GURPS Spaceships 5: Boldly Going

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by Langy

Bought it the moment I saw it.

Me too - and only then did I check the playtest credits. Then again, it´s for a good purpose.

And it would have saved me a little bit of time if the pdf had been named like the previous ones.

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by davester65

Ditto on being anxious for Spaceships 7, but I scooped up 5 as as soon as I saw it anyways. Oh wait, is 7 the one for alien spaceships? That's the one I'm really looking forward to.

Alien and superscience ships, yes. I'm assuming it'll have the rules for building a spaceworthy flying car...

[Langy]

Books 5 and 6 are the two I, personally, really wanted. Book 5 has almost everything I was hoping it would - it's missing fast, realistic intersteller colony ships, unfortunately, and I'd have really liked a description of the type of things a colony would need besides '10,000 people'. Things like how many people of a number of occupations that might be required, or what type of equipment they might take with them, things like that would have been really great, but unfortunately aren't in there:( Really, no actual colony-making rules are in it, which sadden me.

The exploration rules, on the other hand, are top-notch. Love them lots, though I'm not sure the assumption that radio waves can be easily detected at intersteller distances with really bad sensors is true. The rules basically say a TL8 sensor array appropriately sized for an SM+0 ship (so actually massing 10 pounds) would be able to trivially easily detect radio waves coming from Alpha Centauri. Actually, they say the same sensor could detect radio waves coming from anything up to two parsecs away, again, with no modifier.

That just doesn't make much sense, especially since SETI itself says that we couldn't detect our own radio waves out past 0.3 light years distance. SETI's estimates for the Arecibo radio telescope suggest it can only detect very narrow-band signals with transmitter strength on the order of giga to terrawatts at any useful intersteller distance.

Mass media signals simply would not be detected at all at intersteller distances unless they were using ridiculously overpowered transmitters transmitting on very odd bandwidths. You'd only be able to resolve UHF TV pictures up to 2.5 AU away with an Arecebo-like reciever, and the carrier wave only up to 0.3 light years.

SETI says that only that high intensity narrowband emitions will be detectable beyond 1LY, and on Earth that's primarily narrowband radar. However, I have doubts even narrowband radar would be detectable at interstellar distances simply because even then you need gigawatts of power just to transmit to 5LY away.

Source: http://setifaq.org/faq.html#1.2.3

[Agemegos]

Woot! Gloat!

There will be a rules-compliant design of the Nekaut-class Survey frigate in time for tomorrow's game!

[jimminy]

Originally Posted by Lanfranc

Spaceships 5 and Ryan Wolfe's excellent new Future Armada on the same day?!

Surely, my spaceship cup runneth over.

I bought both of them too! I'd never noticed this 'Future Armada' thing but the Orion one I got was pretty sweet. It has all the maps for a huuuuge spaceship, which is great for me because I like using Maptools for maps, so I can load it in, give it some topography for vision blockage, etc, and voila!

I love spaceship maps and I've never owned any traveller core books, but I have bought several Traveller 3e ship books for all the diagrams and stats. I might have to look into more of these Future Armada things (and usually I just buy GURPS from e23).

As for Spaceships 5, exploration was always the main theme of my homebrew Space campaign, so this is one I've been waiting for! I'll read it over once I finish Maptoolsing-up my gigantic fighter carrier...

[The Fox]

Originally Posted by Steven Marsh

Thanks for the heads-up... we'll see if we can't get those pesky p. 00's killed in the next day or so!

And, as promised, the corrected file is now online. All those pesky p.00's should be killed now. Sorry about that, folks!

[panton41]

I've been trying to convince a Trekker friend to play GURPS and the PALOMAR-Class Exploration Cruiser (pp 12-13) is pretty obviously a TNG-era Federation ship. I've been telling him Star Trek would be easy to do, now I can prove it.

Now if we can only figure out how to stat phasers... (Or as I vote toss them out as unrealistic and make my Federation more realistic that Roddenberry's...)

[Lanfranc]

Originally Posted by jimminy

I bought both of them too! I'd never noticed this 'Future Armada' thing but the Orion one I got was pretty sweet. It has all the maps for a huuuuge spaceship, which is great for me because I like using Maptools for maps, so I can load it in, give it some topography for vision blockage, etc, and voila!

Yes, I do the same thing. The whole FA series is excellent, highly recommended, and the ships generally seem to scale quite well with the system in Spaceships.

[davester65]

Originally Posted by robkelk

Alien and superscience ships, yes. I'm assuming it'll have the rules for building a spaceworthy flying car...

That would be nice. I actually would like to see rules for adding a wheeled drivetrain to a spaceship design. So I could design a starbug type thingy like in Red Dwarf. Also having some quick and dirty rules for designing Wheeled APC's and even simple ground cars based around the Spaceship design template would be nice as well.

[Peter Knutsen]

How much of the content in this PDF expands the build options? New modules , new build/design options?

How much is new rules?

So far, I've been rather disappointed by the low number of new modules and systems in PDFs 2, 3 and 4. I want more options.