Johannes replied to me: > I had first understood the question as, what reasons would there exist for > making small ships, independent of what ships exist as well.
Hello Johannes, my question was how one would adjust, adapt, or mutilate the 3E rules so that typical starships can be crewed by player characters, without a need for non-player characters to fill the ranks. This is not for a specific game -- I want to organize my thoughts to talk about vehicle design systems in general. If things work out nicely, you might see some 3E vehicles over the next months ... It is relatively easy to get a setting with small and large ships. I wrote some examples as my Vehicle of the Week 864 to 867. So now I'm looking for a solution where all the ships are relatively small, from a few dozen tons to perhaps a thousand tons, and with an endurance measured in days or weeks, not just hours. > Do you want small ships or small crews? I wrote very large ships with small crews in the weeks 808, 850-862. This time I want to try something else. > If the ships, including the freighters are all small, you need to decide > between transporting only low amounts of volume, or having lots and lots > of freighters. Or some of both. Consider what is carried as air cargo right now. If there were no container ships, some of their loads would probably go into the aircraft, and other things would no longer be carried -- no more fresh flowers or seafood by air mail. > Maybe worlds are ecconomically independent and only very specific items > are transported between worlds at all, so there simply is no need for > large freighters. (sort of an anti-traveller background ecconomics wise). > And you'd have passenger transport, but thats propably something few > people but the rich and beautifull do. Or the passenger transports are fast enough to look like airliners. No cabins, just more (or less) comfortable seats. The problem with this approach is that freighters won't need crew quarters, either, and that will change the flavor of the games (see above). > Or there simply is a maximum size for FTL travel. Perhaps you go through > gates and there is a technical limit how large a gate can be. Or larger stardrives get increasingly more expensive. I like this twist on Travis' suggestion (see below). > You still > might have larger ships for various in system activities. If it pays to build one-system-only ships. There might be a few large monitors, but perhaps not many big freighters. Sure, big ones might be slightly more efficient, but you can't switch to a new market if the old one goes soft. > What is a DSN Runabout? Star Trek Deep Space Nine had relatively small ships based on the station, called Danube-class Runabouts. I think they were a very good size for roleplaying purposes, anywhere between two and six bridge crew, and small bunks for multi-day missions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runabout_(Star_Trek) > Re Mutually asured destruction: [...] > Contemporary and past human nations, do not seem to be able to live to > that doctrine in the long run. Sooner or later they get leaders, that give > in to the temptation, to use their military power to further political, > ideological or ecconomic agendas, they might have. When you get multiple actors, having one crazy actor becomes more likely. Roger wrote: > If you use GURPS Spaceships rules and don't allow shields, a > decent-sized nuclear weapon will kill pretty much any ship... can't > remember how VE2 handles this. If you score a hit, and there a no dampers (VE72), you probably get a kill. My four megaton TL15 cruiser has DR 625,000 including force screens, and 10,000,000 HP. The flash and radiation from a kiloton contact explosion should finish it. Travis wrote: > One option would be a drive that does not scale well. > Perhaps reaction-less thrusters can only scale up to a certain size > without causing problems(ripping a hole in the fabric of space from > pushing too hard or some such), and if you have more than one within a > certain range of each other(100m? 1km?) you can only get an effective > thrust equal to basic thrust * sqrt(thruster count) without having > that same problem(ie. ship goes boom instead of moving) Or limit the number and size of FTL drives, that's much easier technobabble-wise. The problem could be escalating costs, even if large drives are possible, so everybody goes "ooh" when the Evil Overlord has larger ships than anybody else. David wrote: > Yeah, the maintenance requirements of vehicles are stupidly high. Getting a neat and simple formula for anything from a bicycle to a stealth fighter is quite difficult. One option would be to introduce maintenance requirement multipliers -- one aircraft landing is worth so many hours of level flight, one night in a storm is worth many weeks in a sheltered anchorage, and for a spaceship time in orbit might count for almost nothing. Mike wrote: > Wagon or part of the crew is the ship? I want the ship to be the 'mobile home' or 'mobile base' for the characters, even if it is no character by itself. > More laters.. Got to find a better way to merge old and new and delete old > email address and phones from my PC/Laptop, old and new cell, and maybe > gmail and yahoo? Please keep this one on GURPSnet. How are your thoughts on the interstellar invasion question coming along, btw? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
