I've wanted to delve a bit into construction of fighters and warships / Jumpships / Dropships for a while, mainly to fluff out alot of my kitbashes and customs.
What would someone consider the bare minimum or adequate thresholds for the major structure, armor and cargo in percentages? Ie:
Fighters: mainly looking at SI, armor and fuel.
Warships / jumpships / dropships: SI, armor, fuel, cargo
I know some things like cargo, and armor can be incredibly variable due to fluff reasons, with less variance on fuel and SI, so wanted to see what the major shipbuilding of the forum use as rules of thumb.
Thanks in advance!
For Warships, my rough guide is:
Fuel: 1% mass
Cargo: 1% mass (long-range such as a strike at the Clan Homeworlds will have a larger %of mass or auxiliary Dropships)
Armor: Max it
Weapon costs: doesn't matter compared to KF core costs
(all numbers are from MegamekLab v0.48.0)
To give an idea of what I mean by maxing armor, a 2.5 MTon vessel that can move 5/8 and has a Structural Integrity of 240 can carry up to 12,000 tons of armor, or about half a percent of its mass. There is no reason to carry anything less than max armor on a Warship.
To see what I mean for KF Core costs vs weapons, I will compare four types of
McKenna Warships
* Base design: 30,974,056,800 C-Bills
* Removing all of its weapons: 29,636,964,800 C-Bills
* Keep the weapons and just remove the Li-Fu Battery: 18,476,556,800 C-Bills
* Keep the weapons and Li-Fu battery, removing only one Dropship Collar: 28,567,856,800 C-Bills
(Yes these are custom ships, but I needed examples to show the cost differences)
In terms of final cost and respective mass:
All the weapons represented about 4.4% of the ship cost and tied up ~216,000 tons of mass (~11.6%)
The Li-Fu battery represents ~40% of the ship's cost, and massed 19,300 tons (1%)
Each Dropship Collar represents ~7.8% of the ship's cost, and takes up 1,000 tons (about a twentieth of a percent)
So when designing a Warship, max the armor, decide what weapons you want, and then depending on your budget decide if you want Dropship Collars, a Li-Fu Battery.
In fact, with the current construction rules it is often a good idea to increase the mass of the ship to fit in more gear, as the KF costs (and Warship Cost Multiplier) do not scale with ship mass. All of these ships have T/OT of 1/2, no armor, no weapons, no equipment, no Dropship Collars, no Li-Fu Batteries, and only minimum crew and Heat Sinks:
* 100 kton ship: 3,792,578,000 C-Bills
* 200 kton ship: 4,211,458,000 C-Bills
* 1 MTon ship: 7,561,326,000 C-Bills
* 2.5 MTon ship: 13,841,130,000 C-Bills
Twice the mass, yet the smaller ship's cost is still ~90% that of the larger.
The vessel 10* larger is only ~twice the cost of the smallest ship
The vessel 25* larger is less than 4* the cost of the smallest ship
(Yes these are custom ships, but I needed examples to show the cost differences)
These two vessels have 1 Dropship Collar or Li-Fu Battery:
* 100 kton ship w/1 Dropship Collar: 4,594,958,000 C-Bills (+21% to base cost)
* 100 kton ship w/ Li-Fu Battery: 6,541,758,000 C-Bills (+72% to base cost)
(Yes these are custom ships, but I needed examples to show the cost differences)
To give an idea, the McKenna's entire weapon loadout costs less than adding a single Li-Fu battery to the 100 kton vessel.
From the McKenna comparison we can see that the weapons are a small price of a Warship's costs, so tossing on twice as much weapons/armor/equipment is not a big price to pay. The cost increase means that going up in mass is a minor issue also. So feel free to make larger 'corvette'-class vessels, as the price increase will be small compared to its combat effectiveness.
Aerospace Fighters are fun. The key limit to launching them is the number of Bay Doors, and there is no penalty for carrying a large number of ASF (unless you carry so many that you can't launch them all before the battle is over). They can also be rapidly replaced if they are damaged or destroyed (or obsolete), while a Battle-line vessel will need repair/upgrade time for its loadout.
Study up on AMS rules. Find a level of AMS that can deal with any missile attack that occurs in your games, and mount that on your Warship. The number of AMS needed will be smaller than the tonnage of armor being lost to enemy fire.
The other fun is to read up on the Fire Control Tonnage rules. Basically if you exceed the limit for the number of weapons in an arc, you pay an extra % of their total mass based on number of excess weapons. So 20 Heavy Naval PPCs in a single arc might not be an issue, but adding a single Machine Gun to that arc will impose a 6000-ton Fire Control penalty. So you might go with certain arcs being Naval Weapons only with a few extremely powerful weapons, and other arcs being full of several dozen Battlemech-scale weapons. This way the tonnage penalty is based on the lighter weapons, rather than the Capital Weapons.
