[ST:RPG]:Starship Range Ideas
from an Old FASA ST:RPG Game Master by Tony Bruno 9-16-1998

I've read all of the comments and ideas about running a ST:RPG with a great deal of interest . I ran a three-year campaign (1987-1990) with the old FASA rules during my tour in Germany. During that time, I wasted more than my fair share of brain cells dealing with issues like "Replicator Limitations", "Sensors Capabilities" and "Transporter Operations." I'm not complaining; it was an eye-opening experience, and one that absolutely paved my way to graduating college with honors. (How else could I make it through a higher education institution without learning to think "outside of the box"?) Be that as it may, I sometimes felt that I had a head full of worthless information and ideas. How refreshing it is that I can finally dump some of my experience off to someone that actually might find it useful.

First of all, let's get a couple of things straight: I don't really know what rules system is in use today. I only recently returned to gaming, and then only to AD&D. As such, all of my ideas are based around the old FASA rules system and -- much more importantly -- Star Trek Universe. If *that* doesn't mean anything to you, consider these things:

  1. Space was big. I mean, REALLY big: Okay, enough Adamsisms. By this I mean that we used the FASA supplement "The Triangle"'s Warp Rulers, and "The Federation"'s maps in order to navigate. Using their scales, a Warp Six journey from Earth to Starbase 22 on the Klingon Neutral Zone border took six MONTHS. Not hours (as in the later films and TNG), not weeks, MONTHS. The result was our characters could literally be roll-played over a LIFETIME in one sector of the Federation.
  2. It was a COLD WAR Galaxy: The Klingons were mean. The Romulans were sneaky. The Feds were Imperialists. The result was that our PCs not only had their missions to accomplish, they had clearly-defined enemies with logical agendas to go up against. All in all, it was a dangerous time to be on a starship. Great RPG fun, if you ask me.
  3. The History of the Trek Universe then had NOTHING to do with what is considered "canon" (shudder) now: FASA made a history with what they had. It was a far more interesting timeline than the Okuda work, IMHO...but when FASA pissed off the Great Bird with their proposed "Operation Armageddon" Strategic War Game, they lost the license and many of their better ideas went away. In short, FASA's Star Trek was a military role playing game. Oh, it had the appropriate head-nodding to the Prime Directive and the Federation's "pacifist" nature, but the sub-text of almost EVERY adventure I played in (either as PC or as GM) was that inevitably, as in TOS, you were gonna come to blows.

All in all, Star Trek was more dangerous back then, and FASA's rules tried their best to reflect that fact. They did, however, have GLARING omissions...like how effective starship sensors were in anything other than Starship Combat, or how much energy a starship could store, etc. Even the supplements didn't' really do squat to answer these questions. GMs were pretty much out on their own.

Given this situation, I decided that I wanted to delineate my Star Trek world in the following manner:

  1. I wanted the ships to NEED to come to port every six months or so. Not only for PC mental health, but because I didn't believe that Starfleet would let a multibillion credit starship out of its sight for any longer than it needed to...even if it was designed to go exploring.
  2. I wanted the ships to feel more vulnerable. They seemed far too powerful and omnipotent in the sketchy rules I had. I wanted the engineer to feel like they had a job.
  3. I wanted the Navigator to have to consider LOGICAL course plots, as opposed to "Oh, just go that way."

A tall order, I know, but I got lucky. My PC starship Captain was a real-world Reserve Army Lt. He agreed with my intentions and offered to help. So, on a lazy Sunday afternoon we made a pot of coffee and pulled out the old FASA starship manuals, fired up PC Calc, and proceeded to re-write the starship rules.

The long of what we did is below. The short is that we developed an additional starship attribute known as TOTAL OPERATIONAL RANGE. TOR   was an emergency figure, if you will. It was determined by calculating the total distance a starship could travel out and return while moving at Warp Four.

Any slower and the crew would get either get intercepted by another ship before they ever got to their destination, and any faster would indicate a ship operating nominally.

Once again, my luck was great; My PC Starship Captain was spending his non active-duty time in a graphics shop. Once we'd calculated the TORs for all of the major ships, he created clear plastic overlays for our Federation maps in order to get a sense of how far our ships could travel. It wasn't perfect, but it helped to hook all of our players immensely, and helped me as a GM in ways that I can't even begin to relate.

Now I don't know if the new ST:RPG rules include any kind of range limitations or not (my guess from postings would be "no") but if they don't, CONSIDER THEM. It forces your players to play like crewmembers, not just "Commanders of the Dinner Table" (if I may borrow that phrase). If there's any piece of technical GM advise, it would be this.

Okay, how did we come up with our figures? Well, honestly, it was a mess...but it worked. Follow me on this:

First of all, we needed to agree on our ships limitations. We agreed on all of the following principals:

The result is that, though you could THEORETICALLY stay in space for years at a time, it becomes pretty damned clear that Starfleet would set up some fairly conservative guidelines to ensure that a starship is within its calculated TOTAL OPERATIONAL RANGE should any of the above conditions become life-threatening.

Since I couldn't consult with Starfleet Command (other than as a voice in my head, and then I'd probably need medication to deal with that) we needed to come up with a simple calculation to determine how a vessel could perform. Since we'd decided that these ships DID have finite resources, all we needed to do was come up with some figures for daily cruise operations, orbital operations, emergency operations, wartime operations, and finally battle operations.

We were lucky with this. FASA's old "Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator" had stats for the old ships, with the number of "power points" per "turn" listed for every ship. The good news was that we knew that a power point was 10 MegaWatts. The bad news was that NO ONE had any idea what a turn was. We fudged this: We'd roll-played enough combat to know that the average three phase turn ran about a minute per phase. Give then that a TURN was three minutes, all we needed to do was turn to the stats of a particularly famous starship class -- the Constitution -- and determine the total number of power points necessary to fulfil its typical cruise. We came up with this:

Constitution Class Cruiser

* Yes, we knew that the Connie was rated at 18 years worth of cruise, but we read that as more of an 'Time Between Operation Refits' rather than "Gas up once every generation."

Number of Minutes in a Five Year Cruise = 2,628,000

Dividing this by our per-minute output yields our magically useful long-term tracking number: The total number of phases worth of power that a Constitution has for a five year mission, or Total Power Points. In this case, that number is:

2,628,000 /14.6 = 180,000 Total Power Points

Since we used combat charts to make this determination, we can infer that a starship uses 1 Total Power Point per phase of combat. Thus a starship engaging in combat for fifteen minutes in one day uses 15 of the TTPs. Assuming the ship was just starting its cruise, that would mean that it only had 179,985 to use during its entire cruise.

Okay, so now we have an operational limit of Total Power Points, derived from the base rule system. Since we can infer that a starship in combat must be using EVERY resource at its disposal, we decided -- arbitrarily -- that every MINUTE of combat (sucking up one TTP) actually sucked up the equivalent of an entire DAY's worth of Cruise Operations Power. Once we had that correlation, it then became a matter of hashing it out the different TTP costs. They all worked out to be simple: Examples:

...and so on. Since this all dealt with the actual maintenance of the starship, our Chief Engineer PCs were constantly busy...and very important.

Once we finished the table, we sent our PCs out on their new Connie to play their mission. The system worked wonderfully, as suddenly the "mighty" starship felt both more real, and far more fragile. We also ended up with the ships coming home about once every 120 days. A nice, realistic cruise number.

 

Why did I share this? Partially because I wanted to excise it from my skull. :) The other reason is to share my experience. Given that others are playing a similar game now, it only stands to reason that any idea -- however cock-eyed -- should help.

Tony Bruno http://www.starlion.com/

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments  rec.games.frp.misc

In the above article, Tony Bruno says...

>Given: A starship has a finite power supply. (You have to refuel with >anti-matter SOME time).

That limits your energy stock, not your power supply. A limitation on your power supply comes from the finite rate at which your engines can extract userful energy from annihilating antimatter.

>We were lucky with this. FASA's old "Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator" >had stats for the old ships, with the number of "power points" per "turn" >listed for every ship. The good news was that we knew that a power point >was 10 MegaWatts. The bad news was that NO ONE had any idea what a turn >was. We fudged this: We'd roll-played enough combat to know that the >average three phase turn ran about a minute per phase. Give then that a >TURN was three minutes, all we needed to do was turn to the stats of a >particularly famous starship class -- the Constitution -- and determine the >total number of power points necessary to fufill its typical cruise. We came >up with this: > >Constitution Class Cruiser > >Total Power Points = 44 > >Which is to say 440 MW/3 Minute Turn... >Which is to say 146 MW/Minute >Which is to say 14.6 Power Points Per Minute

A megawatt is a unit of power, not of energy. That is, a megawatt is a rate of delivery or consumption of energy equal to a megajoule per second.

Megawatts/minute does not make much sense.

>Typical Cruise Length = Five years* > >* Yes, we knew that the Connie was rated at 18 years worth of cruise, but we >read that as more of an 'Time Between Operation Refits' rather than "Gas up >once every generation." > >Number of Minutes in a Five Year Cruise = 2,628,000 > >Dividing this by our per-minute output yields our magically useful long-term >tracking number: The total number of phases worth of power that a >Constitution has for a five year mission, or Total Power Points. In this >case, that number is: > >2,628,000 /14.6 = 180,000 Total Power Points

This might make sense if you had worked in terms of energy instead of power.

Typically, systems use up energy (in joules). The top rate at which they can do so is their power.

The energy available from the annihilation of one kg of antimatter and one kg of matter is about 9 * 10^16 joules.

 

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