Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by RedMattis

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First off, is GURPS Spaceships good for this? I figured it would mostly lean towards realism in terms of combat, and I'm guessing the cheapest space ships costing outrageous sums? Is GURPS Spaceships worth a buy for this kind of setting?

What I'm aiming for with the setting is more of a star wars pew-pew feeling where laser weapons and plasma guns are generally slightly _less_ dangerous than proper TL8 guns would be. And I'd prefer the space fights to be similarly cinematic.

l]

The cheapest ships you can make with Spaceships will cost aroud a million $. That's for SM+5 ships of around 30 tons such as seen in The Mandalorian.

Tech generally looks more expenisve in default Gurps but some of that is exaggerated by people not taking into account Average Wealth. That's $75,000 for TL11 instead of $20,000 for TL8.

If you want Cheaper Ultra Tech (CUT) for a Star Wars like setting just divide UT prices by 10. Divide ships by 100 if you want but you might also want to change Average Wealth.

Spaceships combat is primarily "realistic" in the damage it allows for kinetic weapons. In settings where superscience means people don't use KE space weapons it's not particularly realistic.

Especially in the book 1 abstract combat system it highly privileges maneuverability and pilot Skill with all ships basically dogfighting.

[newton]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

The cheapest ships you can make with Spaceships will cost aroud a million $. That's for SM+5 ships of around 30 tons such as seen in The Mandalorian.

Tech generally looks more expenisve in default Gurps but some of that is exaggerated by people not taking into account Average Wealth. That's $75,000 for TL11 instead of $20,000 for TL8.

If you want Cheaper Ultra Tech (CUT) for a Star Wars like setting just divide UT prices by 10. Divide ships by 100 if you want but you might also want to change Average Wealth.

Spaceships combat is primarily "realistic" in the damage it allows for kinetic weapons. In settings where superscience means people don't use KE space weapons it's not particularly realistic.

Especially in the book 1 abstract combat system it highly privileges maneuverability and pilot Skill with all ships basically dogfighting.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think ships and tech are actually that cheap in star wars there’s just a really strong secondhand market.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by newton

For what it’s worth, I don’t think ships and tech are actually that cheap in star wars there’s just a really strong secondhand market.

And if we go by the movies, most characters either have the ships provided by their employer or patron, or they came by the ship in fairly questionable circumstances.

If they're like (water) ships today, a small ship of questionable soundness and considerable age can cost "You can have it if you take away. Today.", while shiny new large-scale warships are eye-wateringly expensive and unafforable to all but the richest polities.

[newton]

Originally Posted by Rupert

And if we go by the movies, most characters either have the ships provided by their employer or patron, or they came by the ship in fairly questionable circumstances.

If they're like (water) ships today, a small ship of questionable soundness and considerable age can cost "You can have it if you take away. Today.", while shiny new large-scale warships are eye-wateringly expensive and unafforable to all but the richest polities.

Absolutely, i’d reckon that’s also why some level of technical aptitude is so common in setting. Luke, for instance, can do all those repairs because a big part of being a moisture farmer is keeping the moisture collectors running.

[Rupert]

Star Wars technology works like pre-20th century tech, and so farmers, settlers, space jocks, and anyone else not living in an industrial centre fixes and maintains their own stuff as a matter of course. Also, apparently blaster tech is so mundane that people can make them out of little more than number 8 wire and baling twine.

[TerryW]

Small spaceships have costs comparable to cars and mopeds while the larger ones are basically boats as far as price goes.

That's definitely not GURPS Spaceships, unless you apply a lot of houserules.

You can get cheap ships with Spaceships rules, assuming you buy them used and worn out, but it's used light aircraft cheap not used car cheap. It also sounds like you want your ships to do some fairly unconventional things (By GURPS Spaceships standards) so you'd need the first PDF plus at least Spaceships 4 and 7.

If you're comfortable with just eyeballing the stats for your ships, and your players are having fun with that, I don't see a lot of need for Spaceships.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by TerryW

That's definitely not GURPS Spaceships, unless you apply a lot of houserules.

You can get cheap ships with Spaceships rules, assuming you buy them used and worn out, but it's used light aircraft cheap not used car cheap. It also sounds like you want your ships to do some fairly unconventional things (By GURPS Spaceships standards) so you'd need the first PDF plus at least Spaceships 4 and 7.

If you're comfortable with just eyeballing the stats for your ships, and your players are having fun with that, I don't see a lot of need for Spaceships.

Dividing prices by about thirty gets a TL-11^ 30-ton (SM+5) hypershuttle down to about a year's income for the average T11 worker. That puts it at the same relative price as a 'Luxury Car' (B464) has to a TL8 worker's income. Dividing it by ten puts it in the same relative price range as a bus or small light plane (and makes a very cheap one cost like a car, but also eat up over $100/day in parts).

For the spacecraft stats other than knocking the prices down, all that the OP would need to do is define how the drives and FTL system work.

For combat, making ranges shorter is mostly just a matter of doing the same thing to the listed ranges, and possibly to accuracy as well. Damage vs spaceship screens, armour, and HP will take a bit more work to balance, but that's something they'll need to do whether using Spaceships or not.

[Opellulo]

Originally Posted by newton

For what it’s worth, I don’t think ships and tech are actually that cheap in star wars there’s just a really strong secondhand market.

I really liked the idea suggested in "The Last Jedi" that the galactic war between Empire/Order and Resistance is fueled by a constant stream of
weapons flooded to both sides by weapons manufacturer so that it will never end. "The Frontier" not like in Old West by like in some eastern European/African country...

But it has become a bit too real in those days.

[ericthered]

So you can extrapolate spaceships smaller than SM+5, and I do it all the time. My experience is that the spaceships books in general gives you pretty cheap ships, its just that when the smallest thing you can build in the system is 30 tons, it looks really expensive. Also, if you avoid using rocket motors, nuclear reactors, and the current armor costs drop a lot. You can also double For example, I made a Modern SM+5 Fishing Trawler that costs $183,000 dollars using spaceships. You may want Pyramid 3/34, which is essential for making spaceships do things when you're not in space. Including making habitats a lot more expansive when they don't need to provide life support.


The trick to extrapolating costs in spaceships is that almost everything across all the books scales in cost with mass. I think the exceptions are gasbags and stealth fields. So you can design a ship at any size, figure its cost at a convenient size, and then multiply up or down based on its mass. I have an article on scaling spaceship sizes and costs using SM+10 as the base size every time.



One of the main topics on my blog is how to use spaceships to make small vehicles: I call it Robots as Spaceships. You might find some of those articles useful.



On the other hand, you seem to have already worked out your spaceship stats...