Idea Info Name: Space Combat Engineer Index: Primary Category: Simulation Submitted: 12/6/2003 1:34:19 AM Written By: alan2110 Game Architecture and Design: A New Edition Book Highly Recommended !

Designing your starships

You will be an engineer working with a tight budget, limited resources, and limited development time. You will use your budget and resources to design starships for the military to use. How fast you can turn out a good starship design and how well you use your budget and resources will help the military win wars and open up opportunities for larger budgets and resources.

The military will first come to you with a design request. They may want a small short range fast fighter or they may want a larger slower battleship type dreadnaught. They will tell you what your budget is, how large your design team will be, and what resources are available. They may even have requirements for how much firepower the ship should have, how much damage it should be able to sustain, and how far a distance it can go before requiring a refuel.

You will then sit down on the design table and come up with the blueprints for your first prototype. You will design the hull, the engines, the cockpit, the fuel type, and how thick the armor will be. Your design will designate how much this starship will cost to make, how heavy it is, how fast it can accelerate, how quickly it can turn, what kind of firepower its weapons will have, how much energy/fuel it will eat up, and how much damage it can take.

The game will not tell you all this information at first though. You will need to use test pilots to try out your first prototypes. Your test pilots will run your prototypes through all sorts of tests. They will take your starship to the limits of speed, maneuvering, and will test weapons on unmanned drones. Your initial designs may be unstable and there could be an accident with one of your pilots. But after all the tests you will get all sorts of valuable data on how your starship performs.

You will then want to return to the drawing board and try to make changes for your design’s shortcomings. You can do this cycle of testing and redesigning as many times as you want, but the more cycles you go through, the more money and time you will eat up. Not meeting the military’s milestones will make you look very bad and may prevent you from getting more important design requests.

When your starship design is ready it will be submitted to the military. They will start mass producing your design and put it to test out in the field. Real combat pilots will use the starships in real combat situations.

You will be able to see results of wars waged that used your starship. You will be able to see how it performs against enemy starships. It may be too slow, or not have enough firepower or armor. You can use this information for future upgrades.

With an upgrade you will be able to make small modifications to your starship designs. If your fighter pilots are getting killed because your design doesn’t have enough armor then you will want to address this in your next upgrade. But additional armor will weigh the starship down and make it slower so you will need to be aware of this.

Your enemy will be using starships that have certain performances. You will need to keep up on spy reports to know what kind of performance your enemy will have. Now and then your enemy will also introduce new designs or upgrade existing designs. So you will always need to be keeping track of your enemy.

Good designs will help the military win wars.  As your starships do well you will get promotions and the military will put in more requests from you to design more starships with bigger budgets.

As you gain promotions, you will also have some feedback in what the military researches. Research will be important for coming up with new weapon systems or more efficient fuel types. You will be able to direct exactly what the next researched technology will be.

As the military wins wars they will have access to more planets in the solar system. These planets can be mined for more resources that can be used in your starship designs.  There can also be discoveries of new material types such as stealth armor or cold fusion reactors.

Game play

There will be a large assortment of hulls, metals, weapons, engines, cockpits, life supports, generators, sensors, … To be researched and used in your starship designs. You will be able to design full 3d starships if great detail. You can design the curve of the hull and place every engine and gun on it. Your design decisions will be very important and will affect wars.