4th Edition Vehicles

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by whswhs

The worst problem I encountered in using Vehicles was that in designing seagoing ships, I could figure out length, beam, and draft, but there didn't seem to be a natural way to get freeboard. I ended up splitting the main hull into the part below the waterline and the part above it, and making the part above it a big superstructure, but I was never sure that was giving me plausible answers.

That's not surprising. The GURPS Vehicles system was based around a particular workflow (as indicated in the rule book) and generating freeboard (and the stats you need for it - i.e., hull depth) - was not a priority.

This was basically because finding the dimensional information necessary for this for watercraft was a pain, and since the system had to also work for everything from bicycles to jet airplanes, doing it for things that were even more complex in shape than ship hulls was impossible.

In general, the best way to think of ships in 2nd edition is to remember that the length, width, depth, etc. was an afterthought of the system. Instead, remember the system is built around weights and volumes, so build the ship by first putting everything that your data says is in the ship (cargo volume, the right number of staterooms, the correct kW/horsepower of power plant and propulsion, fuel for it, access space, ammo, etc. This will then give you the baseline ballpark for hull size. At that point you can make some estimates and if it seems too long, deep, or whatever you can redesign, but given that that system's numbers didn't CARE about length or freeboard very much, trying to design the ship around such figures will just be frustrating!

The 4th edition version cares a bit more about length to beam ratios, with vehicle length to beam ratios for body types and vehicle length having a key effect on water speed, but GURPS Vehicle system is not designed around modelling actual exterior dimensions
first and then generating volumes from that, and attempts to do this - rather than working backward from displacement tons - will almost always end in tears and confusion.

I'd take a dimension first model if I were building a purpose-designed ship system (as I did with spaceships in Transhuman Space) but trying to apply that to a system that handles all manner of vehicle shapes ends up causing massive problems. (I know from having attempted a draft that did so.)

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Did you not have a keel-to-deck dimension? Because otherwise, freeboard would be that minus draft, wouldn't it?

It's amazing how difficult it is to find keel to deck - i.e., hull depth - in non-technical sources.

(If you have a picture or model of the ship out of water you can usually make a good estimate and with enough other data you can calculate it, but it's not trivial, which is why I largely designed to the system to ignore it. As a consequence of this, however, generating freeboard is difficult.).

Mind you, it's even worse finding hull depth figures for non-ships like cars or airplanes, since height figures invariably include superstructures, suspensions, and so on. This is another reason that a "height x width x length" figure for volume was generally avoided in the system and why the system maintained the "add the components, then build the hull around them" as the default approach for most vehicles.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

Personally, I think Steampunk Conveyances took the right approach (and I enjoy the heck out of it, so thanks for that!) - rather than a collection of similar vehicles, it was a collection unified by genre/setting. I'd rather see a book of "Old West Vehicles", for example, that had two or three locomotives, a stagecoach or two, a riverboat, and so forth, than a book of "Steam Locomotives, 1840-1900". The former is much more likely to be useful to me, as I'm more likely to use one or two examples of several different types of vehicles in a milieu, rather than several examples of the same type of vehicle. The wishlist, however, right now strongly suggests the second type of book is what they're looking for.

I’m glad that Conveyances worked for you, and thanks for the kind words. I agree with the rest of what you say, too, but I suspect that the company would take a decent proposal that happened to be setting/genre based; there was no great heart-searching about Conveyances, after all. (It came into being at their suggestion, actually; I originally just proposed a chapter on vehicles in a Steampunk gear book.) The problem is deciding on one.

I guess that Vehicles of Yrth might be interesting...

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Did you not have a keel-to-deck dimension? Because otherwise, freeboard would be that minus draft, wouldn't it?

When it comes to ships, finding draft in sources usually isn't too hard (though finding stats for draft at the load you happen to be interested in can sometimes be a pain). Finding freeboard or keel-to-deck (and which deck, anyway?) can be surprisingly hard. Finding out what loading the ship was at for that freeboard is often next to impossible.

When it comes to ships larger than a yacht, freeboard isn't that useful for gaming anyway. What you mostly want to know is how high from the water the deck most used to walk around on and work on is, and how, where, and how easy it is to get from the water onto the ship.

[LokRobster]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

...The idea, however, was that Vehicle Design would appeal to the hardcore gear head who had been ignored through much of the 4e line. At the same time, the books are definitely NOT intended to replace simpler options such as Spaceships, just to provide an extra detail alternative.
***
"Add components, then wrap a hull around it" continues to remain the default (you go mad when building things like airplanes or anything with lots of sub-assemblies without using it), the "build the hull first, then add components afterward" option is covered right at the start of the book, and should you opt to use this, it lets you avoid some of the empty space decisions, albeit at the price of sometimes running out of space...

MMMM Autoduel vehicles, for the GURPS gearhead. Sounds fun to build from either starting point.
For 4e GURPS Autoduel, I've gone to stat-line research (especially Pyramid 3/40's "Hot Rides", thanks Pulver!) to guesstimate up 4e armed and armored cars lots of times and then moved on to other things instead. I've only stat'd out a couple of specific cars for my Infinite Worlds campaign.

I wondered what form the 4e Vehicles would take, since everything else steers so far from the in-depth 3e robot/vehicle system. I have to say that this approach/product concept has me very hopeful.

I look forward to the eventual pdf!

as we eagerly await Car Wars 6e too.. I'd imagine CW6e releases first.

GURPS/Car Wars tie-in!?

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

I suspect that the company would take a decent proposal that happened to be setting/genre based;

Actually, I do too - what I was trying to communicate (but missed the mark on, apparently) is that the current examples on the wishlist make it seem like they're after the more specific-vehicle-style collections, but that impression was probably not accurate. Fortunately, now that Steampunk Conveyances is the default example for that wishlist item, maybe it will be more obvious that other styles of proposals will be considered.

[Been]

Will it have the weapon desighn rules (and designing hand weapons) that 3rd edition had?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

The 4th edition version cares a bit more about length to beam ratios, with vehicle length to beam ratios for body types and vehicle length having a key effect on water speed, but GURPS Vehicle system is not designed around modelling actual exterior dimensions
first and then generating volumes from that, and attempts to do this - rather than working backward from displacement tons - will almost always end in tears and confusion.

That's all very well, but having thought it over, I don't think that's exactly what I'm asking for.

When I designed a boat or ship in Vehicles, it gave me a volume and a draft. But now suppose I wanted to know what the cargo space looked like, or the crew quarters. I couldn't just say, "Okay, the draft is Z, so that means the floor area is A," because there was no reason to believe that the upper deck of the cargo space or the quarters was at the waterline.

So on one hand I could say that the vehicle body went from the keel to the main deck, which could be at any height within reason. Or on the other hand I could say that the part of the vehicle up to the waterline was body, and the part above that was all superstructure, and the cargo space or the quarters occupied partly the body and partly the superstructure.

That came up, for example, when I was working through the design of the trireme, for which I had fairly detailed figures, since I had read not only Casson's Ships and Seafaring but two different books from the Trireme Project. And there I had a row of oarsmen down inside the hull, and a row above them sitting in a kind of porch along the side, and a row displaced to the side with their bodies sticking up into the porch and their legs going down into the hull (there's a passage in Aristophanes about the men on the lower rank being victims of their crewmates' flatus!). And then there was a walkway between the two porches on a kind of upper deck, on which the sailors and the marines were stationed. Trying to describe that in Vehicles terms gave me fits.

[Kax]

A problem is that the classification covered by 'line' is quite broad, and hull shapes and profiles within a classification can differ.

A cog and a barge are of the same Lines, and one looks like a potato and the other like a block-sided sausage.

You really can only look at historical examples of ships the same mass and basic design and see what their decks and freeboard were.

Unless you're a ship design engineer, of course.

[hal]

For what it is worth - anything that has David's name on it will be hard for me to pass on. I've waited this long for a updated VEHICLES that waiting a bit longer won't be all too much of an issue from my end.

Kromm's commentary earlier about who is available to work on what, tells me that despite the manuscript being turned in, we may have something of a wait for it to see the light of day, if ever (not that Kromm added the if ever mind you!).

As far as I'm concerned, knowing a few individuals who have worked at producing a manuscript and knowing the birthing pangs/pains involved in bringing it into existence, regardless of what does happen, David - you did more than I EVER could have been able to do. That makes you a better man than I in my books.

But, truth be told? I'd really like to see this manuscript come into existence as a solid item, and if SJGames doesn't produce it, I sincerely hope that it can be produced under a "Powered by GURPS" kind of approval.

I have purchased multiple copies of GURPS VEHICLES (largely because they got so dog eared or beaten into near uselessness from constant packing and removal from my back pack for books when I'd travel for game sessions. They were used constantly for game sessions and game session preparations. I used it for the weapon design system constantly. It served as the springboard for my own research into what goes into Naval ship designs of the Age of Nelson era warships.

David Pulver? It is all YOUR fault I had so much fun with the material you wrote for both GURPS VEHICLES and GURPS ROBOTS. That I have two copies of GURPS ROBOTS plus the PDF, plus at least four copies of VEHICLES (not including those I purchased as birthday gifts or Christmas gifts) should say "hey, you done did good."

:)