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Sunday, September 07, 2008

Batteries and Ship Design

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

One thing you can be certain of, people do not see things the same way you do. This comes up in all sorts of different ways.

To take a game, player A sees a ship with a lot of batteries, and what flashes through his mind are all the options having that much reserve power might give him.

Player B sees the same ship, and becomes concerned that trying to find enough power to refill those batteries and keep moving and fighting his ship may be a problem, and it would be better if some of the batteries were something else.

Both are right, but when you are balancing the ship you have to figure out which is "more right".

Reserve power is a very powerful rule in Star Fleet Battles, a rule that must be learned and employed carefully. But it depends on your ability to "cycle" the batteries, i.e., to put power in and take power out, such that the ship can maintain operations and not come to a screeching halt in the middle of a fight because it needs to recharge the batteries.

A good example of that is the Juggernaut monster. It seems unstoppable, until you realize that its strength relies in a deep battery deck, and once that is drained the monster has a hard time keeping its speed up and fighting its enemies. A careful player controlling the Juggernaut is loathe to use a full alpha strike, because refilling the batteries will make him vulnerable to attacks on his rear, i.e., deprive him of the ability to maneuver.

Another thing to consider is that batteries are relatively early hits in the Damage Allocation System once a ship's forward hull is destroyed. This makes ships with forward hull more inclined to dump any reserve power they have to reinforce a facing shield, losing the ability to use the power later but preserving the batteries themselves by minimizing damage to them. This fact allows Federation ships to ride out fairly heavy initial damage, and retain the tactical flexibility of reserve power (also the Gorn double and triple bubble ships, and the Hydrans are very good at this), but Klingon ships are likely to lose the ability to use reserve power after relatively light damage (typical D7 or D6 will lose its batteries between 15 and 23 internals), placing significant handicaps on them later in the battle.