[grumbler]

Now that the B5m2 files are available, I thought I would point out a few things and explain the reasoning. I will start with the components (les weapons, which I didn't mess with much except to give every race a fairly decent weapon for playtest purposes).

One of the first things I did was to change the balance of ship production from planet-based to space-based. This is in accordance with the way the series and JMS's short stories show ships being produced. To make up for the lack of population bonus to shipyard production, I added an additional three base shipyard components that can only be built on 1000kt bases. At their peak, this means a player can construct with 8,000 of each resource per turn. It probably will only make sense to have a few of these mega-shipyards, as even with maintenance discounts they still use a lot of maintenance, but the idea was to have these be the yards building the capital ships, while smaller ships are being built in the smaller shipyards.

Another change was to use the component enhancements to handle engines. One engine will cost roughly 10% of the ship's hull size, with the idea that the "typical" ship will have 40% of the hull devoted to engines. Reactor outputs were "tweaked" to result in a 1-1 correlation between the power needs of small, medium, large, and huge ships and reactors.

Within these parameters, "standard" speeds are:
Fission: 4
Fusion: 6
Antimatter: 9
Gravimetric: 12

The same style of engine was given to fighters (so that larger fighters don't become faster Versions of the smaller fighters, but better-armed and armored Versions at the same speed). However, I decided that fighter reactors made no sense - we continually see in the series references to the limited endurance of fighters. So, fighters have to get back to a planet or get recovered by a carrier to refuel.

Standard speeds (normal/combat) for fighters are:
Fiss 6/5
Adv Fiss 6/6
Fus 9/6
Adv Fus 9/7
Am 12/8
adv AM 12/9

I placed all of the inert armors at the end of the file so that they will appear at the far right of the components list in the ship design screen. This makes sense, because shipbuilders are going to fill in any leftover tonnage with inert armor, and the design process should go left to right.

I was playing a bit with the cost/benefit tradeoffs with crew types. Nothing here is hard and fast, other than wanting to avoid Val's overly generous maintenance reductions for non-First Ones.

The cargo modules are a compromise between Val's huge cargo sections (which drove all other design considerations for freighter-types) and the standard game's small cargo sections (which resisted damage too readily and were too easy to tuck into any type of ship). I am still not satisfied with the tradeoffs made for external cargo bays - they seem too good, for reasons I canot quite articulate.

There are some components that I don't really use anymore, but left in because I thought someone else might be able to make sense of them:

1. The IPX module was originally conceived as a way of reflecting the exploration of a ruins planet without the expense of colonization. There is nothing to prevent the sending of colonists to an IPX setllement, though, so this would be a component used only in human-human games with house rules to prevent exploitation.

2. I left in a lot of Raiders and Ancients components because taking them out seemed like too much work. They are never called for because neither Raiders nor Ancients have been added yet.