Modifying Aircraft

You can do modifications involving a percentile of the plane's payload depending on the pilot's Natural Touch skill. In order to implement the changes, the head technician must also have this level of skill, but anyone can maintain the plane once the modifications have been made. Systems damaged badly enough to need replacing require a fully qualified technician.

The percentage of total payload that can be modified is [CS skill value -5] * 10% or [FS skill value -13] *10%

Moving pounds around cost's nothing but time and money. If you want to increase the payload of the plane, this can be done for 10 XP for each percent of the aircraft's mass you want to add.

Any system added counts as a modification. The exception is if the weapons in a certain position are altered; this does not count against the limit. You still need to free up the required weight, of course.

Adding or removing special characteristics counts as a 5% modification each, both for time and Xp. Not all special characteristics can be changed, some are an immutable part of the design of the craft.

You can freely remove or downgrade systems to free up displacement for you modifications. Thus, you can downgrade performance to upgrade weapons (without using any new gun positions) with no limit.

Acceleration, Speed or Gs cannot normally be changed by more than one each, up or down. Base Target Number can never be changed.