GURPS Spaceships Design Spreadsheet

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by DaltonS

To give you an idea about the size, the total deck area of the habitat ring is about 155 acres (13 decks that average about a mile long) and would take 156 pages to map. How do I convert this into an SM and systems?

Originally Posted by Celti

The Designer's Notes give suggestions for deck plan conversions that extrapolate to a rule-of-thumb of 1-3 hexes per three tons of non-armour systems.

Using that as a baseline:

An acre is 43560 square feet, or 43560/9 = 4840 square yards.
A 1 yard hex is 0.866 square yards area.
An acre contains 4840/0.866 = 5589 hexes.
155 Acres contain 866,281 hexes.
This corresponds to a mass of 288,760 to 866,281 tons.
Which corresponds to a SM of +13 to +14.
Which puts it in the ballpark of SM+15 based dimensions.

One other thought I had was to compare tonnage to size of a real world large vessel - the USS Nimitz. These have a displacement of 100,000 tons and a length of 364 yards. This puts them solidly at SM+12 by mass but a bit over SM+13 by length, so a discrepancy of one to two SM between the two isn't out of the question, especially when you stray away from "boxy" shapes.