Juanma replied to me: > Personally, I find little ships too unbelievable, unless you're in > space-fantasy land (Star Wars, etc.). In the campaign I'm currently > preparing (hard space opera, TL12, as little superscience as I think > my players will accept), I'm going for 10 to 30 K-ton ships, crew < 10 > (lots of automation, of course). Think of Nostromo.
Hello Juanma, if you look at the Spaceships rules, the performance mostly depends on the number of engine or fuel modules. A big ship means that you can get more into a single habitat system, and that you get more DR per armor system, but other than that it shouldn't be difficult to explain small ships. The old 3E vehicles rules are slightly less favorable. The hull weight scales with area, not volume (unless you use the optional Expansion rule), and more DR is required for reentry. And Anthony replied to me: > There are basically four viable sizes for ships in RPGs. > Option one is 'everybody gets a ship'. The virtue is that it's probably > the most interesting for ship to ship combat, as it means everyone > actually has something to do. > Option two is the ship that can be crewed entirely by the PCs. > Option three is the ship where the PCs are the command staff, their > actions pretty well determine the fate of the ship, and everyone else is > basically background color (the Star Trek model). > Option four is the ship-as-setting, where the ship basically functions > like a city that's a home base for the PCs. > > Option one is mostly used for fighters and mecha, and tends towards > ships-as-characters, since otherwise you have a whole bunch of identical > units. > Option three doesn't work too well in GURPS, as it requires a fair > amount of suspension of disbelief (why is the command staff going off by > themselves when they have a hundred redshirts available?) and isn't > generally how the tech assumptions in GURPS work (you don't have lots of > crew unless you actually need lots of crew). > Option four generally only needs the stats of ships as a plot device. > > As such, option 2 is the one where GURPS style ship stats are the most > useful. ... which is why I write so many of them. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
