GURPS Spaceships Series

[Jeffr0]

Originally Posted by Brett

Here's a thought.

When the GURPS Spaceships series is done, I'd like a cumulative index. It shouldn't be to hard to do with a world processor: copy, paste, find, replace, and sort would do most of the work.

Then I could print out each of the different volumes of the series on a different coloured paper and bind them all together with the cumulative index, and I would have a handy GURPS Spaceships omnibus.

If you could cut and paste the indexes to respective text files, I could right a Perl script to combine them and reformat the page number references in a coherent way. Any good Unix nerd would be able to do it with a single command line instruction. ;)

Let's see if that works with Spaceships 1.... Yes. They cut and paste just fine. The only minor hitch is that you'll want to get rid of the unhelpful line breaks-- probably getting rid of all carriage returns that occur just before a line that starts with a number or lowercase letter would work for 99% of the cases.

Sounds like a fun project. :D

[Agemegos]

So do we prefix page numbers with volume numbers in Roman numerals?

[Jeffr0]

Bingo.

And name the text files with the prefix you want to use.

[Flyndaran]

Is there an easy way to make a generational ship like the Magellan class tow pre-made space stations?
Also, no medium between 300 and 3 million ton space stations?

Anyone want to create a 10,000 ton TL10 space station for me please?
Any help would be much appreciated.

[Jeffr0]

The code to make a comprehensive index for e23 PDF's is here.

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

It *would* be possible to get much closer using the same system but with a somewhat finer grain of hull sizes, but that would be incompatible with the existing series, though it might make a fine system for a dedicated Traveller revision.

Actually, I hammered out some rules at one point for extending the current Spaceships rules to allow for finer granularity; they work rather well, and are fully compatible with the current system*. My goal at the time was aimed at allowing the creation of a wider variety of mecha, not just 10-ton, 30-ton, and 100-ton designs; but I don't see why you couldn't apply the same concept to larger ships - and a Spaceships X: Traveller designs supplement would be a perfect excuse to publish them.

In fact, doing this would be much easier; for the Mecha-related stuff, I put in a tweak to the "roughly box-shaped hull" assumption of the Spaceships design system so as to better allow for more bizarre shapes (such as humanoid hulls, with systems in the limbs as well as the body). That tweak, and the issues that go along with it, wouldn't be needed for a Traveller-based supplement.

The core mechanism isn't too different from the way that Spaceships 4 extended the design range down to SM +4, except that it interpolates between existing entries rather than extrapolating from the end. The secret is to allow decimal SM adjustments, in steps of 0.2 rather than 1 - and to apply these intermediate steps to systems as well as the hull. With this revision, hull sizes between SM +6 and SM +8 allow for 100 tons, 125 tons, 150 tons, 200 tons, 250 tons, 300 tons, 400 tons, 500 tons, 600 tons, 800 tons, and 1000 tons, not just 100, 300, and 1000 tons. If you need more granularity than that, I could revise the decimal adjustments to allow for SM increments of 0.1, which would bring 700- and 900-ton hulls into the fold, and would result in hull sizes being able to vary by roughly 10% in mass, as opposed to the current three-fold granularity.

* - well, not quite fully compatible; but the handful of incompatibilities had nothing to do with improving the granularity of the system. They dealt more with the allowance for subassemblies and an option for variable system sizes - both matters about which a Traveller supplement wouldn't need to worry.

s

[Langy]

I made a post a bit back that has all the formulas for deriving statistics and prices for each system (including conventional guns and missiles, though I don't remember if I did energy weapons or not) given any arbitrary ship size. I back-calculated them, so they might not all be perfect, but if not they're still pretty close.