Special Rules & Concepts

Innovation: The Serendip Death Eggs

Analysis: Both armour and agility is important to spaceships. But it is hard to both armour a ship to maximum and give it top agility. The pro- blem is the jump drive. Or rather, the jump fuel, because the drive it- self dosen't amount to much. One way to deal with this is to stuff the jump drive into a carrier and let the tender carry non-jump fighting ships. Unfortunately such carriers tend to be BIG ships, and big ships take a long time to build and tie up shipyard capacity the while.

The new Serendip Belt line of ships (nicknamed the Death Eggs) tries to solve the problem slightly differently. The main concept is the same for the whole line: The ships consists of a fighting part and a non-fighting part (or, rather, twin non-fighting parts).

The basic shape is that of an egg:

                                       main hull
                                      /
                               _____ /
                             /      /\
                            /\     / /\    fuel shuttle
                           /  |   / |  \  /
                          /   |     |   \/
                         |    |     |   /|
                         |    |     |  / |
                         |    |     |    |
                         |    |     |    |
                         |    |     |    |
                          \__/       \__/
                              \_____/

(Hopefully your imagination can make that diagram a bit more truly egg- shaped.)

The two fuel shuttles are shaped more or less like a lens and fits smoothly onto the main hull, thus maintaining the streamlining of the egg shape despite technically being exteriorly mounted (which according to the rules automatically makes the whole ship a dispersed structure). In this case it is not so. Here it is the whole ship is streamlined; the flip side is that the main hull without the shuttles is not (Though I think it may be possible to make it partially streamlined. What do you think, Steve?).

The main hulls of death eggs will be type coded with a three letter code where the first and second letter denotes the ship type in the usual way and the third letter is either M for main hull or D or V for dorsal or ventral fuel shuttle. The code number will be the same for all three parts of the ship. Only the ship will recieve an official name, although crews are welcome to adopt names for the shuttles.

Some extra fuel shuttles of each type may be built later. If so, they may be named individually.

Innovation: Launch Ports

Launch ports are an invention of mine. I hope you'll approve:

Ordinary launch facilities for a ship allows one craft to be launched per turn per 10.000 tons of hull. There is no extra cost or tonnage. Extra launch facilities can be bought. Launch ports requires tonnage Cr 2.000 per ton. Each allow one extra craft to be launched per turn. (Note that 25 launch ports takes up the same tonnage as a launch tube and only allows 25 crafts to be launched per turn.)