Topic: n00b questions

[apcampbell]

All,
First timer here, stumbling through the mod installation process. I have some general questions that I hope can be answered.

First, I'm reinstalling the game and several Fed ships and would like to know what they actually are, such as the Northampton. Is it a NCD, NCD+, NEC?

I'm looking to install the following: The Andor, Saladin, Loknar, Larson, Northampton, Remora, and Thurfir.

I also noticed the Andor I downloaded has an exp file, but the rest don't. Is there a place where they are available?

[FoaS_XC]

There is often a disconnect between ship models and ship stats, not a bad thing, it just exists.
There are a couple of reasons for this:

(1) There are various "veins" of Star Trek. Canon is the Mississippi River, the largest. The Starfleet Battles universe is the Missouri River, and the FASA universe is the Ohio River. Yes they all flow into each other, but sometimes navigating the confluence of their currents is troublesome at best. There is no "Remora" or "Northampton" in the SFB universe (on which SFC is based), so if you want to have those in there, they need to be shoehorned in. With the complexity of SFC/SFB, that can be no easy task (Personally, I think it is certainly doable, but be prepared to have a lot of excel spreadsheets open and a calculator or three) - especially to keep things balanced. I've spent many many many hours fitting together the SFB, FASA, and Canon universe into my own bastardized "FoaS-trek".

(2) often modelers make pretty ships. It is my personal opinion that the best models come about from contemplating how they would work in-universe, however, that is just my personal workflow. Other times, people just want to make pretty ships without caring how they would work in game. That being said, I think it best to figure out what you think would work well in a given slot. For example, I use a model of the Chandley as my F-CAD (Heavy Drone Cruiser), it makes sense in my head, because its the right "feel" for the job.

(3) with the complexity that is SFC, people's mileage varies greatly with what they have. This becomes especially true when you get better at the game. I really love flying a King Eagle - 762 laughs at me for it . How does that relate? it increases the "strain" of balancing a standardized fleet of "Fan" ships.

With all that in mind, there really hasn't been an attempt at making a "Ship Stat library for fan-designed ships".
EXP files (files from shiplist) aren't really used much. In all honesty, I stopped using ship edit a long time ago as it bloats the size of your shiplist something fierce (not really a concern for single-player, but its a big deal if you are running a server). I just stat my ships using Excel. Again, varying workflows means there's no real common format for ship stats.

Hope that huge mind-dump helped .
Welcome. Feel free to post any other questions you have, or any thoughts or ideas you might come up with too .

[GotAFarmYet?]

Normally there is a readme file in the zip and the author usually says what this ship is designed (Harp pointed ) for in there