[Spaceships] Getting started on a Java-based ship builder

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by ciaran_skye

I'm thinking rather than the XML-based import I discussed earlier I'll use tab-delineated plain text and instead of recreating the tables in Spaceships I will recreate its mathematical underpinnings (namely the 1-3-10 and 2-3-5-7-10-15 based cycles) and generate the data from that information. Doing that would allow ships of arbitrary size.

While that works with most systems, keep in mind that a few ship systems step outside of those two standard size ratios. The lowest end of armor dDR, a few of the SM4 systems introduced in a later supplement, and the number of Areas in Open Spaces immediately come to mind. If you can use the standard size cycles for most information, but allow for specific SM's to be set "arbitrarily" that would help alleviate some problems you'll encounter later on.