Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

Nope. I'm not releasing a new PDF this week. It's too much work.

Weeeeeeeell... Okay, since you asked nicely, here's GURPS Spaceships 6: Mining and Industrial Spacecraft. It's got spaceships an' asteroids an' stuff! Cool, huh?

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

Seen it, bought it, updated my GURPS 2009 release speculation thread - very cool.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

Pg. 8, under Solar Panel Satellite: transmitterss

Pg. 9, under Space Factory: providign

Still browsing.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

I believe errata should go to the errata coordinator...

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

I'm kind of disappointed in this one, even though it was the one I was most looking forward to. For one thing, it's only half the size of the other entries in the Spaceships series.

It's also completely missing any mention of how to go from mining raw asteroids -> building actual ships, something I was really hoping for. Fabricators require some amount of parts, but nothing's ever mentioned on how to go about getting those parts made. I suppose you could go Raw Materials->Parts->Finished Ship, but then you're hung up on how much the raw materials are worth and if they're the right type.

I'll probably just say to assume you need twice as much raw ore as your ship's loaded mass and that it takes 2/5 as many days to fabricate parts as it would take to build your ship to turn that raw ore into the parts your fabricator needs, basically assuming the parts are all SM+2 or more.


Also: There appears to be an error in the PDF. On page 5, production times for spaceships are said to be able to be sped up in two different places, but they give different costs to reduce the time by the same amount. The first paragraph says paying twice as much reduces time to 2/3, while the second paragraph says paying three times as much reduces time to 2/3.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

The SPS (p8) gets a special place in my heart as a disappointment for labeling the power beams in joules instead of something actually meaningful...

But it also seems to have a genuine bug. It has a spinal power beam which can only be pointed forward, and a rear-mounted power beam that can't. There's no way for it to point all its beams at the ground station.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

It clearly states that the beams are just 'representing' the actual power beam. It doesn't actually have one spinal mount laser and three major mount lasers - it has one big power beam array that masses 30% of the entire station.

Also: If you want to convert those joules to watts, just divide by twenty. It fires that many joules every twenty seconds by default, so divide by twenty and pow! you've got x joules/second, also known as watts.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

It's an abstraction -- another option (trading one "error" for another) would have been to represent it as two spinal batteries. Again, that's not legal for actual weapons, but that's not what this is -- it's just a big ol' power beam with no actual offensive capability.

(David could have written up a new, 6-system monstrosity for this one satellite, but that would've really been overkill. Especially considering that it's mainly just a bullet-point on the description of what this thing does.)

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

Yeah, $8 is really too much for what you're getting here. I ended up buying it anyway, and it turned out to be barely worth it, but I don't think I'll get the remaining two if they're similarly priced.

Indeed, seems sort of a strange omission that a product about "mining and industrial ships" has three pages of rules on the latter (which were quite useful, BTW), but none on the former.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

So far, they're shaping up to be considerably longer than Spaceships 6 was -- this one just happened to end up as the "runt of the litter".

Actually, there are detailed rules for gas giant mining on p. 21 and general information about asteroid mining on p. 16. There's also rules for space debris removal on p. 12 -- all useful stuff which might be overlooked if you only skim the beginning for rules.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

There are no rules that actually let you use asteroid mining, though. There's a good amount of stuff on getting He3, sure, but that's it. Asteroid mining is at best a background element with this book - you can say 'there's an asteroid mining station, and these are its stats' but you can't say 'that asteroid mining station can use its ore to do x', because there are no rules at all for that. There's nothing about how much money you can make mining asteroid ore, what types of stuff you can build with asteroid miners and an industrial ship, nothing like that.

Asteroid mining isn't really covered at all by this book. It also references two other books if you want more/better rules on asteroid mining - Space and THS: Deep Beyond. Space is close to useless - it just tells you a few types of asteroids and some very general statements regarding them, like 'carbonacious asteroids have carbon and sometimes water ice'. I don't know about Deep Beyond - I remember looking through it once trying to find asteroid mining rules and couldn't find any, but I don't own it.

Still, if there are already books with stuff about asteroid mining around it should have been easy enough to stick some of that information in Spaceships 6. There was certainly plenty of room for it!

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

Sad to say, asteroid mining *itself* isn't really very interesting!

It is a legitimate industrial enterprise, and its ships and stations make useful targets for pirates, industrial disputes, sites for alien monster infestation, etc., which is one reason to feature them.

But actually mining asteroids is about as interesting as mining iron on Earth. That is, not really. (The rules in GURPS Spaceships tell you how much ore you can process already and the cost of mining modules, etc.)

The economics are also unappealing for gaming. The average big asteroid has at least a few billion dollars (at current prices) worth of valuable metals (platinum, etc.). So either the PCs end up super-rich or the rare metals economy crashes and people in orbit are using platinum and iridium for sewer pipe (well, electronics, etc.), which is probably a better default assumption at TL9+. There are many thousands of these asteroids in our own belt, and they're easily detected. The problems of asteroid mining, in large part, involve (a) inventing the technology to build spaceships cheaply that can reach asteroids and (b) going there, digging up asteroid dirt or dust (fairly homogeneous, no real nuggets) and separating it. Not much fun. An asteroid itself is also a fairly benign environment as space goes. Unless something breaks or you accidentally fall into a rock shredder, there's nothing really other than do a fairly mundane job and keep the systems maintained... There's probably a reason GURPS Oil Rigs hasn't yet appeared, and asteroid mines, aside from being in space, are even less interesting than something taking volatile gas out of the ocean floor in a hurricane-ridden environment (which is why we spend a bit more time on gas giant mining).

Moreover, since just about any metallic asteroid of which there are plenty is going to have useful stuff, prospecting is not exactly a thrill a minute either. (In any case, the rules for geological prospecting are covered in book 6.)

It is possible to imagine more interesting asteroid mining by making up rare things to find (cf. GURPS Space Unobtanium, which the book references) but this more or less campaign dependent - it requires making decisions about what strange things might exist outside of or on the edge of normal physics in a particular campaign, or using alternate science (e.g., "asteroid belts are really the exploded 10th planet made of superdense core material"). In which case you aren't really doing normal asteroid mining.

Most thrilling asteroid mining plots in science fiction are about (a) bar fights at Miner's rest (b) the corrupt mining company store and/or setting up your own store (cf Rolling Stones) or (c) the asteroid miners revolt and use their mass drivers and what not to fight a war of freedom against Earth. None of which really require asteroid mining rules. The mining is just the background.

Transhuman Space: Deep Beyond does discuss in some detail about that setting's particular asteroid mining tech (lots of robots and swarms of prospector microbots) and some detail on how the economics of that setting work.But asteroids are mostly used for remote research stations or fringe colonies who do other things there (biotech, political experiments, etc.) with mining as a background detail. Because unless exploring or speculative trading or dealing with strange passengers, it's not really fun...

In the playtest, I did include a lengthy 3-4 page section explaining details of asteroid mining and so on. And the general reaction (including from the editor was) that this was not really worth including. Because, basically, it wasn't something that was interesting, any more than a detailed discussion of how a modern open pit mine works is especially interesting.

While book 6 is a little shorter and lighter, all the other books have been significantly longer than had been originally planned. (The original contracted length of the eight books was c. 240 pages in total. The series is much longer than that...) Book 7 is much meatier in terms of new mechanics.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

Yeah, the process of mining is boring - I'm not particularly interested in that. Hadn't realised asteroid mining would be so cheap that rare metals would have significantly lower prices if we went into 'roid mining, though. Good to know.

But what I was really interested in was the idea of using asteroid mining to build ships (or anything else, really). That seems like a natural thing to put in this book, but it doesn't even touch on it. That makes me sad:(

Any chance you can release the boring asteroid mining stuff you wrote as a 'developer's notes' or Pyramid article some time?

As for the length: While this one was certainly the runt of the litter and was a bit disappointingly lacking in an area I was looking forward to, I've been quite pleased with all the other books in the series. I've been snapping 'em up the moment they've been released. Book 5 (Exploration/Colony Ships) is probably my favorite so far - love all the rules for exploration in it - but the rules for constructing ships and the like are still excellent in Book 6. Those are the two I'm likely to use the most, and I'll probably jury-rig some rules for asteroid utilization in construction.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

David -

OK maybe Langy and I are both a little whacked, but I have to second his notion of seeing your asteroid mining text. I'm actually in a GURPS asteroid mining game right now, although, as you say, it's the interesting stuff that makes the adventure (we found some sort of multi-dimensional cube buried in the asteroid that registers as billions of years old). But the asteroid mining process lends good background to the game and makes it more realistic. No, I don't want to spend my roleplaying time mining asteroids, but it's like background color in any GURPS book; it adds realism and depth to the setting.

And, yeah, I'm the kind of geek who would want a tour of an iron ore mine, just to see how it works. :) I don't need to know tonnage per day, efficiencies of scale, or any of the nitty-gritty stuff, but an overall view of the process is something I find interesting.

Brian

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

I'd like to see something for this as well.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

If I can find a place for it, I'll make it available. Note sure where, though: Pyramid requires articles fit the theme, and this is probably too peripheral to match anything upcoming. (Transhuman Space already has detailed asteroid rules in Deep Beyond.)

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

First, thanks for taking the time to respond to our questions, comments, etc.

I think the issue for some people is that until you get to TL 11 nanofactories, there doesn't seem a way to be really self-sufficient (as in Transhuman Space). You can get ore with a Mining system. You can turn ore into processed chemicals with a Refinery. You can turn components into finished goods with a factory--and you have to buy some of those parts; you cannot just make them yourself (at least, that's what is implied by the text on p. 16 of Spaceships). But that's exactly what people want to do. How do you turn the refined chemicals into components? That's the missing step.

Does Spaceships 6 include rules for using a factory to both create components and then turn those components into finished goods, perhaps at a lower production rate? (It seems the easiest thing would be to just say you have to buy two Factories...one turns chemicals into components and the other turns components into finished goods. It costs twice as much, but you are now totally independent of any supply line.)

Mark

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

No, it does not. There's no mention of how to go from asteroids->finished goods in Spaceships 6.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

How odd. Are there any ships that appear to be truly independent of any supply line? Like the Mobile Industrial Colony?

To me, a factory capable of doing assembly, machining spare parts, etc. should be able to handle the creation of components. I'm sure a factory includes 3D printers, lathes, tool & die equipment, etc.

I suppose another way to do it is to just say that if you are fabricating the components that you take generate them as you would any other goods and then turn around and use them. You will produce a larger physical quantity of basic components more quickly, but that's because the fine machining, testing, etc. for finished goods takes longer. (As an analogy, in the time it takes to build a house, one can cut enough boards, etc. to build several houses.)

For example, a SM+7 factory can produce $15K of goods per hour. Okay, during the first hour, it makes $15K of components. Those components are enough to build $37.5K of goods, but the time involved will be 3.5 hours instead of the 2.5 hours it would take if was buying the parts from an external supplier.

In other words, if you have to make your own components, it takes 40% longer to produce finished goods.

I suppose if someone really wanted to be persnickity about it say, "But you have to have 40% of the components that will be the 40% of the finished goods!" I did a little number crunching and you can do that pretty much indefinitely, but as far as I can tell it won't go above .667. (That is, 1 + .4 + (.4 x .4) + (.4 x .4 x .4) +...and so on). So even with this restriction, you could say that the entire fabrication process should end up taking 5/3 as much time as it would if you were able to just buy the components.

I just wish there was an official ruling on this (or, if I'm wrong, an official ruling the says, "No, you were right the first time. Buy two factories to handle the two steps." Which would be a more simple way to do it.) Or something.

Again, to me, the issue isn't that I want to spend time running the whole fabrication process. That would be a pretty boring campaign. I just want to know how to build a space colony that is totally independent of other settlements. To do that, you have to be able to cover the entire industrial process from ore to product.

Mark

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

I bought Spaceships 6 a couple days ago. It is OK, but I think I would prefer you include some of that asteroid mining info. As other posters have said, I wouldn't want it to be the focus of a campaign, but it would have made for useful background material. If nothing else, it would have brought the page count more in-line with the other supplements, so I'm surprised you didn't toss it in there given that you were not pressed for space.
Here's to hoping 7 turns out to be as meaty as the rumors say it will.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

If you've got access to JTAS, here is an interesting article about asteroid mining (not only for traveller) which proposes mining asteroids for oxygen, water etc. instead of ores (as a few asteroids are enough to drop prices significantly).

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

I just bought it half an hour ago and I have to admit that it was the first thing that struck me. I got Dungeon Fantasy: Clerics, a Pyramid subscription and Spaceships 6 at the same time, and Spaceships 6 just seemed a bit short for $7.99. Don't get me wrong, I love the series, but I would have expected a buck or two off, maybe like Dungeon Fantasy: 40 Artifacts. And I do love the fun rules at the back of all the other Spaceships books.

Still, it's always good to see more in the Spaceships series, and if it balances out in the next one then forget I said anything. Incidentally, I counted through my e23 library and I realised that I've bought 62 different GURPS pdfs from there (counting individual issues of the new Pyramid bought through subscription), GCA and a smattering of other products, as well as the free GURPS PDFs, of course. That's a lot of PDFs! I had no idea I had bought that many over the years. I guess I just wanted to say I'm a fan of e23, and even I was a little surprised to see how much! But keep on putting out good products and I'll keep buying!

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

Sorry, but $8 for 40+ pages (most other Spaceships books) vs. $8 for 24 pages doesn't cut it. I'll wait for Spaceships 7.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

As somebody who spent a vacation taking tours of iron and copper mines, they are kind of interesting. And I've read about mining, and that was kind of interesting too. But role-playing it would be a little like role-playing double entry accounting.

What asteroid mining does to the economy is your own call for the adventure. It's possible that the cost of transportation will not make these metals especially affordable. It's just as likely that their greater availability instead spurs new technology that wasn't possible when these resources were more scarce, and thus maintains the high demand even with the greater availability.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

I hope this isn't too late of a reply.

The way I read it, the refinery module does just that, at least up to the point that the factory can take over. Need beams of iron forged? A multi-purpose refinery can include foundry capability (the iron has to wind up in some regular shape) - note that this means it can forge solid slug ammunition too (though bullets that contain explosives, or any active component such as biological or robotic payloads, probably need a bit of factory time). Need new electronic chips? The refinery gets you the metal, chemicals, and silicon wafers that are the components from which chips can be made; the factory infuses the chemicals to turn bits of the silicon into transistors, and adds the metal circuit leads.

For what it's worth, I'm the "additional material" credit on the book. I am not an employee of Steve Jackson Games, so I don't know how official my word is, but...

Being independent of the supply chain was the intent of the Rock Snake design, without any extra steps. Material flows into the mining system for the listed conversion rate, from there to the refinery for the listed conversion rate, and from there to the fabricator for the listed conversion rate. Further, these things can happen in parallel if there is enough power and raw materials to keep all systems busy at the same time. (More precisely, a Rock Snake is intended to take raw asteroids and convert them into things that others would use, for profit. The easiest score is platinum and platinum group metals, as mentioned in the book, as those do not need much conversion and are quite expensive - until the platinum market gets flooded. That's when it shifts to manufacturing space infrastructure.)

It is possible that certain components can not be manufactured, or at least not manufactured efficiently, on a Rock Snake. The former is more likely if blueprints are licensed, or any other legal restrictions exist to prevent unlimited manufacturing. The latter depends on the game world as well, but can include things like replacement components (a factory much larger than a Rock Snake can build a Rock Snake - or major systems thereof - faster than another Rock Snake can) and supplies (production lines dedicated to creating, e.g., medicine can do so more efficiently, and thus more cheaply per unit output, than a Rock Snake's jack-of-all-trades systems; see "Manufacturing" in GURPS Ultra-Tech, starting on page 89). These would be among the things a Rock Snake's owner uses those profits for.

As always, change things around to suit your game world. Want a world where space manufacturing has obsoleted all planetside industry, and giant warships are cranked out daily? Ignore that bit about slower rates for manufacturing things above SM+2, and speed up the base manufacturing rates. Want a world where space manufacturing has yet to have much or any impact? Simply declare that factory systems for spaceships do not exist (no one has invented one yet). Want a spaceship that builds legions of clone soldiers? Wet nanotechnology and vatfacs are TL10; simply have a factory system cranking out SM +0 clones, using the prices from GURPS Bio-Tech (and if they are being assembled via nanotechnology, perhaps their brains are created with an already-trained template of memories and skills); another factory can churn out their equipment.

That is my take on the issue.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

The point here is completely missed by most of the posts.
The issue is for fabricators you need %40 of the items cost which is represented by money as the quantitative value. You can say mining equipment produces X tons of rock per hour all you like and it only helps replicators which convert mass and nan facs to a lesser extent as they reorganize elements you feed them. Without a quantitative value to the tonnage your collecting that X tons of rock could be pure rare metallic minerals or glorified sand. Running with the sand how many tones would you need to make a certain number of glass items? Easy answer, we don't know with out a value on the sand to make up the %40 of the finished product.

Also there's talk here about mining not being adventure worthy? It could be made as enjoyable as any other facet of a game by applying the same techniques that make anything else interesting for players.

Rule 1 Danger and difficulty = reward.
Make finding mother loads a "quest" involving a variety of skills rolls and dangers. All the easy non dangerous resources you don't have to travel far afield for are quickly taken advantage of by anyone who would want them for the same reasons as the players.
Navigate the hazards, claim the treasure whatever the treasure is. The hazards could run a huge range, from competition [hostile or friendly human to unknowable alien]. Natural hazards and threats [space debris/weather or space native lifeforms]. would avoiding rouge asteroids be any less fun or interesting then a thief making rolls to detect and avoid a trap in a dungeon? There's also more mundane complications like ship malfunctions, maybe even turning into a 3 hour mining tour for a change of pace. If players getting ultra rich is a concern... don't let them. There is alot of complication that keep prices what they are mining equipment/ship and repairs aren't cheap. The possibilities to get rich aren't any higher then with standard adventuring if anything they are lower unless abiding by rule 1 to be heroic and "more fun".
I see a potential for good gaming as much here as anywhere else and its limited only by the people you bring to the table and their ability to find enjoyment in other aspects or role playing/story building that doesn't require something being killed every 3 minutes.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

Is it so much to ask for a "generic asteroid loot" table possibly with some sort of considerations for prospecting, surveying or chemistry skills to work from? Or some way to assign some kind of value to these tons of material mining modules process....

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

You could play the GDW classic Belter and add GURPS to it. :)

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

A random thought just struck me: Could we use the planet tables from GURPS Space and tweak them a bit to get the resources for an asteroid? I'm talking about the mineral wealth tables further on in the chapter.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

I don't know how the resource value modifier tables would help much, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean in 'mineral wealth tables'.

I did do some thinking on this, and came up with a pretty decent way to get the resources for a C-type asteroid, at least. By using this table, you can figure out how much of each element a C-type asteroid might have. I came up with approximately 50% of the mass of a C-type asteroid is in industry-useable elements, with the other 50% being in volatiles (oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon). Using that table's figures, I came up with a figure of ~$2,000 per ton of industrial elements (volatiles are worth ~$250 per ton). If you then use that to produce parts in a factory modules, and then use those parts to build your end-product, you get something like this:


Build two 100 ton craft for $2,500,000 - ship costs $12,500 per ton. Using SM+10 modules.

First, 400 tons of ore is processed by mining modules - produce 200 tons and $400,000 of industrially-useful elements, 200 tons of volatiles (16 tons hydrogen, 175 tons oxygen, 8 tons carbon, 1 ton nitrogen)
200 tons of processed ore given to two factory modules - this $400,000 of ore is turned into $1,000,000 of parts
$1,000,000 of parts given to five factory modules to process - together, produce $2,500,000 of starships

Require 400 tons of ore to produce 200 tons of ship and 200 tons of useful volatiles (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen)

Requires seven factory modules and eight mining modules to produce five factory modules worth of stuff per time period.

A robofac is twice as fast as a fabricator, but it still needs the same amount of parts per finished product - double the number of mining modules required. With nanofacs, you don't need those two extra factory modules at the beginning - you can turn those 200 tons of processed ore straight into your starships. However, they're also twenty times faster than a fabricator - and mining modules don't increase in speed, so if your ships haven't gotten any more expensive, you'll need twenty-times as many mining modules per nanofac compared to a fabricator.

So, it'd go something like this:

My figures for asteroid composition are rough - I rounded them a bit so that they fit neatly. Other than that, they should be good.

EDIT: Note that if your vehicle costs more than $12,500 per ton, you'll either need to put it through a few more turns on the fabricator or use more expensive ores than the stock $2,000/ton ones. Another round will get you up to $31,250 per ton, then $78,125 per ton, $195,312.5 per ton. The most expensive module is a fully-automated replicator for $20.02 million per ton, which would require sixteen turns on the fabricator to produce, multiplying the raw ore's value over 2,000,000 times over. Alternatively, a replicator might require primarily precious metals in its production, which according to Spaceships 2 might have values as high as $10,000,000 per ton by themselves. If you need large numbers of precious metals to produce a replicator, then you only need to run it through a fabricator maybe two times (one from processed ore to parts, one from parts to replicator).

Also note that Spaceships 2 gives a different value for the price of Industrial Metals than I derived from the asteroid composition chart - $6,000 per ton. Probably either assumes a higher cost for iron or less iron in the mixture.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

Does it have a spaceship that is an asteroid? If not, do any of the Spacdship series products have one?

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GURPS Spaceships has stats for Rock (and Ice) armor.

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For pre-designed ships, Spaceships 6, 7 and 8 all have a few.

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Actually, 7 does not. It has only a couple example ships and none of them really qualify as "asteroid" ships. Most of Spaceships 7 is filled with new and alternate ship systems and ship features.

Spaceships 6 & 8, however, do have several examples. Spaceships 8 takes a heavy bent towards realistic near future, since the ships are all based on GURPS Transhuman Space.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

The Tree Ship is perhaps pushing it a bit.

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Don't tree ships appear in both Niven's The Integral Trees and Hayashi's Tenchi Muyo?

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Thanks, that is exactly what I wanted to know.

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Also Simmons' Hyperion and Endymios series.

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And also in Dan Simmons' Hyperion.

Re: Spaceships 6: We Will Rock You
 

What about Pulver's GURPS Bio-Tech?

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I wasn't aware that was a novel (or a novelization of fiction in a different medium)...