Hey- yeah, I don't talk much on here, I don't really have anyone to GalCiv with, and I probably won't want to until I'm satisfied enough with the state of the custom race I've been faddling around with for the last couple of years.
However, I am compulsively organized about 4x games in ways I usually am not about any other game type. Which means, among other things, that I'm trying really hard to figure out as best I can an appropriate set of ships to build for the race. I've gone to a lot of trouble to learn the shipbuilder and plot out scales of equipment to place on ships (I like integrating the actual placable gear, so sue me). However, I'm running around on some intense frustration over weapons, armor, and engine masses, having only just now downloaded and installed Crusade.
Can someone help me out here? I can tell that there's a change in mass for lots of the equipment as the ship chassis changes size class, but I can't manage to figure out just what it is. I can see that in the 2.2 changelog from May that "Beam Weapon space usage reduced from 5% to 3%" happened. Given that Lasers have a mass listed in the tech tree as 17, and when I'm trying to design a ship in-game a Cargo hull mounts them at a mass of 20.5, a Small hull mounts them at a mass of 18.5, and a Tiny hull uses them at 17.3 mass, I can't see this working as a straight percentage of the base hull mass allotment.
This mass variance would indicate that a Cargo hull adds 3.5 mass to the Lasers, which is neither 3% of the 90 base mass, 3% of the lasers' base 17 mass, nor is it 3% of the 99 mass that is the minimum a +1 Dense race (such as the one I'm trying to craft) has for a Cargo hull. Additionally, comparing masses, if the 3% is directly aimed at the hull maximum mass, then the Small hull should add slightly more than half as much mass to the Lasers weapon as the Cargo hull does, and it doesn't- the 1.5 mass increase for the Small hull is less than half of the 3.5 mass added for the Cargo hull. By the same rubric, the Tiny hull's addition should be exactly half of that of the Small hull and it isn't (.3, which seems like it should stand in for .25 or .275 depending on whether or not Dense is taken into account, is not in any way, shape, or form half of 1.5. It's also not 3% of anything, instead rating at approximately 10% of the hull total mass.)
Presumably by this point someone somewhere has figured out how exactly these mass changes math out and to what degree (if at all) they are affected by technologies that alter the mass value of a hull (assuming that the technologies that reduce equipment mass always operate on the mass of the equipment AFTER taking into account hull size and hull mass altering technologies). If anyone has, or if anyone can provide me the necessary math to figure this out, I would adore the chance to simplify what I'm doing. I don't mind doing a bunch of math myself, but I can't for the life of me figure out if the hull sizes are actually applying consistent modifiers to equipment mass across the various hull sizes, nevermind what rubric that modifier is actually using.
Anyone?