[Sorenant]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Missiles are indeed streamlined - check the SM for targeting them against their weight, and you'll see this is the case.

Good to know, it's important for point defense.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Better handling can be had - but it has a mass (and monetary) cost associated with it, and only works in atmosphere. The relevant system is the Maneuver Enhancement, from Spaceships 7.

For the engines, while some of the other books have plenty of additional options, about the only way to pay more to get better performance is if you're able to pay extra to get something of a higher TL.

A better Control Room, I'm not sure about. My gut reaction would be to work out what computer would be included by default in it, then apply modifiers to that. For example, using TL 9 and SM+10, the C7 of the Control Room is doable with a 400 lb, $100K computer (a Mainframe). You could spend an extra $900K and sacrifice 3600 lb of cargo space to upgrade that to a Macroframe (total $1M and 4000 lb), or just spend extra cash to the tune of $1.9M (end cost $2M) to upgrade your Mainframe to Fast, in either case getting C8 instead of only C7.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

There is an exception tot he lack of "upgrades". Some settings can have "Super" FTL units that give the sort of bonus you're talking about.

Mostly though, superior performance comes from choosing a different technology though that almost always will cost more.

There are some more systems in (I think) 4 for SM+4 fighter types and 7 for stranger and anachronistic tech.

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

As mentioned, there's not much provisions in Spaceships for systems that are just better than standard, without going up a full TL. However, there are some reasonably simple house rules you can use. I've used these before in a couple of games with space travel, and they've worked pretty well.

First, if you figure your setting is reasonably close to the next TL, or you've got characters with appropriate invention skills and advantages (like Gadgeteer), you can allow them to buy or build prototype versions of the next TL's systems. Usually, these will have bugs or flaws, which can be used to keep them under control, and provide adventure hooks. For engines, a good flaw is "functions about half-way between this TL and the next in effectiveness". For example, if you're at TL 10 and have standard reactionless drives, you could allow the ship to have prototype TL 11 standard reactionless drives, that produced 0.75 Gs of thrust per system, better than the TL 10 0.5 Gs, but not quite up to the full 1 G of "mature" TL 11.

Note that this approach is only barely a house rule anyway - it does basically fit into the standard rules for inventions and guidelines for what sort of tech should be available.

The next option is to allow systems to be optimized for certain tasks. For this, use the normal rules for equipment quality (p. B345) to apply to a specific skill roll usually made with that system, for the normal cost increases to the system. For instance, your engines could be optimized for emergency thrust tasks. For 20X their normal cost, they'd count as fine-quality equipment, giving +2 to anyone rolling the relevant repair skill for them to give more thrust.

In general, don't allow this to apply to rolls that are directly affected by the ship's stats already. For example, don't allow people to buy Fine control room systems to get a boost to handling, since that's already covered by the Maneuver Enhancement system that Varyon mentioned. Similarly, upgrading your guns to get better effective Acc should be disallowed. But specific subsets of such tasks are probably reasonable, like buying maneuver drives optimized to give bonuses in very tight quarters, or to improve vehicle Dodge only, or weapons specifically good at targeting a single class of ships.

Oh well, too bad there's no official ruling for this. Regardless, I like Kelly Pedersen's house rules, it's not as comprehensive as I wanted* but it's based on RAW which is very nice. Thanks for the help and suggestions, much appreciated!
*dST doesn't change with TL so you can't have make a spaceship, in fact a mecha, that is stronger than another of the same size like you often see in animes (eg GM vs Hygogg); Lack of option to improve sAcc from the hardware side makes it harder to distinguish specialty models like normal GM and GM Sniper (maybe give conventional guns to GMs and EM guns to Sniper?); There's no way to make a jet plane like Yukikaze (from Sentou Yousei Yukikaze) that comes with a small supercomputer onboard that hosts an almost volitional AI. Anyway, as Snoopy once said, you play with the cards you're dealt.