Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
Some of my feeling may be feedback from David Pulver during the playtest and/or going back to previous projects. The first draft of Transhuman Space (the corebook) had a more elaborate gamist combat system in it. I'm afraid I led a bit of a revolt against it back then suggesting that it be moved to Deep Beyond.
There was another sort of gamist combat system in the last edition of Space for 3e too. David was prominent in the Gurps Traveller version as well. David just likes space combat games.
If you doubt the central nature of a combat system in Spaceships just look at how ships are organized i.e. into random hit location charts.
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The 20-systems is also partly because 5% increments made the system a lot simpler. The decision to write them up to look like hit location charts was actually made by SJ Games because they thought they looked prettier that way as a page graphic, rather than for hit location. My initial proposal had a Traveller Book 2-style narrative description (but still 20 systems).
Tactical space combat systems are not something I really push or are in love with, though they occasionally interest me. The impetus for them in 3e was largely Gene and Loren, the managing editors of their respective lines, who were both steeped in the wargaming tradition. I'd posted the original Traveller-style modular design system to GURPSNet to describe some stuff I'd played with, some simple vector and combat rules that had actually grown out of an unrelated project for Global Games. Gene was reading GURPSNet - he was pretty active in playing GURPS, and I at one point I was actually in play-by-email game he was running - and he really liked it and asked me if I could write it up Traveller and for Space 3e, which Loren also thought was a good idea. Gene also had an ulterior motive: he had decided he wanted the associated modular design system to include in his upcoming baby, GURPS World War II. As there was no budget for me to be paid for any of the stuff I contributed to Traveller core rulebook (the couple of chapters I wrote for it were initially submitted as playtest comments) or for that matter, in WWII, the quid pro quo as Gene explained it was they got the design system and tactical rules they wanted, and I would get the contract to revise GURPS Space and, at their behest, include the Trav space combat system in the revision. (Gene wanted to do the World War II mofulst conversion himself, along with some other authors; I wasn't really involved in that at all.) (At the time, SJ Games really wanted everything vehicle-ish to be Vehicles derived, even though it really caused a lot of headaches due to Vehicles' complexity.)
The same was initially true of THS. With Transhuman Space, at one point Deep Beyond was intended to be the very first book in the line and SJ Games contacted me to discuss a Transhuman Space wargame. This went back and forth a bit and for various reasons they ended up deciding on a core book instead. By that point, the wargame-ish rules already existed, but as you say, they were by then a poor fit for the actual core book.
SPACESHIPS in contrast had a fairly cleaner design mandate. It was designed to provide some spaceships rules since it was clear that Vehicles wasn't going to be comining out any time soon. It also had to be VERY simple system at heart. SJ Games was having a bout of Vehicles-phobia at the time (sick of big complex rules that caused editorial melt down) and it was made very clear to me that the ONLY way I could get a spaceship design system accepted was to make it as dirt simple as possible while still being moderately realistic. SJ Games were initially skeptical, but the 20 systems - everything in 5% increments - and the 1-3-10 progression was designed for rule simplicity, and they liked that approach. The ability to combine the design system with combat hit location was seen in that respect, as a means of avoiding extra complication, not as a primary design driver, though obviously its utility for combat was seen as an advantage. "Tactical" combat was something of an afterthought: the initial idea was "we'll just mate this to the GURPS Space 3e semi-abstract combat rules" but as it went along, it was apparent that new combat systems were needed to reflect the complexities of scale involved in trying to cover everything from Star Trek to realistic rocket ships in a relatively small space, and that a hex-brid based system would be desired as well, so that was factored into the project line plan.
Primary drivers throughout SPACESHIPS were very tight restrictions on the length of the rule book, driven by constraints of the e23 format and the desire to ensure a certain price point. This meant that something had to give, and as a result the rules had fewer examples and less special cases then they perhaps could have benefitted from, but then again, without these constraints, they would never have been published in the first place...