Is the Warships Stardrive Too Powerful?
Is the Warships Stardrive Too Powerful? (minimum power requirements seem too low) posted in Spaceships & Vehicles forum comment posted by cobalt_phoenix I keep running into a weird issue: the stardrive in Warships just seems way too powerful to me.
I don't know if I am running into this more than others, but it mostly has to do with ships intended for direct combat (cruisers, battleships, dreadnoughts, and fortress ships, in particular). One of my main rules when designing these sort of ships is that the amount of power they need is dictated by combat requirements. In that regard, I try to always have enough power to run the engines, life support, weapons (pretty much all of them at once), defenses, sensors, and computers. There are some other systems on there, like workshops, which I deem to be important to have handy in combat, but those are the primary ones. Of course, these are also the systems that tend to have the highest power demands on the ship.
The result is that my designs tend to have so damn much power that they hit dramatically high FTL speeds. We are talking heavy hulls that hit 70+ lightyears, and super-heavies that hit 150+ lightyears. Hell, I have a fortress ship that can piggyback 12,000 HP of extra hull points to 257 lightyears.
Something important to consider is that I can't find any rule in Warships that limits the range of a starfall. That only seems to be in the S*DCS, as far as I can tell, but that is only generalized (supposedly, the Rigunmors have a fortress ship capable of up to 60 lightyears per starfall, so it seems more that the limit is more due to technology level and not something core to drivespace).
The implications in the S*DCS are pretty major. I have a fortress ship capable of carrying 2 battlecruisers, 4 armored cruisers, 10 light cruisers,15 destroyers, and 4 medium freighters up to 257 lightyears in 5 days (and I still have 640 HP of available docking clamp space, which would be an extra light cruiser and 2 destroyers), and that's not even including the fighter wing of 84 fighters, 24 strike fighters, and 12 cutters. If I remember correctly, that should mean that I can have that fortress ship with full task force jump from Kendai on the edge of the Stellar Ring all the way to Tendril in the Verge in basically one starfall.
In the case of dreadnoughts and super-dreadnoughts, I often hit about 150 lightyears. In S*D, that would mean CSV
Vition,
Revealer, and
Lightbringer (the 3 stated dreadnoughts in the Verge) and their task groups should be within range of any Verge colony, allowing them to arrive after one starfall. That means that
Vition (dedicated to defense of Hammer's Star) would always have two extra task forces that could likely be reached within 2 days by FTL communications, and could be there within 7 days (if needing to recharge their drives, you could put that comfortably at 10 days). And it literally wouldn't matter which Verge system they were in, they would be within that 150 lightyear range.
And even heavy ships run into this. I can build battleships and battlecruisers with the ability to hit 70+ lightyears per starfall, while carrying at least some number of escorts.
So that is the problem I'm having. I find it way too easy to use the stardrive to hit huge FTL ranges. I actually think this makes it faster than any other FTL drive at PL7. And the drivewave generator is just as bad in terms of range.
I think the problem is the result of the minimum power requirements for the stardrive as compared to the amount of power generated by the mass reactor.
The stardrive requires 3.0 power points for every hull point devoted to the drive.
The mass reactor produces 3.5 power points for every hull point of reactor.
The result is that the mass reactors required to power the drive at its minimum are always going to be smaller than the drive itself.
One potential I can see to dial this back would be to increase the minimum power needed by the stardrive. Not by a small amount, but probably by double to triple the minimum. That would make the stardrive demand 6.0 to 9.0 power points for every hull point.
As an example using a battleship hull (1200 HP) with minimum requirements, you would need a 60 HP stardrive. Using baseline Warships, that demands 180 HP, which only requires about 51.5 HP of mass reactors (producing 180.25 PP total). If you increase the power by double, that needs 360 PP, provided by 103 HP of mass reactors. At triple the power demands, that puts the drive at needing 540 PP, which would need 154.5 HP of mass reactors.
Now doing this would certainly have an impact on small craft, light hulls, and other ships, especially civilian vessels that aren't going to be decked out with massive amounts of firepower. I actually don't tend to have this problem when I develop a carrier, since most of the space is devoted to hangers and docking clamps.
But I still think this sort of tweak isn't a bad idea.
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