Spaceships!

I've been worried for a while now on how to handle spaceships in Freedom in the Galaxy.

* I could just handwave them, and assume that all fighting is ground-based. But that's just not the way the boardgame works.

* I could dream up some complicated, Traveller sort of construction system. Sounds like way too much work.

* I could adapt the 'system' used in the Big Yellow Book (BYB). That doesn't seem to cover what I want.

I want unique ships, as well as cookie-cutter masses of vessels. I want personality! I also want a system that will be easy for me to use.

And I thought about the ships and their characteristics. I'd need a way to rate their strengths, their agility, their resilience to damage...

Characters.

Why not use the same attributes as characters? It'd go like this:

STR - How heavily armed the ship is (damage bonus)

CON - How much damage it can take

SIZ - How big it is

INT - How good its sensors are (idea roll)

POW -

DEX - How agile it is, i.e.; how good it's defenses are (dodge roll)

CHA - How good its countermeasures are (persuasion roll)


This is all sort of hazy, but I want to make smaller ships hard to hit. So I'll use Defender's SIZ as a modifier on the Attacker's roll. But do I use INT for the attack attribute, or POW? Still haven't decided on that one.

Let's say POW. (INT for detecting, POW for attacking). It would go like this:

Ship with POW 10, firing on ship with SIZ 2 (say a Millenium Falcon size...), would effectively be a POW 12 on the Resistance Table. Cross reference with the DEX of the defending ship to see if a hit is scored. If it is, the defender still gets a Dodge roll. If that fails, roll damage (and larger STR ships get a bonus to damage...) Take damage off CON (or HP, if you will...) and when the ship reaches 0 it cannot fight any longer.

Oh, wait, I still need a relative accounting of speed -- maybe POW could be that?

Like I said, still a work in progress. But I'm definitely MAKING progress.