Timstone: I would like to work with you on this 2.0 mod, if I could. Maybe another forum or even a yahoo egroup would be better than confusing this effort even more, but I like the idea of taking what is here and "rationalizing" it in some ways that cannot be done without causing unexpected faults in what is a workable system right now.
SJ: What I meant was to double even component "hull" sizes when doubling output, so that the effect is identical, but yet i don't have to count to figure out whether I have 23 or 24 of these 5 kt engines on my battleship so as to make the total energy requirements work out.
The next effect would be zero, except that ships would lose their speeds due to damage in a less smooth curve. It also wouldn't take three times as long to refit a ship as to build it!
TS: I have founf that when playing the game I actually only research the final stages in the existing reactor techs when I need something for a battleship. It is actually easier to get gravimetric reactors than A-M ones, and in general gravimetrics are better (though the small reactor is exactly like the small A-G one except more expensive).
If you want to keep some reactors out of the hands of some of the races, it should be trivial to add racial (i.e Ancient) requirements to the reactors themselves rather than to the techs needed to research them.
In fact, if you do things the way I envision, the ancients can do the same research that leads to, say, Fusion reactors for the younger races but get ancient ones instead. I mean, who believes that the ancients didn't have fusion reactors after a million years anyway!
On the issue of the sensors and ECM: the existing system seems to me to be quite intuitive and elegant. They are one of the few areas I would leave exactly as is, given my druthers (except that maybe the basic sensors get too expensive reletive to the extended and elite ones, but I haven't done the research to say for sure that this is true, and I expect SJ has!).
Timstone, if you look back at maybe January or February's Posts, SJ explained the whole thing rather nicely. It's basically a system of diminishing returns with the additional types of sensors, designed to restrict them to the hulls that can afford the space.
[ June 16, 2003, 01:06: Message edited by: grumbler ]