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Old 07-12-2016, 03:41 AM   #11
johndallman
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Default Re: Handling maintenance and overhauls for GURPS Spaceships

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Originally Posted by RogerBW View Post
(1) Regular keep-stuff-running, done by the crew.
(2) After a long deployment, time alongside in the home port; some crew are helping with major maintenance along with the shore-based techs, but most are on leave.
(3) After several years in service, full-on shipyard time for refits and upgrades.
What I've encountered in various 20th century histories was Royal Navy vessels far from home doing (2) with just the crew, somewhere that there was a dock and supplies, but no dockyard personnel. For example, HMS Cumberland was doing this in the Falkland Islands at the time of the Battle of the River Plate, and had to stop it and rush north when she heard about the battle.
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Old 07-12-2016, 04:02 AM   #12
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Default Re: Handling maintenance and overhauls for GURPS Spaceships

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Warships are supposed to be able to do self-overhauls, at least in some navies and some historical periods. But this is probably a consequence of their large crews, all trained in maintenance to keep them busy.
I'm not sure how true this has been since say the 1870's, steam engines and steel hulls would have put a severe crimp on the kind of things earlier crews could have done. Before this point most things could be done by the crew with hand tools and a secure anchorage. After this point even if the crew can do the work they will probably need a proper yard to do it in [partialy ninja'ed].

How this carrys over will depend upon the setting. Either way I would be reluctant to assume this is going to provide a basis for what the OP wants firstly because it mostly applies to warships with large crews and systems that are readly accessible to facilitate damage control and secondly because it still doesn't offer a precedent for underway refitting.

In most settings this might justify letting the players deduct crew salaries from the 30% surcharge for crew members with relevant skills as a replacement for hired workers in yard based refits. In settings that stick closely to age of sail tropes (say something close to David Drake's Reaches or RCN series) I might let the crew set up an improvised dock and do the work without the surcharge over a longer period of time.

Last edited by Frost; 07-12-2016 at 04:21 AM.
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Old 07-12-2016, 03:51 PM   #13
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Default Re: Handling maintenance and overhauls for GURPS Spaceships

A similar issue is how fast can ships startup? Warm or cold starts? That's a question that comes up occasionally in my games. Seconds, minutes, hours?
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Old 07-12-2016, 04:41 PM   #14
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Default Re: Handling maintenance and overhauls for GURPS Spaceships

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A similar issue is how fast can ships startup? Warm or cold starts? That's a question that comes up occasionally in my games. Seconds, minutes, hours?
My instinct has always been to assume minutes as an absolute minimum with hours being the norm for larger ships. Even the most basic ships are going to be composed of dozens of relitively complex and often interconnected systems that will take time to start and may depend upon other systems already being active.

Crews that need to leave somewhere fast will need to keep critical systems running and or start systems up fairly regularly (particularly mechanical systems) in order to facilitate a rapid start up.
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Old 07-12-2016, 05:14 PM   #15
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Default Re: Handling maintenance and overhauls for GURPS Spaceships

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A similar issue is how fast can ships startup? Warm or cold starts? That's a question that comes up occasionally in my games. Seconds, minutes, hours?
That depends on how fidgety the systems are, if you need to do a long and complex tuning of the drive system in a setting is totally different from one where you just turn the key and fly away. Also in some fictional settings from books a ship is never turned off and in others you need a new engine after each jump and so on.

Overall:
Seconds: It is like stepping into a car and driving off
Minutes: It is like flying off in a private plane or casting off in a larger boat.
Hours or days: It is like starting a large industrial plant.

So it depends on the feel you want to have in the process. Personally I have mostly used the minutes at it has seemed to fit most settings best.
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Old 07-12-2016, 07:12 PM   #16
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Default Re: Handling maintenance and overhauls for GURPS Spaceships

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That depends on how fidgety the systems are, if you need to do a long and complex tuning of the drive system in a setting is totally different from one where you just turn the key and fly away. Also in some fictional settings from books a ship is never turned off and in others you need a new engine after each jump and so on.

Overall:
Seconds: It is like stepping into a car and driving off
Minutes: It is like flying off in a private plane or casting off in a larger boat.
Hours or days: It is like starting a large industrial plant.
Way I figure it: SM 0 through SM +3 craft are in the seconds to half a minute under normal circumstances; SM +4 through SM +8 is in the several minutes level, as you're typically following a standard checklist of system by system, like most modern aircraft; and at SM +9 and up you're looking at 15 minutes to an hour to go from a cold start. I should note that at SM +9 and up you're probably almost never fully powered down unless you're dry-docked; even modern naval ships keep their power plants running while docked in order to speed up deployment.
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Old 07-12-2016, 09:27 PM   #17
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Default Re: Handling maintenance and overhauls for GURPS Spaceships

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Way I figure it: SM 0 through SM +3 craft are in the seconds to half a minute under normal circumstances; SM +4 through SM +8 is in the several minutes level, as you're typically following a standard checklist of system by system, like most modern aircraft; and at SM +9 and up you're looking at 15 minutes to an hour to go from a cold start. I should note that at SM +9 and up you're probably almost never fully powered down unless you're dry-docked; even modern naval ships keep their power plants running while docked in order to speed up deployment.
I like this approach, from a dramatic standpoint. I was really wondering, though, if anyone had seen rules in GURPS books for this.
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Old 07-15-2016, 08:51 PM   #18
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Default Re: Handling maintenance and overhauls for GURPS Spaceships

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I like this approach, from a dramatic standpoint. I was really wondering, though, if anyone had seen rules in GURPS books for this.
The Spaceships line is 'generic' so things like start-up time is left to the GM. That way they can tailor it to whatever sort of Sci-Fi background they are trying to create. You'll notice the books are packed with 'design switches' that help you emulate different options for different game worlds.
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Old 07-15-2016, 09:06 PM   #19
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Default Re: Handling maintenance and overhauls for GURPS Spaceships

You can get inventive under war time conditions or the equivalent. I have a book about getting the shipyard the Italians had in Eritrea back in operation after it was captured in WW II. It wasn't built to handle warships except destroyers, was built for commercial work. So they cleaned the hulls of cruisers by putting one end in the floating drydock, tilting that end up out of the watr and cleaning it then reversing the ship and getting the other half. In one case the had to fix damage on a ship whose armor was well thicker then the bending brakes could handle. The attached one edge and then used blowtorches to soften where the bend was and sledge hammers to bend to fit. The book is Under the Red Sea Sun and is very interesting, he was a salvage officer that was also involved with the D-Day portable harbors and the salvage of the sub S-51 before the war.

So I can see where penalties and taking Extra Time to overcome them might be the way to go in many cases.
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