On 26May2020 1453, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
> In High Guard, if I recall, agility (or maybe emergency agility, but
> then again if I'm in trouble, isn't all agility emergency agility?)
> was calculated from excess power and in MT perhaps as well. In some
> versions of the game, you got to sometimes substitute your pilot level
> (but others did not seem to do that).
In HG it was based on your excess power after everything *except* your
manoeuvre drive was accounted for, and was capped by your manoeuvre
drives's rating. It was thus your combat acceleration with everything
powered. Most warships had agility equal to their M-Drive's rating.

In MT is was based off excess power after everything *including* the
M-Drive was paid for, so having a really big reactor somehow made you
more agile without you having to pay for extra manoeuvring thrusters or
the like (and also without you being able to actually *move*). I think
the authors of MT's spaceships section didn't actually understand what
agility in HG was. A late errata made agility scale with
power/displacement I think, but even so using excess power as a measure
like this is silly.
>
> It always felt odd to me to see the 60K dTon cruisers having high
> agility and your small traders and whatnot having less (unless you
> could count pilot skill and ignore your hardware because even a crappy
> trader could have a pilot-4 or 5 if they were very fortunate).
Remember, combat turns were about 20 minutes long, and agility wasn't
about little jinks and weaving like a WWII fighter, but about hard
accelerations that meant you weren't where you were expected to be when
the incoming fire arrived.

>
> With the geometric laws that govern hull size and mass, I would have
> thought that it would be easier to have an agile small ship than
> large, especially because most of them only have Jump 1 or Jump 2 but
> many of the larger cruisers and the like are Jump 3 at least.

That does make it easier to fit big engines in, yes. However, you have
to mount those big engines and power them. A small warship is probably
quite agile. A small freighter is most likely not, because big engines
and powerful reactors are cost and mass that's useless almost all the time.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>