Quote:
Originally Posted by McAllister
First, generate a 50 point Marine cadet (your starships have marines, yes?) and a 250 point rocket scientist. Make them fight.
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To be honest I have never really seen any point to this particular demonstration. Any points based system (at least that I am aware of) tends to favour characters with more points in combat skills and advantages rather than simply more points.
I think that the best advice to starting planning a GURPS campaign is to sit back and think about what sort of tone you want and how you want it to work. Ignore the rules, at least at first, and concentrate on more on what you want it to look like. Once you have a clear picture then you start trying to fit the picture to the rules.
GURPS has a not entirely undeserved reputation for being complex mostly because it comes with options for most types of campaign. The trick to making GURPS work is to have a solid idea of which options you want to use.
To give you an example you mention mercenaries, what do you envision them doing? Security work or frontline combat? What sort of strength do they operate in (you mention mechs so I will assume armour) troop, squadron or perhaps something larger?
Your answers to these questions will determine what options you chose.
The last thing that I would point out that while you certainly can using lite and a few supliments (Space, which is about asking the kind of questions that I was discussing, and UT are as Anders says the best starting point) it is probably harder than any other style of game. From experience Space SF plays to the 4e version of lite's major weaknesses. If your campaign takes off with your players you will probably want to step up to the Basic Set fairly quickly.
Your answers to these questions will determine where you go from there.