The Duracell Factor

Ken Lin

U.S.S. Ohio

Analyzing Expected Battery Life is an important part of evaluating a ship’s capabilities. Experienced captains already have a “gut feel” for how many internals a ship can take before starting to lose the batteries, but we will explore this question with more rigor and detail. The purpose of this play aid is to provide tactical guidance to captains who need to estimate how many internals they can take without losing the batteries.

When taking a single large volley of internals, a captain must decide whether or not to use available battery power as shield reinforcement (the only possible use for battery power during the Direct Fire Damage Resolution stage). Using the batteries on a volley that is too small will mean the batteries could have been held for later use. Not using the batteries on a volley that is too big will mean the batteries will be destroyed and the battery power wasted.

The survival of the batteries is a function of the hull structure of the ship. For most ships, the most important number is the number of Forward Hull, since the most common DAC roll of ‘7’ hits FHULL before BATT. Special cases include ships with small amounts of Aft Hull (Fed), and ships with Center Hull or Cargo (Gorn, LDR, Archeo-Tholian, Hydran, Orion, Aux, King Eagle, Andro). The blue bolded lines on the following table describe the probability of hitting FHULL on the Damage Allocation Chart:

DAC roll probability

2 (1/36)

3 (2/36)

4 (3/36)

5 (4/36)

6 (5/36) = 0.1389

7 (6/36) = 0.1667

8 (5/36)

9 (4/36) = 0.1111 (1st ‘9’ hit will be underlined LWARP)

10 (3/36)

11 (2/36)

12 (1/36)

For special case ships, it is also important to look at the DAC rolls that generate RHULL hits (5,8) and CARGO (5,7,9). However, the concept is similar to the FHULL table displayed above.

Using spreadsheet simulation methods, we can model how many internals a ship can take before starting to take battery hits. In addition, a Monte Carlo (random number) approach has the advantage of generating percentile results since the output data consists of a large number of simulated outcomes. Attached are the modeled results, using 5,000 simulated internal volleys per ship:

The way to read this table is as follows. Examine the Klingon line. On average (50th percentile), the 1st battery hit will come at the 14th internal. 20% of the time the 1st battery hit will come at or before the 11th internal, and 5% of the time the 1st battery hit will come at or before the 8th internal.