[Spaceships] It seems that TL7 Chemical Rocket's acceleration is an overspec.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The msot important thing to remebr is that though Spaceships does give you a G number and a Delta-V figure that you can use in combat those things are mostly calculated on an average per mission basis not as second by second simulation.

What does Spaceships do to simulate how your Gs of thrust go up as you burn fuel and/or how your fuel use goes down as mass decreases while holding a given aceleration? It averages your acceleration and fudges your Delta-V with that adjustment in the Fuel tank section for the number of tanks.

Spaceships is a simple system, an abstact system and not a second by second simulation. Even Ve2 wasn't really and it was far more complex than Spaceships.

This is another of those weird occasions where somebody tries to defend Spaceships by painting it as doing something much worse than what it actually does.

The text of Spaceships indicates to me a really clear understanding of the breakpoints and other factors that make a 'mission average' acceleration a largely useless number. Furthermore, if that's what it was trying to do it would be obviously doing it wrong since the mission average mass obviously depends on the fuel fraction while the Spaceships' acceleration values do not.

Deciding that key statistics will not be subject to frequent recalculation even if logic suggests maybe they 'should' is an understandable and familiar GURPS game design choice. It doesn't need to 'justified' as an ill-concieved 'abstraction' of things the game does not in any way treat as abstract.