Quote:
Originally Posted by Alonsua
an exhaustive list of engineer specialties for the game.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
for a particular setting
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This is a key point. You might attempt an exhaustive list for a setting, just one game you might play with your house rules, and which might well get changed for the next. The weakest claim in the GURPS acronym is "Universal", simply because covering anything anyone might want to do in an RPG is so impossibly broad. For instance, I notice the proposed list omits Paratemporal Engineering, for designing Infinity Worlds conveyors and other paratime tech, and also completely forgets Megastructure Engineering for Dyson spheres or Kardashev III galaxy shells. Then there's Spacetime Engineering for constructing truly big or tiny projects like wormholes, Tipler machines, or some of the works in Baxter's Ring series.
You don't want those in your intended game for your setting? Fine; leave them out. That's exactly how GURPS rules approach universality -- by having that toolkit of rules and options from which you chose when you're doing worldbuilding. But if you intend to do a drop-the-mic definitive end-of-story list to rule them all, then there's quite a lot of work ahead. Probably wiser to leave that task for individual GMs doing their worldbuilding.
While we're on the topic, I recall from the descriptions in another thread that "Mechatronics" was the engineering skill for "anything that goes into a mecha". That makes it the opposite of an engineering specialization; it's a generalization or fusion of several relevant specialties into one for convenience. A similar example would be for starships. The "fix anything" sort of ship engineer that's so popular winds up with a number of Engineering skills -- unless the GM simply doesn't care about that level of detail as being not particularly relevant to his game, and just says "Engineering" (with or without !) covers it all, rather than expecting separate skills to cover the systems for power, electronics, mechanical, armory, and so on. The granularity and detail of a skill list is determined as much by the intended focus of a game as anything else. Is "Petroleum Engineering" really a fundamental cornerstone of "Engineering", or it is just something we happen to do a lot of in the real world at TL 6-7-8, that in TL3 England or TL 10 Panfederation Space will be just a curious sub-field of Chemical Engineering? And if the game is set in the real world in TL 6-7-8, are the characters going to need to make Petroleum Engineering rolls in the course of the game, or is their closest contact with the subject going to be remembering to fill up the getaway car before the big chase scene?
Not all games can sweep everything away with the Broom of Rule of Cool and still reach their intended feel. Not all games can spend their limited player time on niggling differences between three dozen slight variants of the same item, whether that's an engineering specialization or a 9mm auto pistol.
All that said, if you're looking for sources, then look at the online catalog for some engineering schools (MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Carnegie-Mellon, Purdue... and apologies to those outside of the US for not including your schools) and see what degrees they offer, and what specialties they offer within those degrees at the master's and PhD level. (You'll find they change every so often, not just because "tech level" changes, so you might want to pick a particular year for comparing catalogs.)