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This one is obviously my (Flippy Nips) first choice. If forced to take more crew the science lab could be swapped out for life support. Did I say Science? No I said a missile bay, obviously, yes… a missile bay.

But beside the point that I didn't say “science lab” what has science ever done for us, really?

Now, I'm not some silicoid Napolean, I'm happy to compromise. But only on my terms.

There are telechutes, which require a cargo bay, and are neat Cargo Bay Items. But we'll obviously need a bigger ship if we are to use these as there is already not enough space for our defensive measures. We could also put a “Local Life Support” module in, which would give us one extra crew, but that would still cost a missile bay.

Lets say we get rid of one missile bay, and put in a cargo bay with telechutes and local life support, and in return you spoil me rotten and we get two external missile pods attached to the cannon terminals?

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Species : human
Ship Ability : Reduce difficulty of Helm manoeuvres by 1.

Ship

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[Toowheet-Twoo] Typical ♪♫♫♬♪ silicoid. Wants the whole ship bristling with ♫♬♬♬♬ guns, without the slightest ♫♬♬♪♬♪ thought as to where the ♫♬♬♪♬♪ power to fire the ♬♪♫♬♬♪ things is gonna come from. ♫♬♬♪!

[Tktkah] Science bay means shields. Though I guess that without shields we would have more power for all those guns.

[Flippy Nips] Well apart from shields what has Science ever done for us? I have taken out a missile bay for a cargo bay. We need the telechutes item for a mini-wormhole between the engines, and local life support so we can fit the one extra crew member we will have. That leaves two empty slots in the cargo pod. If we can add two missile pods (attached to the cannon terminals) that gives us a potential 5 launched in the first round. We could also put in a second telechute from science to hyperdrive? In this layout its very straight paths for jetpack travel, so we can bounce between stations very easily and its only one turn to the teleporter for most.

[Toowheet-Twoo] I'm built for moving around if we are going to install a telechute it should go to the lumbering pile of gravel. See below. If we join the cannons with a telechute this works nicely, with the benefit of considerably more coverage from the cannons (2 forward, 2 starboard, 1 port, 1 aft) compared to (2 forward, 1 starboard, 1 port, 0 aft). We'd try to keep enemies on our starboard with our helm and life support sheltering on our less shooty side.

Species : human
Ship Ability : Reduce difficulty of Helm manoeuvres by 1.

Ship

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[Toowheet-Twoo] Here is an actual proposal

Kerbite Size 4 Frigate
Ship Ability : Reduce the difficulty by 1 to pump or transfer power.

Ship

Okay, explanation:
Engineering: The addition of a third engine is of fairly marginal benefit (3 Ergs per round), the main benefit being that I won't get quite so antsy about others putting used markers on my engines. Instead the addition of another life support and an Engineering bot to always give me +2 assist with the ship's ability gives a whole extra erg per phase (6 ergs per round.)
Combat: Superb firing arcs with straight runs between cannons. (I think we've been doing jetpacks wrong, though it's probably just me. A double jetpack should make two moves, straight line moves of up to 10 squares. [p93.]) Without the need of telechutes we could swap the cargo bay for the extra missile Flippy Nips was after. though there is other cool stuff that the cargo bay can hold
Science: Tried to get the science bay closer to the rest of the action on the ship and the relatively expendable teleporter up front but it can all be moved back to a more standard kerbite layout. The main problem with the science bay there is if I need to come up and do repairs
Piloting: The loss of the human ship ability and the larger ship is really going to limit the speed we can manoeuvre nicely at. Might need to give the pilot some stims and/or a chip in his head in compensation.

[Tktkah] Think outside the box sentients! Get a Tentac hull with 360 degree fire arcs and no facing issues.
Or even requisition another hull module and upgrade to a size 5. Our pilot should be good enough to deal with the reduced handling, yes?
Includes Toowheet-Twoo's extra life support idea. Dr Worm will be sciencing so I'll be teleporter (its a gun Toowheet-Twoo, not relatively expendable) and one cannon, FlippyNips will be cannon and missiles.

Species : Tentac
Ship Ability : External modules ignore facing restrictions and have 360 degree firing arc.

Ship

[Tktkah] So different ship types that would fit our style.
Tentac size 4 frigate - No module facing restrictions and 360 fire arcs. Just good really. FlippyNips would love it.
Whistler size 4 frigate - Pump or transfer power from any station no penalty. Stop Toowheet-Twoo running around.
Trundlian size 4 frigate - If there is any power in Guns, consider it one power higher. FlippyNips likes guns.
Canosian size 4 frigate - If shields are powered, they count 1 higher for defense and 1 lower if you are Teleporting. Defenses are good.
Kerbite size 4 frigate - Reduce the difficulty by 1 to pump or transfer power. Power is good.

On layout, we should cluster the modules that each person will be using (NOTE: if we have 2 life support modules we also can have 3 extra bots). What I think each person is using is:
FlippyNips Guns and missiles.
Toowheet-Twoo Engines.
Dr Worm Science Bay and Hyperdrive.
Gornak Helm.
Tktkah Guns, Teleport.

FlippyNips and Tktkah are also our boarding team so should both be near Teleport and/or Missiles

[Flippy Nips] The Kerbite layout is a win. As I jetpack mostly around the ship the straight line to the guns means one movement and no downtime for fireworks. We need to keep the cargo bay, too much nice shiny. Like shield cutter, solar sails, and missile pods.

Do we *need* a second life support? We can put a “life support pod” into the cargo bay for one more crew.

[Tktkah] That layout can appear on most ships. The second life support means 3 bots which is 3 extra actions/assists. Say, one for power assist, one gunnery assist and one to steady the ship after a manuver. Also I'm not going to be in science so will be likely to be on one of the cannons and we'll have 2 shots a phase. You won't be jet packing between them.
Sorry, the upgraded life support we did this mission means we don't need any other life support (not cargo based either). An extra module would give us 4 bots.

Species : Tentac
Ship Ability : External modules ignore facing restrictions and have 360 degree firing arc.

Ship

Looks like we should requisition an extra module and move up to the size 5 ship. How about the below with a bot on the extra engine and one on the helm to steady the ship.
Kerbite Size 5 Destroyer
Ship Ability : Reduce the difficulty by 1 to pump or transfer power.

Ship

[Toowheet-Twoo] I'm happy with different registry/layout that suits others. Carefully analysing, I think I can do an ok job of power without that extra 1, with it I could do magic. I can make do with shooting-up on TecKnow - as long as the mission isn't causing continual athletics checks.

My vote probably isn't for the tentac ship. The no firing arc restrictions thing is better than even the best cannon placement, but that open layout that makes everything so far apart, it seems too high a price to pay. Not when there are other good abilities without that cost.

I don't know how much a crew full of bots affects levelling. It's probably better to just get a local life support and one bot + MORE GUNS, but it's a little tight. It is really beneficial to have more capacity filled with bots to deactivate if we have guests. It's possibly not the best idea to be reliant on an upgraded life support because it loses the upgrade if slagged, though that's probably a rare occurrence. Another good thing about bots is they can mind the ship while we all don our red shirts and join the away team.

If we get only one bot, I was thinking what we need is an engineer with some pilot skill and a jetpack stationed in the helm at the other end of the ship to me. It can jet around to repair damage that I can't reasonably get to, assist me with engine pumping remotely and assist the pilot locally with difficult manoeuvres.

Size 5 is too big. A single manoeuvre at speed 3 would be at a difficulty of 16. If our pilot is still at skill 5 that is a risky speed, he'd need to be buffed just to slow us down again without too much risk of sending us OOC instead. Forget about the high speed double manoeuvres that have been the secret of our success so far. We probably need a pilot bot to help just for a size 4.

My choices of registry would be: Human to help the pilot – could make the difference of an increase of reasonable top speed, but the pilot would have to work out whether it's the case that the next speed notch is juuust stretching his abilities that little bit too far. Tentac to help power generation – though looking at my numbers I'm satisfied that I can do a fair job without it. Trundlian – especially if it allows gun power 7 which I cannot see outlawed in the rules. Would go nicely with CE Strafing cargo bay item. I don't like the layout though – no great places for guns.

Most of the other abilities are available as cargo bay items or have been discussed.

I definitely think we need AT LEAST a local life support, and it's probably enough so I'll put my vote there.

Are we allowed to keep changing ship registry or is this the decision time having started playing full rules?

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[Tktkah] It was pointed out on FB that power in a system is limited to ship size so in the last mission our shields would have maxed at 3 and guns at 3. Larger ship means higher power and higher hull checks. More life support for more bots means they can be spread around the ship to do things like repairs or can be in helm to do some manuvers while Gornak does others. High speed double manuvers have only been important because we had a small size 3 ship.

Remember that it does not have to be just you doing power or just Gornak piloting. With the 4 tasks of power, pilot, shooting and science if we have more than 4 characters/bots we can have multiple people doing each thing.

Hulls are free so we can change ship registry and size as needed for the mission.

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[Toowheet-Twoo] “ It was pointed out on FB that power in a system is limited to ship size”. Wow, okay. Can only find one mention of that in the rules, on p7 in the introduction. You'd think they'd mention it in the section about pumping engines. That does make larger ships more attractive for me considering I've already beefed up my engineering to provide more power than we can use on our current ship.

It's not dog fights though, which we haven’t done much. We've been getting in and finishing the mission before bad stuff can happen. I'd rather not be warping in 20 hexes from our target facing the wrong way, having to laboriously turn then crawl in at speed 2, sorting out the move order and dice rolls for 5 or 10 bots as well as ourselves. While making ever more difficult athletics checks or dealing with a missile per phase for all those phases.

I'm not forgetting that we can get more power by adding more engines and a bot to pump them, it's just that it does not help us. Our enemies are levelled to match us so they effectively get another engine and a bot to pump it too. To gain an advantage we have to use our hero abilities to get more out of smaller. Adding a bot and an engine doesn't do that, it just dilutes our heroes advantage. No amount of bots helps the speed problem though, you can spend more power and get more OOC to do multiple manoeuvres but then we need to limit our speed to what the bot can handle reliably – at least one speed lower than the right hero can do. At the lower speed the hero could have done doubles and not wasted the power and OOC.

[Tktkah] So mission briefings are up. We can either do a smuggling mission where we can't shoot or a Mirror universe mission where we have to kill an exact copy of our ship. (p.s. can we please try and do this all in one place together rather than some people on FB and some here)

[Toowheet-Twoo] Just a slight back-flip. It doesn't make much difference. If it goes as I think, it might be tediously drawn out sitting on a ship that we can barely move, and probably not as successful, but it could be more fun to go with a big ship with as many toys as we can accumulate.
I have also realised that I can actually generate as much power as we would likely be able to use even without managing to step it up an extra notch. So no need for Kerbite ability unless we want to add a third cannon, can switch to a Kerbite registry later if that's wanted. The size 5 loses the cool gun placements so isn't particularly attractive.
A third engine only gives 3 Ergs more per round so really it's not worth the space, replace it with a second cargo bay, or that third cannon or some-such.

[Tktkah] If you aren't fussed about the Kerbite ability I'll re-suggest the Tentac layout. I know it looks like the modules are far apart but a size 4 frigate makes the most distant modules 7 modules apart (including start and end modules) which is the same distance as the Kerbite most distant modules. Or the Canosian layout which has the same outrigger module locations for guns and a shield bonus (+1 defence/-1 to teleport out) If you are generating power as fast as you can how much per phase for phases 1-6 can you generate (e.g p1-5 p2-3 p3-2 p4-1 p5-1 p6-0)

[Toowheet-Twoo] Assuming I can upgrade the second engine and requisition\buy a head chip, I'll be able to pump {4,3,2} from each engine (I run back and forth to do the big ones first 4,4,3,3,2,2) giving 18 Ergs per round (actually 16-18 because my fail rate will be 1 in 8 and results in dropping a 2 off the end). It's enough to keep two canon continuously firing in power hungry multi, and still have 6 ergs for manoeuvres, missiles or teleporter bombs. We might draw the power banks down a little in a tight dogfight but that would only be for a short stint. Last time I was pumping {3,2,1} from each engine (12/round) with a couple of bonuses when I could get an assist. That was enough to keep the power banks over full and the canon firing. 6 more ergs to feed the second cannon should be plenty.
So looking at that, I think we'd be better off getting a gunner bot on the second canon to use the ergs I can make rather than what I got over excited about i.e. a bot to give +2 (Noble) assist and +1 from a Kerbite ship to get me up to {5,4,3} from each engine.

[Tktkah] Why do we need a gunner bot? What do you think each person is going to do?

[Toowheet-Twoo] You've drawn ships with two life support modules and therefore lots of bots. I would still advocate getting a local life support and a single bot, so we can use our second missile bay. Either way we will have enough power to run two cannon in multi plus missiles. Having realised we are not short of power the next step is to maximise our use of it. I realise you are an all-rounder and could pop up to use the cannon occasionally, but in the heat of battle we still need targeting, teleporter bombs, missile launches, and healing and other medical. Even with two science officers, I don't think you'll always have the spare phases to fully utilise the second cannon, plus you're usually needed to actually do research to complete the mission.
A bot designed for using the cannon would have some engineering for reconfiguring cannons, so would also be able to do repairs. Even if it was just launching missiles and reconfiguring cannons so that heroes can keep firing, it would massively increase our total output.

[Tktkah] The two life support is purely because you had it on the early Kerbite layout and there were some concerns over losing our life support upgrade if the module got damaged. I'm happy for just one. I think having a support/assist bot would be useful but the NPC versions can only do very simple things so I'm not fussed if we did without and had something else in that cargo bay slot.
We only have one science station which accumulates usage markers and Dr Worm will be using it. .
That is why I spent turns doing nothing last mission. .
Bot skills are: .
“They have a skill level of 3 in their profession and are entitled to a professional reroll. In all other skills, they have an effective skill level of 1.” It is possible to upgrade them with a engineering mod, combat mod and a Toolkit for an effective combat skill of 4 and engineering of 32. That would take 3 upgrade rolls. Fail that roll and “Any failed Upgrade attempt destroys the bot irrevocably.”
So a bot would definitely be useful but preferably used for simple things. Actually that should be engineering 2 for things like reconfiguring cannons TN8 so 6+ on the dice. The toolkit adds for upgrades, repairs, installation in cargo bay and putting out fires.

[Tktkah] Also, I'm not an all rounder, Combat 4 Science 4 in the last mission, which meant my combat was at least equal highest in the group (FlippyNips shows Combat 3 at last missions Rank 4 but that might have gone up to 4 for the last mission). My character tracker Tktkah is up to date if you need it.

[Toowheet-Twoo] Yes the bot would need to be upgraded, it would be able to fire off a missile and reconfigure cannons and handle closer cannon shots. It's not a great success rate about 70% after the first upgrade depending where you start, improved by further upgrades, but it's better than those modules sitting there unused while power is going unpumped.
You could just say your combat is at 4 and you're planning to use the cannon instead of having me type out an explanation that you already understood, just so you could get upset that I clearly haven’t studied your stats. You need to say what you're planning and not expect mind reading. I was working on the basis that we had two scientists, if you're not really sciencing much and therefore would fully utilise the cannon then the bot would probably be better spent elsewhere. I did not mean to threaten your job with automation.
I've already tried to bow out of this bizarrely hostile conversation it doesn't make any substantive difference. However, you asked a specific question about how much power I generate, I shouldn't have added the bit about needing a bot to spend power rather than generate it, but if you're working to design the ship you should at least know what side of the ledger to be working on.

[Tktkah] The conversation isn't meant to be hostile. However I've commented that I would be on a cannon and kept getting ignored so it was a bit irritating. From above:
“Also I'm not going to be in science so will be likely to be on one of the cannons”
“I'll be teleporter (its a gun Toowheet-Twoo, not relatively expendable) and one cannon”

I gave up on trying to actually design a ship a while ago and was accepting that you had a design that you wanted and that we were going with that. I was trying to understand how it would work and where I was going to fit in as all the positions seemed filled and there wasn't actually anything for me to do. It had felt that you were writing me out of the game.

[Flippy Nips] We obviously need a commander and as I am the most qualified, we go with the Kerbite ship, and replace one life support with a cannon - AND we take the mission to kill ourselves without shame.