Ship Checkers and Memories

This is Steven Petrick posting.

One of the problems with doing new things is keeping track of the old things. That extends not just to new ships, but to game background.

One of the new ships appearing in Module R12 is another early Federation carrier. It is the long requested Federation carrier on the destroyer hull. Since game background has pretty much established the production of the venerable "lollipop" (saucer with a single cruiser engine) came to stop early in the General War (due to problems with providing enough of those engines for dreadnoughts and cruisers, including Galactic Survey Cruisers, and replacements for engines dropped or wrecked on the existing ships). This forced the design of the Fed DDV to be an early war one.

Even though it was an early General War design, the people asked to check the SSD immediately began demanding that the design be fitted with late General War improvements (like the shuttle bay being a "tunnel deck", or having a "wide hatch" even though none of the other more modern saucer carriers that existed at the same time, or entered service shortly after this design, had such features).

Another thing that keeps coming up is people who want to convert the Federation into Kzintis with photons, or at least Klingons with photons. That is to say to put the same number of drone racks on Federation ships as are found on equivalent Kzinti (or at least Klingon) ships. Some are so enamored of this that the forget that the only Federation DD hulls that had drone racks were the DDG (which gave up two photons) or DE/DERs. They remember that he Federation "plus refit" added drone racks to every Federation ship, even though their memories are wrong and the DDs and DDLs and SCs did not get drone racks.

There are other problems. Star Fleet Battles has not been stagnant over the years. It has grown constantly and added both new empires, and new history. With the appearance of Module Y1 a technological sequence was added for improvements in transporters and tractor beams over the years. And this is not the same for all empires. Only those in contact with each other advance at the same rate. (It does not matter if the Federation or the Klingons were the first to get range two tractor beams, both were working from the same data and advanced at about the same rate. The Gorns and ISC, however, were isolated from other empires, and advanced at a different rate.) Yet now that this data exists, some are crying out for all SSDs to have even more notes added noting (if the ship has a year in service prior to Y160) that its tractor beams and transporters have range restrictions and what years those are in force.

There comes a point where notes are more harm than good, and I often think we have passed that point.