GURPS Spaceships Design Spreadsheet

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by The Rampant Gamer

Understandably you'd not be able to do much with Habitats at those sizes, but honestly, that's realistic. Are there other components (other than scaled down weapons) that need to have rules written for them to define what happens at SM+3 and lower? If we can have convincing SM+1 and even +0 "ships" we could be on our way to statting up missiles themselves as separate ships that we keep in a special hangar...

SM+4 Habitats are already 0.1 slots; at SM+3 they'd be 0.03 slots, far too small to do anything. A 1/2 habitat module would take up 17 out of 20 ship system slots.

Weapons would scale alright. We already have stats for guns down to 2cm and beams down to 3kJ, even though the only way to hit those sizes is to use Rapid Fire and VRF weapons. So if you assume that no VRF isn't available we don't fall below that floor; even with VRF we usually don't hit the floor on many weapon types.

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

Damage and DR would need to switch from decade scale to normal, but that's not a big deal.

To go below SM+3, yeah probably. At SM+3 you might be able to get away with keeping the decade-Scale damage and dDR, but choices of weapons and armor are artificially limited because values drop below the decade-Scale resolution.

Originally Posted by vierasmarius

More challenging would be the Control Room, for which the computer and sensors will continue to scale down, but the crew station will not.

This. Actually, there's only so far the computer and sensors can scale down and still be useful. A SM+3 ship would be 3 tons; each system is 300lbs, which you can easily fit a basic seat and person into (without the fancy things like G-cushions and life support).

The real problem is that Spaceships was designed to scale from SM+5 to SM+15. It scaled to SM+4 pretty well; it scales above SM+15 alright (although stats for really large ships get funky). I'm just not sure that it can go much smaller.