General Guidelines
for Converting Space Fleets from
Existing
Backgrounds to "A Sky Full of Ships"
By Stephen Thomson
Converting
other fleets from existing backgrounds is a bit of a grey area. Some times
there is no hard data or statistics on the fleets, making them difficult to
construct for ASFoS. Some times you can find interpretations on the internet. In
other cases That I have dealt with, such as Freespace 2 and Homeworld 1 and 2,
there have been sites where the webmaster has gone into the actual game code
and pulled out the core statistic, making ships considerably easier to convert.
the
first thing you should try to do is to try and establish a scale. is this ship
300 meters or 900? can you compare other
ships to it with any accuracy? In some cases, ships will turn out to be large. When I converted the Freespace 2 ships to
ASFoS the smallest ship was 8 mass, but the more common ship designs in that
background were all titans. In this case I was able to cut the mass of all the
ships in half, to keep the ship sizes manageable. In other backgrounds you will have to telescope
the masses slightly to keep them manageable. This is the case with the Homeworld
ships. When comparing the Homeworld
"motherships" with the next biggest ship, the Battlecruisers, the
motherships are probably 10 times that mass.
the battlecruisers in comparison to all the other ships in the homeworld
fleets is quite large, at 24 mass, or that area. this would make the motherships
240 mass. this is way too large. I telescoped the mass between the 2 big ships
and made the mothership 120 mass. keep
in mind that generally a 12 mass battleship is generally around 400 meters
long. This is the approximate length of an Eathforce Omega destroyer from
once
you have a scale set and have decided on a mass you have to consider the ships defence
factor. Do the ships you are working on have well armoured hulls, or are they
reliant on some sort of shield technology? there are some grey areas here, such
as
Engine
speed is usually easy to figure out. is your ship fast and manageable or sluggish
and slow to turn? standard battleships (such as the EA Omega) are not very fast,
or overly manageable, and have an engine of 2.
Other ships such as the White star have a 6.
Some
ships are considered agile. These types of ships are generally very adept at dodging
incoming fire. Usually only escorts and light cruisers have the agile attribute.
Weapons
are one of the most important parts of a ship in ASFoS. Generally I look at
weapons in the following order:
Specials, Secondary, and Primaries.
I start by looking for signs of special weapons. I look for weapons
systems that have special attributes but are not the ships primary armament. After
this, I look at the descriptions of the weapons effect. In most instances where
a weapon which fits the description of a special makes up the majority of a
ships weaponry, I make them primaries. Such is the case with many of the
Turning Point UNAN ships, which use many railguns as their main armaments. Only
the very large Railcannons were made to be Mass drivers on the ASFoS designs.
When I
look at secondary second I am usually aware of what kind of firepower is left
to distribute to the ship. I keep this
in the back of my mind to help make a reasonable decision.
I
look at weapons with very short ranges and/or anti-fighter capability. You
can't account for EVERY system on a ship. You have to generalize the percentage
of the fire factor of the ship that is dedicated to anti-fighter role.
Primaries
are the last thing I allocate. I usually
allocate these in ratios. For instance
a ship may only have 1/3rd the weaponry in the rear arc, as in the front
arc. After this I shift 1 or two weapon
points around to make the fire factors in each arc make as much sense as
possible.
The last
and most important Guideline I can give you for converting ships for other
backgrounds is this: make sure the ships are balanced with each other. For
instance, a Centauri Primus and a Narn G'quan can have a fairly even fight when
fighting head on, but not when engaging each others side arcs. For this reason,
a Narn G'quan has about 50% of it's primaries in its front arc, and a Centauri
has a more even distribution of weapon points across its front and side arcs.
Balance
between the ships of a single existing background is the most important thing
when converting ships to ASFoS