That all sounds more interesting than it likely is. Here are the reasons R&D is not totally wide open.Mark wrote:Not to criticize, because I know how much work you guys put into this (hence the awards nominations), but I do feel that we are restricted alot in our R&D. Basically, we can't have a real propulsion advance because we are all using warp, we can only kick up our top speeds, which doens't really give us much advantage. We can't really research new weapons, as there is no way to calculate them (I'd love to develop a hyper-iso phaser after all), which again, prevents a real significant step forward. Same with shields, stealth tech, and alot of other areas.
I sort of suspect if someone only focused on ships, weapons, and speed, that most R&D advantages would be useless anyway.
1. Weapons and Defenses- Ok, so say I let someone develop the modern equal of a polaron beam that passes straight through shields. Well as soon as the other side finds out about it they will R&D shields to counter it AND they will want to develop their own weapon that does the same thing. Basically where you are going to end up is with people just topping one weapon after another, almost like the scene from dumb and dumber where Harry declares you can't triple stamp a double stamp. It really takes any planning and skill out of the game and it comes down to timing. More than that I, and most here, don't have enough of a science grounding to rule on if these ideas are feasible (in as much as that applies in a world with FTL travel). By keeping weapons within the realm of what we have seen in trek, torps and beams, we make the game much more about planning and interaction that we do about crazy ideas. Plenty of innovative weapons systems have been developed by people in both sims, but in general if your idea starts with "It will pass through shields and crush my enemies in one shot" the answer will be no.
To take your specific example. Does a Hyper-Iso Phaser beat another players Phased-Refractive Shield system that just drops incoming weapons fire into another plane of existence? Beats the hell out of me. Debating such matters is not really what this is supposed to be about. I have seen longer ranged beam weapons developed, higher-yield torpedoes, ultra-high output phaser arrays and other such things. Just don't pitch an uber-weapon and generally it can be worked into the game for you.
2. Stealth- Honestly, I have considered just making cloaks vanish in Alpha by decree of a Q who finds you all groping around blind for one another boring. I have not and probably won't but from a GM perspective perfect stealth just takes all player skill and planning right out the window. That is why no cloaking system will be perfect for long. It is just almost impossible to manage in operation movements for the players.
3. Propulsion- You can develop different methods of moving, it is just horribly expensive. The reason for this is two fold. One IC the UFP has been trying since at least the TOS movies to get faster than warp to work and they have not. There are a few examples seen in Voyager but that is about it. Two OOC the problem is the scale of the map. If someone develops slipstream drive we go from our little corner to the whole galaxy being open (and possibly adjacent galaxys). That is just too much to manage.