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BRP Starships pdf - comments welcome


clarence

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I think tying modules to a set size is a bad idea. A module should have an average size that can be determined after the fact, but not a defined one set before a ship is designed. There are too many possible configurations to have a module to metre ratio set in advance. You can have ships that are cylinders and ships that are spheres and they can have the same volume but very different lengths. I think general size categories is the way to go and a range of lengths (or displacement) appropriate for a given number of modules.

But then how do you determine how many modules a ship should have? Or how many modules you can cram into a shuttle the size of a minivan?

While I'm not for implementing a hard rule where length X is X modules, I think some sort of rough guidelines are needed to keep us all in the same ballpark.

Length is just the way clare4nce did in in the rules, and an easy method to use.

I don't mind using volume or displacement but it would mean adding a bit of complexity, and you guys don't seem to want that.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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Ok, I think it will work quite well with a chapter named Advanced Combat to collect most of the optional rules. Some adjustments will of course end up in the other chapters as well, but the overall simplicity will remain, hopefully with a bit more consistency. If the advanced chapter is at the end of the text or following right after the existing combat chapter, I think is perhaps less important.

Correct and fine-tune to make it smooth and consistent.

Yes, I hope those fine adjustments will come when the rules are used in play. I think the worst unbalancing has been ironed out by my playtesting, but more people using it will make it better I'm sure.

But... if we doubled the height and width to 2m each, we could keep the length at 1m, and the 100m long captial ship would take up 100 capital scale modules instead of starship scale. Get it?

I will have to think this through a bit.

But...I've been toying around will keeping the doubling progression for SIZ for all mass scores. If we did that, the Earth would "only" be SIZ 541, and have 541 hit points. At Emcha scale that is only 54 points. Which is only around 10d10 on the weapon table. That we can do. Heck, we can sometimes do it with the examples I wrote up. To get to 10d10 I'd just need to make the weapon bigger.

541 size/hit points for a planet sounds very little! What size is Cthulhu and his distant cosmic relatives? And Death Star's cannon - couldn't it be a special case, a weapon working on an entirely different principle, and thus inflicting outrageous amounts of damage? Seems a bit like cheating, but blowing up planets with a big gun is quite fictive too...

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Well, I think that as long as we consider the crew some kind of military personnel, (hot) bunks with 8 crew per Capital Ship module would be fine. (I have always wondered though what all those people are doing all day on sci-fi battleships…)?

Look at it this way -- the modern supercarrier USS Gerald Ford will have a crew of 4,660 when it enters active service in 2016. A large part of them are occupied with the continual maintenance the ship and its systems will require, from cleaning and painting to inspection and repairs. Another large part of it will attend to the 75+ naval aircraft kept on board. These sailors will be supported by innumerable other functions, from cooks and kitchen help to keep them all fed and medical staff to keep them healthy to barbers, laundry people, and other such. By contrast, a destroyer has a much more spartan crew compliment -- typically 300, many of whom pull multiple functions.

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I think some sort of rough guidelines are needed to keep us all in the same ballpark.

Length is just the way clare4nce did in in the rules, and an easy method to use.

I don't mind using volume or displacement but it would mean adding a bit of complexity, and you guys don't seem to want that.

Absolutely. I think general categories of a rough length or displacement is the way to go. A set volume or dimensions for each module might make a cool advanced optional rule though.

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Absolutely. I think general categories of a rough length or displacement is the way to go. A set volume or dimensions for each module might make a cool advanced optional rule though.

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.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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I will have to think this through a bit.

Think away. Better still. Try designing a capital scale ship using the large scale modules.

541 size/hit points for a planet sounds very little! What size is Cthulhu and his distant cosmic relatives? And Death Star's cannon - couldn't it be a special case, a weapon working on an entirely different principle, and thus inflicting outrageous amounts of damage? Seems a bit like cheating, but blowing up planets with a big gun is quite fictive too...

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.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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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.

The problem with sci-fi ship sizes is that size and role get divorced rather quickly. In sci-fi media (be it comics, shows, movies, games) a ship has a given purpose and its size is usually arbitrarily larger or small. Take a look at his site for examples:

http://www.merzo.net/

However, they are often consistent within a given fictional universe. So the real issue here, is "what's the reference point?" Are we designing ships that are in relation to the rules for normal people?

I'm more interested in a weird combination of harder sci-fi and exploration horror, so I'm likely going to go with an amalgam current naval classification system. If you add in single pilot fighters and borrow some coast guard terms, you could end up with the following: (heck, let's throw in titan from Master of Orion as well)

titan

battleship

cruiser

destroyer

frigate

corvette

cutter

small craft

fighter

So I'm going to figure out a number of modules for each size and they will slightly overlap. A sufficiently large fighter is bigger than the smallest possible small craft and a very large cruiser can be the size of the smaller battleships.

I think this can pass the "same page" test as well, once a framework is accepted (and given the smallest crafts are single person fighters, we have one). It breaks down on the high end in certain fictional universes because you can have cruisers in one video game or movie be the size of titans in another.

My solution to this is to get a bit idiosyncratic and concentration on the type of play I'm interested in. Harder sci-fi with sub-frigate ships being the most numerous and destroyers and larger being largely outside the scope of the player characters.

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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.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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Look at it this way -- the modern supercarrier USS Gerald Ford will have a crew of 4,660 when it enters active service in 2016. A large part of them are occupied with the continual maintenance the ship and its systems will require, from cleaning and painting to inspection and repairs. Another large part of it will attend to the 75+ naval aircraft kept on board. These sailors will be supported by innumerable other functions, from cooks and kitchen help to keep them all fed and medical staff to keep them healthy to barbers, laundry people, and other such. By contrast, a destroyer has a much more spartan crew compliment -- typically 300, many of whom pull multiple functions.

Yes, good observation! It's actually a complete, small community (or village) on those ships. For some reason this makes me think about Eddie Izzard's "Death Star Canteen" (

).

Try designing a capital scale ship using the large scale modules.

Designing and drawing modules on paper… always easier to think with a pen in my hand.

But the SIZ table, was built on a logarithmic doubling progression.

Do you think it is wise to deviate from the BGB definition of size? If it's really needed (perhaps for Puppeteer-like aliens, moving planets around before breakfast), it might be better to introduce more scales perhaps.

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One thing I've been trying to avoid in this thread is putting my desires for ships appropriate for harder sci-fi survival/exploration horror games into the general zeitgeist of the thread. I've been trying to clearly mark when I think an idea deviates from the more cinematic approach the document starts off with. I don't think it's the case here as these ship sizes and terms appear in a lot of science fiction media of all types.

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.

The only real borderline label is the cutter. It's a coast guard or harbour pilot classification with its history being the smallest naval vessel to actually get an official commission. In the 1700s if you were the captain of a cutter, you would have a legitimate commission from your nation as an lieutenant and you'd likely be the only actual officer on board. Anything smaller and you'd not be granted an official commission and instead would report to an officer elsewhere. Today though, various nations have ships the size of cruisers that they call cutters just because the ship happens to be performing harbour pilot or coast guard duties, though the vast majority of the ships used for these duties are much, much smaller.

Actual size could vary by 50% or so in either direction. Something like this:

The numbers look really good for my purposes. Are they good on the larger side? Would someone be able to build a cruiser with up to 480 modules and be happy with the results?

I'm going to go ahead with these classifications for future shipbuilding in my game. Thanks!

Edited by NathanIW
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One thing I've been trying to avoid in this thread is putting my desires for ships appropriate for harder sci-fi survival/exploration horror games into the general zeitgeist of the thread. I've been trying to clearly mark when I think an idea deviates from the more cinematic approach your document starts off with. I don't think it's the case here as these ship sizes and terms appear in a lot of science fiction media of all types.

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.

The only real borderline label is the cutter. It's a coast guard or harbour pilot classification with its history being the smallest naval vessel to actually get an official commission. In the 1700s if you were the captain of a cutter, you would have a legitimate commission from your nation as an lieutenant and you'd likely be the only actual officer on board. Anything smaller and you'd not be granted an official commission and instead would report to an officer elsewhere. Today though, various nations have ships the size of cruisers that they call cutters just because the ship happens to be performing harbour pilot or coast guard duties, though the vast majority of the ships used for these duties are much, much smaller.

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.

The numbers look really good for my purposes. Are they good on the larger side? Would someone be able to build a cruiser with up to 480 modules and be happy with the results?

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.

I'm going to go ahead with these classifications for future shipbuilding in my game. Thanks!

Good Luck! Let us know if it works out okay.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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Do you think it is wise to deviate from the BGB definition of size? If it's really needed (perhaps for Puppeteer-like aliens, moving planets around before breakfast), it might be better to introduce more scales perhaps.

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.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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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.

Sorry, I was reading other posts in the thread while I did my reply and thought I was replying to something clarence wrote in another post with that paragraph. I'll edit.

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.

Sci-fi as a genre is definitely a story of us. The technology and it's implications are often the lense through which themes about humans today are brought into focus. Though it's quite common for thematic stuff to take a background role so we can enjoy ships blowing each other up with flashy energy weapons. My main concern with the ship categories was that they were to militaristic and not general like tiny, small, huge, large, etc.,.

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.

A simple "every category is about twice the size of the previous one" was definitely a good default approach. In my own game capital ships are pretty much only something the military has and everyone else uses smaller ships. Even the super-freighters are pod ships where a smaller ship connects to a bunch of cargo containers to pull them through a jump gate.

Good Luck! Let us know if it works out okay.

It's definitely given me a clear jumping off point in terms of getting stats made for ships that have already appeared in game but haven't yet been in combat. For example, the freighter that connects to a bunch of cargo pods is a cutter with a bunch of economy engines, a thruster module, a robot arm and a cockpit. When it's not hauling cargo, it's actually quite zippy, but as a train of cargo pods adds effective modules, it get really slow and boring. The simple doubling of size at each category up from a fighter is pretty intuitive.

Edited by NathanIW
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So I started writing the text of my optional appendix entry. I wanted to communicate that hit locations are about the idea that where a shot lands can matter, the opening up of called shot options and the increased lethality of such an approach. I think it's equally important for an optional rule to tell you when you might want to avoid it as well as when you might want to use it.

Why Hit Locations?

When Runequest first arrived on the scene in 1977, it introduced the idea of hit locations into the RPG hobby. The authors had been doing a lot of sport combat and historical fencing which inspired their thinking about what RPG combat could look like. And that includes having where the blow lands actually matter.

The same approach can be transferred to starships. A blast of energy might pierce through the shields and armour of a craft to damage a particular system. A missile salvo striking the engines of a craft might leave it a floating hulk. It also introduces the ability to go for called shots-- like when a starship captain orders the tactical officer to target the enemy's weapon systems or engines.

One thing the original Runequest rules were known for was how lethal combat could be. Hit locations were part of this. It provides the opportunity to die in the pursuit of adventure with every shot fired. It is likely not the option you want to use if you are going for a character centered or cinematic game. If you want the chance of a stray laser opening the ship to the vacuum of space (and perhaps sucking a hapless character into the void) these optional rules are for you.

Edited by NathanIW
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I've been experimenting a bit with the different scales, and I feel that a Capital Ship scale of x4 might be a bit small. For Starship scale (formerly medium scale), designs up to about 200 modules are quite manageable. Above that, the smallest Capital ships should reside, and that landed me at yet another x10 up from Starship scale. That means, for example, 1 module for ten people, or 3 people for longer trips (actually 2.5, but with the earlier discussions on hot bunks etcetera, rounding up seemed like a good idea). By introducing half modules, some of the less desirable effects can be dealt with, as Bridges being too big for example. Rounding the total number of modules up I think is the way to go here too. What do you think about this? Does it wreck some of the other ideas we have played with here?

I also find that the modules always refers back to the basic Starship-scaled module. A 20 module long ship in Capital scale is 10 times (or 4 times if we go with that multiplier) longer than a 20 module ship in Starship scale. 1 Starship module = 10 Capital modules. Maybe I'm a bit too drawing-centered, but area seems to be a very natural way of working with this (except that dividing a module sketch into four pieces is much easier than dividing it into ten pieces...).

So I started writing the text of my optional appendix entry.

It looks like a good start! This could easily be fit in as another chapter in the text, if you want to. I just want to point out that with the current layout, texts need to be kept quite short.

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)

For military starships I think this looks very good. A short description for each of the ship types would be good though.

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.

But doesn't this mess up the direct module-to-size relationship we've had so far? Could it be linear up to size 1000, and then logarithmic (to deal with really big objects, not often coming into play)?

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I've been experimenting a bit with the different scales, and I feel that a Capital Ship scale of x4 might be a bit small. For Starship scale (formerly medium scale), designs up to about 200 modules are quite manageable. Above that, the smallest Capital ships should reside, and that landed me at yet another x10 up from Starship scale. That means, for example, 1 module for ten people, or 3 people for longer trips (actually 2.5, but with the earlier discussions on hot bunks etcetera, rounding up seemed like a good idea). By introducing half modules, some of the less desirable effects can be dealt with, as Bridges being too big for example. Rounding the total number of modules up I think is the way to go here too. What do you think about this? Does it wreck some of the other ideas we have played with here?

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.

But doesn't this mess up the direct module-to-size relationship we've had so far? Could it be linear up to size 1000, and then logarithmic (to deal with really big objects, not often coming into play)?

You mean it's linear! =O

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.

Edited by Atgxtg

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It looks like a good start! This could easily be fit in as another chapter in the text, if you want to. I just want to point out that with the current layout, texts need to be kept quite short.

Okay, I'm going to write the full length text stuff for my own use and I'll make a short summary version for other people to use as they like. Something like:

--

Hit locations are an option worth considering if you are interested in increased lethality and the targeting and damage of specific systems in your starship combat. If you want a cinematic or character centered game, the potential for a stray laser blast to open a ship to the vacuum of space may not be appropriate for your game.

--

In the end though, it's entirely possible that everyone's ideas will be just too divergent to be in one document and the variety of optional ideas might be best kept in a separate supplemental document.

For military starships I think this looks very good. A short description for each of the ship types would be good though.

Would we be better off with a separate list for civilian ships or simply putting civilian examples in the description? For example, under titan, mentioning that the largest colony ships and habitat structures could be that size.

As for the larger scale issues, I simply haven't used BRP scale stuff enough to know how it really works, so I'll leave the commenting on that to others.

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You mean it's linear!
=O

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.

Well, I thought so : ) but I'm ready to change my mind. You mean modules actually grow bigger, the bigger ship you are building? What is the explanation for that? (It's wonderful how some things gets more complicated the more you think about them. Modules and scale are easy enough concepts that we seem to know when we write about them, but in fact we have quite different views of them...).

Would we be better off with a separate list for civilian ships or simply putting civilian examples in the description? For example, under titan, mentioning that the largest colony ships and habitat structures could be that size.

Please include them if you have some picture of it. I will probably have a list of civilian ships too, but a comparison is always good to have.

If you want to keep the x10, then maybe change medium from 1 per 4 to 1 per 5.

Yes, I also thought about that. It will make the system a little neater.

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.

I finally got what you were trying to say - the example did it for me. This is a very compelling idea. Just let me take a swing at it at the drawing board, and I will get back.

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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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Well, I thought so : ) but I'm ready to change my mind. You mean modules actually grow bigger, the bigger ship you are building? What is the explanation for that? (It's wonderful how some things gets more complicated the more you think about them. Modules and scale are easy enough concepts that we seem to know when we write about them, but in fact we have quite different views of them...).

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").

I finally got what you were trying to say - the example did it for me. This is a very compelling idea. Just let me take a swing at it at the drawing board, and I will get back.

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!

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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I've been doing some reading on civilians aeroplanes and ships. Categories currently in use are based on what the ship's purpose is and then there are a variety of systems to rate their sizes (mostly born out of tariff and taxation demands). For the military vessels, I liked Atgxtg's list because it starts with the smallest reasonable manned military craft and then doubles for each category. I think that works great and should also be applied to civilian craft.

I'm going to come up with some examples for different size classes and just include them in the description.

Now an interesting idea I have for my setting is that jump gates are the primary means of travel. In the real world, ships are often categorized by the passages that can pass through. For example, a ship of the largest size that can pass through the Panama Canal is called a panamax.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Panama_Canal_Miraflores_Locks.jpg

As you can see, they mean it. Any wider and they won't fit through. If their keel went any deeper, they'd run aground on the bottom.

So I'm going to include jump gate classifications and have size categories based on whether the ship fits through or can be transported by a given jump gate. There will be an upper limit in terms of height and width to fit through the gate and length in terms of getting through the gate while it is still stable. A nice simple class system based on common gate sizes.

Idiosyncratic to my own setting? Absolutely.

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I've been doing some reading on civilians aeroplanes and ships. Categories currently in use are based on what the ship's purpose is and then there are a variety of systems to rate their sizes (mostly born out of tariff and taxation demands). For the military vessels, I liked Atgxtg's list because it starts with the smallest reasonable manned military craft and then doubles for each category. I think that works great and should also be applied to civilian craft.

I'm going to come up with some examples for different size classes and just include them in the description.

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.

Now an interesting idea I have for my setting is that jump gates are the primary means of travel. In the real world, ships are often categorized by the passages that can pass through. For example, a ship of the largest size that can pass through the Panama Canal is called a panamax.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Panama_Canal_Miraflores_Locks.jpg

As you can see, they mean it. Any wider and they won't fit through. If their keel went any deeper, they'd run aground on the bottom.

So I'm going to include jump gate classifications and have size categories based on whether the ship fits through or can be transported by a given jump gate. There will be an upper limit in terms of height and width to fit through the gate and length in terms of getting through the gate while it is still stable. A nice simple class system based on common gate sizes.

Idiosyncratic to my own setting? Absolutely.

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.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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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.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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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.

Huh, sounds almost like you are describing Star Fleet Battles/Federation Commander! ;)

SDLeary

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Huh, sounds almost like you are describing Star Fleet Battles/Federation Commander! ;)

SDLeary

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.

Edited by Atgxtg

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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