Ship Design Systems

[robject]

So last night I got the privilege to look over the starship design sequence for Spacemaster, and I was not impressed.

Not that it's a bad system, relatively speaking. Its starship worksheet is very well designed, and all the pieces are there. It flows, though like most systems, you really need a spreadsheet to use it. It just disappointed me because it's too similar to the Traveller systems to bring anything new to the table. It shows many signs of borrowing from MegaTraveller, in fact. SpaceMaster in general borrowed from Traveller in many areas, and for the way they use it, they did well by it.

And in that respect, it's uninspired. I want to be inspired.

What are your experiences with other ship design systems?

 

[The Oz]

I think there really are only two basic ways to go about it: either a component-based system (like LBB2) or a percentage-based system (like HG).

Usually you get a combination (such as HG, which is percentage-based for some things and component-based for others) and I can't think of any other ways to do it.

One thing that might be added to any system would be a mechanism to allow spending more money to get a higher-quality ship component: imagine spending a few MCr more to get a beam laser that has a +1DM in space combat. This would be scaled so you would have to spend increasingly more for higher DMs, with some upper limit. You could even set things up so a designer could pay for pluses to-hit, or pluses to damage, or for both (at greatly increased cost) or for other benefits depending on the component in question.

 

[robject]

That's the tack Spacemaster takes for many components, such as armoring, weapons, and sensors. It uses factors called 'Marks' for defining different levels of performance, which have increasing costs and/or diminishing returns. But for all that it's still High Guardlike, and in fact to my uninitiated mind the Spacemaster rules appear to be a tad munchkin.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Yeah, robject, SpaceMaster tends a bit munchkin, in general, compared to CT/MT. But, then again, so does D&D, compared to CT/MT.

 

[aramis]

Gee, first ed looked more like Space Opera than like HG.

Second ed still looked more like SO than HG.

 

[Scott Martin]

I still like TNE for gearheadeness (and keep running into areas where it isn't "geary" enough)

That said I'm spending a fair chunk of time working on modules for integration with a "higher level" ship design system, which would probably be much more HG-like (spec out the basic hull size, add Jump/M-Drive/powerplant and then add weapons and sensors which include enough power to run them in the "module". Once this is done, add crew and you're off to the races!

This also saves me a lott of time in task force design, since most of the weapons systems are "standard" so design is really a question of size and role.

I'm also putting together "civilian" sockets (the weapon AND power supply AND sensor package AND crewstation AND MFD (if any) need to fit within the standard socket mount. This gives systems that are a LOT less capable than ones designed to use the socket for the weapons mount only, but allows merchant ships to retrofit point defence lasers without needing a serious drive overhaul, or decide what systems get turned off during engagements.

The "High Threat" versions of these systems come in two modules: the weapon mount itself, and a small power supply that needs to be installed in the hold (along with appropriate wiring etc) I imagine that these would be moderately popular in "fringe" systems because they have the added benefit of giving you a backup power plant in case of severe trouble: any powerplant capable of running a serious weapons system is also capable of keeping life support and commo online in case of an engineering casualty!

Scott Martin

 

[robject]

Well Scott, it looks like you're headed in the same direction T5 is going for starship design. Friendly modules with a less friendly substrate.

 

[Scott Martin]

"Layered Complexity" is an intelligent design strategy. The two main problems with it are that you need a *lot* of work getting the "substrate" layer into chunky enough pieces that people can do LBB-2 like design, and if the "substrate" layer is poorly thought out or inconsistent then everything on top of it is troubled (GIGO).

Perhaps I should restate that: It takes a lot of work (and testing) to get modules that allow people to do LBB-2 type design that results in completed ships / vehicles / whatever that are comparable to something that was designed from the keel up in the "substrate" layer. In addition you need to keep the underlying substrate solid: building and rebuilding on a constantly shifting foundation gets tiring. If the T5 designers are (as appears to be the case given TNE and T4) using our current understanding of Physics as the bedrock of the design sequences, then sharing *that* layer would be very useful, since things like KKM mechanics (or "Floogle Beams") can be proposed and playtested in a more straightforward manner.

I am committed to building modular components usable by other Traveller players (OK, maybe that should read "Traveller GM's") to create "LBB-2" style ships that are not at a massive disadvantage to vessels created "from the keel up". For me to do this, the "core" Traveller ruleset needs to stay fairly constant and have ready conversions for equipment from previous versions, or every new version will need to have the equipment *completely rebuilt from the ground up*. I suspect that this explains some of the "impossible" Canon equipment (designed and converted, or designed using an intermn version of the "final" ruleset and not corrected before press)

(Ramble / rant warning)

One of my frustrations with recent versions of Traveller (MT and on) is that the "Canon" equipment has either not conformed to the posted design sequences (Shattered Ships of the Fighting Imperium) or that the published designs were very poorly thought out (TNE had a Zhodani escort without a master fire director, making it useless for anything but close (myopic) anti-missile support)

This makes it *really* hard to make Traveller "variants" (such as the Hard SF universe I have been tinkering with) since it almost requires building everything from the ground up, instead of tinkering with the existing framework.

I'm in favor of a system that allows me to build my universe (IMTU) and still allows people to take what I have built and make *minor* changes to bring it into the "Canon" universe.

A Concrete example: IMTU the following technologies simply don't exist:
-Meson Guns
-Reactionless thrusters
-"Fusion Plus"

I'd like people to be able to take a "Republic" or "Concordance" starship design, pull out a turret or some fuel tankage, add a meson screen and have a useful vessel in another Traveller universe. Worst case I need have an easy "HEPLAR to Thruster Plate" conversion that gives the difference in power mass room and cost, and let them add meson screens and extra capability.

Because of the way that I am (now) designing, I think that this will be possible, but because the "substrate" layer has apparent consistency problems this can be difficult. As an example TNE and T4 HEPLAR efficiencies are identical, but they chose to change units: TNE is a *lot* easier to understand because Traveller has used "G's" for decades: Why suddenly go to "Newtons" and force an additional conversion at the end of the design? Other aggravations are things like the compensator tables: one column is "Per cubic meter of hull" the rest are "per cubic meter of machinery". Changing all of the columns to be "per 100 Dt" would allow people to design with pencil and paper instead of spreadsheets, and still allow the tables to have reasonable column widths.

Scott Martin

 

[aramis]

Scott:

Newtons because the realworld science is done in newtons. Tons of thrust convert easily to newtons, and vice versa, and tons of thrust/mass = G's. 1N≅0.1 kilopond ≅ 0.0001 TT

 

[GypsyComet]

I hate to be sour grapes here, but if you need a physics education for this stuff to look easy, then it *isn't* easy.

If the simplest version of such a system is aiming for Book 2 (ie. volume only), then a design process should barely need *paper*, much less a calculator. The middle step, which should be aiming for the HG/MT/SSDS range, will need paper and calculator more for simplicity, since at this stage you are balancing more than one set of limits (volume, power, with weight being an issue in a few cases). The highest level of detail, emulating Striker and the FF&S volumes, is certainly "math-heavy" by comparison, but should still operate close enough to the final context that accidently designing a laser pointer when your goal was a ship-killer (or getting a race-car when you wanted a farm tractor) is unlikely.

 

[Hyphen]

Dear Folks -

Originally posted by Scott Martin:
A Concrete example: IMTU the following technologies simply don't exist:
-Meson Guns
-Reactionless thrusters
-"Fusion Plus"

Insert one moan about T4 here: Marc's original idea for "Fusion Plus" was simply to have smaller fusion plants delivering the same power output.

In other words (IMHO), tinker with Striker's powerplants and scale efficiency ratios.

However, TPTB (notably Greg Porter, author of the Vehicle Design System in Central Supply Catalog) morphed it into something else.

(Unfortunately, thereby, making the VDS incompatable with everything out there, including T4's other design systems... sigh.)

 

[GypsyComet]

I seem to recall that changeup, yes. It was intended to be just a name for the TL12 to TL13 innovation that improved the power-to-volume ratio for fusion plants.

As has been the case elsewhere, putting too much detail into what is really only color can often come back to bite.

That said, Striker's powerplants are directly responsible for the starship messes of MT. I'd rather start from the TNE/T4 base of fairly realistic energy requirements and go from there.

 

[Scott Martin]

TNE was the first Traveller version that had nice Micro / Macro integration: 2300 AD had the beginnings of this (and it showed) while TNE had a more mature integration: TNE / Brilliant Lances was the reason that I started tinkering with Traveller again. I won't get into T4, since it was (to me) a fairly significant step backwards. Still better than most other systems, but not as good as it was.

Striker's "Order of Magnitude" system was problematic (I have to double my armour thickness for an extra 8 points?!) and Striker-2's "Insta-kill" of vehicles that take more than 7 points of penetration seems to be taken from Striker-1 instead of redesigned (Since you can have a tank as large as BL starships it eems a bit odd that the "small craft" would suffer a couple of "minor hit" results while the tank is killed...)

All that said, TNE held together well, both being internally consistent as well as being (mostly) consistent with the laws of physics as we know them. It also had good "layering" allowing levels of detail by player interest. Fire Fusion and Steel (the original) is thus far the best equipment design system that I have encountered, in no small part becasue it integrates into the rest of the system.

Because of that I'm willing to throw my hat in the ring and say that if T5 uses a similar system (hopefully backwards compatable with FF&S-1, THE "Saving Grace" of T4) I will spend my dollars and commit a not insignificant amount of my time building pieces to support players (and GM's) who want to play the "RPG" game instead of the "Univere Design" game.

Why support Traveller in this way? When you compare Traveller to the other gaming systems out there (Space Master, Space Opera, Star Frontiers, Star Ace, Star Hero, Warhammer 40K (included for completeness) and a number of other games (there was a Chaosium / Runequest space opera system out there, the name escapes me) It comes out significantly ahead of the rest in terms of consistency and the ability to generate hardware that "could" work with actual trade-offs: the only "Zap Gun" in traveller is the Meson Gun, and you can simply not use it if you choose. The only real "Competition" for a hard SF universe that includes FTL travel is GURPS, and a goodly chunk of "Space" GURPS is taken from Traveller anyway.

Sorry for the long-ish tirade, but this hopefully brings the thread full circle back to "Ship Design Systems"

Scott Martin

 

[Uncle Bob]

One thing that bothers me (and FF&S offends badly) is adding extra layers of complexity to the design sequence, without any real purpose.

Small arms design: I never did manage to design a reclgnisable RW TL7 firearm. Or I once tried to design '68 Hemicharger with notably little success. And if the design of known technology is broken, I can't see investing that much time in designing hardware with speculative technology.

Or HEPLar. Broken physics and bull hocky explanations to get around the classic maneuver drive. Or, to put it another way, the reactionless maneuver drive uses physical principes we don't fully understand, but might be possible. HEPLar is more complex to design, works by more easily understood principles, and is impossible by those same principles.

Now I personally have a weakness for designing in tons, then converting to volume for deckplans (engineering more dense than crew quarters, etc). In CT I just try to keep things symmetrical. Remember the old Constellation class from Star Trek? The impulse engines were off-center, but it all worked out if you assumed the warp-drive nacelles were twice as dense as the engineering hull. Figured that out when I was 16.

 

[ditzie]

I like FFS. It lets me design my universe, bit by bit, especially when the mood hits me and life gives me a huge chunk of downtime that I can spend however I like. The few, the proud, the gearheaded. It lets me be a minimaxer, or a munchkin, or just a simulationist. It lets me test wider boundaries in the way I like.

I also understand that FFS is only a tiny portion of Traveller. If starship design is 5% of Traveller (1 out of every 20 pages is for starship design, perhaps), then FFS-level design is certainly less than that.

However, it's a saleable product for Traveller, and I think if it can be harnessed to benefit the whole Traveller community then it will be worth the effort for T5.

To me, this means rethinking how it's used, but it doesn't mean doing away with it.

 

[robject]

Well, I don't care for FFS -- it's not that it's bad, per se, but I'm not into decimal places for the sake of gaming. I prefer the first approximation, or, at most, 1.5 decimal places of accuracy.

If FFS3 (or whatever) can be used to create generic components in even tons and EPs, I think that would be a big win for Traveller as a whole. Encourage gearheads to design for the masses. Make it a prestige thing to make user-friendly modules. That kind of thing.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Definitely, robject - .25, .5, .75 should be the only decimals used. Most folks can do math up through quarter fractions....

 

[Scott Martin]

Hi Robject

I think that most of us are in violent agreement (with the possible exception of Uncle Bob... but I think that he raises some excellent points.)

Given the option of bitching about the stuff that is "broken" or proposing solutions to the problem, I prefer to propose solutions. By definition, the solutions that I propose will fit *my* idea of what they should be.

If Uncle Bob put together a pile of small arms (from TL-5 to TL-7, because we "know" what the boundaries for those are: I'd further suggest aiming for the midle of the "Canon" date range) and came up with consistent results then this could be used to "calibrate" the design sequences. As an example, if 6 weapons were built to match historic performance and all of them needed to be 20% heavier than their "real world" counterparts to match their historic performance, then posting an addendum to that effect would be useful. Perhaps the "historic" weapons can have their parameters matched by adding an extra tech level etc.

But *I* don't know enough about this to do the analysis. Similar comments have been made concerning the vehicle design sequences at lower tech levels, but I have yet to find someone to give a concrete comparison of a vehicle's "real world" performance vs a FF&S (or Striker, or Striker-2) vehicle, and without a number of these comparisons there is no way to "fix" the problem.

We may be having a precision vs accuracy issue here: If half the Real World(tm) comparisons are heavier than the TNE design and half of the are lighter, then the model is fairly accurate. If the variation from Real World(tm) to TNE designs is off by a significant margin, then there is probably need to add some sort of "quality" rules into the design sequences to improve the Precision of this modeling.

I'm sure that Uncle Bob can come up with a number of firearms that were "ahead of their time" (.45 ACP? 9mm Mauser?) and could be modeled with either "pay extra for +1 TL" or "Pay extra for quality of +20%" but without knowing what the range is we can't even start to consider how to correct the underlying system. In any case, *either* of these variations would add *even more* complexity to the underlying system.

For folks like robject, who just want to use the gear, this isn't a really big deal, as long as there are lists of equipment available that have the same underlying mechanics, and this integrates well with his system. But if the rules (and calibration) aren't available, then no gearhead will waste their time *doing* that design, and I don't think that there is enough margin (or enough of a player base) for Traveller to develop, test, edit and maintain enormous "catalogues" of equipment lists.

If someone (Uncle Bob?) would care to put together a list of "representative" firearms (2 carbines, 2 rifles, 2 pistols) for each "Tech Level" and list their appropriate stats (Cartridge size, barrel length, magazine capacity etc) I'll build a couple of them in FF&S, and then we can compare the final weights. If 5 other people are willing to do the same, we will have a nice cross-section of weapons to compare against and can "calibrate" the design sequences appropriately, even if they don't become "Canon".

Anyone game? If so, please start a "Real World Firearms" thread in "Imperial Research Station" and I'll try to hammer out some numbers for comparison in the coming week.

Scott Martin

 

[robject]

Originally posted by Scott Martin:
[...] If the variation from Real World(tm) to TNE designs is off by a significant margin, then there is probably need to add some sort of "quality" rules into the design sequences to improve the Precision of this modeling. [...]


[...] But if the rules (and calibration) aren't available, then no gearhead will waste their time *doing* that design, and I don't think that there is enough margin (or enough of a player base) for Traveller to develop, test, edit and maintain enormous "catalogues" of equipment lists. [...]

[...] If 5 other people are willing to do the same, we will have a nice cross-section of weapons to compare against and can "calibrate" the design sequences appropriately, even if they don't become "Canon".

Anyone game? If so, please start a "Real World Firearms" thread in "Imperial Research Station" and I'll try to hammer out some numbers for comparison in the coming week.

Scott Martin

Interesting points you bring up. Thanks for posting!

First, Marc's motto is "build it and they will come". In other words, he wants to put the tools into the Watchmakers' hands. Hence FFS3 will happen.

Second, Marc is planning to have something like quality in T5. Surprisingly (to me), this solves variance issues in technical design, as you suggest.

Third, I would love to do some weapons research for purposes of calibration.

Rob

 

[aramis]

Calibration is fine, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem for many: and FF&S like system is simply too detailed, and multiple design systems tied to the same combat rules & setting lead to clear indications of one being better than the other.

Its a small improvement, but probably not significant.

As for quality in T5, I hope so, but I'm doubtful. The worst errata farm of T4 was the core rules... on par with Mega, And that tends to indicate MWM, as much as the T4 staff.