GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

David Pulver wrote another book! He helpfully titled it GURPS Spaceships 5: Exploration and Colony Spacecraft so that people would know what it's about. And he's such a great guy that he decided to give it to us to sell rather than fawning over it in a cave while muttering about how precious it is. So lets all show Pulver what a swell guy we think he is by throwing lots and lots of money at him.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldy Going
 

Bought it the moment I saw it.

I did notice a little error in it - looks like whoever did the final layout forgot to update the internal page references. There's lot of (see p. 00)s around.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldy Going
 

Money already transiting at a mix of sublight and light speed!

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldy Going
 

Oh, dear. In that case, I can wait for version 1.1...

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldy Going
 

*shrug* It's not a big deal, and if you buy now you'll get the revised edition for free whenever it's released. One of the many benefits of PDFs!

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldy Going
 

Well, I don't need this PDF yet. (Spaceships 7 is the one I'll buy the day it comes out. This one is a "nice to have", not a "must have".)

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

Thanks for the heads-up... we'll see if we can't get those pesky p. 00's killed in the next day or so!

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldy Going
 

Ditto on being anxious for Spaceships 7, but I scooped up 5 as as soon as I saw it anyways. Oh wait, is 7 the one for alien spaceships? That's the one I'm really looking forward to.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

I didn't think that this would be one of my favorites of the series, but it is. David went into a lot of detail on TL8-to-early-TL9 realistic moon and Mars exploration. There's everything one needs to run an early-days-of-system-exploration campaign or to run a full-on Star Trek "boldly going where no one has gone before" (not that the show focused on that all that much) campaign.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

Spaceships 5 and Ryan Wolfe's excellent new Future Armada on the same day?!

Surely, my spaceship cup runneth over.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldy Going
 

Me too - and only then did I check the playtest credits. Then again, it´s for a good purpose.

And it would have saved me a little bit of time if the pdf had been named like the previous ones.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldy Going
 

Alien and superscience ships, yes. I'm assuming it'll have the rules for building a spaceworthy flying car...

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

Books 5 and 6 are the two I, personally, really wanted. Book 5 has almost everything I was hoping it would - it's missing fast, realistic intersteller colony ships, unfortunately, and I'd have really liked a description of the type of things a colony would need besides '10,000 people'. Things like how many people of a number of occupations that might be required, or what type of equipment they might take with them, things like that would have been really great, but unfortunately aren't in there:( Really, no actual colony-making rules are in it, which sadden me.

The exploration rules, on the other hand, are top-notch. Love them lots, though I'm not sure the assumption that radio waves can be easily detected at intersteller distances with really bad sensors is true. The rules basically say a TL8 sensor array appropriately sized for an SM+0 ship (so actually massing 10 pounds) would be able to trivially easily detect radio waves coming from Alpha Centauri. Actually, they say the same sensor could detect radio waves coming from anything up to two parsecs away, again, with no modifier.

That just doesn't make much sense, especially since SETI itself says that we couldn't detect our own radio waves out past 0.3 light years distance. SETI's estimates for the Arecibo radio telescope suggest it can only detect very narrow-band signals with transmitter strength on the order of giga to terrawatts at any useful intersteller distance.

Mass media signals simply would not be detected at all at intersteller distances unless they were using ridiculously overpowered transmitters transmitting on very odd bandwidths. You'd only be able to resolve UHF TV pictures up to 2.5 AU away with an Arecebo-like reciever, and the carrier wave only up to 0.3 light years.

SETI says that only that high intensity narrowband emitions will be detectable beyond 1LY, and on Earth that's primarily narrowband radar. However, I have doubts even narrowband radar would be detectable at interstellar distances simply because even then you need gigawatts of power just to transmit to 5LY away.

Source: http://setifaq.org/faq.html#1.2.3

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

Woot! Gloat!

There will be a rules-compliant design of the Nekaut-class Survey frigate in time for tomorrow's game!

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

I bought both of them too! I'd never noticed this 'Future Armada' thing but the Orion one I got was pretty sweet. It has all the maps for a huuuuge spaceship, which is great for me because I like using Maptools for maps, so I can load it in, give it some topography for vision blockage, etc, and voila!

I love spaceship maps and I've never owned any traveller core books, but I have bought several Traveller 3e ship books for all the diagrams and stats. I might have to look into more of these Future Armada things (and usually I just buy GURPS from e23).

As for Spaceships 5, exploration was always the main theme of my homebrew Space campaign, so this is one I've been waiting for! I'll read it over once I finish Maptoolsing-up my gigantic fighter carrier...

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

And, as promised, the corrected file is now online. All those pesky p.00's should be killed now. Sorry about that, folks!

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

I've been trying to convince a Trekker friend to play GURPS and the PALOMAR-Class Exploration Cruiser (pp 12-13) is pretty obviously a TNG-era Federation ship. I've been telling him Star Trek would be easy to do, now I can prove it.

Now if we can only figure out how to stat phasers... (Or as I vote toss them out as unrealistic and make my Federation more realistic that Roddenberry's...)

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

Yes, I do the same thing. The whole FA series is excellent, highly recommended, and the ships generally seem to scale quite well with the system in Spaceships.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldy Going
 

That would be nice. I actually would like to see rules for adding a wheeled drivetrain to a spaceship design. So I could design a starbug type thingy like in Red Dwarf. Also having some quick and dirty rules for designing Wheeled APC's and even simple ground cars based around the Spaceship design template would be nice as well.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

How much of the content in this PDF expands the build options? New modules , new build/design options?

How much is new rules?

So far, I've been rather disappointed by the low number of new modules and systems in PDFs 2, 3 and 4. I want more options.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

There are no new modules or build options, just new rules. There's about fourteen pages of new rules and 24 pages of spacecraft. The closest thing to a new 'build option' are the sensor drones/probes. It also mentions nanostasis, growth tanks, relativistic travel and time dilation, the small upper stage, and a likely mars mission scenario in the 24 pages of spacecraft. Probably adds up to one extra page of rules and one less pages of spaceships.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

I always figured phasers were like disintegrators, but with a stun option.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

What options are you lacking with the main rules? The intent of Spaceships 2-8 has always been "mainly new ships, with a few new rules, and maybe a design option or two that doesn't have general appeal." The reason for this is that all the design options that are generally useful should have been included in the original GURPS Spaceships! To publish a core book and then say, "But to get all the systems you might need in a game, you really have to get each supplement," would be kind of weasely.

So no, SS5 doesn't include any new modules, because there simply aren't any modules that are only useful on an exploration or colony ship. Instead, you get lots of rules on system exploration, world mapping, linguistic analysis, first contact, etc., along with a new type of "ammunition" -- the sensor probe missile.

And BTW, disappointed with even SS4's amount of new system options? That one had a lot of 'em! Again, though, they were all systems and options that were mainly useful for building fighters and mecha. About the only generically useful rule was the one about area-effect ECMs, though that's still mainly a "fighters in formation" trope.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

Don't forget the bomb-pumped lasers, R.PK! Those were in Spaceships 4, too, and are pretty much never depicted as used by fighters (though they are depicted as significantly underpowered in anything but an anti-fighter role compared to the bomb-pumped lasers in fiction).

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

Yeah, but, again, that is a fighter-specific rule, since it's intended primarily to combat fighters.

I'm not saying that no SS supplement will ever have generally useful rules in them. Quite the contrary -- I think that there's something useful in every SS book released to date! But it's nothing that you should literally need unless your game focuses on the topic of the SS book in question. For example, if trading and transport are a major part of your game, then you really need SS2; the rules in there are invaluable and you'll almost certainly do better with them than just winging it. But if trading and transport are not major factors in your game, then you don't need SS2 -- but that doesn't mean it won't still have plenty of stuff that you'll be able to use in your game.

(Personally, I like the new rules and options, but speaking as a time-beleaguered GM, the pre-made spaceships are a huge draw for me. One or two quick tweaks to an existing design is a lot faster than building it myself, and anything that simplifies my game prep is a Good Thing.)

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

More options appear in Book 7. (As the series went on, I realized there was a demand for that, so we altered book 7 to cover it.)

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

What new options do you want?

So far I have been pleased that most of the build options are in the build book, not scattered among several books. There was nothing in the merchant vessels book that you need unless you are playing a merchants campaign, nothing in the warships book that you need unless you are playing a space combat campaign, nothing in the exploration book that you need unless you are playing an exploration campaign, and you don't need four books open on your desk to build a ship. The series is properly modular, and I think that is good.

Putting ship modules and systems in the later issues of the series would be, by itself, a bad thing. It would make the later PDFs into more of individual "must haves", but at the price of making the complete set harder to use, and of making it impractical to do what I have done and been pleased to do: skipping issues that specialise in things I'm not interested in. It would make the entire series less useful and more expensive.

When Spaceships came out I gave it a glowing review. Wouldn't have been able to do that if I had to wait over a year to get a complete set of the build rules. Spaceships has been a considerable success, with excellent sales. If it had come out lacking significant modules and systems I don't think it would have done so well. Early buyers would have been disappointed and given bad word-of-mouth. You wouldn't be able to begin to use it until about now, it couldn't possible start to sell well until it was reasonably complete. But by now its brand name would be mud.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

I think in general, I mostly just want more specialied modules, including versions of existing modules. Rules to differentiate primitive space vehicles from advanced space vehicles would also be nice (e.g. in terms of life support - life support at TL7 has got to be bulkier and more expensive than life support at TL12), and both those kinds of rules would be an excellent fit for supplements.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

I liked the probe rules; I was working on a 'first in' scout ship design and had put two missile tubes on it assuming probes would be fired from them. The probe rules were very timely for me as a result.
Also, all the exploration and contact tasks are very handy. I liked how they were laid out like the abstract combat system's phase tasks. The consistency of the overall series is very nice.
Next project: Drop cans full of hot apple pie! (self-baking).

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

A "higher realism" supplement of that sort could be interesting. It is not covered in any of the planned books - Spaceships 7 has a few realistic systems, but is mostly superscience and divergent technology - but it might be useful for some future expansion or Pyramid article.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

That's good! Glad it's useful to you.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

I haven't bought SS5 yet, but it's a good thing that it at least does have some kind of probe and probe launcher system. That's rather useful for scout ships.

Re: GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going
 

The kicker is it also gives rules for using the probes as improvised missiles in a pinch. This could be handy for a desperate, outgunned scout ship trying to make a run for it.