01-15-2013, 09:44 PM | #131 | |
Join Date: Dec 2005
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Re: GURPS Releases seem to be slow?
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I'd be fine with a spaceships style vehicle design system. I do love the 3e version though. The problem is that vehicles are an important part of many systems and hugely under supported as SJG always intended them to get their own book and left them out of many books they should have been in.
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01-15-2013, 11:38 PM | #132 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: GURPS Releases seem to be slow?
Just as a side note, I want to mention the single thing that caused me more perplexity than anything else in using Vehicles for 3/e: Ship displacement.
Ships are traditionally rated in tons, a "ton" actually being a unit of volume: 35 cubic feet (approximately 2,240 lbs., or a long ton, if filled with salt water). That's the volume of water that the ship displaces if filled to its rated capacity. But it's not the total volume of the ship; it's only the part of the volume that's below the waterline. In ship design calculations, this is treated as the body of the ship. But how do you handle the part of the ship that's above the waterline? Do you treat it as superstructure? That seemed really weird, as it's not actually a separate part of the ship (whereas the castles on a sailing ship were describable that way). And what percentage of the ship is below the waterline? For the Monitor, it seems to have been around 90%. For normal ships, is it two-thirds, half, one-third, one-tenth? Guidelines would help in coming up with ship designs that make sense. Not having them had me scratching my head a lot. Bill Stoddard |
01-16-2013, 01:00 AM | #133 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
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Re: GURPS Releases seem to be slow?
Hooray! And there was much rejoicing.
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My Blog: Mailanka's Musing. Currently Playing: Psi-Wars, a step-by-step exploration of building your own Space Opera setting, inspired by Star Wars. |
01-16-2013, 01:07 AM | #134 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: GURPS Releases seem to be slow?
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01-16-2013, 01:50 AM | #135 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: GURPS Releases seem to be slow?
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If it sets "displacement tons" it's mass, however. What you can do once you have displacement tons is take the assumption that each long ton requires about 35 cubic feet of volume to keep the ship from sinking. Then, since in practice most ships other than something like the Monitor or a submarine aren't semi-submersibles, so about twice that or 60-80 cf per long ton is actually a decent rule of thumb for hull volume for most metal hulled ships including warships and ocean liners, and not really bad for larger ocean going wooden craft either. I'd be leery of applying it to galleys and especially to smaller boats. Thus, a 50,000-ton ship might be estimated as having perhaps a 3.5 million cubic foot hull. Except for some modern cruise ships which have a very large superstructure, the latter adds about 10%-15% for most freighters and warships to about 20-30% for liners. Another approach to measure hull is detailed geometrical analysis if you want to do lots of plans, or otherwise length (ignoring anything sticking out too far) times width times height from bottom to main deck. As ships aren't cubes multiplying that by about 0.55 to 0.67 for most modern ships generally gives the right ballpark. If actually using the Vehicle design rules, there is a reason the design rules have worked "in reverse" and that is that years of testing have shown me it is a reasonably accurate way of calculating the actual volume, much more so than geometrical analysis, especially for oddly shaped designs. Look up the major components, install them first, follow the guidelines on accessible space, and that will usually actually give you a quite good estimate of the "real" volume. If anything seems too big, slap it into a superstructure. My own practice is to use all three methods if necessary, but any two of them can check one another and give a rough estimate.
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Is love like the bittersweet taste of marmalade on burnt toast? |
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01-16-2013, 02:18 AM | #136 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: GURPS Releases seem to be slow?
Considering they failed to notice that their layout software had translated all multiplication symbols to ¥ symbols, expecting them to notice more subtle errors such as unparseable text is pretty unlikely.
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01-16-2013, 02:26 AM | #137 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: GURPS Releases seem to be slow?
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First, find a picture that shows the entire hull, not just the waterline. This is sometimes hard to get, though you may find diagrams in good reference books or dry dock photos, but I've found the best choice for any ship remotely famous is to search (google images, at museum, in a catalog etc.) for a model of it, as ship models usually show the entire hull, not just the waterline. With a known length and the model as a reference you can easily find the depth of the hull, i.e., the distance from bottom to the main deck just by measuring the depth as a ratio to length, and then multiplying by known length. Then it is simply (Draft / Depth) x 100 = % of ship below the waterline. Obviously enough, iif you know the displacement tonnage, the draft, and the depth you can then get the *precise* hull volume: Tonnage (long tons) * Draft (feet) * 35 / Depth (feet) = Hull (cubic feet).
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Is love like the bittersweet taste of marmalade on burnt toast? |
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01-16-2013, 02:29 AM | #138 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: GURPS Releases seem to be slow?
Yeah, that was... uh, not very good. Kind of like how I feel, with flu now.
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Is love like the bittersweet taste of marmalade on burnt toast? |
01-16-2013, 02:47 AM | #139 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: GURPS Releases seem to be slow?
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Here's how to cheat. 1) Please note that Ether Sails (in the Ether Propulsion section of Spaceships 7) are described as about the same size as normal masts and sails and capable of functioning as them. Divide the cost by some reasonable figure if you want non-ether masts and sails, I'd suggest by 5. Say you can have up to 4. 2) In the Pyramid article, use the same propulsion values for Sails as you would for screws, except read "power" as "number of sail or ether sail systems". For acceleration use 0.25 per system (assuming good wind). 3) Assume this is with the best wind; apply the usual sailing suggestions in Low Tech for less optimum winds or just halve again for normal conditions. This is a bit optimistic, but perhaps not unduly so. Thus 3 sails systems (=3 power) at SM +7 gives, I think, 17, which we halve to move 8.5 (17 mph), and that's with the best wind; we'd get 8.5 mph under most circumstances. Likewise acceleration is usually half power; now its 0.75. A bit of a kludge, but might work. Try it and modify it to taste.
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Is love like the bittersweet taste of marmalade on burnt toast? |
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01-16-2013, 03:01 AM | #140 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: GURPS Releases seem to be slow?
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For those not familiar: Mostly the fun or frustrating part of Vehicles is that since just about everything in the universe can be a vehicle, it provides an extensive nuts-and-bolts tech infrastructure for GURPS for those who like it. But it's a very "bottom down" system taking an atomic view of everything - you don't pick power plants that are ready to use (for instance); rather you'd consult a table that gives the weight, volume, cost, and fuel consumption per kilowatt of power output for, say, a dozen different internal combustion engine categories e.g., high-speed diesel or turbocharged gasoline engine, over 3-4 TLs, these figures derived from me researching rough averages of real values in each period. And you do this multiple times for each of the 20-30 major components in your vehicle... (Of course, over time you build up a library of per-built modules, but the first few times it can take quite a while). The main advantage is the "build anything" focus of it - with everything ground up, you can consistently define, say, vehicle with 4 legs, a head turret, a tail arm, steam power, flapping ornithopter wings, and a high performance supercharged diesel and call it a diesel punk robot dragon. Or go to "cyborg brain" section and install a human brain. Or go to the weapon section and create a flame thrower so it can breathe fire. And go to the structure section and give it an orichalcum skeleton and an aramid-fiber (kevlar) skin over its body. And then go to the section on building natural weapons and give it claws and fangs and a powered jaw. And then go completely insane and add a chameleon system and a small cramped internal seat so someone can ride inside. And then drive yourself crazy by spending 2 hours or so working through the ground and air perforamnce chapters trying to calculate whether it has enough of a power to weight ratio to lift off, and if necessary going back and trying to add a bigger engine, or realizing you forgot the fuel tank. The current edition at least has a few more pointers to cover this. It's kind of super complex - legendarily so - and is famous for requiring complicated math like assuming you have a calculator (or can use Google) to find a square or cube root, and it's only somewhat realistic (it takes a broad view) but it is detailed. So in addition to building vehicles, you can build, say, radios, or radars, or fishing gear, or laser designators, or life support systems or find out the weight per point of DR per square foot of bronze armor (useful for making iron golems or armoring your house or if you know the area of a human being, a breast plate) and so on. Kind of amusing to play with that.
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Is love like the bittersweet taste of marmalade on burnt toast? Last edited by David L Pulver; 01-16-2013 at 03:13 AM. |
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