When making a standard
- Look for the possible minimum, maximum and optimum.
- Search for a word or idea to clearly separate weight-classes and categories in your own specification.
–––Disclaimer: My opinions here–––
Class-0 Unmanned - defined by size of living quarters from Class-1:
- Drones can even have a million blocks.
- They have no interior and works without any crew.
- If used for combat or mining or any task that scales in power, you have
- at least 2 and a mother-ship or station nearby (no hyper-drives).
- Many of them. A dozen at least.
- Single-Drone uses:
- surveillance
- scouting
- probing (collecting data on non-sentient entities that proof no treat of consequence after detection)
- Mines = Drones with single usage.
- Satellites = Drones without proper mobility (or static).
Military:
Class-1 Fighters - defined by docking size of Class-1:
- Light : 1-2 persons (like a motorcycle)
- Medium : 1-3 to 1-5 persons (Like a car)
- Heavy : 2-4 to 2-8 persons (Cannot be driven by 1 person anymore)
Crew space is at least as thick as the thinner parts of the hull, for fighters mostly 1 deck and 1.5 decks for heavy (second being not as big as the first).
Class-1 Interceptors - defined by docking size of Class-1:
A fighter is an interceptor when it has
- jump-drives (burst of mobility)
- tools to pin down the target or stick to it.
Class-2+3 Warships:
- Light - defined by minimum crew size:
- Gunboats : Larger than fighters
- Gunships : Larger than Interceptors –– can also be called Light-warships.
- Gunboats+ships have no fighter/interceptor bays.
- 3+ crew with required professionals
- Pilot, Captain, Engineer, ... at least 3 jobs.
- Medium - defined by flexibility:
- Can carry 2..4 Class-1 to do side-tasks.
- Also has 4-8 slots for mines, drones and satellites, because the flexibility it adds to the fleet is worth more than the 1% extra space saved.
- It also has interior-space usable for various tasks.
- Prisoner cells
- High-value goods too valuable or secret to put into cargo ships.
- 3+n..6+m+x crew. n= min of carried Class-1. m= maximum of carried Class-1. x= variance of your Class-2 ships of that category.
- …
Fighters, Interceptors, Gunboats and Gunships need to be pure military functional vessels. Max 10% penalty in efficiency due to decoration and similar.
When making a standard, you have to know the limits between it and lower categories.
The limit needs to be defined. The best way to do this is using a word.
As weight-classes I use:
0. [Drops] Only unmanned.
- [Tiny] Fighters + Shuttles
- This class is "tight" - all Class-1 should fit into all Hangars for any Class-1.
- no proper living quarters
- Hangar/Cargo for max 1-2x Class-0, but would sacrifice other parts.
- Fighters can have 1-2 smallest-reasonable turrets (medium, heavy). Reasonable = >50% blocks for scalable properties.
- [Small] (War)ships
- This class has 2 docking bay sizes using a technique like DIN-A4, DIN-A5 where a paper is the size of 2 smaller ones.
- proper living quarters for 1-2 weeks
- pressurized cargo bays and should have 1 drone bay for various tasks.
- [Medium] ships
- Have all optional parts of Light ships of their own category (war, civilian, etc).
- proper living quarters and crew size.
- Should carry Class-1
- [Big] ships - defined by not being supposed to dock into another ship.
- [Super] ships - defined by being unique outfitted.
- [Special] space-whales, stations, planets, alien-stuff, foreign designs, …