Re: [Spaceships] Stat a Viper Mk II & VII
 

Raptor

Front
1 Armor (Nanocomposite) dDR 5
2 Control Room (pilot)
3-6 Passenger Seating (8 seats worth of limited life support)

Central
1 Armor (Nanocomposite) dDR 5
2 Cargo
3 ECM
4 Battery (Major) [unpowered]
5 Sensor Array (Multi Purpose)
6 Fuel Cell
0! Contragravity Lifter

Rear
1 Armor (Nanocomposite) dDR 5
2-3 Tylium Torch*
4-6 Fuel Tank
0! FTL Drive

Options: SM5, TL11^, Streamlined, Stealth, Winged, Artificial Gravity, Gravity compensation

Based on Fusion Torch or Antimatter Torch for required performance.

M$ 3.9 if based on Fusion Torch, 5.7 if based on Antimatter Torch.

Re: [Spaceships] Stat a Viper Mk II & VII
 

Maybe it's actually like one of those Metalstorm weapons? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm

Most BS weapons seemed like high rate of fire pulse weapons to me, like maybe a Klingon disrupter but rapid fire. Just as easy to say the 20mm casing was actually some kind of pulse battery that is ejected after say a 100 shots (for the sake of the fluff).

Re: [Spaceships] Stat a Viper Mk II & VII
 

According to specs 20 rounds per second. According to the movies that could match. Not exactly high rate of fire. Look at what modern machine uns do, and you will see you don't need somethin like metal storm.

Nice ;) Comments anyone? How many passeners does that thing carry? (I dont have my space rules here at the moment)

Re: [Spaceships] Stat a Viper Mk II & VII
 

6 passengers, and one pilot.

Re: [Spaceships] Stat a Viper Mk II & VII
 

A little more than in the series, if I remember correctly. You can always argue, though, that some passenger seats are removed under normal conditions for additional electronic capacity - not so much sensors, but recording and analysis equipment. In most scenarios you will want to collect a ton of information in a raptor for later analysis.

Nice little hugger, though ;)

Btw., anyone has an idea how to do the Galactica? Let's not get too focused on generic details (i.e. the scope we did it so far is great), but I have doubts how to do her in the SpaceShips system.

In particular, it looks a little like we will run out of systems. We have, in addition to the "make a ship" systems:
* Hangar space.
* We need additional fuel and ammunition reserves for the fighters.
* Armor.
* A main weapon that is at least a major battery - her forward facing main cannon is pretty powerfull.
* Quite some anti fighter weapons (one or two tertiary batteries?)
* Another major battery with missiles - supposedly loaded with Space to Ground missiles for bombardement.

Not blaming SpaceShips here, but the Galactica BattleStar role always seemed to be pretty unfocused. Doing everything, and nothing really good. Not like today's arcraft carriers that have no main guns. I fear two specialized battle stars would just eat three of them alive (imagine one only with fighters, standing behind, and one focused on heary anti ship weapons).

Re: [Spaceships] Stat a Viper Mk II & VII
 

Does anyone have dimensions for the Galactica? The only informal mention I found put it at SM+17! The problem may be too much space.

Re: [Spaceships] Stat a Viper Mk II & VII
 

People keep writing up these stats as tech level 11^, which just doesn't make sense to me. For the most part, Galactica definitely doesn't seem that much more advanced than our own society, and FTL is superscience, allowing it to appear at any tech level. I'd place them at tech level 10, maybe even 9.

Here's how I've modeled the engines. A lot of this is guess work because we haven't heard much of anything about the STL engines (other than the fact that they run on tylium). Tylium has been described as a substance with a tremendous energy density, "half a million gigajoules per kilogram" according to the Battlestar Wiki. Given that, it makes sense to me to use the HEDM Chemical Rocket as the main engines for a Viper. I realize that this would likely give it a low delta-v, but I haven't seen anything in the show that indicated to me otherwise. The Viper seems like a craft designed for acceleration, not delta-v. Indeed, when it leaves the ship, accelerated by a launch tube, indicating that it needs a bit of help to get up to a good operational speed. However, it seems to be the case that every ship in Battlestar Galactica uses tylium for fuel, and HEDM rockets clearly don't model Battlestars or Raptors well... unless you assume that tylium can also be processed into nuclear pellets. The level of power previously mentioned is about 81% that of deuterium fusion (according to the Battlestar Wiki) so it makes perfect sense to me that tylium could be manufactured into pellets that would power a pulse drive. So, if you power a Viper with an HEDM rocket, a Raptor with a Pulse Drive, and a Battlestar with an Advanced Pulse Drive, you start to get performance ratings that make sense given what we've seen.

As for FTL fuel, I would just assume that Raptors are too small to hold a nuclear reactor and therefore use a fuel cell. The FTL drive doesn't need fuel, the fuel cell does. That makes a lot of sense to me given that the fleet made around 230 jumps in 33 without any chance to refuel. Anyway, that's how I would model the ships engines.

Re: [Spaceships] Stat a Viper Mk II & VII
 

Sorry, no. This could have operational advantages. If you launch the fighter in passive mode, you dont have to cool down the launch tube and get rid of exhausts before putting in the next fighter. Also stress on the material is lower.

As you may want to launch as many fighters as fast as possible in combat oerations, it may make more sense to launch them via a launch tube than under their own power.

You do not want to just throw them out, because sometimes you may want them to clear the close space of the battlestar as fast as possible. Remeber the scene where the Galactica crash-jumped into atmosphere? For those not knowing - the Galactica went onto a crash course down into the atmosphere, jumping out the last moment. They used the showckwafe the armored ship generated to distract defenders and were deploying the vipers while going down into the atmosphere.

All this can give you good operational reasons to use launch tubes.

Regarding the engine form, I would say that the effectiveness of engines seems to scale up with their size. Maybe there are different forms to deal with the fuel, but some of the mechanisms arej ust too large to fit into a small fighter. OR you simply get laret duration, but have a problem generating hih delta V. In the Viper you need a higher delta V, so you trade range (as in fuel efficiency) and use a less efficient but more acceleration generating form.

Re: [Spaceships] Stat a Viper Mk II & VII
 

The fighter's fuel and ammunition gets folded into the hanger space (until it hits 5% all by itself in addition to what can be included in the hangar).

The weapons aren't really a problem. You just split a single tertiary battery between the AAA and the missiles. Neither comes close to the 5% mark even with magazines. The Main Battery makes up only one more system at most.

The Galactica is not heavily armed by the standards of Spaceships. A main battery on Galactica would need to look like a turret on a WWII Battleship in relative terms.

Remember every system needs to be 5% of the ship's total mass. It doesn't matter how distinct or seperate it looks. If it's not even close to 5% it's part of another system or just handwaved.

It's a very common problem with converting to Spaceships from fiction/movies/etc that details keep adding up. Everything that can get documented looks like it wants to be another system and Spaceships just doesn't work that way.

For all it's' virtues, Spaceships has a hard cap on the level of detail it can handle and that cap is set at 5% of total mass per system.

Re: [Spaceships] Stat a Viper Mk II & VII
 

Like most TV SF socially the people appear at most TL9 so that the actors and society can be identified with. All the TL advancement is saved for the background hardware. They have different TLs in different fields.

Looking at the four fields of TL (G p512) the Colonials appear approximately:
TL11^ or 12^ in transportation tech (manned interstellar space flight is a _minimum_ of TL11 - though superscience blurs this).
TL9 in weapons tech
TL9 or 10 or 11 in power tech - it's hard to tell
TL9 in biotech

Cylons appear TL11 in at least one aspect of biotech (living machines), but are otherwise similar to the Colonials.

For baselining compare it to say TL10 Transhuman Space. The Colonials are not as advanced in biotech, were obviously once at least as advanced in AIs (to build the original intelligent robot warrior Cylons), it's not clear where they are with power tech, and are way more advanced in their transportation TL.

I would put them generally at TL9 with TL11^ or even TL12^ transportation/space technology.

I would just give the fighters High thrust versions of the same engines that the other craft use.

A single HEDM engine would use a tank of HEDM in 40 seconds. I think you have to go superscience to get something workable - possibly including a pseudo velocity component?

As an aside: I would guess that the origin of the word Tylium is from a contraction of Helium Three (Threelium, Threlium or Telium).

Seems reasonable.