Pirates and Nomads

[DirectorTsaarx]

Edit: dammit, SJ posted while I was drafting this... now I look I'm just parroting his response...

Originally posted by geoschmo:

quote:

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Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
That's not quite the system Pax had proposed. I'd still prefer to have 30 engines than 3.

No, what Phoenix said actually is exactly the system Pax described in his post. If he revised that somewhere else we missed it apparently. The idea is to have a QNP system where larger ships require more space for engines, while still having each engine move the ship one standard movement point as it does in the stock game. Instead of having many more engines as standard QNP does, you have fewer, larger engines.

Your original complaint against the mount based was that it made larger ships more immune to engine destroying weapons. That was incorrect, under a mount based QNP system larger ships are no more or less susectable to engine destroying weapons. However, under "standard" QNP that you say you prefer the larger ships are much more immune to engine destroying weapons. It takes ten times more damage to kill 30 engines than it does to kill 3, assuming they have the same structure.

Geoschmo

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I think Imperator Fyron's original concern was that, if the larger engines also had higher structure, they may actually become IMMUNE to engine destroyers, since (IIRC) there's a bug that partial damage doesn't actually accumulate against engines. So, an engine with 50 kT structure would take NO DAMAGE AT ALL from an engine destroyer that only did 40 kT of damage. Even if you hit that engine 30 times in the same combat, doing a total of 1200 kT damage (enough to destroy that 50 kT engine 24 times). Now, you addressed that concern in your original response by saying that structure wouldn't necessarily be increased for the "larger mount" engines. I'm not certain why IF still prefers 30 engines to 3 engines, unless it's because he likes the fact that current QNP mods have a larger total structure in engines without being immune to engine-destroyer damage.

In other words, as you pointed out Geo, the current QNP system that allows 30 engines could actually have a larger total amount of structural points; which means we have a choice of:

1. The current QNP system, where large ships have lots of engine structure, but can eventually lose those engines to a concerted effort
2. A QNP system where large ships no longer have lots of engines to absorb damage, and therefore lose engines just as quickly as the smallest ships
3. A QNP system where large ships eventually become completely immune to small- and normal-mount engine destroyers.
   

[ September 17, 2002, 15:50: Message edited by: DirectorTsaarx ]