[Suicide Junkie]

SJ,

Now that I finally understand really how and why QNP works, I feel confident enough to make a suggestion or two. Feel free to disregard them if you wish.

My biggest problem with QNP has always been the
extreme number of engines it takes to build one makes the designs very cluttered, and a bit too problematic to repair and upgrade. Larger ships should take longer to build and repair, but it woul be nice if the whole thing could be "shifted" some. I know you have added larger engines to help this some, but that kind of go against the principle of QNP to begin with a bit. With that in mind I worked up a suggestion. Instead of basing the QNP on the speed of an escort with 6 engines, 25Kt per engine, double that and base it off of the speed of a destroyer with 6 engines. The escort would take 3 engines to go 6, the frigate 4, the
destroyer 6, the LC 8, and so one. You'd have to change the MP of the engines to 6 of course. The max speed for each hull size would remain the same, however you would start to see RCE problems with maxed out ships earlier. You'd get them with Cruisers instead of Dreadnaughts. But with the hybrid system you can eliminate that anyway and maintain a constant engines to hull size ratio.

Another thing that I'd like to see is smoothing out of the number of vehicle control components. As it is there is a not much use in going from LC to Cruiser except for specialty ships because much of the newly available space is taken up by engines and crew and life support. What I'd like to see is the "Quasi-newtonian" principle applied there as well. There are two ways I can see to do this. You can start with the escort, and assume that a vehicle of 150Kt requires 30 Kt of Vehicle Control components, or 10kt for every 50Kt. Using this as a ratio we need to add 10kt when we step up to Frigate. I suggest that any time a half step is required the crew compartments be stepped up first. So a frigate would require 1 bridge, 2 cq, and 1 ls. A Destroyer would require 1 brige, 2 cq, 2 ls. LC would add another cq, Cruiser would add another ls, and so one. You can see that actually with this method there would be less space available in the Cruiser, but that wasn't the point. The point was the loss of relative efficency going from LC to Cruiser. This fixes that. It's not too restrctive in the large ships either. A baseship would need an additional 90Kt dedicated to cq and ls under this system. That's one less weapon. I don't know about your moon ship cause I don't have the P&N numbers here with me.

An alternative Version of this idea would be to also base the ratio on the destroyer hull, so each 100kt would require an additional cq or ls. The escort and frigate would still get one of each cause 1 is the minimum after all, unless you go with zero for the smaller hulls, and I don't recomend that. This way the LC would need an additional cq, the Cruiser would be the way it is now, and the rest would increas
gradually instead of large steps. In this format the battle Cruiser and battle ships would need one more each, and the dread and base ship actually would need fewer cq and ls than they do now.

What do you think about adding this feature as part of the QNP when you implement the hybrid idea?

Geoschmo

As to the first point, about how slow the ships are.
Firstly, the example I posted on the forum used an extremely slow scale. I chose the example numbers just to make the math easier, and to highlight the effect of the Hybrid scale "steps"

In P&N, I have escorts require 1 Ion engine to move 1 speed (10kt).
With max engines, these things fly at a speed of 12.
As technology improves, the quantum engines will drive that same escort at a blistering pace of 24.
The light cruisers can go slightly faster, since the C&C takes up a relatively smaller fraction of the space.
The only time the ships start slowing down is when you try to make them haul heavy equipment around

The linear-scaled C&C requirements is also a good idea.
Perhaps crew quarters could be shrunk to 3-4 Kt, and require 1 per 50Kt of ship... LS (centralized) could be left at 10, and require 1 per 200Kt (plus 1 minimum)

I would have to tweak a bunch of the minor racial traits in P&N in order to fit that in, but it should work.