Anyone ever tried to design a ship design system?

[SGavorsky]

Originally posted by Scarecrow:
How about throwing volumes out the window and using an advantages/disadvantages build system like BESM? Basically you have a certain number of build points to put in things like FTL drives, Cargo space, AI, weapons etc etc. Building in defects will give you extra build points and also give the ship character.

Deckplans can be winged. How big is a jump drive? How much fuel does it need? You don't need exact figures as long as you are sensible (and I imagine you're not a munchkin). Besides, your ship designs (visually) can then be more creative and interesting when you're imagination's not tied down by strict volume figures and rules.

Crow

I've been trying to wrap my head around doing this with Tri-Stat dX in a slightly different genre (Space 1889-ish steampunk), and I just can't quite grok it. I might be too much of a gearhead to abstract stuff completely away (which is what attracted me at first to the CODA Trek system, until I found it too tied up with Trek technology and history to extract a generic system from it. Best Trek ship design system I've seen, however, and great for roleplaying). I always seem to get bogged down is trying to replicate a 6" smoothbore with Tri-Stat dX, which I think is where I'm missing the point (or maybe I need to switch to Hero ).

 

[The Oz]

Originally posted by Sulpicius:

Geez, I just wanted to design ships--not a combat system as well. Curse this creeping complexification!

You can't do one without the other: how the ships are built and how they "work" affects the combat system. It all ties together. It works the other way around, too: if weapons are rated for "points" of damage, then ships (and ship systems) have to rated for "points" of toughness.

 

[SGavorsky]

Originally posted by The Oz:
You can't do one without the other: how the ships are built and how they "work" affects the combat system. It all ties together. It works the other way around, too: if weapons are rated for "points" of damage, then ships (and ship systems) have to rated for "points" of toughness.

Well, I was sort of hoping to integrate the finished designs somehow into the system. For instance, since I am using spaces to eventually represent Defense like armor, I figured I should be able to come up with some form of conversion: # spaces Armor = # points (modifier, dice, dried-lime-bean-being-used-as-Stone-Of-Power!(tm), whatever).

Frankly, the movement relationship is more cumbersome at the moment than combat. Probably because speed does not equate directly to volume/space--atleast not without some serious kludging. Oh well.

 

[mike wightman]

Have you seen Slag?

You can get the free preview from here.

 

[robject]

If design doesn't take combat into account right from the start, then combat will probably be difficult. In fact, another guy on this board suggested that one way to design a SDS is to first explain how you want space combat to work in detail, then design the SDS.


Unrelated suggestion: if you want to streamline things a little, and don't mind bending the rules, then make the jump drives a standard size rather than scaling them to the hull. The J1 is always 10 tons, the J2 20 tons, and so on. Fuel requirements for the J-drive dwarfs the drive volume anyway.

 

[robject]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Have you seen Slag?

You can get the free preview from here.

Wow, looks nice... Greg Porter, no less...

 

[mike wightman]

Good, isn't it

 

[robject]

Another idea for a greatly simplified SDS would be to use a percentile system; each component takes up a percentage instead of a true volume.

So, a Jump-1 drive takes 2%, a Maneuver-1 takes 1%, a Power-1 takes 3%, etc.

Moreover, you can mechanically determine the life support requirements of a ship with a percentage, too. For example, crew requires 10% volume, plus the total drive percentages; a passenger ship needs 10%-20% for passengers. You can apply these rules of thumb to other things, too: a cargo ship needs 30% of its volume or more for cargo. And so on.

The nice thing here is that you know when you're done, because all the percentages will add up to 100. You can also then classify ships based on their component ratios: freighter? liner? cruiser? etc.

 

[mike wightman]

That's not a bad idea...

 

[The Oz]

All you would need then with such a percentage-based system is a way to turn X percent of Y tonnage into so many staterooms, laser batteries, fighter bays, etc, etc, etc, etc.

As an example, if you allocate 10% of a 10,000 dton ship for fighter bays and a single fighter bay takes up 15 dtons, you get 66.67 fighter bays out of that. Having different sizes of fighter bays, laser turrets, etc, would allow mixing and matching to use the allocated percentages as well as possible.

 

[robject]

You'd have to think about your ratios a bit, so that power plant usage more or less covers the energy required; but since you're not overly concerned with staying true to one of the ten or eleven mutually incompatible craft design systems within the Traveller corpus, you only have to capture the spirit of Traveller, rather than its numbers.

 

[TheDS]

I came up with a fairly simple system, at least on the surface. Here are the important points:

</font>

• Choose a number of hull sizes. My first design had 4, plus a special 5th one thrown in for fighters, and missiles were considered a 6th. A newer option would be to have numerous hull sizes roughly analogous to D-tons ranging from 1 to 1 million, but represented with decibels, so you would have approximately 60 hull sizes to choose from.</font>
• There are always 20 spaces in each ship, no matter its size. This makes each worth roughly 5% of the total ship's available space. A given component will have a different amount of power/capability depending on what size of ship it's in. EG a laser in a small ship will not do as many damage points as a laser in a large ship, even though they take up the same percentage of the ship. If the smaller ship is half the size of the larger one, then 2 lasers in the smaller should be about as powerful as 1 in the larger.</font>
• There are no power concerns. It is assumed when you buy a component that you also buy enough powerplant to run it. Likewise, there are no crew requirements to calculate either, as it is assumed a fraction of the space for that item is for crew.</font>
• Things in the spaces are generic. It's up to you to determine if anything is special; the space just says LAB, not what kind of lab, or CARGO, not what kind, or TROOP TRANSPORT, not what kind.</font>
• The end result is not necessarily translatable directly to real-world stats, but by choosing small numbers to keep things meaningful, it becomes easy to digest a ship's stats.</font>

Starting with the 4 basic hull sizes (roughly 400, 4000, 40,000, and 400,000 Dtons) I came up with a number of damage points for that hull size, armor that acted as DR, shields that acted as additional hit points and refreshed over time, a chart of lasers, missiles, and spinal mount weapons, and a table of engines and ratings. Also added in some overhead for Crew compartments and such: at the lowest TL, you need 5 spaces for crew, but as tech goes up, this gets reduced, until at the highest TL, you need only 2. You can have additional Crew spaces, as hits against crew compartments detract from the ship's ability to handle itself.

Each space of maneuver drive increases the speed of the ship, and TL affects this as well. A jump drive takes up no space itself (originally I said it did, but that one space was just too needed for other things!), but each parsec of jump fuel takes up a single slot. I also incorporated a fuel-usage for maneuver drive, so you could run out of fuel if you didn't have enough. A single space devoted to maneuver fuel could power the ship for about 240 hexes, but having armor increases the weight of the ship, and each armor point counteracts a unit of maneuver, so if you had a drive able to do Maneuver 8, but had 3 levels of Armor, you could only do Maneuver 5, but you'd SPEND 8 fuel for that 5 hexes. (Armor doesn't take up space, btw.)

If you want to carry stuff, you could call it Cargo. 1 unit of troops carried in a Huge ship might be worth 100 combat points, if you can get it to ground, but that same troop-carrying capacity might require several smaller ships to unload it from the bigger one.

However, there are a couple difficulties. What if you want tankers? While you can certainly have them by designating spaces as fuel tanks, when transferring a quantity of fuel from one ship to another requires you to stop and calculate the number of actual units contained in each ship's space. If a large ship is 40,000 dtons, then each space on that ship is 1/20th, or 2000 dtons. A small ship at 400 tons, having tankage of 10 spaces, can take on 200 dtons, so that one large space could fill up 10 small ships' tanks.

Also, the model I use for movement isn't exactly hard physics; it's more along the lines of a Stutterwarp in the way it functions, and I have to use a bit of handwavium to allow ships to both fight in combat and travel through a star system without running out of fuel, but that's just MY problem: you don't have to design your movement system the same way. You might say each Maneuver point is a G of thrust, rather than a Movement Point, and that would do better, but I like the simplicity of MPs.

AAAaaanyway, I've got the thing about 75% done, and making ships takes about 1 minute or less. I still have to tweak the combat system, and sort out all the optional options from the core game. Damned details!

 

[TheDS]

A couple other things I should mention:

No computers: they're too small for anyone to care. Of course, you can designate whatever you want.

Bridge is whatever size you think is appropriate, organized how you like. In my combat rules, the bridge is the first crew compartment (CC #1), and so if that one is rolled (use D20 to determine hit locations) then you have your bridge effects.

This isn't really conducive to typical role playing. If your characters are in charge of a battle between a handful or more of ships, ok, but if they're just one small ship vs another one, well, there's not much surviving a bridge hit, unless of course you write your own rules to take role playing into account. Shouldn't be all that hard; instead of "bridge destroyed" you write "bridge hit, everyone roll for damage" or somesuch.

My Components list: Hull (4 sizes, with damage point capacity), Lasers, Xray Lasers, Spinal Mounts (choice of particle, meson, anti-particle, or disintegrator, room for jump projector or whatever else), missile launchers, armor levels, shields, Maneuver Drive (one for each TL), Jump Drives (one for each TL, assumes you always have the highest rating for that TL), Aerodynamics (to enter an atmosphere), Crew compartments, and assorted fuel (maneuver, jump, tankage - it all is interchangeable) and cargo (generic cargo, troops, subordinate craft (fighters or riders)). Let me strap onto that, sensors and stealthing. For the most part, all ships are assumed to have sensors of a given quality, but once I've finalized the combat rules, I'll figure a way to take up hull space for better sensors.

That's it. That's every component available (unless I forgot a couple). Each has a performance value (where appropriate) and a cost (trying to rate on usefulness rather than "cost", so equal cost ships should be equivalent). It all is organized into a few small charts, to take into account Tech Levels, but it didn't take me long at all to create a small spreadsheet to simplify making ships, and with it, I can literally make a whole ship in about 10 seconds, plus another minute or two to fill out the damage track sheet.

 

[aramis]

I just added Jump Drives to Starfire...
Jd use 1 space, cost 25, and work exactly like I for rating.
Jf use 5 spaces, Cost 1, and work exactly like I for rating, and must have a rating equal to or greater than the Jd rating.

1 space of crew is 2 people, and so a Q is 50 people worth.

I like the method used for CODA/D-Trek, however, it fails to account well for a lot of things, some of which are important: passenger capacity, for one.

 

[Sifu Blackirish]

Greetings, Sulpicius!

Like you, I tried a ship design system. I took Starblazers, Starfire III: Empires, Star probe and Star Empire (am I showing my age here?) and blended them together into a ship design system some years ago.

Like you, I sort of bogged down in the combat and crew sustainability issues.

Varying hull spaces by vessel class is a good idea! I might try it again with those caveats. Also still tinkering with that idea for my own simulation for events IMTU.

By SCU, I was thinking of something like a "Standard Cargo Unit," a short-hand way of noting items.

Some systems, like Star Probe, assign cargo fill on the value of items within it, or stating that it can carry one small craft or fighter.

I do like they way SFB combat works out with marking off boxes gives you a good visual interpetation of what is happening to your ship and how bad a shape you are in.

Starfire used a very similar system, with the ship stats represented by code letters in a single line. As damage is received, mark off the letters from left to right. Elegant but not really descriptive enough for me...

How about throwing volumes out the window and using an advantages/disadvantages build system like BESM?

Maybe I am being dense, but what's BESM?

An old issue of Space Gamer (man, I really am showing my age...) had an article for using CHAMPIONS for building starships. Don't remember there being adv/disadv seen, but it would work if done skillfully.

Frankly, the movement relationship is more cumbersome at the moment than combat. Probably because speed does not equate directly to volume/space--atleast not without some serious kludging. Oh well.

It might work if you used TRAVELLER's percentage based formula for maneuver drives. Something like that would level the playing field a bit.

Man, I'm way behind on this thread...every time I come up with a good opinion, someone has beat me to it...maybe that just means that great minds think alike...

Nice system, DS...will try it sometime.

 

[aramis]

Hero System has a StarHero for both the 3rd and 5th edition rulesets.

it works well.

Mekton Zeta Plus (RTalsorian) has a scaleable system, including space/weight. Covers from person scale through gigantic SDF-1 scale and bigger.

The slightly older Mekton Technical Architecture is essentially the public beta of the same system.

Hmmm... there's an Idea: MZTraveller!

 

[robject]

Jeffr0's suggestion for creating a SDS is to first create the combat system. From there, the necessary components and how they fit together flows naturally.

Or so he says. It's a good idea. Maybe worth a try.

 

[TheDS]

DLO:

BESM = Big Eyes Small Mouth. IIRC, it's done by David Pulver of SJG fame and is supposed to be an RPG for anime-style games. I hear it's a pretty good system, but I've not even seen it myself, only heard about it. Judging by Pulver's other works, though, I really oughta take a look at it.

Thanks for the compliment about my post! I've worked off and on on this system for maybe 15 years; it was inspired by a need to quickly resolve a large space combat that the ref had going on. At the time, I came up with a fairly simple way to figure out how many survivors there'd be, and whether or not our ship would be one of them. Though we were outnumbered, we had some heavier ships, and by the means I had there, it was fairly close, leaving pretty much just our ship, heavily damaged, before the opposition retreated, unable to finish us off.

The whole thing got resolved in about half an hour, plus another half hour to make up the system. But not being satisfied with something so simple, that allowed so little in the way of actual tactics, I made an effort to make something better. As usual, the first attempt was way too crazy, the second was worse, but the 3rd though 6th have each reduced unnecessary complexity and some have added options that I may have hastily disposed of. For the most part, I'm sure I've got it right this time, it's all a matter of fixing the details, and deciding on a few things, like for instance, should battleships be invulnerable to destroyers or not, should missiles and fighters have value and if so how much, etc. So I'm also working on balance issues.