Brainstorming spaceship design

[soltakss]

Originally Posted by Nightshade

I tend to think that there's a bit too many border conditions not to want to have something that addresses how ship size relates to human size (and perhaps more importantly, Strength). This is a game that's going to be handling superheroes and other potentially larger than life characters on occasions, so interacting with small ships may be a real issue; and you have to deal potentially with the in-between case of non-spacecraft vehicles to boot.

Generally, if you have rules for spaceship design, then you are focussing on the SciFi element of the game.

The rules may be generic, but other rules will be setting/genre specific and may well contradict rules in the BRP rulebook.

So, I wouldn't worry too much on how spaceship design affects a Supers game.

Also, I'd tend to split out aircraft design from spaceship design. Sure, have rules for aircraft and ships, but don't mix them with spaceship design.

[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by soltakss

Generally, if you have rules for spaceship design, then you are focussing on the SciFi element of the game.

The rules may be generic, but other rules will be setting/genre specific and may well contradict rules in the BRP rulebook.

So, I wouldn't worry too much on how spaceship design affects a Supers game.

Also, I'd tend to split out aircraft design from spaceship design. Sure, have rules for aircraft and ships, but don't mix them with spaceship design.

I still think that ignores too many potential border conditions; as I said, mecha interact with spacecraft all the time in the genres they're used in, and with small spacecraft simple issues of whether that large alien animal can grab the fighter craft when it enters atmosphere can come up. If you don't have any comparison value between human scale size and craft size, you're entirely on your own.

[Atgxtg]

Originally Posted by soltakss

.gbx files are Game Boxes from Cyberboard. Go to the Cyberboard website CyberBoard or the download site CyberBoardfor an excellent program to model board games. I draw all my maps in Cyberboard now.

Ah, thanks.

[frogspawner]

Originally Posted by Trifletraxor

Diceless? We need some way to add that back in though. Is it mainly a fleet against fleet game, or is it for one on ones too? The players will probably sit in only one spaceship, and would want to use some of their skills to influence the outcome.

Yes, diceless. Miss/Hit/Special/Crit is determined by cross-referencing secretly-selected tactics (attack/defend/retreat) and speed difference. If you're interested, see the rules here: WarpWar Rules

Rather like BRP/RQ itself, it's best for one-against-one, or up to about half-a-dozen a side. So the players could have a fighter each, or all-in-one, or whatever. IIRC, it's quite difficult to completely destroy ships - aiding character survivability!

As I said before, adding-in complications (like crew skill-rolls) should still end up with a fairly simple system, as it's so simple to start with.
I did a similar thing a few years ago when adding skill-rolls into an on-line 'EnGarde!' combat program - and that's a similarly diceless combat system.

[Atgxtg]

General Heads Up for Everyone:

Okay, before we get into the nuts and bolts any futher, I just want to make it clear that this is brainstoriming. I might express preferecnes, but, especially at this stage in the design process, any one take is as good as any onther. Left-to Right, Right to Left, whatever. So I'm mostly throw out a lot of options.

Just wanted to get that out there.

Originally Posted by soltakss

I wouldn't necessarily be too slavish about +8 SIZ doubles mass. If you have super-massive ships then you have to work out mass, engine thrust and so on. I'd keep things relative and rough.

Well, I've been tinkering with using either (STR/SIZ) or STR-SIZ to get a move rate. Since STR is measuring the thrust of the Engines and SIZ is the mass of the ship, and both are rated on the same scale , the who doubling thing won't factor into it. So a SIZ 10 ship with a STR 10 engine would move as fast as a SIZ 100 ship with a STR 100 engine.

THe whole +8 doubling thing would be for IF we give a ship a number of SPACES to put in shipboard systems. So a SIZ 18 ship would have twice as many SPACES as a SIZ 10 ship.

Well, yes and no. If you have power drain through equipment use then you need to track it. You either have enough power to do something or you don't.

Maybe. There is more than one way to skin a cat (sorry Badcat). One apporach is the marking off of Energy points each turn. But a less complicated method would be to assume that a ship was designed to produce enough energy to operate everything on board (that's how we design them today. No one has to turn off the coffee pot to work the radar). We have power drain through equipment use in the real world, yet in RPGs we rarely have to track things like how long a flashlight or MP3 player will run, of if the PC plugged into the wall is going to suffer a sudden blackout.

I was thing Power Point/Magic Points were simply reserve power that was used to boost or reinforce things, like in many Sci-Fi shows, while the POW attribute is the generators. So I was only tracking spare energy.

What I'm thinking is that we could simply assume that power isn't a problem, UNTIL the ship gets damaged and then suffer the effects of reduced power.

In some cases we could allow for "brownout conditions" Many devices will work at reduced capacity if given a reduced charge. That works great with Magic World type powers doing double duty as high tech weapons and shields. Lose some power and the shields get weakened. Or we could simply restrict the number of systems usable at one time.

For instance, what if the total number of "items" a ship could power at once was equal to it's POW attribute.? Damage tot he generators could reduce the POW score, and force the players to decide just what systems to turn off.

Perhaps, but how would you model a situation where the generators are dead and you only have enough Life Support for 4 hours (Standard Star Trek Episode Number ???)? That's why I think you need some kind of power requirement for Life Support, it causes you to make life or death choices. Do I cut the power to Life Support so that I can charge the batteries enough to make a Hyper-Jump even though it means some of our crew members could die?

Well, you could go with my POW option and say a POW 10 ship can spend 10 POW fa turn for free and cover both bases.

Or you could go with the way it is handled in Decipher's Star Trek RPG. Life Support is treated like hit points, and takes damage. In that game you can reroute power from one system to another, reducing one score to raise the other. Sort of like lowering CON to raise STR in BRP terms.

Or you could treat it as Life Support damage, give the shipa battery with a time limit, rather than in points, and force the payers into either repairing the generator or putting on their vacc suits while the run the engines.

Itn't it amazing how in SciFi no one even seems to use a Space Suit or the facilities of a life boat/escape pod when life support is on the fritz?

Don't they have safety regulations in the future?

I think we'd need to hack out some rules, then build some spaceships and see how the rules go. You know, almost like a playtest

I've started. Instead of putting it up here AFTER it's done, I opted to post some stuff first, see what the reaction is and try to see what direction most people seem to want to go in. I figure it was no sense writing something if I was the only one who liked it.

Plus this way I've got other people to shoulder the blame when other people STILL don't like it.

I've never played Star Fleet Battles, but it sounds like the kind of thing you might need to do. That's how Star Trek always did it, anyway. Star Wars doesn't really track power but does track system damage.

It's one way to do it. Most Star Trek RPGs have done it that way too. Basically a ship produces X amount of power and allocates it each turn amongst the various ship systems.

It does slow the game down, forces to track Energy expenditure in minute detail (and most people don"t like the Fatigue rules, and those are a lot simpler).

It isn't the only way to do it, and doesn't really fit Star Trek to well either. The only time power is ever a factor ion TV is when something has happened to the ship and it suddenly doesn't have enough to get by. Typically that means it has taken battle damage, or under some weird power draining effect.


Several RPGs don't track power, but simply track damage. Power outage could be such a damage (we could use adapt the BRP major woudnd chart if we wanted to).

Whatever the scale is, it needs to be consistent and needs to look reasonable. Also, we need to be able to put together some sample spaceships from other games/films/TV series to see how they work. That way, if we need a ship like a Battlestar then we can get a template, if we need something like a Sun Hawk then we have those stats.

Yup. And I got an idea on that, it's lower in the post.

[quote]
Has anyone got rules for Babylon 5/Star Trek/Star Wars ship stats? It doesn't really matter what the system is, things should be easy to convert as long as we have relative values.
[quote]

I've got several. A couple differeent Star Wars Games, 3 Star Trek RPGs, Traveler, and three or four more. Stuff! is a good supplment for working up practically anything.

What kind of FTL/Interstellar travel do we have examples of?

Hyper-Jump - Jump between two points in normal space through Hyperspace, instant travel, limited range/aiming.

Hyper-Point - Opens up a Jump Point into Hyperspace and allows the ship to travel through Hyperspace faster than normal. This needs a Jump Point back to normal space. This has durational travel, with a cost for each jump and navigational skills, perhaps each ship has to be of a certain SIZ/Power to create a Hyper-Point. (Babylon 5)

Hyper-Gate - Fixed Hyper-Points that allow for travel between these fixed gates. This gives durational travel, but the ship doesn't need to create a Jump Point. (Babylon 5, Buck Rogers)

Warp Speed - Warps space and allows for Faster Than Light travel. Each Warp is a multiple, or perhaps a power of normal light speed. (As Star Trek)

Worm Hole - Opens up a worm hole between 2 points in normal space. Allows travel between the two ends of the worm hole. (Farscape, Star Trek Next Generation)

I'm sure I've forgotten many types.

But is is a start.

You should all go out and get Pirates! Ya-har! It is really goodf and captures the feel of the setting. It's not very Mongoosey either.

Ship Design has templates for Barge, Barque, Brigantine, Canoe, Corvette, Fishing Boat, Fluyt, Frigate, Galleon, Indiaman, Raft, Rowboat, Schooner, Small Trader, Sloop, Snow and Warship.

Each ship has hull, Structure Points, Seaworthiness, Length, Draft, Capacity, Crew (Minimum/Average/Maximum), Speed, Weapons and Skill (Shiphandling/Boating).

Ship Qualities can be Agile, Battleshy, Clumsy, Cursed, Defiant, Distinctive, Fragile, Foul, Good, Ill, Lucky, Nimble, Reliable, Slow, Sluggish, Stealthy, Sturdy, ZSweet, Swift or Unreliable. Each one gives a bonus or penalty to certain skills/attributes. So, Fragile gives -1 Hull, but Foul gives +10% to all Crew Resilience Checks (+10% to CONx5% Rols in BRP).

Ships can have Modifications, such as Aft Guns, Bulwarks, Copper Bottom, Chase Guns, Full Repairs, Hidden Cargo Space, Lighten Hull, More Cannons, More Cargo Space, More Sail or Reinforced Hull. These changfe the characteristics of the ship.

Temporary Measure include Bail out the Bilges, Batten Down the Hatches, False Colours and Partial Repairs and each gives a temporary bonus or has a temporary effect.

There are rules for crew quality, crew numbers, random events, plunder, crew combat, ship to ship combat, sighting and chasing ships and more. It's all very modular and seems easy to use. I reckon it wouldn't take more than half an hour or so to come up with a workable ship using these rules.

That's the kind of thing I'd like to see in a BRP Spaceship design - modular and easy to use. Not very technical and modeling exactlky how a spaceship works (after all, we don't know how proper spaceships work).

Sounds like a cross between the RQ3 ship rules and the High Seas Supplement for Flashing Blades. Its one way to go.

(Continued in next post...]

[Atgxtg]

Continued from previous post (I hit the 10K limit again!!!)

I guess we can call it the atgxtg barrier.

Is it worth summarising them for those of us who don't have them?

Yeah, I think so.


I got a lot of fre stuff from Drivethrurpg, but haven't gone through them yet, some of them may have ship design rules.[/quote]

STARSHIPS-Is the Starship design book for Decipher's Star Trek RPG. Since the RPG focuses on character scale rather than spaceships it has a few things that would make it useful for our nefarious purposes:

Starship Design
-Each ship has a SIZE rating that indicates how large and massive a ship is. This is an increasing scale, so that a SIZ 6 Constitution-class Crusier is much much bigger and massive than, say, a SIZ 2 shuttlecraft.

-The Size of the ship determines it base number of hull points and the number of SPACES inside. While Hull Points are simply 5xSIZE, SPACES increase on a non-linear scale. You can even trade off Hull Points for SPACES and vice versa.

-You then buy components such as Engines, Life Support, Sensors, FTL (Warp) Engines, Weapons, and Shields for the ship. Generally the better or more advanced the technology the ,more spaces it will take up. One neat thing about this approach is that it allows us to easily modify ships by setting simply be switch out components. For instance we could work up a Jump Drive and use that instead of a Warp Engine.

-Most of the book is taken up with ship writeups for the RPG, with only the first dozen pages or so comprising the ADVANCED starship design rules. So design it quick and easy and easy to swipe.

Gameplay
-For one thing the starship combat rules are abstract. Ships don't move on the battle board, but are tracked in range bands (like being a short or long range).

-Each turn a ship can conduct two maneuvers. There is a bunch of maneuvers in the game, and they require a skill test to perform successfully. There are three types of maenuver, Helm, Tactical, and Command, and each one is modifeid based on the ship's rating in that area. So nimble craft might be better at helm manevers, while flagships could be better at coordinating Commad maneuvers.


-The whole heart of the ship combat system is the maneuvers, and they are easily adaptable to BRP. For example a Close MAneuver will move a shipone range band close to another ship. A Fire (Weapon) maneuver is an attack, and so on. You can pull off some rather fancy stuff too. For instance a Strafing run lets you move in close, fire weapons, and then keep going, moving farther away.

Stuff!
Stuff is a supplment for the EABA RPG. Stuff is fairly simple and lets you design anything from a pocketknife to a battle tank, to a starship, to a T-Rex, to an alien civilization. If you are familiar with the system, you can build a "ballpark" writeup of something on the fly, If you feel like using the advanced rules, and spending a few minutes, you can get a more "accurate" version, that will probably only be a point or three different.

Stuff even has conversion notes in the back for using with other RPGs. The only hard part would be to work out the BRP conversion.

[Atgxtg]

Originally Posted by Nightshade

I still think that ignores too many potential border conditions; as I said, mecha interact with spacecraft all the time in the genres they're used in, and with small spacecraft simple issues of whether that large alien animal can grab the fighter craft when it enters atmosphere can come up. If you don't have any comparison value between human scale size and craft size, you're entirely on your own.

Yeah. THat's why I'm gonna work up a sclae. It's either that or just deal with big number on the ships. Something like x10 or x20 could work, if we design it right.
If I knew the SIZ chart and sample vehilce Hit points from BRP I think I can work out a scale. I'll flip through CoC and see if I can reverse engineer it.

Ideally I'd like to come up with something like x10, x20 or such. So a CON 12, SIZ 12 spaceship with 2 AP and 12 hit points might translate to SIZ 240 with 40 AP and 240 hit points.

Plus smaller numbers and scaling help to keep the category modifers from domination the ship skills.

[The Tweaker]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

STARSHIPS-Is the Starship design book for Decipher's Star Trek RPG. Since the RPG focuses on character scale rather than spaceships it has a few things that would make it useful for our nefarious purposes

If anybody really wants to have a look at the rules without buying the book, there is a fan-created reference document for Decipher's Coda system (the ruleset used for their Star Trek and Lord of the Rings books). It includes all the main rules from both lines in a setting-neutral format, but also expands on some of them: the starship design & combat rules are extrapolated to include all kinds of vehicles (tanks, boats, etc.), for instance. You will also find complete rules for rolling up star systems and alien races & societies - taken from the Worlds supplement for Star Trek -, which makes it a very useful (and free!) resource for any sci-fi game. You can download it here.

[Atgxtg]

Well, I've been looking over the SIZ chart from CoC 5th edition. Interestingly enough at SIZ 300 and beyond the relationship between SIZ and mass is that SIZ=1/10 mass in tons.

They also messed up the metric ton portion (the masses should be twice the values given).

So that makes scaling spaceships pretty easy, since anything over 3300 tons/3225mt would convert at a 10-1 rating, giving us a nice linear formula to use.

So we can use a x10, x100, or even x1000+ scale from ships to characters. Doesn't get much easier than that.

If we go with the 989,000 mt mass for a Constituion-class (Star Trek TOS) Starship, that comes out to SIZ 101,185 (we could probably just round to 100,000 for our purposes). If we got with a 1,000 to 1 scale, then a Constitution-class starship would be SIZ 100, just where soltakss puts a Heavy Crusier!



With a Galaxy-class Starship from Star Trek TNG having a mass of 4.5 million metric tons, for SIZ 460,395 (we could round to 460,000), even 1000 to 1 would give us SIZ 460!


So at this scale, interaction with characters, unless we are talking Superman level, and that the "wimpy" post crisis one.), would be limited to said characters cutting holes through the hull and so forth.

Smaller ships would be the only ones worth having a direct coversion for, at least according to the CoC scale.

[soltakss]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

Well, I've been looking over the SIZ chart from CoC 5th edition. Interestingly enough at SIZ 300 and beyond the relationship between SIZ and mass is that SIZ=1/10 mass in tons.

They also messed up the metric ton portion (the masses should be twice the values given).

So that makes scaling spaceships pretty easy, since anything over 3300 tons/3225mt would convert at a 10-1 rating, giving us a nice linear formula to use.

So we can use a x10, x100, or even x1000+ scale from ships to characters. Doesn't get much easier than that.

True.

Once you have decided on a scale or framework, then it is easy to slot different types of ship in. You just have to decide where a particular ship fits into the scheme of things. If you have a set of relative values for each SciFi Setting, you can slot other ships in according to their relative ranks.

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

If we go with the 989,000 mt mass for a Constituion-class (Star Trek TOS) Starship, that comes out to SIZ 101,185 (we could probably just round to 100,000 for our purposes). If we got with a 1,000 to 1 scale, then a Constitution-class starship would be SIZ 100, just where soltakss puts a Heavy Crusier!



With a Galaxy-class Starship from Star Trek TNG having a mass of 4.5 million metric tons, for SIZ 460,395 (we could round to 460,000), even 1000 to 1 would give us SIZ 460!

That's the problem with having numbers for starships. 4.5 Megatonnes is a hell of a spaceship and is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to build, except in a SciFi game/film/series/novel.

Each class of spaceship will be different - the Star Tek ships have different classes to Star Wars Imperial Cruisers or Mimbari Cruisers or whatever.

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

So at this scale, interaction with characters, unless we are talking Superman level, and that the "wimpy" post crisis one.), would be limited to said characters cutting holes through the hull and so forth.

Smaller ships would be the only ones worth having a direct coversion for, at least according to the CoC scale.

Agreed. While it would be useful to know if Mr Strong can lift and throw a Starfighter, it would be less useful to know that he couldn't lift a Battlestar.

Mile-long starships are probably just too big to be picked up by anything.