Considering getting Vehicles 3e for use in 4e games.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

I would just use character sheets for mecha. Am I the only one who feels this way?

It depends very much on the campaign. Is the mecha your character (such as when you're playing Transformers)? Is it a gadget for a super? Is it basically a character in its own right and acts as the ally to the PC? Or is it a piece of gear, easily discarded and replaced with another? In the last case, it should almost certainly be a piece of gear, rather than a character.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by GodBeastX

I would just use character sheets for mecha. Am I the only one who feels this way?

I would only do this in a few limited circumstances.

The first would be if the mecha were essentially a _big_ superhero that only used "technology" as a Power Source rather than having anything in common with technology as used elsewhere in the setting.

The second would be as a shortcut where I built the mecha as a very simple "character" (ST, DR, Move) but gave it Weapon Mounts and used heavy weapons from UT.

The whole Gurps character creation system is not simple, not even in comparison to Ve2. Building weapons as Innate Attacks in Powers might actually be more complex than building them as plain ol' weapons in Ve2.

However, if mecha can have blaster cannons and non-mechs can have blaster cannons and they're supposed to be the same blaster cannons even when they're definitely equipment and not an intrinsic part of a "character" I would build the mecha as equipment.

[Kalminos]

Hello everyone, just doing some necromancy here to ask some more questions after having bought the books and the design program -

Why is HP based off of surface area? this seems to lead to some absurd values, like a 10 ton plane of mine having nearly one thousand hit points.

Should I just do HP myself as if its any other unliving object? - what if the frame of my aircraft is heavy, doubling its HP in the standard system- do I double it for my plane?

I'm getting some weird sizes and weights- my plane really doesn't like to get more than 8 meters long while weighing more than 25 thousand lbs- its also really thin and short vertically- There doesn't seem to be any mention of wingspan anywhere- it doesn't seem to be factored into the width, as to explain the incredibly thin size of the thing.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Kalminos

Hello everyone, just doing some necromancy here to ask some more questions after having bought the books and the design program -

Why is HP based off of surface area? this seems to lead to some absurd values, like a 10 ton plane of mine having nearly one thousand hit points.

Should I just do HP myself as if its any other unliving object? - what if the frame of my aircraft is heavy, doubling its HP in the standard system- do I double it for my plane?

I'm getting some weird sizes and weights- my plane really doesn't like to get more than 8 meters long while weighing more than 25 thousand lbs- its also really thin and short vertically- There doesn't seem to be any mention of wingspan anywhere- it doesn't seem to be factored into the width, as to explain the incredibly thin size of the thing.

This was the 3e way of doing HP. 4e changed and produces its' own weirdnesses like when you're car is only 5 times as hard to reduce to hamburger/irreparable junk as you are.

If you're going to be mixing your GVB stuff with 4e sources calculate HP with the 4e rule. 4e is done in much lower detail and does not allow for inanimate objects to have HP not related to their gross weight (except for shields which on a per lb basis are the toughest things in the universe).

If you wonder, shields get fixed in Low Tech. Cars are still quite fragile.

As to your last paragraph, even Ve2/GVB as detailed as they are just don't directly address your points. Shapes are handled abstractly when handled at all. Mostly this is factored in as streamlining or hydrodynamic lines.

If you're getting suggested linear dimensions from GVB you should probably ignore them. They have no game effect and were probably intended to describe something other than airplanes. Tanks or Roman galleys or starships or _something_. :)

Ve2/GVB very specifically do not calculate wingspan. Draft is about the only real world stat that they do calculate and even that needs to be manually adjusted in many circumstances.

[Curmudgeon]

Wingspan isn't precisely calculated in Vehicles, 2nd Edition, but neither should you find that the wings seemingly don't show up at all. You do have the 2nd and not the 1st Edition, correct? Both are meant to be used with the 3rd Edition Basic Set. A bit confusing, but there you are.

The procedure is at follows:

First, choose your wing shape (VE6, Wings) and apply the results of any streamlining (VE8, B. Streamlining) to the results of our next step.

Second, calculate the Wing Volume (VE 17, E. Wing Volume) remembering to add empty space, if needed to give both wings the same volume, and then apply the effects of streamlining (and slope, if applicable) to the wing volume.

Finally, calculate the surface area of the wing subassembly using Wing Volume, (VE17-18), taking particular note of the wing surface area multipliers given in the paragraph immediately above Total and Structural Surface Area. Dividing Wing Volume by the final wing surface area will give you the approximate thickness of the wings.

You should be able to estimate a rough width:length proportion for the wing of the plane you're designing, which will give you a somewhat oversized wing if you use it as is. An important point from VE8 in the Wings section is that the two wing subassemblies also include the tail of the plane, so you will need to make a rough and ready guess as to how much of the wing volume is actually tail and then reduce both wing subassemblies by half that amount to find out how much of the wing volume and surface area is actually wing and not tail.

You can then arrive at wingspan as equal to both wing lengths plus the width of your fuselage.

It's a bit of work and there is a fair bit of estimation but it should get you in the ballpark if you want to go to the trouble of working it out.

[Curmudgeon]

Just checked on the internet. The length:width ratio I was speaking of is properly called the aspect ratio and the width is the chord. There was a dearth of easily accessible hard numbers for aspect ratios of real aircraft but one site (and I can't remember what it was) did have wing area and wingspans for some aircraft of WWII to modern vintage.

The aspect ratios varied from a low near 10:1 to a high of 18:1. A value in that range should certainly work, with more maneuverable aircraft aiming for low aspect ratios and endurance aircraft aiming for the high end of the range. Lower aspect ratios, and possibly higher ones, shouldn't be ruled out.

[Ketsuban]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

It depends very much on the campaign. Is the mecha your character (such as when you're playing Transformers)?

Well, yes, you stat out a character... as a character.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Is it a gadget for a super?

I wasn't aware supers tended to have Gundams. Generally they use their own superpowers to save the day. The closest you can really get is Roger Smith (Big O) who tries to be Bruce Wayne and succeeds only in being a chauvinistic dork.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Is it basically a character in its own right and acts as the ally to the PC?

In this case you'd stat it as a Ally and then give your character both the Ally advantage AND any of the abilities the Ally grants with the Granted by Ally modifier, as per MyGURPS' "Hidden Familiars" section.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Or is it a piece of gear, easily discarded and replaced with another? In the last case, it should almost certainly be a piece of gear, rather than a character.

And this is the contentious bit. There's three ways of doing it - gadget limitations, Spaceships, and vehicles-as-characters.

Originally Posted by MyGURPS

Some people recommend buying [nonsentient Allies] as gadgets, but I've tried that and it can be ridiculous . . . leading to odd builds involving Enhanced Move with Affects Others and gadget limitations, DR which only protects against attacks that go through the vehicle, and so on.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the Spaceships 4 rules - they feel too much like they'll end up with identical box mecha rubbing against one another until one of them falls apart as if they're made of Duplo. What I want is what gets depicted in fiction - a fight between SM+4 metal people - which is covered adequately by vehicles-as-characters.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Ketsuban

Personally, I'm not a fan of the Spaceships 4 rules - they feel too much like they'll end up with identical box mecha rubbing against one another until one of them falls apart as if they're made of Duplo. What I want is what gets depicted in fiction - a fight between SM+4 metal people - which is covered adequately by vehicles-as-characters.

SS4 can, I believe, easily be tweaked to get what you're probably looking for. First off, rather than treating each leg system as a single leg, assume all mecha have 2 legs, and just use the Move values as-is - a slow-moving, heavily armored mecha would have only a single leg system (Move 5), while a rapidly-moving, lightly armored one would have 4 (Move 10/20), despite each mecha having 2 actual legs. Use the Hnd/Stab rating for 2 legs for all mecha (unless they have an explicit maneuverability system). You could also allow characters to allocate more energy to the legs than normal for a speed boost. Another optional change would be to change the Move values so that mecha with 2 leg systems move as though they were man-sized - that is, a 2-leg-system SM+0 mecha would have Move 5, one with SM+1 would have Move 7, and so forth - your SM+4 mecha would have Move 20 (Move 20/30 with 3 leg systems, 20/40 with 4, and so forth), making them look as though they were moving at human speeds. Finally, design your mecha with minimal or even no armor (and no handheld weapons), then add in their actual armor after the fact, letting it modify their Move as encumbrance. Finally, ignore the Spaceships combat system (which is for spacecraft acting at 20+ second intervals, not mecha acting at 1 second intervals) and you've got a solid system for designing mecha. "Super" mecha, like Gundams or whatever, would have access to armor, weapons, etc of 1 or more TL's higher.

Now, perhaps all the above seems more complicated than just building the mecha as characters, but what it gives are good guidelines for how a mecha should function, rather than saying "Here's 500 character points, build an SM+4 or +5 mecha."

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Ketsuban

I wasn't aware supers tended to have Gundams. Generally they use their own superpowers to save the day. The closest you can really get is Roger Smith (Big O) who tries to be Bruce Wayne and succeeds only in being a chauvinistic dork.

Maybe, maybe not, but nothing says you're required to use the gadgets-as-advantages rules to simulate four-color American supers only

And this is the contentious bit. There's three ways of doing it - gadget limitations, Spaceships, and vehicles-as-characters.

There's also a Pyramid article, which expands your options a little. But yeah, if you want to do mecha-as-standard-military-tech, then I'd really like to see GURPS Vehicles, or possibly GURPS Mecha 4e.

[Verjigorm]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I've been toying with it as well, but I've run into some problems when I use it.

I can see two reasons to build vehicles. Either you're trying to model real vehicles, or you're building hypothetical vehicles. For real vehicles, it's actually pretty easy to come up with stats. I could probably stat up an Abrams for you, if you wanted. You can just study up on wikipedia for the Rolled Homogenous Armor equivalent for DR, and then look at the top speed and acceleration and mass and so on, and pretty soon, you have your vehicle.

For hypothetical vehicles, we have two rough kinds. The first are vehicles-by-fiat. What is the cost of the Death Star? Nobody cares. How much damage does its cannon deal? Enough. What is its DR? Irrelevant, as nothing is going to kill it without doing some crazy quest first. So for these, vehicles is also pointless.

That leaves hypothetical vehicles where we want a consistent and logical system behind them. Pulver once called Vehicles "The technological infrastructure book" and that strikes me as correct. If we decide that our civilization has access to realistic fusion power, what sorts of vehicles does that allow and what sort does that prohibit? Given weapons of this power and nature, what sort of armor would you need to defend against it, and so on.

The problem with this is that GURPS 4e hypothetical technologies are very different from GURPS 3e hypothetical technologies. Ultra-Tech changed considerably between the two editions, and so I find it of limited usefulness to me. On the other hand, Spaceships isn't exactly all that useful to me either. So I find myself adrift, simply waiting for a book that has yet to materialize (and might never be finished)

This is largely what I used and still use Vehicles for. Even if I know my players will never encounter a Panzer* except as a prop piece, it's handy to know how the Panzer's behave, so I can describe them properly and have context for them in the world. In this case, I eventually found that a fairly good sized fusion reactor and multiple redundant turbofans for lift, coupled with some pure thrust fans, gave me a vehicle that could hit 500mph in flight(and gain enough lift from it's body and canards to stay airborne), but when it slowed down it has to use much more of it's power to stay aloft. It also let me benchmark the armor and payload of those panzers, So I knew if the autocannon carried by the power-suit troopers can damage it or not.

Did I ever use the vehicle stats? Nope. But it was good to have the comparison so that I could describe the effect of the Panzers smugglers were using in the campaign.

*Shadowrun slang for armored VTOL vehicles that serve as a sort of mix between a light tank/afv and a helicopter gunship