Talk:Parsec Rules Clarifications/@comment-5051964-20120807211536/@comment-1538006-20120812151946

Sure. Basically, Power is also a dice-pool providing either extra dice or the ability to power weapon systems. Having lasers cost extra dice to power up is a balancing mechanic, and also makes sense because a military laser would draw a ton of power.

Power is also an abstraction - it is how much acceleration you can put out quickly, and it is also effectively how many weapons you can have active on your ship. Lacking weapons, it is something for an engineer to do in combat - to allocate advantage dice to various systems, in part to temporarily mitigate damage by using the ship's resources to compensate.

The reasoning for higher Power in larger ships is in part because larger ships can carry a lot more fuel, and the assumption is that they can also support more weapons systems and their engines put out more energy overall. This is somewhat balanced by smaller ships having higher maneuverability, but some detail is lost in the abstraction.

In a flat-out chase, what I'm imagining is the larger ship has exponentially more fuel, and can burn that fuel much less faster in short bursts, whereas the smaller ship is maneuvers more easily, but fuel is more of a concern. Not a perfect representation at all, but we are balancing simulation with simplicity, and this is how it came out with regard to Power.

So, big ships have a bit more power to start, and one odd result of that is that they are faster in a straight line than smaller ships. If you want to mitigate this by hacking the system a little bit, you could say that for a sprint only (in relative terms), a smaller ship gets +2 to Power dice when rolled to withdraw. This might also be something we alter at some point - good question.