[spaceships] components by tonnage

[muduri]

Apropos of a few other posts that forumites have provided much-appreciated feedback on, I'm putting together a Battletech-style tactical robot combat game, using the mecha rules from Spaceships as the base.

I'm intrigued though by switching from the admittedly elegant and quick Spaceships "each component is 1/20 of your loadout, scaled to your SM" to the Battletech "a given system weighs X tons of your available Y total". At least for weapons, armor and engines - it's kind of appealing to have engines increase in weight slightly faster than tonnage for ground-based vehicles per the old "bigger is slower" trope, but without having to jump suddenly to a second component slot. Or not having a full extra component's worth to devote to armor but wanting to squeeze in that extra 1 ton to reinforce just your howitzer arm. But presumably other components like robot arm, control room, hangar bay etc. could be kept as simpler scaling-with-size fractions.

Any considerations or resources I should keep in mind for this endeavor? Looking at the forums it looks like 3E Traveller and Vehicles used tonnage (although with cost and weight already in play I may be too lazy to incorporate surface area as well, ha) and some people have already done homebrew mechanics for proper spacecraft. And someone mentioned in an earlier post that by introducing Light and Heavy SM variants you can get a fair range of tonnages - 15, 20, 50 and 70 as well as the existing 10, 30 and 100.

All pointers, reservations, or experiences with similar conversions appreciated!

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by muduri

Apropos of a few other posts that forumites have provided much-appreciated feedback on, I'm putting together a Battletech-style tactical robot combat game, using the mecha rules from Spaceships as the base.

I'm intrigued though by switching from the admittedly elegant and quick Spaceships "each component is 1/20 of your loadout, scaled to your SM" to the Battletech "a given system weighs X tons of your available Y total". At least for weapons, armor and engines -

Any considerations or resources I should keep in mind for this endeavor?

Can you answer the question "What is it you think you're keeping from Spaceships?". I'd be afraid of finding out I was throwing out everything or at least that something important didn't work any more after all systems weren't created equal..

[mlangsdorf]

I think if you're going to do some components by absolute weight, you might as well do all components by absolute weight. Having some components by relative weight is going to be confusing.

If you do all components by absolute weight, you might as well use the existing BT design system, and then have some notes for converting the designs into GURPS stats. Or at least start with that, and make the adjustments you want.