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Ah. Interesting vehicle. I don't suppose Asimov mentioned it's size or speed in any sort of practical scale, other than the 30 foot leaps? I think I can build something like it using the my vehicle guidelines, but without knowing it's size makes it tougher. I'll do something with the assumption that is is about SIZ 45, the same as a sports car. I wouldn't think that jumping would be a very efficient means of travel through.

Okay, here is a test design. We7ll call it the ZRS-4 (because that is the name of the real world airship I'm writing up). Total Power: 3360kW Volume: 184000 cubic meters Lift (with Helium): 184 mt (184000/1000=184) SIZ 133 (SIZ for 184mt on the SIZ table) HIT POINTS 133 (equal to SIZ) Square root of Power/Weight = 4.27 ACC 2 (1+4.27/3=2.42) HANDLING: +0% MOV 147 (4.27*34.5) =132 kph =82 mph =72 kts RATED SPEED: 13 ARMOR: -/13 (132 kph/10)

Here are some preliminary guidelines for writing up Airship for BRP. Please keep in mind that this is very sketchy, and thrown together last night. STEP 1-THE CONCEPT First you need to have an idea of just what the airship is supposed to do, and it's role in the game. Is is supposed to be a passenger liner, research craft, flying carrier, or whatever. The conept will help in working out the rest of the design. STEP 2-POWER Assign the airship one or more engines. These should be rated in kilowatts (kW). As a rule of thumb 1 horsepower (hP) is appropriately 3/4 of a kw. Note that you may want to hold off on this or adjust it based on the end performance you desire. STEP 3- VOLUME Determine the volume of the gasbags used to provide lift for the airship. Get this in cubic meters. A cubic meter is approximately 35.33 cubic feet. STEP 4-LIFT and WEIGHT The amount of weight that the airship's gasbags can lift is approximately 1 ton per 1000 cubic meters. So you can divide the volume by 1000 to get the number of metric tons the ship can lift. Alternately, if you know how much weight you want to lift, you can multiply this by 1000 to get the required volume. Hydrogen provides about 8% more lift than Helium (but is highly flammable), so divide volume by 925, or multiply tonnage by 1080. Note that Since the gas must be able to lift the airship in order for it to fly the final mass of the ship cannot exceed the lift provided. STEP 5- SIZ and HP To d ermine the ship's SIZ rating, use the maximum lift value and look up the corresponding SIZ value on my Expanded & Revised SIZ chart, posted in it own thread. Note that while the actual mass of the ship is close to twice this value, the lower value is useful to reflect both the airship's less durable nature (compared to other craft), and the lifting properties of the gas. Hit Points for a semi-rigid airship are equal to the ship's SIZ. Hit points for a non-rigid ship (blimb) are equal to 75% of it's SIZ. STEP 6- POWER/WEIGHT FACTOR Dive the ship's power (in kilowatts) by it mass (in metric tons). Taken the square root of that. Write that number down, and keep 2 decimal places. You will be useing it a lot. STEP 7- ACCELERATION The ship's ACC rating is equal to 1 plus 1/3rd the ship's Power/Weight factor worked out above. Since airships are not designed for rapid acceleration, this number will probably end up a 1 or a 2. STEP 8-HANDLING Generally this is +0%. Put simply, most airships can't take the stresses associated with a high turn rate. As a rule of thumb, a ship would need a armor rating of around 15 to be able to take a +5% handling, and such armor would take up too much mass, until the modern era. STEP 9-MOV TO determine a ship7s MOV rating, multiply its power/weight factor (worked out in Step 6), by 34.5. IF you want to know what that MOV means in real numbers: To get kph, multiply MOV by 0.9 To get mph, multiply MOV by 0.56 To get kts, multiply MOV by 0.49 (or roughly half MOV) STEP 10-RATED SPEED A airship's rated speed is caclulated by looking up it MOV on the tablre below and finding the speed that it is closes to. MOV RATED SPEED 5 1 10 2 15 3 42 4 55 5 67 6 75 7 83 8 92 9 100 10 117 11 134 12 166 13 183 14 200 16 Note As long as the ship is capable of at least MOV 100, you can use the square root if it's MOV as it's Rated Speed. STEP 11- Armor The airship provides armor to anything inside equal to 1/10th it's speed in kph. (or maybe use it Rated Speed as it's Armor rating?). That's about it. As a guideline, you can assume that about 6xArmor% of the ship's tonnage is used up in making the airship's frame, gasbag, outer covering and such, leaving the rest for the gondola, crews quarters, and cargo. Half this percentage for modern airships, and probably half it again for arirships made with futuristic materials.

I didn't think airships could get enough alititude to avoid nasty weather. BTW, do the people in your world have some sort of high tech material they could make the ship's "skin" out of? If so they could have a jet airship. But it probably wouldn't be as effiencent as a prop design.

They will now. Come to think of it, I've got an old issue of Popular Mechanics that had some hi tech airship that was supposed to be built by now. Off the top of my head, I would think they would behave much like other pistol driven craft, except that it doesn't use/need wings to generate lift. So expect a crummy handling score, but good fuel efficiency. I work up a couple of designs.

Depends on what a "hopper" is and how it moves. It is an antigrav vehicle, some sort of hovercraft/SES/ground effect vehicle, skimmer, flying aircar or what? If it's a flying aircar type of vehicle, then I'd probably treat it mostly like a jet, with an antigrav "hopper" being able to reduce it's effective mass/weight. Less weight would mean less lift required for maintain level flight, and more power available for speed.

Guess you know who to get if/when you do a book covering the Imperal era. Maybe he eats off of lead plates?

I7ve been working on a vechile supplement for BRP. Basically it will cover just about any sort of vehicle and will have guidelines for creating BRP stats for real vehicles, as well as designing vehicles from scratch. Since it uses real terns like horsepower and tons (or kilowatts and metric tons), it should be usable for steampunk designs as well as modern ones. Steampunk designs would just be less efficient. If there is anything in particular you want to design, let me know and I can post some of my design notes. They are not finished, but they are probably good enough to give fairly decent game stats. One cool thing about an RPG is that things just work as written up, even if real world physics says "no way".

I was considering something like 2D6+6 for INT and SIZ, and 2D6+3 for the rest, then give the players 6 points or so to play with.

While all gratitude is appreciated, don't thank me until I actually "release" something. I for some reason everything goes "poof", te only benefits for others are stats for a score of cars, a golf cart, and a couple of spreadsheets. I have been considering making some of my spreadhseets/worksheets available, but I've been holding off--that way I can still play around with the formulas and stats. I'm not sure if it is better to let a few things out and let other try them (and send me feedback and more data) or keep it all under wraps until its ready.:confused: It I could get a half dozen people using the car worksheet and sending/posting the stats that would mean more cars available for mass consumption, and more cars for "the book" (I think I'll give it a blue cover).:cool: I probably should post some stats for watercraft and aircraft, too. Watercraft rules have been behaving rather nicely.

Or a Storm Bull buddy. SOme of the big damage values are sort of academic. I work them out to try and make sure things are consistent with each other. For instance, making sure that the rate explosive damage increases makes sense compared to the rate cannon damage increases. Because it can get silly if a demo charge does more damage than a howitzer. Some of the big damages might prove useful for tings like ships (sea or space).

I vaguely recall something about rolling for "urban or rural" and urban PCs getting the +3 to their EDU. Not that Deep Ones were ever snobbish about that sort of thing. Most Mythos beings were equal opportunity horrors.

Did you remember to round to the nearest? ;) Seriously, nukes are an extreme example. Of just about any topic. But for explosive effects in BRP, since the damage drops of 1D6 per meter, the minimum radius of an explosive is it's damage dice in yards/meters. The listed "burst radius" given becomes relatively unimportant at a certain die size, as the sheer number of dice take over. Plus it is alwayas good to have an idea of how far away one needs to be when using explosives.

Thanks, "bug". Overall, the feedback seems to be quite positive on this, so I guess the cars are working out. Consistent is the key word, too. While "eyeballing" stats can often be faster and easier when "stating up" one vehicle, or even a handful, some sort of guidelines are needed to keep it all consistent. At the 300+ mark, it is much easier to type real data into a spreadsheet and have formulas do all the work than trying to "eyeball" every car write-up.

I'll look over my notes and see if I can put something up. Are you interested more in blasting through stuff or doing damage? Seeing that you are the forum member who lives the closest to me, you should be the last one to laugh. You7re the one who is going to suffer the "fallout" of my error. :eek:

Ahh, I get it. So, how do you pave an ocean?

6,027. But, that's with the optional JBL 4 disc CD changer.

Gee, you'd think any species that wanted to colonize a water world would be smart enough to alter their genetic structure and make themselves amphibious.

Oh, yeah. I've got a couple of ways to do it. What I'm try to do is to simplify things down form real world formula (Army technical manuals are nice for that) to a X amount to breech a SIZ Y, Armor Z object. The tricks are in keeping the numbers reasonably close to reality, and making it all consistent with the other stuff I'm writing up for BRP, not to mention consistient with the actual BRP rules. For instance, I don't want to have 10kg of C-4 doing more damage than, say, a APC shell from the U.S.S. Iowa. What I should do, and will try to do is a "basic" rule that is consistent with the core book, and a "optional" rule that might be more complicated but more accurate. In the case of a Claymore, it would mean treating it more like a shotgun blast, but then that would mean differentiating between buckshot and solid slug. I hope to have something rough, but usable in the near future. I've got some promising formulas, but got to see how it holds up to examples. Right now, my nukes are doing damage out too far. But then when something does 13000D6 damage...

When you ask why Chaosium changed conventions that you've been using for over 10 years, you are not just talking about House Rules. If you had said, "I don't like 2D6+6 for INT and SIZ and prefer 3D6", this thread would have gone quite differently. But the way you phased it, it look like you wanted an explaniation/clarification for the change. When people tried to explain why the thought Chaosisum did what they did, your posts seemed to blame them for making changes that ran contrary to your long standing conventions. Yeah, but you appeared to be blaming Chaosium for not following the same conventions that you do. As far a "fixing" things go for your campaign, I7d suggest using the 2d&+6 for all stats method used in Elric! It would not only get all stats on the same scale, but would give you the same overall effect as 4D6 drop the lowest.

I've been working on (well on and off) some rules for handling demolitions and explosive damages for different types/amount of explosives. As I've been working of stuff for capital ships and the big guns (stuff like 16 inch/406mm cannon), I am trying to get it all to work out consistently. Plus, I haven7t got the blast radius for 1,000,000 tons of TNT to match up with the raqdius of a 1MT nuke....Yet.

Don't say things like that. Nothing is too slow or small to need any stats. You never know when a PC will use one for cover, run someone down with one or pick up an try to throw one. So: Yamaha Ultima Electric G19E Golf Cart Rated Speed: 3 Handling: -5% ACC: 1 MOV: 27 (24 kph/15 mph)-thanks to a governor (who would want to go 100 kph over rough terrain in a golf cart?) Armor: 10/0 SIZ: 26 (SIZ 32, with six SIZ 5 , 8 volt/107 minute golf cart batteries) Hit Points: 26 Crew:1 Passengers: 1 STR: 35 Not that it counts, but I'm voting for the Aqua-car.

I don't see your point here. How does the way you did something for 10+ years have any bearing in how someone else writes a game. Is there some reason to believe that Chaosium should have checked with you first, before they released RQ3, 25 years ago? OR is there any reason for them to have reversed that now? As for the "conventions", such as 4d6 drop the lowest, or assign the stats were desired. they belong to a different RPG, AD&D to be specfic. As far as RQ and most of the BRP games go, the "convention" has been to roll your stats in order and take what you got. For those who wanted more control over the process there was a method where you could assign a few points to the rolled stats. So it's not that Chaosium changed the stats and character generation from game from the way you did them, they were never did that way in the first place. Your whole argument seems to be that it was wrong to change a method that you were using for over ten years (longer than RQ had been around). Your reason why it was wrong seems to be that it makes it harder to do something (assign rolls to stats as desired) that wasn't done in RQ to begin with. How can you blame them for not following your houserules?

True, and one that has it own thread to boot. In a nutshell, I'd say that the original post does have some merit. BRP isn't quite as nice, neat and easy as most of us would like to believe. Since it mixes elements of virtually every Chaosium RPG that came before it, and is covering a lot of ground, it isn't quite as easy to pick up as it predecessors. Not that it is any tougher to pick or or less consistent most the other generic RPG systems.

Okay, I just wanted to be sure that this was "going in the right direction" as far as others are concerned. I didn't want to waste time putting this stuff here if it wasn't of interest to anyone else (besides rust, that is). As far as some of the thoughts mentioned go: How do people get around in those underwater cities walk? Maybe they would have some sort of "ground" vehicle. Something like a EV or fuel cell car a(turn sea water into hydrogen fuel and the oxygen is used to replenish the air). Something like that submersible Lotus Of James Bond fame might be the typical car. You're just fishing for a K factor for skimmers, right? Thanks for the input. IT will eventually find its way into the DL section, or maybe just maybe be released as a supplement. Not that I've got any kind of deal going, but I've worked out the bugs, and have stats for a thousand cars, plus ships, subs, and aircraft, who knows? Yeah the hp to STR idea was brilliant. I wish it was mine. Greg Porter actually came up with that first for EABA. Mr. Porters is probably the best designer for designing game data around real world information. I just took the idea of a correlation and brought it to BRP. Since the design process uses real world values not only does it give you a guideline for converting stuff into BRP, but much of it would work independent of the game system. So someone could use this to design craft for a game other than BRP. Rust is kinda doing that already. Yes, that is exactly what I was thinking of. I got stats for the Trabant, with Berlin 761 in mind. It certain helps to keep the mood/flavor using a period car like the Trabant. rather than generic sedan. It's also why I've been digging up dozens of Edwardain and Vintage era stats. I'm looking up info on some of the early electric and steam powered cars too. Both for historic games, and for fantasy campaigns. I can imagine stuff like a steamer being powered by a fire elemental,or crankshafts being turned by gnomes. Ow!. Fowl Play.