Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

True, but if they only included the "core" volumes of the DF series, and added a campaign world and adventures, then ... maybe. And that's still a big maybe.

(I've no doubt SJGames knows what they're doing. If a big DF book won't be profitable, then I'm happy with mini pdfs (which I assume are profitable).)

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

The reason they're doing these little PDFs is because they know the market is fragmented. Of ten customers that bought the core book, 5 like the idea of space battleships, 7 like the idea of space carriers, and so on.

Of the ten customers who already bought the parts of the series that they already wanted (and thus, didn't have to buy stuff they DON'T want), maybe 1 will buy a revamped, combined, and expanded monster PDF.

It's not worth the effort. SJ Games prefers the "a la carte" system of PDFs.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

SJGames' customers prefer the "a la carte" system. SJGames prefers whatever system will make it money without compromising quality.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

I'm looking forward to this one. I hope it's released soon.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

I just finished the first draft of Book 7: Strange and Alien Spacecraft.

I am now about to start on Book 8.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Is that the TS spaceship book?

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Yes. Book 8 is Transhuman Spaceships.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Sweeeeet. Been waiting for that one.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

My campaign starts in a week. Whom do I have to bribe in the Production Department?

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Chances of my getting Spaceships 5 in time for my birthday are sinking slowly in the west. Any chance of Christmas?

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

It hasn't slipped at all . . . Spaceships 5 is still on-schedule for its slated October release.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

I'll give you David's Phone # for $10

Don't call before 8AM or after 10PM otherwise he'll name something
bad in the next book after you...

;)


>

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

The phone directory has under-bid you.

Something bad is always named after me.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

We out here in Consumerland never know when e23 releases are slated for. They aren't announced as forthcoming releases.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Heh.

For those unaware, Brett's last name happens to be Evill.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Fnord.

Spoil a perfectly good perplexing obscure statement, why don't you?

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Heh.

You're saying it wasn't a good joke?

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

There's loads of stuff slated for this year. It kind of scares me how much stuff that really is . . . Probably explains the sleep-deprived feeling and headaches.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Any chance you could start putting e23 books with the upcoming releases?

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

You might want to see this thread I started in the e23 forum which has a compilation of 'expected' GURPS releases for the rest of 2009.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

It's an off-handed joke, something Loren Wiseman had mentioned
being awoken in the middle of the night at some Traveller Convention
by an all-night gaming group who needed to know the color of Jumpspace

"We need an official ruling...Let's call Loren!"

< laugh> that one always makes me crackup.

>

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

At a guess, probably not. Remember, when REAL books are in production, they have to schedule time with the printers and arrange for transport. Thus, they have a one or two month advance notice as to when the books hit the shelves.

With e23 PDFs, they don't have to be printed and shipped, they only have to be uploaded. Thus, they don't have the benefit of an advance notice.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Indeed. The gap between " 'kay, book's done" and " 'kay, book's up for sale" is so small as to be terrifying. I wouldn't expect to start seeing PDFs announced ahead of time.

Besides, that would mean making up a new procedure, and that would be, like, hard, and stuff.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

It's October already! Are we there yet?

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Moooooooommmm!! Brett's on my side!!!!

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Kromm's blog mentioned Spaceships 5 being set for release in the first half of October. Since it wasn't released today, I assume that means either next Thursday or the Thursday after.

I was hoping it'd be released today, but my hopes were all dashed:( Oh well - a few more weeks shouldn't be too much a burden.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Hey were "finally" getting Vorkosagan......

So it looks like is gonna be a good month....

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Woot! Got it!

I'll print it out after the first corrected version comes up.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Reading it now.

I must say, I'm surprised that the Enceladus nuclear-pulse explorer wasn't given a magsail. Spaceships clearly indicated that as a possibility, and magsails are around at TL9. And you'd save a lot on armor, as well as having a secondary propulsion system.

As well, you should be able to manage a Mars Mission using a TL7 nuclear pulse drive, which contradicts the statement made in the Mars Mission box. Of course, that means extensive use of nukes, which tends to be frowned upon in the current political climate.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

I'm betting this a Spaceships conversion of the Advanced Interplanetary Ship that Freeman Dyson and the rest of the Project Orion crew dreamed would be operating in the distant future of 2009.

The Palomar-class seems to be a Star Trek: The Next Generation Galaxy-class starship. The Odyssey, despite the absence of a homicidal AI, looks like the Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Any other easter eggs anyone has noticed?

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

For that, I would have preferred to have seen a TL8 design - something suitable for the Messiah from 1998's Deep Impact, and an example of what we could build right now if we needed to (politics aside).

I'm not that familiar with Blake's Seven; but the quote given makes it highly likely that the Alcatraz is supposed to be the prison transport from which they escaped at the start of the show. Likewise, the Charon-Class Sleeper Ship could very well be the Botany Bay from Star Trek.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Amusingly, if it is they made a slight error. According to Memory Alpha there were 72 augments in Cryogenic sleep canisters aboard the Botany Bay (the exact amount the Charon has), but 12 more died when their canisters failed, so it had a compliment of at least 84 Hibernation chambers.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

This is one of the times the simplifying assumptions of Spaceships collide with physical reality. An Orion drive is something that's difficult to build small, but gets better with size. A larger ship has a bigger blast plate that catches more of the pulse bomb's blast, and larger nuclear devices are more efficient as well. So we probably could build a huge Orion Drive ship right now, but a smaller one we could not.

In my try at converting the Advanced Interplanetary Ship, I used TL8 materials and a TL10 fission pulse drive to match the ISP that the designers planned for.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

[QUOTE=tratclif;864392]This is one of the times the simplifying assumptions of Spaceships collide with physical reality. An Orion drive is something that's difficult to build small, but gets better with size. /QUOTE]

Note that SPACESHIPS requires a minimum DR for the rear armor, and it is easier to have a higher DR at less mass for big ships, so the performance of Orion drive vessels does tend to scale better with larger size.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Other SPACESHIPS news:

I submitted the final draft of GURPS Spaceships 7 and the first draft of GURPS Spaceships 8 on Monday.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

That's a good point. Since the Orion drive takes up a HULL space in the Rear Hull, that only leaves 5 spaces for armor to hit the minimum dDR 50. That means the smallest ship that can do that at TL7 is an US SM +9 or SL SM +10. This drops by 1 SM per TL, which means you can't have SM +5 ships with Orion drives until TL11!

Magsails at TL9 change that, of course, but then we're talking about mag-Orion drives, which are technically different animals.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

All good news, though that pretty much wraps up the current plans for the Spaceships series. Might I humbly suggest a GURPS Spaceships 9: Traveller? Covering both the Interstellar Wars and GURPS 3e Eras would be nice.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Hey! Good idea!

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Agree, even if I almost never play Traveller games. Not sure how it'd go after they put together a spaceship design system specifically for Traveller: ISW, though.

Oh: And finish Vehicle Design System and Weapon Design System first!

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Well, the ISW design system is significantly different than the Spaceships system. If we're talking GURPS Spaceships 9: Traveller it should be built using the Spaceships rules, with modifications necessary to model the Traveller universe (specific rules for Jump Drives, Meson Guns, etc.).

OTOH, if the book were going to be GURPS Traveller: ISW Spaceships I'd expect you'd use the design system from that book to design the ships.

As I rather like the rules for GURPS Spaceships, I'd much rather see the former than the later.

I believe Vehicle Design System is done, it's just stuck in editing hell.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Nah. Work on stuff that SJ Games will publish.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

But I want them to be published:(

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Primarily an editing issue, but since it's been quite some time since the draft was written, it is conceivable that several sections might benefit from judicious rewriting to ensure component or thematic compatibility with later or upcoming GURPS books (for example, making sure it agrees with LOW-TECH). Kromm has discussed other issues at various times. As I transition out of SPACESHIPS and other projects, I hope to be available to assist with anything that needs doing, but I may have a thing or two do first.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

A formal, official SPACESHIPS book would be a tricky conversion, though: since every +2 SM is a 10 fold mass (and presumably volume) increase, it's hard to maintain some of the canonical relationships of ship classes. E.g., 400, 600, 800, and 1000 d-ton ships would blur together. This is an issue because the ships have 30+ years of familiarity and people are attached to them (and they're often depicted in extent deck plans) and many adventures and economic edifices have apparently been constructed around their precise sizes and exact costs. On a less formal level, I did do a JTAS article suggesting rule-of-thumb conversions, and others have also taken a stab at it.

It *would* be possible to get much closer using the same system but with a somewhat finer grain of hull sizes, but that would be incompatible with the existing series, though it might make a fine system for a dedicated Traveller revision.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Me too. actually...

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Me, too.
But if the options are a) getting the book as-is sometime in the next 3 years or b) getting it revised and taking into account books published after it getting into editing and it actually coming out sometime in the next 10 years, I'd pick b).
For me, its essential, but I want it to be as compatible to the *-tech books (and others, where necessary) as possible because of it being that essential.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Wanting SJGames to publish a supplement doesn't make much difference as to whether SJGames will publish that supplement, as any Car Wars or In Nomine fan can tell you (often at length)...

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Hi,

I'd really like to see CAR WARS Compendium 2e up on e23. I'd also like to see a new edition of Ogre.

Thank you,

A Black Plastic Grognard

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Here's a thought.

When the GURPS Spaceships series is done, I'd like a cumulative index. It shouldn't be to hard to do with a world processor: copy, paste, find, replace, and sort would do most of the work.

Then I could print out each of the different volumes of the series on a different coloured paper and bind them all together with the cumulative index, and I would have a handy GURPS Spaceships omnibus.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

If you could cut and paste the indexes to respective text files, I could right a Perl script to combine them and reformat the page number references in a coherent way. Any good Unix nerd would be able to do it with a single command line instruction. ;)

Let's see if that works with Spaceships 1.... Yes. They cut and paste just fine. The only minor hitch is that you'll want to get rid of the unhelpful line breaks-- probably getting rid of all carriage returns that occur just before a line that starts with a number or lowercase letter would work for 99% of the cases.

Sounds like a fun project. :D

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

So do we prefix page numbers with volume numbers in Roman numerals?

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Bingo.

And name the text files with the prefix you want to use.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Is there an easy way to make a generational ship like the Magellan class tow pre-made space stations?
Also, no medium between 300 and 3 million ton space stations?

Anyone want to create a 10,000 ton TL10 space station for me please?
Any help would be much appreciated.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

The code to make a comprehensive index for e23 PDF's is here.

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

Actually, I hammered out some rules at one point for extending the current Spaceships rules to allow for finer granularity; they work rather well, and are fully compatible with the current system*. My goal at the time was aimed at allowing the creation of a wider variety of mecha, not just 10-ton, 30-ton, and 100-ton designs; but I don't see why you couldn't apply the same concept to larger ships - and a Spaceships X: Traveller designs supplement would be a perfect excuse to publish them.

In fact, doing this would be much easier; for the Mecha-related stuff, I put in a tweak to the "roughly box-shaped hull" assumption of the Spaceships design system so as to better allow for more bizarre shapes (such as humanoid hulls, with systems in the limbs as well as the body). That tweak, and the issues that go along with it, wouldn't be needed for a Traveller-based supplement.

The core mechanism isn't too different from the way that Spaceships 4 extended the design range down to SM +4, except that it interpolates between existing entries rather than extrapolating from the end. The secret is to allow decimal SM adjustments, in steps of 0.2 rather than 1 - and to apply these intermediate steps to systems as well as the hull. With this revision, hull sizes between SM +6 and SM +8 allow for 100 tons, 125 tons, 150 tons, 200 tons, 250 tons, 300 tons, 400 tons, 500 tons, 600 tons, 800 tons, and 1000 tons, not just 100, 300, and 1000 tons. If you need more granularity than that, I could revise the decimal adjustments to allow for SM increments of 0.1, which would bring 700- and 900-ton hulls into the fold, and would result in hull sizes being able to vary by roughly 10% in mass, as opposed to the current three-fold granularity.

* - well, not quite fully compatible; but the handful of incompatibilities had nothing to do with improving the granularity of the system. They dealt more with the allowance for subassemblies and an option for variable system sizes - both matters about which a Traveller supplement wouldn't need to worry.

s

Re: GURPS Spaceships Series
 

I made a post a bit back that has all the formulas for deriving statistics and prices for each system (including conventional guns and missiles, though I don't remember if I did energy weapons or not) given any arbitrary ship size. I back-calculated them, so they might not all be perfect, but if not they're still pretty close.