[GURPS Starships] Armor tweaks

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Varyon

It's not giving that up, it's essentially just building the ship like it were a character and then tossing a suit of armor on it. All mass is still accounted for - if my example were an SM+10 spaceship, the initial design is for a 10,000 ton vessel. Those 6 armor systems weigh 500 tons each (5%), so we're adding in 3,000 tons, for a 13,000 ton vessel. It's just that we're ignoring the extra weight of the armor when determining volume - and as long as we aren't using ice armor, this is probably close enough to accurate.

I didn't say you were failing to keep track of the ship's mass. But the ship is no longer divided into 20 systems, each 1/20th of its mass. It is divided into 20 systems, each 1/20th of some particular mass, and then some variable number of additional armor systems of the same mass.

(Minor note you probably already realize: for calculating delta-V you have to reduce effective fuel tanks before bonuses for high fuel fraction, not just calculate delta-V and modify that. Your example ship had little enough fuel that this had no effect.)


Alternate Spaceships in Pyramid 3-34 offers another way of adjusting for the density of armor, and similar ideas on that subject had been worked with on the forums.