We never really dealt with heat dissipation, and I was never that
satisfied with construction times. Of course this is all proof that you
can always make a system even more complex than it already is. In reality,
natural selection via time available demonstrated that GDW was able to
publish a system (rock) that it could just about lift.
If I follow what you're saying about surface area, is going into more
depth about what configurations were best suited to various requirements.
That was kind of a two-edged sword, in that we liked the idea that players
could fiddle with the system as written to try to determine what was best.
Thus the notion of the "Top Laser" tournaments, analagous to the Trillion
Credit Squadron competitions.
Of course TCS revealed something that no one wanted, namely big ugly rocks
were best, and no one wants big ugly rocks, people want cool, sleek
spaceships. So beware letting people road test your system, they'll find
out things about it you didn't mean.
> One thing that would have been interesting is using a surface area
> calculation for ships. So a larger vessel (say 2* each for L, W,and H),
> would have eight times the mass, and four times the surface area. This
> surface area would affect armor thickness (twice as thick), heat
> dissipation (effectively half the rate), jump fuel used (only four times
> as much), aso.
>
> So you might have spherical ships that can handle lots of weapons being
> fired at them, due to their thicker hulls (minimum surface area per
> volume), needle shaped ships for higher Jump speeds (lower cross-section
> to Jump space), larger ships being more efficient for Jump fuel usage,
> etc.
>
> Of course, you'd still have smaller ships because they can dissipate heat
> faster, can be made on an assembly line easier (reducing the price per),
> have a lower structural fraction needed (or can take higher
> accelerations), etc.
>
> But at that point you are getting into GURPs ship design.
>
> Todd Kes
>
> --- On Mon, 6/18/12, Evyn MacDude wrote:
> Yep they where gone.
> But to be honest with power and surface area constraints building a ship
> that had more than one ship scale weapon was difficult.
> --
> Evyn
>