- Black Box sounds like a good addition.
- Subcapital weapons are on the techtree, no? On warships, they are mostly a way to implement a "Death of a thousand Cuts" approach, or to murder fighters more efficiently. A dropship is crying somewhere in a corner.
- More techs seem reasonable. Like non-primitive mechs, advanced materials (to reflect things like reflective armour), artillery cannons, and maybe two-stage development of bracketing.
I think it would be nice to nice to be limited to one unknown tech a turn as long as the player is above the average for technologies developed between all factions (could be added to the spreadsheet, round up), with extra developments being rolled by the GM - aka, I want to develop two more, I say "development area 1", and log a downpayment, then next turn, the GM rolls a 3-sided die and tells me what I got. That means I can select only one technology I really want. Last iteration, tech progression was too complicated, but now, it's a bit too easy, I think.
A simpler alternative would be to just gradually raise research costs if you're too far ahead of the curve, thereby giving research a sort of maintenance cost if you want to keep up your advantage. Right now, research has the disadvantage of making it cheaper for everyone else. Relatively speaking, that is a sort of cost, but it has the effect of accelarating the tech race instead of slowing it down.
Edit: Additional potential techs: some robotics research before Caspar, and another tech to make them jump capable. Interface cockpits. Is there a technology for fighter-based anti-capital missiles? The ones in the rules, I mean.
A few things:
A) Maintenance. I know I've been seen saying a want it a bit more fine tuned and complex, and I'd be willing to tweak a spreadsheet to that effect so players don't need to bother, but let's ignore that for now and keep it simple.
We could have a slightly lower annual cost for smaller vessels, in a simple 3-tier system. Say, 40% up to 300kt, 45% up to 550kt, 50% starting at 800kt. Then several techs could slightly raise the latter two limits. I think this would balance larger, more powerful vessels by a higher upkeep and give smaller navies a better fighter chance.
Alternatively, to keep it simple, just a tech to make smaller vessels slightly cheaper, and another tech that allows shipyards to work on half as many ships that are, say, 8% rounded up above their actual capacity.B)Dropships and capital conversion:
I feel dropships have no business in combat whatsoever atm - I can create a medium dropship that spends more tonnage on armour than my Kutai class corvettes, yet only reaches a quarter of the protection.
I feel that while the conversion of standard to capital scale works well, the capital to standard conversion is too harsh on those smaller vessels. To take an analogue of the early 20th century - torpedo boats were a thing.
I've been pondering this for a while.
If we go with standard dropships, maybe a 1 -> 20 conversion for capital damage, with an extra guaranteed critical against non-capital targets, could work. Or maybe even 1 -> 50 with an extra -1 to hit for weapons over 1500 tons vs. targets up to 10kt.
Alternatively, we could just change the general damage conversion to such an effect and give fighters an extra damage penalty. Even at just 20 to 1, a small dropship mounting 20 AC/20s in all of it's facings could at best hope to deal 3x 2 Capital damage - against a Warship with no armour.
If we go with custom dropships, we can carve them from solid aluminium, and make the smaller ones extremely fast instead, because they will die to a hit anyways - then the current conversion might work.
c) And this is small because its a bit out there. I think it'd be interesting to have specific weapon configurations be a point of research. Like in the early dreadnought race, the powers involved actually spent quite the bit of design work and trials on getting the turrets right and what not. Could also just factor in some strategic magic dust in the GM room, or affect maintenance. F.Ex. I've been trying to keep somewhat to this by always keeping my NL/45s and NAC/10s in dual mounts, because I imagine that's what they are mounted in and the Navy will want to keep some standards.
... Collars? None of CC ships have collars?
Ok, maybe I'm misreading the spreadsheet. What does DSC / 2 mean?
