Hey everyone!

I've said before that I love police ships. I've also recently found myself taking to modifying SSDs like a duck taking to water. Given that the Frax are, so far, the only C4 simulator race to be given a police ship, I figured why not make some POLs for the other C4 races myself? After all, if "C4R" (or whatever it will ultimately be called) is ever to be published, somebody has to, right?

With that in mind, here is the first of the POLs I will be publishing in this thread, the Deltan "Heeler" Police Cutter...

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/CaptainTrek/HeelerPoliceShip.jpg

This one was A LOT of fun to design, both in the conceptual and practical stages. At first, I was going to give the Heeler a single photon in its nose and a pair of PH-1s where the photons are on the larger Deltan ships, but then I thought to myself, "Hang on, Deltan ships are supposed to be all about running with overloaded photons, right? And the Hustler and Hellhound are short on phasers, so why not make a heavy weapon-based POL with a light phaser armament, kind of like the E3?"

So, I did, giving the Heeler two photons in the usual Deltan FA-L and FA-R positions, a PH-1 in the FX nose position, single PH-3 each in the LS, RS and RX positions and an ADD in the 360 phaser position, as well as enough power for the Heeler to run at up to speed 28 with overloaded photons (assuming no battery use).

I felt the Heeler should have a better turn mode than the heavier Deltan ships, so I gave her a turnrate of "3" at all speeds, which gives her a similar level of manoeuvrability compared with a Fed POL or FF as a Hustler or Hellhound has compared with a Fed CA.

Actually, she may well be somewhat overpowered for a POL, in which case cutting the ship back to ten warp boxes, smaller sensor and scanner tracks and possibly even reducing the nose phaser to a PH-3 would be my recommendations.

I am, however, [i]extremely[/i] proud of her and I think she looks great, even if she isn't perfectly balanced...

Well, now it's over to you guys...So, what do you think of the Heeler (and indeed the rest of the POLs that will come later)?

By Michael C. Grafton (Mike_Grafton) on Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - 02:56 pm: Edit

Very nice

By John Swift (Sirbroadsword) on Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - 11:00 pm: Edit

Opps... Looks like I forgot to add the copyright to the SSD...

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/CaptainTrek/HeelerPoliceShipWithMark.jpg

Anway, I should have the Qari POL up by the end of the day...

By John Swift (Sirbroadsword) on Thursday, May 27, 2010 - 10:00 am: Edit

OK, here's my next police ship, the Qari BR5...

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/CaptainTrek/BR5.jpg

As you can see, this ship is a lot less, shall we say, "inspired", than the Heeler, requiring only relatively minor modifications of the BR6 SSD when compared with the complete and total overhaul I had to perform on the Hellhound SSD to turn into into a POL. It was also easier to figure out during the conceptual phase, as it was immediately obvious that the BR6 was already quite a weak frigate and thus didn't really need to be "cut down" in any substantial way, lest I end up creating a ship with a BPV of 30...

I did, however, abandon my original idea to replace the BR6s APRs with LABs (and give the ship an APR and a transporter below the two batteries) partway through the modification when I realised that it really didn't make sense for the police ships to have labs when the frigates didn't, particularly when the POLs of many races actually have FEWER labs than their respective frigates, with the only exception I'm aware of being the Hydran Gendarme (and even then, the Hunter/Cuirassier, unlike the BR6, does have labs) and that it also didn't make sense to give the BR5 and extra transporter (or tractor, for that matter) when Qari ships in general tend to be chronically short of both of these systems.

Still, I think what I ultimately came up with fits in with the other smaller Qari ships well without being so weak as to render it unable to compete...

And now, here's a short "backstory" for the ship that you could conceivably use in the "C4R" rules manual...

"The Qari police ship design was hastily put together to fulfill its assigned mission. Based on a cut down BR6, it loses some of the firepower but retains the relative toughness of that design. The cut-downs were also enough to render the BR5 nimble, though just barely."

Well, that's that then. Next up, the Flivver POL...

By John Swift (Sirbroadsword) on Friday, May 28, 2010 - 10:29 am: Edit

And here it is, the promised Flivver Police Corvette...

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/CaptainTrek/FlivverPoliceShip.jpg

Honestly, because I'd put alot of thought into this one beforehand and because of the ship's rather convenient shape, modifying the outline of the ship and the boxes within the outline was probably the least time consuming part of the whole exercise. Tidying it up was what took the longest...

Like the Heeler, the Flivver POL is reflective of that race's overall shortage of phasers. For a while, I wasn't sure whether to give this ship two hyperdrone boxes or four. Since each group of three HDrone boxes on the CA and DW are, in effect, one heavy weapon, I did seriously consider giving the POL a single, centreline HDRN rack with three boxes, but in the end I felt that keeping the ship's weapons in the "standard" Flivver hardpoints would look better, particularly given that I fully intended to give the ship three cargo boxes all along (one for hyperdrone storage, two for its police work). I also thought that giving the Flivvers more variety in the number of heavy weapon (say, a CL with nine, an FF with four and a POL with two) boxes they have would be a bit more fan than slavishly adhering to the "three HDRN boxes = one photon/disruptor/hellbore/etc" concept...

Anyway, I reduced the ship to one shuttle primarily because I felt I had to reduce the rear PH-3s to one box, meaning I'd have to do the same to the ship's shuttles if I wanted to make the ship's outline nice a trim. However, I did let it keep two TRAC and two TRAN boxes to make up for the fact that it (like the other Flivver ships) doesn't have any APRs...

Note also that the centre warp engine is four boxes, which fits perfectly with the statement in the manual that around 40% of a Flivver ship's warp power should be centre warp and thus hoverwarp capable (indeed, why the DW has has three equal engines instead of eight in its centre warp and five in each of the left and right warp completely baffles me, particularly when 8/18 is only 44.(4) % and it would seem to make sense that higher tech "war" units would have better hoverwarp anyway).

And now, the ship's "backstory"...

"The Flivver police corvette is a unit specially designed to take into account the unique nature of Flivver starships in the context of police work. A small but effective hoverwarp engine allows Flivver police captains a massive manoeuvrability advantage of the freighters they are typically charged with protecting and/or searching, thus reducing the threat such dangerous targets as hostile large armed freighters would otherwise pose to the unit. A large cargo hold provides plenty of storage space for both spare hyperdrones and the usual police-work related cargos."

Next up, I'll be doing the the ship that arguably deserves to exist the most... the Barbarian POL...

By John Swift (Sirbroadsword) on Tuesday, June 01, 2010 - 10:56 am: Edit

Sorry for the delay guys... Here's the Barbarian Police Ship...

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/CaptainTrek/BarbarianPoliceShip-1.jpg

I really enjoyed editing this one, even though this is actually the first SSD I've had that I've "redesigned" after having nominally completed it. Originally, the ship had one forward option mount and one centre option mount, but I eventually realised that this just didn't work very well within the rules for Barbarian option mounts, so I changed it to two forward mounts. Also, the ship originally had only one Power Option, but I changed this to two feeling that I just couldn't ignore all the police ships that had two APRs... Players are more than welcome to void one PO box (or use it as an NWO) on ships with one APR/AWR...

Basically, the Barbarian POL is set-up in such a way that the fairly varied relative strengths of the POLs of different races can be accounted for. More powerful POLs can be simulated by filling all the weapon options with weapons while leaving them void or filling them with other systems. Generally speaking, the two NWOs are intended to be fitted as cargo, but they could, of course, be used in a variety of ways (a fighter bay on a Hydran POL simulaid might be an example).

As I said in my last post, this is the POL that, out of all the POLs I have built and have still to build, deserves the most to exist. Surely, I figured, the ISC would have wanted to accurately take into account enemy police ships that might by guarding convoys or planets when planning for the pacification campaign and thus surely they would have constructed a Barbarian Police Ship for that purpose...

Anyway, with that said, here's the "backstory" of the ship...

"The Barbarian Police Ship was designed to (mainly through create use of its options) simulate the various police ships of the other alpha-octant powers and was primarily used in simulated ISC attacks on convoys and planets. This ship was a better solution to the problem of factoring the existence of police ships into the plans for Pacification Campaign than simply using a Barbarian frigate with some voided options because doing so would produce a ship with an unrealistically large amount of power available and no "nimble" status. Hence, the police ship was designed. Typically, it was the two NWOs that were used for the cargo space that was standard on most police ships, though any of the ship's options could, of course, be used for any number of purposes..."

By Mike Kenyon (Mikek) on Tuesday, June 01, 2010 - 11:55 am: Edit

Minor issue ... the Bar A/B mounts are arc F

By John Swift (Sirbroadsword) on Tuesday, June 01, 2010 - 11:07 pm: Edit

"Minor issue ... the Bar A/B mounts are arc F"

Umm... Yes... It does say that on the SSD... Is that a problem?

Well if you really want me to, I could polish up and post my other version of the Bar POL (with one forward mount and one centre mount), but again, like I said, having one forward and one centre box doesn't work very well because a Bar ship can only have "half" of its forward and side boxes as heavy weapons, so what do you do if you have three boxes? And if you round down, what do you do about things like the Hydran Gendarme? Because centre boxes can't legally hold most types of heavy weapons at all...

Granted you can't have a 360 phaser on the ship as I've set it up, but really, how many POLs have 360 non-drone weapons? Not counting the Hydran POL (as the already existing PH-3s will just get replaced under the rules by a 360 PH-3 anyway), there are only two...

Anyway, I forgot to mention that next up will be the Sharkhunter Police Ship...

By Mike Kenyon (Mikek) on Wednesday, June 02, 2010 - 12:05 am: Edit

Well, by tradition most things are FA, FL, FR or FH. F opens things to a degree of difference of opinion that may be considered undesirable in all but the friendliest of competitions.

By John Swift (Sirbroadsword) on Wednesday, June 02, 2010 - 07:45 am: Edit

You don't have a clue how Barbarian option mounts work, do you Mike? If you were to check module C4, you'd see that ALL Barbarian ships have forward mounts with "F" arcs (and side mounts with "L" and "R" arcs) and that the rulebook explains how this works with relation to various weapons (for instance, phasers and heavy weapons in the "F" mounts become FA, while plasmas become FP).

I have, however, noticed that I have erroneously left the breakdown ratings of the Barbarian and Flivver police ships at 5-6 instead of making them six and I'm also not convinced that the crew compliments, tracks and shields strengths I came up with for the ships are any good...

Anyway, here's the Sharkhunter police ship...

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/CaptainTrek/SharkhunterPoliceShip-1.jpg

This one was initially very difficult to conceptualise, but ultimately VERY easy to put together once I figured out how I was going to work all of the myriad Sharkhunter systems into a police ship sized vessel... Unfortunately, the changes I made ultimately caused what had previously been the frigate outline to shrink only slightly, something I'm not entirely happy with but can't really see a way around...

I also had a fierce internal debate over wether to give the ship PH-1s or PH-3s in its LS and RS arcs. On one hand, PH-1s seemed like a good idea given, for instance, the chronically low BPV of the Gorn "Police" FF, but on the other hand the Gorn FF has neither as many non-combat systems as the Sharkhunter POL, 'nor has the Chaff Thrower or Bomb Throwers of the Sharkhunter POL, which I felt might just serve to balance that out. Ultimately, I went for PH-3s, if only because I personally would rather create a slightly underpowered ship (hence the way I did the Qari and Flivver POLs) than a slightly overpowered one. Besides, they can be very easily changed to PH-1s if the ship proves too combat ineffective anyway...

OK, here's her "backstory":

"The Sharkhunter police ship came into being when more than one group of cadets who had been running variations of the famous Sharkhunter scenario "The Space Wolves" demanded a "police-sized unit" to place in Sharkhunter convoys for added challenge, finer control over scenario "balance" and improved "realism". What was produced in response to these calls was a fine police design and should not be underestimated by a cloaked raider..."

By Mike Kenyon (Mikek) on Wednesday, June 02, 2010 - 04:37 pm: Edit

Nope - never played them, just looked a might odd ... Thank you. Learn something new every day.

By John Swift (Sirbroadsword) on Friday, June 18, 2010 - 12:54 pm: Edit

Well, here's the Triaxian police ship... I have no excuse for the delay this time, I was merely procrastinating, dithering over just what the Hell I was supposed to do with this one...

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb6/CaptainTrek/TriaxianPoliceship.jpg

Ultimately, I fear what I wound up coming up with is just too powerful to be a police ship, but at the same time too badly gimped to be a frigate. It didn't take me too long to realise why a ship smaller than the destroyer (not counting the PFs) wasn't published in C4... The way the Triaxian ships and their combat doctrines are designed means that a minimum of three plasma torpedoes is quite simply a requirement, rendering small ships vastly overgunned...

For a while, I considered giving the ship three plasma-Ds or a single 360 plasma-F, but I ultimately rejected both of these ideas because plasma-Ds simply arent used that way and 360 plasma-Fs simply do not exist on ships, respectively, not to mention that the Triaxians were first programmed well before plasma-Ds were invented and surely some bored Gorn programmer would have bothered to plug in a police ship design well before the plas-Ds came around...

So instead I tried to make the ship weaker than its fellow police ships in other areas, hence the relatively weak shields, the small hull and the ship having nine warp boxes instead of ten. However, these may ultimately only end up being balanced out by the extra shuttle (again a symptom of how Triaxian ships are designed) and impulse engine...

Still, I'm not at all satisfied with the design and knew I probably wouldn't be, which is why I dithered... Oh well, I can say for certain that the next (and last) police ship will be much better... Anyway, here's her "backstory":

"The Triaxian police ship is the logical result of Triaxian ship design and combat doctrines being applied to a smaller hull. What results is a swift, deadly and heavily armed vessel for its size that any raider should think twice about tangling with."

By John Swift (Sirbroadsword) on Friday, July 02, 2010 - 01:24 am: Edit

Note: I can't get my Britannian DN SSD to scan straight, so work on my final police ship design, the Britannian police ship, has been put on indefinite hold... Please instead see my new thread, "Some new Cadet Ships to munch on."