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Just give the Tholians a capacitor based 2x per turn firing disruptor.

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Friday, December 10, 2010 - 12:21 am: Edit

One possibility, the powers that be have mentioned that the Tholians escaped to other places, such as the Draco dwarf galaxy. Perhaps one of these groups supplies the "aha moment" that allows simpiler production.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Friday, December 10, 2010 - 03:39 pm: Edit

This is a backstory snarl that reflects the fact that the neo Tholains didn't exist in the Real World when the Tholian arrival to the Alpha Octet was written.

We add functioning Tholian SC4 ships in order to give the Tholians some EY love, which creates the snarl.

The Tholians originally stole the disruptor because they didn't have a heavy weapon and needed one. With PC-armed ships in EY, this has to translate to "the tholians couldn't build new PCs or couldn't build them fast enough"

When you gain a technology, you don't just gain the ability to use it, you gain the ability to produce it. That has to be what the Tholians stole.

If you can't build the heavy weapon you have, you take what you can get, especially if your engineers look at it and say "yeah we can make this work better in time."

By the time the Neo Tholians arrive, the Holdfast is optimized for Disruptors. PCs are simply a non-starter in the Standard Tech/General War timeframe.

For the Tholians to return to the PC, they would need a reason. "We used to use these things" is not good enough. Tholian production is limited, which means they need an even bigger reason to switch to the PC due to production downtime from retooling. Retooling Disruptor Factory #3 for X-Disruptors probably entails less downtime than converting it to produce X-PCs.

So is the PC that much of an advantage? Not if their standard tech incarnations are any judge. I regard the standard-tech PC as a power-hungry weapon that packs the bone-crunching firepower of the disruptor with the pinpoint accuracy of the photon torpedo. It's sub-par even now after its overload-standard-load restrictions were opened up. Why switch, unless the X-version does something really fun-tastic?

Contrast this with the rapid Tholian adoption of photon torpedoes. Photons definitely did something fun-tastic for the Tholians.

It may be that the Old Galaxy Tholian bureaucracy never cared that PCs were a sub-par or dead-end technology. The backstory pretty much has tech development stagnating, so yeah, we fight with yesterday's tech and don't really care...until the Selt revolt.

I wouldn't mind seeing more diversity in the Alpha Octet in X or X2, especially among disruptor races. I just don't see refitting the Tholians with PCs as the way to go.

By Troy Latta (Saaur) on Friday, December 10, 2010 - 06:20 pm: Edit

I agree with your last point. I'd really like to see some differences between X-DISRs. Maybe Klingons optimized theirs for saber-dancing while Kzinti optimize theirs for crunch. Maybe Lyrans figure out how to move theirs from (FD1.52) to (FD1.51), etc.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Friday, December 10, 2010 - 07:58 pm: Edit

If you look around this topic you'll find discussion of resurrecting the Carnovon disruptor cannon (think: 2-turn disruptor) as the Kzinti X2 heavy weapon.