Atgxtg
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I don't know. Sorry. It looked horrible on my preferred browser (Opera) too, but I thought it just looked that way on my computer.
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Not that I recall. It's like Strike Ranks. Somewhat. It's kinda like (wait for it) Strike Ranks. The delay between actions is usually the same, but can be adjusted, depending on what you are doing. There are rounds, but you don't sync back to zero. Your action roll over into the next round. It's kinda nice because if your character was just about to finish something but ran out of Impulses, he gets it early in the next round. There is a disparity, but it isn't huge. I think it's about a 2 point difference between 8 and 18. What makes it important isn't that the DEX modifier is greater than the other factors, but that the other factors only count for the initial action. Frankly, I think I'd rather try to use the SR rules and just let actions roll over into the next turn. . The Impulse system in Ringworld, if I remember it correctly (it's been years since I've read through those rules) is mostly like the SR system, except that the stat based values are bigger, and the "strike ranks" roll over into the next round. You get to act again something like each DEX SR. So someone might act on Impulse 7, Impulse 12 (i.e. Impulse 2 of the next turn), Impulse `7 (i.e Impulse 7 of the second turn), Impulse 22 (i.e Impulse 2 of the third turn) and so on.
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Not really. I could see a GM doing up a time sheet with 10 rows per round and putting all the PC impulses on gthe sheet in advance. Then adding in the NPCs. Or some sort of speadsheet that automates it. I don't think so. The thing that was nice about the Ringworld system was that those with higher DEX scores acted faster and got more actions in over a period of time. The "traditional DEX ranks system," (ironic name, since it isn't traditional, but new to BRP) lets those with a higher DEX act first, but doesn't let them get in more actions, or factor in for reach, weapon use or much else. One thing that I liked about Strike Ranks and Impulses is that a guy with a pistol will most likely shoot a guy wielding a melee weapon before he can close, whereas just going by DEX lets someone run 30 meters and slash with a sword before the other guy can pull the trigger.
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I'd suggesting typing the crew requirements to the size class. It depends on how many crew you want, but for starters how about something like this: titan (160-480) battleship (80-240) cruiser (40-120) destroyer (20-60) frigate (10-30) corvette (5-15) cutter (3-8) small craft [2-4] fighter (1-2) How does that look? I think you might have a problem with ships being all crew space through. Perhaps some sort of sliding scale for accommodations? the 4 modules per person could be for nice, passenger accommodations, say 2nd class. The whole scale could look like: Luxury Accommodations: 16 modules per person (five star first class accommodations on ma passenger liner; for the ultra rich) 1st class civilian: 8 modules per person 2nd class civilian: 4 modules per person (standard) 3rd class civilian ("coach"/"steerage"): 2 modules per person Military, Officers Quarters: 1 module per person (a bunk with some storage space) Military: 2 people per module (a pair of bunk beds) -Hot bunking could reduce the crew requires up to half again. That way, if you have a 400 module cruiser with a crew of 100, you could fit 10 officers in 25 modules or so, and 90 crew in 45 modules (30 or even 23 with hit bunking) and still have 30 modules to actually build a ship with. You might want to add an automation feature that drops the crew requirements down a step or two on the ladder per module.
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If you didn't mind Strike Ranks then Impulses won't seem cumbersome. THe major difference is that rather than resetting every round, you just kept adding in the characters' modifiers and rolling into the next round. My only complaint is that essentially it winds up being all DEX.
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1% values for the other drives are as follows: Cutting Edge 1.2 speed per 1% "Standard" 0.7 speed per 1% Economy 0.4 speed per 1% Sounds about right so far. One thing you might want to add is some sort of guideline for crew. As it currently standard, there is no reason a Dreadnought can't be crewed by two people. Perhaps some function of the number of modules?
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It's not approximate. If I got your math right, then a 100 module ship with 10 standard engines moves at speed 10 (1000 thrust divided by 100 modules). So the 1 SPEED = 1% of total modules is exact. I was working on a percentage based design system a few years back. I found it good to work with, but most everyone else I showed it to seemed to hate it. BTW, the 10:1 thrust ration of your engines is the sam value I used! It's also just about right for a modern jet engine. Yeah. I figure most GM will design a half dozen or so. A PC ship, a bigger firednly ship, a shuttle, a fighter, and some bad guy ships. It would probably be good to come up with some guidelines to make it easier on them.
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Since each doubling is +8 on the SIZ table from 8=88 then if one module is, say, two tons (SIZ 50), then each time you double the number of modules you add 8 to the SIZ. It holds true up to about 16 modules (SIZ 90). At that point the SIZ progression in BRP is all over the place. That's why there is a common expression, "It's not rocket science", that gets used a lot when dealing with something that ins't very complicated. Rocket science gets complicated because there aren't many constants. There are very good reasons why most rules start with hull size. Some many other factors are dependent on it. For example, we've already hit on the problem with needing more engines as you increwase the mass just to keep the same speed. But the same holds true for power systems, life support and so on. Because form follows function. If you know what the ship is supposed to do, then you should have an idea of what it needs to do it, and how big it should be. In the real world most engineers start by making some basic assumptions about a vehicle, such as mass and desired speed, and then fill in the gaps. Then they usally adjust the mass and other starting assumptions as they modify the design. For instance, with real world fighter jets, engineers can assume that about 15-50% of the plane weight will be taken up by the engines, and another 35-40% taken up by frame and structural support (so it can take the stresses associated with hight speed and high G turns). So 50-90%, or, on average about 2/3rds of the fighter's total weight is already spoken for before the designers get to the drawing board. The same concepts hold true for other vehicles. A battleship, for instance, is built around big power guns, and most everything else, such as armor, ammo magazines (ammo weight adds up quickly when you're firing two ton shells!), number of crew, accomodations, food stores, so much of it is dependent of the guns. If you want to take that approach then I suggest a table with Speed and handling as a percentage of the total modules. It will make it much easier. I think it works out as 1 SPEED = 1% of modules, but I'd have to check.
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Exactly. Yeah, that's because we think in linear terms, not exponential ones. One other little perk that I didn't mention is that since the BRP SIZ table also uses a doubling progression in the SIZ8-88 range, it is easy to convert from a rating to a SIZ or STR stat. Hey, they are you rules. I'm just tossing out ideas for handling some hurdles. Yup. Oh, and BTW, congrats, that's actually one of the problems that go with rocket science in the real world. You add something new to a rocket, and it ups the mass a couple of kilograms, so you need a couple of kilograms more thrust, so you need to tweak the engines, but now you have to add more fuel, so that adds more mass, and so on. The "solution" to that problem is to pick the size of the ship first then fill in the spaces with components. That way the final size (and mass) never changes, so you don't have to constantly recalculate every time you add another module. Also, since Speed and handling are on a 1-20 scale, it's easier and more efficient to add engines in increments of 5%. Sounds okay, except I think it would be better if we have one system for design, not one for small ships and one for large ships. Maybe we can trim off the stuff from the rating system that is most helpful and important, such as a total size, and size class. What if we started the design process by picking a size class and number of modules and then filled it in with components? That way we get the ability to work with large increments or by individual modules as needed.
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Two points: First off there probably should be a limit to how many people someone can keep at bay with a long weapon. While I can see someone fending off one, two, four, or even six opponents this way, I can see them fending off 10, 20, 40 or 60! What's the multiple attack penalty for ripostes these days -20%, or -30%? I'd probably let someone fend off one opponent per multiple of that. Secondly, the keeping at bay thing sort of presume that the opponent would rather give up their own attack rather than get skewered. However, zombies might not have much of a self preservation instinct, and could just walk right up the spear. So I'd say someone (i.e. a zombie) could attack if they are willing to take a hit. Maybe let the long weapon use roll a hit to bump up the success level a step.
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It should be 16 for each. I messed up. Yeah, but that's pretty easy. What you could do is give it a rating and then divde the moduels to get the number of craft. For instance if a ship had a Hangar rating of 6 it would get a 32 module-sized hangar bay (or a couple of smaller bays). This would allow it to accommodate up to 8 ATV, or 3 small fighters. Now if we used the rating system for the size of ships then we could just subtract the size rating to get the number of craft held. For instance with a rating 5 hangar bay, and ATVs being size 2 (4 modules each) then we just do 5-2 =3 which would be 8 craft! Because we are dealing with the actual performance, tonnage, people, etc. rather than modules, everything scales up. For instance, let's say we wanted to make a capital ship with a crew of 400 people. With modules we'd need a lot, an might want to use a x5 or x10 scale to keep the numbers down. But with a doubling progression we only need to give the ship a rating in crew quarters high enough to handle 400 people (i.e a rating of 8 can handle up to 512 people). Likewise if we wanted to build a mile long capital ship with a crew of 40,000 people (i.e. a Star Destroyer), we wouldn't need to make a new scale, we'd just give it a rating of 16 and know that it could handle up to 65,536 people. In both cases we could assign the crew modules however we liked, for deckplans and such. Now the fun bit is that when it comes time to work out stuff like speed and handling, we can just use the rating instead of the actual number of modules. So that Star Destroyer would have a a rating of 15 for crew. If it had a rating of say 12 in weapons, 3 in labs, 12 in hangar bays, 13 in engines and so on, we could fit the whole thing in a SIZ Scale 16 hull (1 bigger than the 15, since nothing else came close to the 15). SO we would know the ship was rated up to 131,072 modules- without having to go into the bother of actually counting them and assigning all of them. Note that it could be 100,000 or 120,000 modules, at that size we really don't need to know. And the reason why we don't need to know is because with so many modules, it would take a lot of modules (I think 10000 if I got the Speed formula right) to change the speed or handling. So basically, the idea here is that as the ships get bigger this system automatically lets you scale up.
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I think the latter. Maybe we could have a SIZ Class for ships, like several other games use, and then just list the various types of ships as benchmark example. For isntance SIZ class 2 could be a fighter, and SIZ Class 9 could be a battleship. Your huge colony ship (SPace Ark?) example could be SIZ Class 10, along with the Titans. One benefit to that approach would be that it would make it easier for people to adapt the scale to other settings, just by shifting the SIZ class for his ships up or down a point or two.
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Just one table. All that would change between systems is what you are measuring. For instance, a rating 5 cargo area would be 16 tons, a rating 5 crew area would be 32 people, a rating 5 lab would mean 32 labs, and so on. The advantage with this variant is that you don't need different scales, since it's built into the progression. A capital ship would just have ratings 2-3 points higher than a smaller ship. One of the neat bits is that while you can determine exactly how many modules a ship takes up with this variant- you don't have to. With a doubling scale you can get a "close enough" estimate just by taking the highest rating and adding 1 or 2.
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Actually I peeked at an SSD for Starblazers, and realized that breaking a ship up into 3 sections could give us a way to get more than 20 hit locations out of the traditional BRP method of handling hit locations. It could be even faster if I replaced the first d20 with a d6 (1-2, 3-4, 5-6) so it could be rolled with the d20. The fighter is a bad example, though, since it has only 5 modules, it would work out better with the traditional 1d20 hit location table. 1-4 Cockpit 5-8 Port Laser 9-12 Starboard Laser 13-15 Port Engine 16-18 Starboard Engine But I could definitely see a picture or silhouette with boxes for modules that could be crossed off when destroyed in battle.
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I've been thinking (dangerous, I know) and it's possible to do ship design in such a way that we don't need a scale. What we do is using a doubling progression for modules, For instance if 1 module is 1 ton, 2 would be 2 tons, but 3 would be 4 tons, 4 would be 8, 5 would be 16 and so on. We could do the same with crew, weapon size and so on. It would actually be simpler than the standard method, since you wouldn't actually need to add up the total values of the modules to get a SIZ class, or work up speed and handling. There's a quick way to get a size estimate with a doubling progression and the rest can be handled with subtraction and a simple table.
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I've been working on (well off and on) a vehicle design system for BRP, and covered some of the same ground. All vehicles are designed based upon their purpose, both civilian and military. The requirements actally force craft towards certain designs. For instance, a high performance aircraft must have a certain minimum percentage of it's weight allocated to structure in order to be strong enough to pull more than 4g. Not a bad idea. Just how are you going to handle the classification though? Use Height and Width, or just total modules (or volume)? I think Beetlemax and Barnardmax add a nice touch.
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Yeah, it really shouldn't be entirely random as to who you hit. THe archer does aim at somebody, and that is who is most likely to be hit. One suggestion I have would be for the archer to pick his target and then roll the target die twice and pick the result closest to the one he was aiming at. For example, Let's say Bob is shooting into melee, where his buddy Big Al (SIZ 15) is fighting a pair of Trollkin (SIZ 10). Bob aims for the second Trollkin. The GM assigns target values of 1-3 Al, 4-5 Trollkin #1, 6-7 Trollkin #2, 8 = reroll. Bob rolls a hit, then rolls 2d8, and gets a 2 and a 6 and takes the 6, thus hitting his target.
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Think about a big ocean going ship. Does it have more engines than a smaller ship? Maybe. Maybe not. What it does have is much bigger engines. Lkewise with crew areas. It probably does't have a lot more crew room, but the ones it does have might contain 20 bunks instead of 2. A battleship not only has more guns than a destroyer, but the main guns are much bigger (in WWII about 14-20" diameter guns instead of 2-5"). Yeah, we could build most ships on 20-25 modules and just scale most things up. For instance an Engine Module could provide 10xSCALE in thrust. In fact, we could simply the engine math a little and just say speed is engine modules/total modules x10. Since modules would increase in size with SCALE, then SCALE could be factored out of the speed and handling formulas!
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I was thinking about hit location, too. Basically, with the way things worked (normal scale) I thought 1 point of damage could destroy/disable one module. What's nice about it is that it is easy to apply damage effect, since we'd lose the benefits of the disabled module. What I was thinking was that we could dive the ship into three sections, bow, amidships, and stern, and then assign the modules to each area. When the ship gets hit you roll to see what section gets hit and then roll to see what system gets affected. The hit location table for a fighter might look like: 1-6 Bow Cockpit 7-13 Amidships 11-20 Port Laser Cannon 16-20 Starboard Laser Cannon 14-20 Stern 1-10 Port Engine Module 11-20 Starboard Engine Module ust a thought, and a very simple example.
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It complicates a few things. I don;t think it outright wrecks anything. But I think it would be good if the medium scale modules could be stacked into a large scale module. If you want to keep the x10, then maybe change medium from 1 per 4 to 1 per 5. Or.... What you could do is scale the size of the modules. Uh, yeah, I know we are doing that, but what I mean is rather than having a set value for the modules, such as X amount of "stuff" (crew, cargo, engine thrust, computers, etc) per module, we could say that you get an amount based on the scale. So x1 scale would give you 1 unit per modules, while x10 scale would give you 10 units per module. Then you just replace the hard and fast number in the book with the the word scale. Does that make sense? Let me try an example: In the current rules 1 cargo module can handle 1 ton of cargo. And a capital scale module (x4) can store 4 tons, and if we switch to a x10 capital scale, then a 1ton capital scale module will soon be able to store 10 tons. But if we allowed scale to be adjustable, 1 module would provide SCALE tons of cargo. You could build all the ships on roughly the same number of modules, but bigger ships would just have bigger modules. Pretty much everything listed scales okay. I can get weapons to work with this idea pretty easily, too. You mean it's linear! I never really considered it so. I consider a Battleship to be far more than a 128 times the size or mass of a fighter, even if it has 128 times the number of modules.
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In what way? In terms of dropping the messed up progression and going with the doublnig progression. Yes. . Even the BGB deviates from it. If you look at the SIZ of battleships and carriers in the BGB you will see that they are only a small fraction of what they should be based on displacement. So I'd rather fix the SIZ scale once and for all, and come up with values that are playable. I think an inherient aromr bonus of about 1/10 or 1/20th SIZ should handle the smaller scores problems, and actually plays better.
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First off, it's not my document but clarance's. I just came up with a few suggestions and a way to expanded the weapon rules. That's all. As far as the classifications go, they show up in a lot of SciFi because it is being written by and for us modern Earth Humans, so they use terms we can relate to. Either current classifications or historical ones. A lot of naval terms change over the years. Frigate is another example. In the Age of Sail, frigates were big craft, just below "Ship of the Line" status (in those days anything that was a Ship of the Line wasn't considered to be a "ship"). These days a frigate is towards the small end of the scale of naval ships, right about in the Cutter-Corvette range. But we don't see Sloops, and Brigs used in most SciFi settings. Good question. I'll have to try it and see. I suspect the results would be good to anyone using this particular scale, but they might not work for a particular setting. I think in the long run if someone wants to use this for a particular setting they will probably have to do up a crib sheet with the scales and values that work best for that setting. For example, for something like Star Trek I'd probably do up a table of phaser types and damage ratings and work from there. I suspect that each type of phaser would probably work out okay if I doubled the type as the damage rating. That is, a Type V phaser would be about Damage Class 10, or about 2d10 damage. But, I'd have to play with it a bit to see how it would work out. Good Luck! Let us know if it works out okay.
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That's fairly reasonable. I see your point. I think to some extent classifications and number of modules will have to be adapted to a given setting. I could also see tech level playing a factor here, with higher tech ships being able to fit in better modules (or more modules, the net effect is the same)) into a given size or class of ship. But... for a start, what if we used the rules default of 5 for a fighter, and then doubled the size for each of the classfications you just gave. Actual size could vary by 50% or so in either direction. Something like this: titan [1280] (640-1920) battleship [640] (320-960) cruiser [320] (160-480) destroyer [160] (80-240) frigate [80] (40-120) corvette [40] (20-60) cutter [20] (10-30) small craft [10] [8-15] fighter [5] (3-8) Note that for anything larger than small craft the numbers divide neatly by 4, making it easier to use Capital ship scale to design the larger craft.
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Think away. Better still. Try designing a capital scale ship using the large scale modules. Sound 541 seems very little if you look at it from a linear point of view,- which most people do. It only looks to be 40-50 times the SIZ of a person! But the SIZ table, was built on a logarithmic doubling progression. That means, that SIZ 24 is twice as big as SIZ 16, and SIZ 32 is four times as big as SIZ 16, and so on. Using this scale would reduce the SIZ of Chtulhu and the other big nasties a bit I did up some adjusted stats for them awhile ago. If my memory serves, I think I just had to up their armor to keep them as formidable as ever.. But the revised scale makes things much more playable.For example a 50,000 ton Godzilla goes from SIZ 5500 or so down to SIZ 167. Now to make this work, we do have to give big things a certain amount of inherent armor to reflect the fact that small hits just won't matter much. For instance if you shot at the Earth with a 9 mm pistol you wouldn't actually hurt the planet, no matter how many times you fired, or if you rolled a critical. The bullet just isn't going to be damaging enough to make any difference. A weapon would probably need to be able to do 200 points or so just to register.
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Oh, I don't think we needed ha hard and fast set volume. Just some sort of scale guidelines to help us design ships. Otherwise if two or three of us try to write up the same ship from a TV show, film, book, or whatever, we could all come up with radially different stats, just because we have no benchmark figures. All I want is some sort of benchmarks that we can work with. And since people want to keep things simple, claence's idea of using length is probably a simple as you can get. Volume is harder to calculate, and mass varies from show to show.
