Re: Ecology of the Scro

First off, just want to say that I've been busy and haven't had time to
throughly look over the ecology post much more than a simple skimming.
I do want to comment on what I saw (BTW Ben, I do intend to read it over
later and I'm glad to see more large posts like this:) in the post and
in the resulting threads.
        Honestly, I really don't see much incentive for the scro (or anyone
else, for that matter) to develop powder weapons.  The reason?  It is,
by far, the most unreliable substance in the game.  In many spheres and
upon several worlds, smokepowder has different properties than normal.
In some spheres, it works fine.  In others, it's any one's guess as to
what properties it will have.  It could be much more explosive, blowing
up bombards and personal guns when fired, it could be inert (like on
Greyhawk), it could be catnip for scavvars, attracting every scavvar in
the sphere to the scro fleet, or it could even become a facial creme.
Depending on the campaign, there could be as much as a 50/50 chance of
it working properly.  That's a lot of energy and time to devote to a
weapon that's expensive to buy and fire and doesn't work half the time.
2000 gp for a single bombard, w/out powder and shells, is a lot of
money.  Add to that the fact that guns are the one weapon that cannot be
easily replaced and the ammunition is hard to keep in supply.  Other
weapons are easy to restock (rocks and spears are fairly common), but to
keep a bombard stocked, you need both a supply of powder and shells of
some kind.  One good battle and a fleet heavily dependant upon powder
finds itself nearly helpless.
        Additionally, powder in the flow is *worse* than useless; it's
downright dangerous.  A simple accident in the magazine, such as a
dropped dagger or a scro in armor tripping and scrapping metal against
metal thus producing sparks, would destroy the ship.  Even worse,
shrapnel from the exploding ship would slam into nearby ships, creating
more sparks and thus more fireballs (I'd rule something like all ships
in a 30 hex range must save vs. fire or suffer the effects of a light
jettison to the ship itself, all crew suffer heavy jettison damage).
Supply ships carrying loads full of powder to the front (and to
powder-depleted fleets) would be extremely hazardous.  An explosion on
one of those ships might cause an explosion so big as to actually cause
fire damage nearby ships in addition to the shraple damage.
        Now to production.  From the material I've seen, I don't believe the
scro have modern manufacturing capabilities.  They use too many vintage
UWI warships and salvaged relics from that era to indicate that they
have much of a manufacturing base.  They do probably have a fairly
advanced forging and blacksmithing capabilities to produce their metal
mantis ships, on par with dwarves at best.  Another solution might be
that the scro don't build the mantises at all.  Instead, they have
hired/enslaved a large nation of dark dwarves (say 5 citadels worth) to
build their metal ships.  While production would be slow, it'd free up
thousands of scro for other duties and give them a really cool ally:)
Personally, I view scro-built ships as being very rare, with many
captured/salvaged ships.  A fleet might have a mammoth command ship, 2-8
mantises, 10+ scorpions, and the rest being captured ships, especially
wasps, tradesmen, lampreys, squidships and hammerships.
        Finally, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but the Elvish Fleet is
actually not all that big.  In the Complete Spacefairer's Handbook, they
list the EIN at about 2,000 MoW and 500 Armadas (total size probably
being about 3,000 or so ships with supply and other types of ships).
Also, the scro have only 8 battlewagons, total.  So I think the listed
fleet strengths were a bit high.
        Ok, that's enough of a long-winded post for now...:)

--
Night Druid