GURPS Spaceships Design Spreadsheet

[ericbsmith]

I've been banging away on this for the last three weeks and it's reached a point I feel pretty good about releasing it. This release represents some pretty significant changes to the sheet, especially to the Weapon Systems section, but also throughout the sheet so there's a lot of possibilities for bugs to have crept in.

Version 2.0 Release Candidate 6

• Added Ship Classification and Size section to the Design Switches and Features section
• Added Control Room Crew Breakdown section to the Design Switches and Features section
• Added Auxiliary Craft section to the Spacecraft Design Table section
• The De-rated Power Plant options has now been folded into Options 1. If you import a ship in Excel using the Macros it will automatically be converted to the new format.
• Rework of the Quantity field used throughout the spreadsheet (in Open Spaces, Habitats, Weapons, as well as the new Auxiliary Craft and Crew Breakdown sections). The Quantity in the drop-down menu will now show you the maximum number of systems that you may install, and the field will remain grey while there are systems installable, but will turn white when you can no longer install more items in that location.
• Added an alternate Troop Strength calculation (see below)
• Complete rewrite of the back-end code for Weapon Mounts.
• Error code (cells turning black) within the Weapons section is much smarter, giving you a better idea of what has caused the error.
• Weapon Batteries are now assigned to specific Mounts instead of being assigned generally to Front, Center, or Rear. If you import a ship in Excel using the Macros the sheet cannot guess at where the weapons should be assigned, so it will assign all of them to section [0]. You will need to manually reassign them to the correct location.
• Addition of seven new Weapon Battery sizes (see below(
• Peripheral Weapon Mounts changed to SM+15 (they became redundant with the new mounts)
• New system: Weapon Battery - Mixed Mount
• In Excel, made the Load Ship and Delete Ship Macro a little smarter; if you select a cell containing a valid ship name it will automatically be selected in the Load or Delete dialog (this can be useful to load an Auxiliary Craft, for instance). Similarly the Save Ship dialog will now remember which Save Sheet the ship was loaded from and offer to save it back to there by default.
• Numerous bug fixes and improved functionality

Weapon Batteries and Weapon Systems

• Complete rewrite of the back-end code for Weapon Mounts. This became necessary to accommodate all the other changes and additions that were made, and may lead to some bugs.
• Addition of seven new Weapon Battery sizes:
  • Quaternary (SM+8 & 100 Mounts)
  • Quinary (SM+9 & 300 Mounts)
  • Senary (SM+10 & 1,000 Mounts)
  • Septenary (SM+11 & 3,000 Mounts)
  • Octonary (SM+12 & 10,000 Mounts)
  • Nonary (SM+13 & 30,000 Mounts)
  • Denary (SM+14 & 100,000 Mounts)
• Weapon Batteries are now assigned to specific Mounts instead of being assigned generally to Front, Center, or Rear. This allows for tracking of the number of mounts left in a specific Weapon Battery system.
• Peripheral Weapon Mounts changed to SM+15 (they became redundant at SM+8 to +14 with the new mounts)
• New system: Weapon Battery - Mixed Mount. This is a build-your-own Mixed Weapon Battery. It acts similarly to Smaller SM Systems, in that you can install three sub-systems. Each sub-system can consist of either one block of the same sized mount or two separate mount sizes. Each pair of mounts has a default number of mounts, however in the System Options section under Options 3 you can specify the number of mounts that the first weapon in the pair will have, which will adjust the number of mounts in the second of the pair accordingly. With this you can create virtually any combination of two to six different sizes of Weapon Mount.

Ship Classification and Size
These entries allow you to specify a Ship Class, Size, Mission Description, and Type. None of these fields are mandatory, but they can allow you to specify information about the Ship's Class while keeping a different name for the Ship itself. e.g. you can specify a Constitution-Class Heavy Exploration Cruiser while naming the ship itself the U.S.S. Enterprise.

• Class Name can be text, however -Class will be appended to whatever you enter here.
• Size specifies a general class size, e.g. Heavy, Medium, or Light.
• Description is a descriptive word about the ship's intended Mission role, such as Exploration, Mining, etc.
• Type specifies the general type of ship, such as Destroyer, Cruiser, Starbase, etc.

Note: Several of these fields use drop-down menus. While other menus in this spreadsheet limit what you may enter in the box, these menus are different. In addition to the examples given in the menu you may also enter any text you wish - so be creative in describing them.


Control Room Crew Breakdown
This section allows you to specify the roles that the Control Room personnel will fulfill.
Note: These fields use drop-down menus. While other menus in this spreadsheet limit what you may enter in the box, these menus are different. In addition to the examples given in the menu you may also enter any text you wish - so be creative in describing the positions.

Auxiliary Craft
Allows you to specify the Auxiliary Craft that will fill a Hangar Bay, Upper Stage, or Vehicle Dock. You can select any Craft from the Saved Ships or Official Ships spreadsheets. In the OpenOffice version of the sheet there is a new WorkSheet called Auxiliary Craft where you can manually enter the basic details of a Ship so that it will be assignable through the menus.

Alternate Troop Strength
In the Mass Combat rules from Pyramid 3/30: Spaceships for calculating Troop Strength there is a significant bias towards smaller Spaceships. The base multiplier for TS is dDR + dST/dHP, but these values scale roughly with ship length, not with increasing size/mass/firepower. It gives larger ships a significantly lower TS and than smaller craft. As one example the two TL 12^ spaceships the Mirage Star Fighter (SM+4) has a calculated TS of 257,400 while the Intrepid-Class Frontier Cruiser (SM+12) has a TS of 2,640,000 - just over x10 the TS for a ship massing x10,000 times as much. This may be appropriate for a strictly realistic game (where a million dollar missile can easily take out a billion dollar naval ship) but it does not fit the expectation in most Sci-Fi universes.
To help correct this discrepancy the Alternate Troop Strength option multiplies the final TS by dHP/150, effectively scaling TS with ship surface area (rather than length). This has the effect giving the SM+4 ship a TS 1/10th the current while multiplying a SM+12's TS by 2, so now in the above example the TS of the two ships are 25,740 and 5,280,000 - a difference of about x200 the TS.

	SM:	+4	+5		+6		+7		+8		+9		+10		+11		+12		+13		+14		+15	
TS Multiplier:	x0.1	x0.1333		x0.2		x0.3333		x0.4667		x0.6667		x1		x1.3333		x2		x3.3333		x4.6667		x6.6667

Excel 2000
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2.zip (2.67MB)
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2.7z (1.20MB)

Excel 2007
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2-2007.zip (3.42MB)
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2-2007.7z (3.30MB)

OpenOffice 3.2.0/3.3.0/LiberOffice 4
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2-Ooo.zip (2.10MB)
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2-Ooo.7z (2.51MB)