I'll explain the title of this post in a second, but first I want to announce that the first (and hopefully last) errata sheet for my miniatures game Greater Space Battles is available on the downloads page.
The errata sheet includes a new way to determine the number of maneuvers a ship gets. My rules as originally written tried to reflect the massive amounts of energy the largest ships have to spend in order to turn their huge bulk. Unfortunately those rules involved rolling the number of maneuvers and then subtracting the ship's size. For large ships this often resulted in vessels with 0 maneuvers, drifting around the table unable to change their vectors. The errata features a change which eliminates this issue, while still allowing small ships superior maneuverability for a given amount of energy. The errata also gives missiles more teeth, something I found in playtesting made the game more enjoyable.
Each ship in Greater Space Battles has five design parameters, also called energy allocation schemes. Each scheme consists of six letters, representing the tokens assigned to movement, attacks, and defense if that energy pathway is available and chosen. Since each letter can be either a "M", "A", or "D" there are 3 to the 6th power = 729 discrete design parameters. And each ship is defined by five of any of these parameters, thus there are 729 to the 5th power = over 205 trillion ship types. And a size 1 ship with the same design parameters as a size 5 ship is still not the same ship. Thus there are actually 5 times 205 trillion, or over 1 quadrillion discrete ship designs possible in my simple beer-and-pretzel game.
I guess have a lot of scratchbuilding to do...
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