 February 21, 2011 - 10:32am | I've been working on a knighthawks campain and came up with some questions that I couldn't really find in the rules so I brought 'em to you guys -Are the ships engines also the power generator? (That was the expression that I got) -If so do ships (or should they) have backup power systems in the form of genortators or prehaps parabatteries on smaller ship? -This leads to: How much power does it take to run a ship? How many SEUs does a shot with a laserbattery take? (insert sarcastic comeback here) |
 February 21, 2011 - 11:08am | My reading of the rules always let to the same conclusion you had, namely that the engines also provided the power for the ship. Should they have backup systems? Probably, but it is never accounted for in any of the standard deck plans or ship designs. It wouldn't be a bad idea through. As to how many SEU's it takes, you could sort of extrapolate out from some information in the rules. For example, the KH Campaign book says that a piece of the ship's hull has 200+2d100 structure points when trying to breech it with explosives. Assume that 1 hull point is equal to 10 times that and take the average to be 300 structure points and you have 1 HP = 3000 structure points. Now on average a laser battery does 5 HP of damage or 15,000 structure points. From the AD rules, 1 SEU does 5 structure points of damage so if we divide the average LB damage by the damage per SEU from a laser pistol/rifle we get 15,000 structure points divided by 5 structure points per SEU = 3,000 SEU to fire your laser battery. The laser canon, which does double the amount of damage would require 6,000 SEU. I'd say the proton and electron beam batteries use 4,000 SEU and 5,000 SEU a shot respectively as they are having to do a little more work to generate the charged particles and accelerate them (and protons are ~1800 times heavier than electrons) and the Disruptor cannon requires 13,500 SEU a shot. That all assumes that 1 HP = 3000 structure points. If you say that 1 HP equals some lesser number of structure points, all the costs are reduced by the same factor. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 February 21, 2011 - 12:38pm | I'd say that there should be parabatteries on board to run essential systems when the engines are down. This would mostly amount to life support. The ship is not going anywhere and energy weapons are too expensive in SEU usage. But for the remainder of the time the ship is taking power from the engines to power it. That is what the rules imply. However, one place this does not make sense is with chemical drives. When a chemical drive ship is not accelerating the engines are essentially shut off and the ship is coasting. In this case there should be no power coming from the engines for the ship's systems. @TerlObar I like what you have done here extrapolating an SEU usage for ship weapons. We should explore this in the KH rules design project. -iggy |
February 21, 2011 - 1:31pm | On chemical drives you could still have the drives providing power if you wanted to. Assuming the drives work off some LH/LOX (liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen) plus fuel system. In that case, when you aren't running the engines you can use small fractions of the LH/LOX supply to generate power by combining them. That gives you water plus heat which can be used to power thermoelectric systems to provide power. Maybe not the best way but it is a source of power, basically hydrogen fuel cells. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
February 21, 2011 - 1:48pm | Could other ships maintian power when the engines are disabled? (in combat for example) It would make pirate activities alot easier if you could disable all the ships systems by shooting out the engines  (insert sarcastic comeback here) |
February 21, 2011 - 2:03pm | That's why I've always assumed there is some sort of backup system built into the ships. Otherwise, yes, if you knock out all the engines then the ship would be without power. Of course that dependes on what it means to knock them out. In theory they are capable of being repaired so they can't be totally destroyed, so maybe while they can't produce thrust for the ship when damaged in combat they can still produce power. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 February 21, 2011 - 3:27pm | Under the Knight hawks rules for the URS each ship has a powerplant that generates power for the ship. these large power generators generate a surplus amount of Seu's/hour and have storage capasitors that can store roughly 5 times the amount of surplus power they generate. A type A powerplant for instance (which is the smallest, and can fit in most fighters) can generate enough power for all ship's systems and produce 10 additional seu/hour which can be used to recharge equiment, recharge a robot's battery etc. The generator can also store 50 seu. If the powerplant is damaged there is always a back-up that kicks in and will maintain the ship's life support and emergency systems running for 20 hours. The back up however does not have enough power for the ship to use its weapons, defenses, or engines, but it's enough power to hopefully give the crew enough time to repair the main power generator. "Hey guys I wonder what this does"-Famous last words "Hey guys, I think it's friendly." -Famous last words "You go on ahead, I'll catch up." -Famous last words "Did you here that?" -Famous last words |
February 21, 2011 - 9:25pm | That makes sense, although larger ships would need a huge amount of generators to power all the weapons a laser battery can fire 12 times an hour (once for moving player fire and once for defencive fire=2 shots per 10 minute turn or 12 shots an hour. If we use TerlObar's calculations that means a ship with a laser battery (like an assault scout) would need 36,000 SEU an hour just for that weapon. The largest generator (type four) generates 4,000 SUEs and hour so you'd need 9 of them for an assault scout, That seems illogical. I think that the drives do power the ships energy needs, that is why mounting weapons on a ship drains away the acceleration and maneuvering capabilities. (insert sarcastic comeback here) |
 February 22, 2011 - 7:47am | In the Dramune Run Module a special parabattery is described as being part of the Gullwind's equipment list- the ship runs off its power when the engines are not running. the module also gives stats for how long this battery will do this and how long it takes to recharge it IIRC check out the remastered module here: http://www.starfrontiersman.com/ EDIT: this brings up the issue of power generators; something I've brought up before. The AD cost for running a power generator is prohibitive- It would almost be far better to install an atomic engine in a city, building or complex and power the place from that. Since atomic engines power up the weapons with their huge SEU costs (thanks Terl Obar for number crunching that) the massive output of SEU s would certainly outstrips the AD power generators. I've generally house ruled that a ship could instal a type A atomic engine with extra shielding as a power plant instead of as an engine- Ion powered large star liner might just find a need for this and even system ships working off of chemical engines would also have a need for this. using the atomic drives is handy as the book gives the cost for them. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 February 22, 2011 - 7:19pm | Let me say this is my favorite type of game discussion. This is the type of crap I think about in my spare time and take to every possible ridiculous conclusion I can think of. *On structure points of ships: If you make a straight conversion from hull points to structure points using the damage required to make a hole with hand weapons you get weird results. If I recall correctly, the 200+2d100 structure points rule is in the part about boarding another ship, so I assumed that's what's required to make a man sized hole which might be roughly 2 square meters. As many people have observed, the ships become tremendously larger as hull size increases, but their Hull Points (and other capabilities) increase linearly. Treating the ships as a straight cylinder, a hull size 1 ship has 5HP and is roughly 69 square meters in surface area. A hull size 20 ship has 100 HP and over 200,000 square meters of surface area. When you throw the numbers into Excel you'll find that converting the structure points of a man sized hole to Hull Points produces drastically different numbers depending on what size ship you're looking at. It goes from 2000 Structure points per Hull point at HS1 all the way up to 300,000 structure points per hull point at HS20. I think game designers don't really think about how all these statistics interact, so using one as a guideline for the other produces weird results. With the one exception that we have a number of points of damage needed to put a hole in the hull for boarding, the two things are different and incompatible. Thus, if you need to produce a statistic for how much energy is needed to fire the ships laser, the best thing that can be done is just making a sensible guess. TerlObar's numbers certainly seem sensible so I'm not trying to argue about that. I'm just saying that there is no way to produce an authoritative number for it. *On power for ships: I remember reading in the book somewhere that ships get power from their engines, I think that really means that a reactor is integral to the engine components of the ship. The atomic drive as described in the book sounds like sort of a "slow blow" controlled atomic bomb...or an extremely fast burning reactor. They could DEFINITELY use excess heat to produce electricity, and you could maybe say they "idle" the engine to produce electricity without thrust when they're not going anywhere. The 10cm fuel pellet would be slowly consumed, but probably not at a rate significant enough to worry about unless the ship is idle for a long time. An Ion engine on the other hand does not generate power. It CONSUMES power....and probably a CRAPLOAD of power to push a huge starship at 1ADF. It's safe to assume they don't run this on parabatteries. It pretty much has to have a nuclear reactor on board. If we believe that it doesn't require any fission fuel pellets, then it could be a hot fusion reactor. Maybe part of the hydrogen fuel consumption is actually being used in the fusion reactor instead of being shot out the back.....or maybe they build hydrogen into helium and then shoot helium out the back. Either way it simply would not work without having a ton of power, so I assume when you buy the Ion engine for your ship the reactor is included. It could be built into the pod out on the engine strut or could be a separate module inside the hull you, but either way you definitely have one. I would say you get a separate fusion reactor with each ion engine and that's built into the cost of the engines. I hadn't thought of that chemical engine fuel in an electric fuel cell idea, but that makes perfect sense. |
February 22, 2011 - 8:48pm | I am glad that Terl reminded us of the fuel cell potentials of chemical engines. I also have pondered further on Terl's conversions and Adamm's insights on hull size versus structural points. It occurs to me that not all of the structural points will be on the surface of the hull. The inner structure also counts and would be part of the hull point to structural point conversion. The larger the ship the more internal structure is needed to hold the outer hull surface together. With a little thought we could pick one of the smaller hull sizes and work out how much of the structural points are for the surface and how much is for the super structure. Hopefully we can then make this scale up logically with the hull size. If not then we have learned a thing or two that can be applied to Knight Hawks 2.0 project. -iggy |
 February 23, 2011 - 7:33am | In an episode of Firefly, the engines were powered by an internal generator, and when that generator failed, EVERYTHING failed...life support (heat, air), engines, everything. I thought it was a pretty good representation of a HS 5-6 ship and how it worked. (I wish it'd had weapons though) You can't argue with the invincibly ignorant. - William F. Buckley |
 February 23, 2011 - 2:20pm | In the Dramune Run Module a special parabattery is described as being part of the Gullwind's equipment list- the ship runs off its power when the engines are not running. the module also gives stats for how long this battery will do this and how long it takes to recharge it IIRC On page 9 of the Dramune Run module (location 20 to be specific, the Power Relay Station) it states the Gullwind has ten type 4 batteries and it would runs the ship's "interior systems" for up to four days (GST, 20 hour days or 80 hours total). Igniting the atomic drives recharges them instantly. So...ten type 4 parabatteries yields 40K SEU (10K per battery) and if recharging is instantaneous via the atomic drives, it's safe to say the three drives can produce sufficient electrical output to operate the laser battery at the aforementioned 36K SEU/12 shots per hour...and still offer plenty of juice to spare. *On structure points of ships: If you make a straight conversion from hull points to structure points using the damage required to make a hole with hand weapons you get weird results. If I recall correctly, the 200+2d100 structure points rule is in the part about boarding another ship, so I assumed that's what's required to make a man sized hole which might be roughly 2 square meters. As many people have observed, the ships become tremendously larger as hull size increases, but their Hull Points (and other capabilities) increase linearly. One key thing to remember here is that it takes 200+2d100 SP to create a man-sized opening in the hull, which isn't akin to damaging the ship's actual integrity. By the same token, a Starship Construction Center has to "cut out" 200+2d100SP in a fighter hull to accomodate the pilot's command chair and canopy. Comparing the earlier 36,000SEU figure that was mentioned to power a ship's laser battery for one hour (12 shots) --- an Alpha Dawn heavy laser on maximum setting (20SEU per shot) would have to fire 150 times to cause 1d10 worth of damage to a ship's hull. Translated to Structure Points, per page 24 of the AD rules, that's 5SP per SEU or 100SP per 20SEU shot fired. That comes out to 15,000 SP to inflict 5.5 hull points damage (average for d10 HP worth of damage) or roughly 2700 structure points per hull point. |
February 23, 2011 - 5:59pm | It occurs to me that not all of the structural points will be on the surface of the hull. The inner structure also counts and would be part of the hull point to structural point conversion. The larger the ship the more internal structure is needed to hold the outer hull surface together. With a little thought we could pick one of the smaller hull sizes and
work out how much of the structural points are for the surface and how
much is for the super structure. Very true, but at the end of all that figuring I think we'd find that we just made structure points proportional to volume rather than surface area, which I think would produce a greater disparity than using surface area. Consider remasterd Knight Hawks page 76: "When a ship's last hull point is destroyed, it will depressurize completely in 2d10 six-second turns." That presents the possibility that Hull Points and structure points are measuring two different things. When structure points are depleted, the object is completely annihilated. When Hull Points are depleted the ship is out of action and no longer space worthy....but it could still have structure points. The point being that converting hull points to structure points is a non-starter, so figuring the SEU's needed to fire a weapon comes back to sensible guesses rather than some kind of formula. |
 February 23, 2011 - 8:10pm | How about we just assume that their is a reasonable and sensible redundant power supply, capacitor system, or emergency power generator that will power the ship for a reasonable duration that anticpates that repair of main power, rescue, or evacuation can be accomplished. When you think about episodes of Star Trek where a starship sustains significant battle damage you often here dialogue about re-routing emergency power to the shields or weapons etc. I figure the same would be similiar with other types of space going vessels in other fictional universes such as SF. The engines are the primary power production source, follwed by a redundant generator system, and finally a battery storage system. It is not a huge leap to assume that in SF some generators would be zero point systems which take less energy to operate then the energy that they produce. I would also assume that starship parabatteries would be considerably larger capacity then the parabattery used to run an explorer or vehicle. Much in the way that a submarines battery system is vastly more powerful than your standard die hard car battery. |
February 23, 2011 - 8:19pm | additionally it would be safe to assume that if in combat and your primary power source is shot, you may have to for-go using the laser, or particle weapons, and rely heavily on assault rockets, rocket batteries, torpedoes, or seekers that require substantially less power to use becuase they have their own propulsion systems. Strategically, if power allocation is important in the game scenario, you may want to lead off with the energy weapons so that you will have the missile weapons available in the event that the main power is knocked out. |
February 24, 2011 - 9:03pm | How about we just assume that their is a reasonable and sensible redundant power supply, capacitor system, or emergency power generator that will power the ship for a reasonable duration that anticpates that repair of main power, rescue, or evacuation can be accomplished. That's exactly what I would advocate. You can't make a statistic for everything. How many turns it takes to tie your shoelaces and how many SEU's are stored in the capacitors in my alarm clock? It doesn't matter. How many structure points are in a hull point and how many SEU's are used by a laser battery are a hell of a lot harder to figure out and only marginally more important. A starship probably has backup power because it would be kind of suicidal not to. What type and what it can do are story elements more than anything else, so you make up whatever is convenient for the story. |
February 24, 2011 - 11:40pm | I don't think that the knight hawks game mechanics were designed to translate exactly into alpha dawn terms. The scales are very different in size and materials used in the construction of an air car verses a frigate so some stats probably wont translate well from one system to the other. Sometimes they just wont mesh and we have to accept the bigger concept behind the idea instead of the bare nuts and bolts of the game mechanics. Most of the time I would solve such inconsistencies with either a house rule or a referee's executive decision on the matter. If it's something that the gaming group will experience frequently throughout the campaign then a house rule is prudent. If it's a one time / seldom occurance or freak chance encounter then referee's discretion is the way to go. |
February 25, 2011 - 12:25am | Agreed on all that. If anything, it would only make sense to allow a type 4 generator or a series of parabatteries as an "emergency measure" than the norm. Such as --- say your ship loses power for whatever reason and the ship's generator/power relay system also stops working. You happen to have a type 4 generator in the hold, so you connect it to the ship's internal power until you can get the main generator/power relay station back on line. |
February 25, 2011 - 5:14am | Agreed, AZ. Now, one situation just came to mind. It'd be Alpha Dawn in a Knight Hawks "Ship", but, your adventurers are in a crippled ship with one "functional" laser battery, but now power. There is a small supply of parabatteries in the hold and they need to get that battery powered up to finish off a Sathar attack vessel. Hmmmm..... "How many batteries do we need to get this damn thing to shoot!" You can't argue with the invincibly ignorant. - William F. Buckley |
February 25, 2011 - 9:30pm | You could make it easy and just say that the crew has to find the batteries, then roll vs. skill to make sure they can operate the system or connect the batteries to the LB and just assume there are sufficient batteries to make it work or that a successful skill roll would allow the characters to determine exactly how many batteries you would need to operate the weapon. On the other hand, you could make the players figure all that out and do the math themselves if your are making this a puzzle type challenge in the adventure. I can't say that any of the players that I have had in the last twenty years would have wanted to do the math as opposed to just doing the skill checks to see if they could do the task or not. |
February 25, 2011 - 9:56pm | You hit my Referee funny bone. Adjudicate the story. What is important for this story? Do you want the PC's captured or give them a chance to get away? "You are able to find enough parabatties in the hold to fire the laser battery (rolls d10) 4 times. It will take approximately 2 ten-minute turns to connect them to the weapon." "I'll give your character a 4 in 10 chance there are enough parabatteries to fire the weapon enough times to fend of the space pirates." Rolls dice, 2! "Ok.. I would say it take two turns to get the batteries from the hold to the power conduits." |
 February 27, 2011 - 7:55am | Personally I see the use of parabatteries as a given. I agree that in a normal story environment there is no need to track power through main engine or backup system usage. But I also see that in a military ship there is sufficient main power for normal operations and combat operations, with battery being used if there is damage to the main power system. In a civilian ship I see main power being sufficient for normal operations, but combat operations (at full capability) require a little more power than civilian systems are capable of. This makes it desireable to mount military grade systems, but unfortunately those systems are illegal in many systems (the joy of controlling my SF-verse). This can create moments where it is the captain who is better at power manipulation who wins the day in a prolonged battle (meaning that it can make cat and mouse moments). In cases of total power failure, then the battery backup will be all that is remaining which can lead to good RP moments of creating solar sails or cold fusion in a sock. Ultimately for most players it is the story and not a gratuitous application of complex rules that leads to enjoyment. I like to sit somewhere in between when extra complication can enhance the RP environment. So when nothing is going on, I just say that there is enough to what is needed to keep everything going. When the moment strikes that there is an unusual moment caused by a rare combination of damage roles and spacial positioning (gravity well for example), the extra pre-thought into how power (or other systems) works can add to the thrill. "I reject your reality and substitute my own."
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