Vorlon placed my new Klingon on his site. The link was broken, but I figured out the proper URL on my first try.

I call this my warp forward design:
http://www.vorlonagent.com/sfb/x2/toscrawford/XD.gif

It could also be my XFU design. Like before the objective was to break design assumptions wherever possible. The center warp detaches with the boom. The rear hull can maneuver with the boom detached.

By R. Brodie Nyboer (Radiocyborg) on Saturday, April 24, 2004 - 09:42 pm: Edit

HEY! That thing's giving us all the finger!

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Saturday, April 24, 2004 - 11:03 pm: Edit

Hey, I created the warp forward design!

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Sunday, April 25, 2004 - 01:08 am: Edit

Loren, can you point me to your warp forward ships? I'd like to compare how you interpreted this engine arrangement.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Sunday, April 25, 2004 - 01:52 am: Edit

Well, I finished my Tholian XC, but there are two problems. The first is that it was done in MS Paint and my artistic skills are lousy. But the more serious problem is that it is not well balanced against the latest designs that have been posted here.

When I designed it I was assuming X2 cruisers would still fall roughly in the CCX/DNH range, i.e. about 250-300 BPV. I initially intended to make the Tholian XC about 230 BPV since most Archeo-Tholian ships are somewhat smaller and less powerful, but also less expensive, than their counterparts in other fleets. After I finished the design, I decided I had overshot my mark and that the ship is at least 250-260 BPV, even though it only has two disruptors and they are X1-tech only. But if most of XCAs were clustered into the high end of the assumed range, say 275-300 points, 250-260 points would still be acceptable. But I'm confident the ship as I originally designed it would beat either Tos' "warp forward" Klingon cruiser or Mike Raper's XCA published above. This would make the Tholian XC the heavy hitter of the (pre-Xork) X2 cruisers, which seems a little strange. The ship, as I said, only had two X1-tech disruptors (though with the DD arcs, i.e. FA+L and FA+R) and it also had 12 of Mike Raper's Ph-X (two four-phaser arrays and two two-phaser arrays) and an improved webcaster and improved snares. I believe the combined effect of the very powerful phaser suite and the X2 webcaster improvements are too much, given current thinking on early X2 ships. And I don't want to "un-improve" the webcaster since I believe that improving their phasers and the webcaster would be much higher priority for Tholian R&D than improving disruptors or photons (and the latter may well not be possible without Fed help anyway).

Back to the drawing board. My current thought is to reduce the phaser suite and the shields from my first attempt, since I want to keep the snare and webcaster changes.

One thing I do disagree with regarding the latest X2 postings is the reduction of engine power below X1 levels. The weapons reductions make more sense to me for general purpose designs. Going to less powerful warp engines seems to me a more dubious design decision. Certainly there are "in game" reasons Why the new engines might be preferable. One possibility is that the new engines are slightly less powerful but much cheaper. This would appear in the game as a "split" EPV/BPV with EPV lower. But no one is splitting EPV and BPV on their SSDs, so that doesn't seem to be the reason. Another possible reason is that the new engines develop slightly less top-end power but are vastly more fuel efficient. This wouldn't show up in a tactical battle but could allow X2 ships to have range/endurance advantages over X1 ships in a strategic campaign. This strategic movement advantage might justify the tactical disadvantage of slightly lower top-end power. All in all, however, I would prefer to see X2 ships with warp engines as powerful as their X1 counterparts. I concur with the general preference that X2 ships not be super-ships, at least until late in the X2 era. But reduction in engine power seems to me harder to justify than reduction in weapons for the early general purpose X2 ships. I mean no disrespect to Tos Crawford, but his "warp forward" Klingon cruiser published above seems particularly egregious to me.

Just my .02 quatloos worth.

By Mike Raper (Raperm) on Sunday, April 25, 2004 - 10:02 am: Edit

Alan,

I've been playing around with a Tholian XCA; I'll send it to you, and maybe we can work on it together.

Did this Klingon XD7 a while ago, and it was the one we playtested with. Fun ship. Switch out the P-X's for P-5's, get rid of the WPC's and ASIF, and it should still work okay.

R3.?? Klingon XD7

The disruptors cost three points to arm in standard mode, and five for overload. The ship has disruptor caps that hold up to six points of power each. UIM and DERFACS are integrated into the fire control system.

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Sunday, April 25, 2004 - 10:38 am: Edit

Alan, did you detect that my Klingon has a well hidden 2/3 MC and was a light cruiser? It is comparable to the D5X. The X2 light cruiser has two more warp then the X1 light cruiser. I knew I was trying to build small but didn’t realize it was a light cruiser until I had finished the SSD.

I may not have been successful in reaching my target BPV, but I figured get the basic design done (inspiration struck one evening) and scale up or down as needed. Its easy enough to add a few extra warp and call it MC=3/4 or MC=1.

Apologies for not including the 2/3 MC table on the bottom.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Sunday, April 25, 2004 - 08:59 pm: Edit

Tos;

OOPS!!! I completely missed that. Okay, with a 2/3 movement cost your ship makes a lot more sense. My most recent Tholian XC, while downgraded a little from the first effort, is a 2/3 movement cruiser that generates a bit more power than your "warp forward" light cruiser. But then, the Tholians have no drones. All their weapons require power to arm.

Mike;

Feel free to send your design and maybe we can come up with a really good X2 Tholian cruiser together. I don't know if you've defined X2 snares and webcasters yet. I've got some ideas that seem to work pretty well, though with the X2 webcaster I think we need to limit it to one per ship until the Xork-era Ultra-Cruisers appear.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 03:43 pm: Edit

Graceful Degradation

Complex military systems and civiliian systems critical to safety (systems associated with Air Traffic Control, for example) are frequently designed with redundant features and back-up capabilities so that they can continue to provide some capability even if damaged or malfunctioning. This is sometimes called "Graceful Degradation". I propose that certain X2 systems might be good candidates for graceful degradation.

What got me started on this train of thought was a comment that I had posted in a different thread remarking that "counting boxes" was not a good method of determining ship size since some boxes represented systems which were obviously much larger and more massive than others. For example, a Plasma-R must surely be much larger than a Plasma-F, but each is only one box on the SSD. What the number of boxes really represents is the amount of damage the ship can absorb, and perhaps a plasma torpedo is rather fragile. Despite its size, it only takes a small amount of damage to render it non-functional.

Some SFB systems already have graceful degradation implicitly. Sensors, Scanners, and Damage Control are the obvious examples. When you take a Scanner hit you check off a box on the Scanner track and after several hits (depending on ship size) your Scanner capability is degraded, reducing the accuracy of your fire. Less obviously, engines and phasers degrade gracefully by virtue of the fact that they are represented by multiple boxes on the SSD. When you take a Left Warp Engine hit, you don't lose the engine, it keeps functioning at reduced power output.

I propose that certain systems which are physically large but still represented by only one SSD box would be good candidates for a graceful degradation rule. Heavy plasma torpedos are the obvious example. Systems which degrade gracefully still have a box on the SSD to represent weapon type and firing arc. But damage is recorded on an external track similar to the Sensor or Scanner track. As the system takes hits, boxes on the external track are marked off and the systems capability is determined by the highest unmarked box on the track.

Hypothetically, suppose that there is an X2 "super-heavy" torpedo that maxes out at 70 points of damage. It is deployed only on a few ships and never more than one per ship. Its external track has three boxes. When the first box is checked off, the torpedo can only be armed as an M-torp or smaller, and cannot use two-turn arming at all. The second hit degrades the torpedo still further. It can only be armed as a G-torp and cannot use ANY non-standard modes. It cannot be shotgunned or enveloping. It cannot use sabot or fire as a plasma bolt. It is a pure-vanilla G-torp only. The third hit, of course, completely eliminates the torpedo. If the torp takes a hit while already holding a torp larger than the degraded mode can handle, the ship has 8 impulses to launch (but not bolt) the torp, just as currently happens when a regular plasma torp is destroyed while holding an armed torpedo.

An R-torp, being smaller, only has two boxes on the track. The first hit reduces its capability to a standard (non-X) S-torp. The only X-tech advantage the degraded torp could use would be the -1 drm for ECCM, since that is a function of the fire control system rather than the launcher itself. The second hit on the same launcher eliminates the launcher.

The criteria for an X2 system to gracefully degrade should be that it is a physically very large system but is represented by only one SSD box. The mega-phaser would be another prime example. Personnally, I don't much care for the mega-phaser idea and would prefer not to see them used in X2. But if they are used, they should probably use graceful degradation rules. ESGs, PPDs, Web Casters, and plasma torpedos smaller then R-torps are other possible candidates but in my opinion not large enough physically (except maybe for M-torps and PPDs, neither of which is ever deployed on an SC4 hull), based on how many you can fit on a given hull, to justify graceful degradation.

Just my .02 quatloos worth.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Monday, May 03, 2004 - 09:18 pm: Edit

Mike Raper:

Several days ago I emailed you some comments about a Tholian XCA. Did you ever receive them?

By Mike Raper (Raperm) on Monday, May 03, 2004 - 10:06 pm: Edit

Yeah, I did. Sorry about not getting back sooner...it's been a heck of a week. Look for a reply tomorrow!

By R. Brodie Nyboer (Radiocyborg) on Sunday, August 15, 2004 - 04:32 am: Edit

The two working versions of my XCA are XCA#2 and XCA#3. These SSDs are close to being finished but need a few more edits. They should give you an idea of what I'm doing, though some of it will be difficult to grasp without the rules/system descriptions available. Those are in the works still.

For what it's worth I'm basically doing a revamp on my rules, and I'm nearly done. In the end just about everything gets something for X2. The SSD reflects that in a cursory manner. I apologize for any confusion.

Version #1 was designed courtesy of Mike Raper last year.

By R. Brodie Nyboer (Radiocyborg) on Monday, September 06, 2004 - 06:50 pm: Edit

I'm pulling the links; going back to the drawing board.

By Jeff Tonglet (Blackbeard) on Monday, September 06, 2004 - 10:02 pm: Edit

Alan,

Where on the SSD would you mark that the system had been degraded? What if you have 4 or 6 of those weapons on the ship?

An early SSD that I tried let the ph-5s have a graceful degredation. Each phaser was 2 boxes joined together with a dashed line. If both boxes were undamaged, the system was a ph-5. If one box was still up, it was a ph-6. Everyone took one look at the SSD and said "yuk".

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Tuesday, September 07, 2004 - 04:28 pm: Edit

Jeff;

The way I had envisioned it, each such system would be represented by only one box "within the ship outline" but would also have an external track similar to the ammunition track for drone racks. You would mark off a box on the external track every time that system took a hit, but wouldn't mark off the box within the ship outline until the last box was gone. For example, suppose the hypothetical X2 "super heavy" plasma torpedo that I mentioned in my May 01 post is "Plasma Torpedo A". There would be a box within the outline labeled "A", just as current torpedos are labeled, and there would be a two-box external track also labeled "A", like a drone rack ammunition track. The first hit scored on "Torpedo A" would mark off one box on the external track. The system would still function at a degraded level, as described above. The second hit on "A" would mark off the second box on the external track, indicating further degradation. The third hit would mark off the box actually within the ship outline, and the torpedo would be totally non-functional at that point, until repaired.

The repair rules would also have to be revised to handle graceful degradation systems. For example, if the torpedo had been totally knocked out, would reapiring it back to full capability count as three boxes repaired (the one within the outline and the two in the degradation track) against CDR capability, or would it only count as one box? I can't answer that off hand. I think it would have to be playtested with other X2 ships to get the right balance. But that is more or less how I envisioned the system as working.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Tuesday, September 07, 2004 - 04:38 pm: Edit

Jeff;

One other point: I don't see having a whole lot of graceful degrading weapons on any one ship, since a system has to be physically quite large to qualify. The smallest systems I could see as having a graceful degradation would be the Plasma-M or the PPD, and I'm dubious about those. So I would think the absolute maximum would be 4 such systems per ship, for an X2 version of the ISC CCX. And given that most of the posters (though not everyone) on this topic have expressed a preference that X2 ships be more "general purpose" ships rather than "maximum weapons" like the X1 ships (at least until the Xorks arrive) even 4 such systems may be more than any single ship would carry.

An X2 Starbase would be a different matter of course, and might have a number of such systems.

By Jeff Tonglet (Blackbeard) on Tuesday, September 07, 2004 - 11:12 pm: Edit

Normally, when my opponent wants to look at my ship's SSD, he's allowed to see the right side (the ship), but not the left (ammo, guards, etc.)

The degredation needs to be on the part of the SSD that an opponent would glance at.

If you like, I still have the GIF file of the first XCA I made, which has the 2-box phasers, and I can send it to you.

By Mike Raper (Raperm) on Thursday, January 06, 2005 - 06:02 pm: Edit

Updated X2 Proposal

Having fun with X2 stuff again, and updated my proposal doc to include a few more ships (mainly some Y220 designs to please those who want more powerful ships, and to show the progression from "normal" ships to combat oriented ones), and some other stuff. Ditched the phaser-x thing for now as anything but a Tholian weapon. My plan for X2 Tholians is to give them the Phaser-X and improved web stuff, but no new heavy weapons. Trying to return them to a more phaser dependent race. Using the Phaser-5 in limited numbers for everyone else seems more fun (though I'm sticking to a 1 point power cost...I know people will disagree, but that's just how it is). The Klingon XD7 and XC7 are FUN to play with, I can tell you that. And while it won't probably see publication, having the Feds once again with the only DN is fun; the XDN is truly badass. Granted, there are only two of 'em, but still, it was just too fun to pass up. I suspect some people will find the Y205 ships too weak. BPV's are really conjectural at this point, too. Not enough testing to really tell yet.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Thursday, January 06, 2005 - 10:32 pm: Edit

Mike,

I'm probably in the minority here, but I dislike the designation "XD7" for a Klingon X2 cruiser. To remain consistent with Klingon nomenclature, it should probably be the D8. And the "XC7" should probably be either the D9 or the C11. That follows the pattern of Klingon ship names going all the way back to the EY period. The DX is (almost) consistent with Klingon patterns since variants or upgrades of the D7 are labeled D7? (B, K, C, V, A, etc.) so to be fully consistent the DX could have been the "D7X". But DX is close enough.

XD7, however, is totally outside the previously established nomenclature patterns. "XCA" is fine for a generic identification for X2-Cruisers. But it seems to me that when a race has a specific naming convention, that should override generic patterns.

Just my .02 quatloos worth...

By Paul Young (Pyoung) on Friday, January 07, 2005 - 04:22 am: Edit

Mike,

Your XF5 SSD has "D-19" printed at the top. Now where could that have come from ...

BTW, I agree with Alan about the ship designations.

By R. Brodie Nyboer (Radiocyborg) on Sunday, January 09, 2005 - 09:15 am: Edit

Mike, I'm with you on the Ph-5 and Ph-6, and the warp engines, and some other things there. The photon will probably end up like yours, maybe a few tweaks here and there. I've got something else in mind for the batteries and drone racks though . . . and some other tricks up my sleeve.

Now as to that XBC and XDN, good Lord what monstrosities! They're like a DUNE sandworm to a man compared to older starships! What fun they must be to play.

Have you tried out your X2 ships against a conjectural follow-on Andro incursion?

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Sunday, January 09, 2005 - 10:30 am: Edit

I'm not really for the 1 point Ph-5 power cost because I kinda like the idea of a computer based fire-control system rather like the Ph-1/2 situation but altering the R9-15 through to R76-100 range brackets ( it's silly having a one in three chance of inflicting 1 point of damage all thr way out to R75 without having a one in six chance of inflicting a point all the way out to R100 ) and calling that the Ph-7. And with two weapons at a cost of 1.5 it's not such a big problem.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Sunday, January 09, 2005 - 11:48 am: Edit

Several people have already suggested that at X2 levels, different races might take their R&D efforts in different directions, so that, for example, Gorn X2 plasma torpedos might not be identical to Romulan X2 plasma and Lyran X2 disruptors might be different from Klingon disruptors. There's no intrinsic reason this couldn't be done for X2 phasers as well. An idea that Mike Raper and I have both advocated is that the Tholian disruptors and photon torpedos remain at X1 levels but that they have more advanced phasers than other races at X2. The rationale is that the Tholians concentrated their weapons R&D on improving their phasers due to the web/phaser interactions, and Tholians would have inferior torpedos but superior phasers relative to their counterparts in other races.

But different phasers for different races could be applied more broadly than that. Just as Klingon X2 disruptors might be different from Lyrans, their phasers might also be different.

By Marcin Radzikowski (Warchild) on Sunday, January 09, 2005 - 12:13 pm: Edit

Alan,

While your suggestion is quite logical and would be the way things wwould go "in the real world" I think that this would complicate the game even more. How many rules will you have for phasers? Will it be just different tables? Will different phasers have different interactions with different plasmas? What about drones? There are enough frames, packages and propulsion units to make hundreds of combinations. Would you want to complicate this further?

By Jeff Tonglet (Blackbeard) on Sunday, January 09, 2005 - 01:52 pm: Edit

Marcin, I agree with you. If you want every race to have a different phaser, look at Omega-1.

Disruptors, OTOH, are an area where each race can be different. About two years ago, I posted a Klingon with disruptors that fire twice a turn, Kzinti disruptors that fire for double damage (a disruptor cannon that finally can overload), and a Lyran with capacitors that cost no energy to hold.

Alan, I think the problem with the Klingon ship names started with Module X1. The D3 was the original WCA, the D4 was the YCA, D6 was the first speed 30, and the D7 was the improvement.
The DX in Module X1 should have been called the D8.
Then the Klingon XCA would be the D9.

Mike, nicely done.