'll spend 3 on ships, 2 on industrie and 5 on research and have way more to write about.


The more complicated the rules become (the more gameboard like), the fewer stories you will get. People will write orders like:
"new unit: battlestar - 3 engine slots, 5 energy generation, 3 laser slots, 4 missle slots, 2 slots to armor, 1 to shields"
and they'll have enough "fun" in creating the ship stats, that they wont care to spend the time to write about the ship in a story format.
But if the actual orders are just "new unit: battlestar - size 4, strength 7"
then they may actualy go into story format to describe the rainbow colored photon cannons they've got on the ship. Different civs can have completely "different" techs for weapons (so the players can go wild creating anything they want), but all the units are still easy to compare in strength.

(just noticed i went back to ship design suggestions, oh well, i think its important not to over do it here, cause if you do, you'll get a monster board game, that you'll never be able to have the time to run and the players will get bored from all the stats. the majority of NESers are NOT monster boardgamers, they dont have the patience, they'll join your game and quit in 2 turns when they realize that they have to spend 30 minutes writing stats for their planets and ships every turn. But everyone likes comming up with complex (or comprehensive/realistic as they would word it) systems, that noone will ever use.)

edited for readability.
 
hmm Limited number of Alost per size (2, 5, 9, 14, 20, 27. or something like that). you divide the sots between Weapons, sheilds, and Armor. each ship also get's a Unique System.
Weapons can be anything you like. what they are dose not determan how powerfull the weapon is, but rather your weapons Tech lvl, which is an indencator of how well you build weapons. (*1 at lvl one, *2 and lvl 2, ect.)
this gives free range on storiy elling. you might have an Uber weapon technolagy, but with a low weapons lvl, it would be a big bulky thing requiering many many slots. on the other hand, you could build relitivly simple weapons and have a high weapons tech, enabling you to minaturize it to an un precedent scale.

Sheilds are just that. sheilds. they are a ships first line of defence. defending on a one to one basies. but they regenreate each round. there strenght is determend by their own tech lvl. straight forward Multiplyer.

Armor is much tougher then Sheilds, but do not regenrate. you get 3 armor per slot, Multiplyed by their own Tech lvl.

Unique Systems are Unique to Each nation. you may have as many as you want, but only one per ship. they offer a small bonus to combat, or a specile ability. nothign major, but might offer an advantage if used right. Mod has final Rulling on them.

combat is simple. Take each fleets combined weapons lvl and deduct from it the opposing fleets sheild. then subtract the new Wepon lvl from the armor, and if the number is negitive, that many ships in the opposing fleet are destroyed. starting with the smaller ships first. if there are still ships left, the sheilds are reset, and the proccess repeats, with the sheilds restored, and the armor that was destroyed removed from the equation, along with the weapon/sheilds of the lost ships.
Note, if both sides have sheilds stronger then the weapons of the opposing fleet, the battle ends in a stale mate, as neather side can win.
 
I am currently working on a viable ruleset for this. Once I am done, I will post the completed version. Hopefully it won't take me too long, but with the Holidays, one can never tell what will come up.

Thanks to EVERYONE for all the great suggestions and ideas. I now have a more solid direction to go for this.

See ya soon.
 
Yes, hurry for I cannot wait until this begins. Always wanted to try one of these Starship NES's.
 
Okay, I figure it's time I made my nation.

Haven
Haven is the name for a planet, specifically, one that a particular human group became stranded on during the time of the Scourge that forced all humans out of space. They had slightly more time to prepare than most, and attempted to collect together as much human knowledge as possible before finally becoming isolated.

Haven is a highly mountainous jungle planet, overflowing with exotic invertibrates. Human settlement is mostly on high mountains, for space observation and solar energy collection reasons.

It is just very recently that they have returned to space. They have redeveloped a general fighter craft, the Justice, and have used it to secure their home solar system. Their next step- rediscovery of the other isolated humans.

Here's a picture of the Justice fighter during a combat test. They are now more stealthy and give off less of a vapour trail.

SPACESHI.png
 
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