GURPS Spaceships Design Spreadsheet

[terranstrider]

[PHP]This thread is primarily about my Spaceships spreadsheet. If you want to discuss designing deck plan please feel free to start a new thread to do so. [/PHP]
Will do.

Thanks very much for making your spreadsheet available. It's an enourmous benefit to my campaign, in particular the output format greatly reduces preperation time for space combat.

[DaltonS]

I just downloaded the Open Office version and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Just a couple of items from Spaceship 7 to tack onto the wishlist.

1. An option to use Smaller and Larger systems as per page 4. The former could be more easily done by stacking the hull sections vertically rather than side-by-side. (That would also make it visually less cluttered.)
2. A "Hyperdynamic Hull" feature could be added to both ship and campaign options.

I want to design ships for my hyperspace rule set that will fit into my Hyperverse tech sequence (radiation screen => hyperdynamic field grid => reactionless drive => "hypersink" cloaking => jump gates to hyperspace => hyperjump stardrive).

Dalton "who finds the sheet ans interesting as the ships" Spence

[Flyndaran]

I keep getting errors from nearly everything I try to do.
I'm using the open office one.
It keeps saying scripting framework error occurred while running the Basic script.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I keep getting errors from nearly everything I try to do.
I'm using the open office one.
It keeps saying scripting framework error occurred while running the Basic script.

Stupid macros. I thought I had this set to be fixed in a macro before I saved to Open Office, but apparently I didn't save the sheet with the stripping macro intact.

Anyway, I've just corrected the open office sheet and this should no longer be a problem.

[thesmiths4]

Sorry if I missed this in the stack of posts, but have you ever considered modding the sheet for the Gurps Vorkosigan ship design rules? (Necklin Rods, different weapons and shield systems, etc.)

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by thesmiths4

Sorry if I missed this in the stack of posts, but have you ever considered modding the sheet for the Gurps Vorkosigan ship design rules? (Necklin Rods, different weapons and shield systems, etc.)

I don't think anybody's asked, and I just haven't had time to do anything like this anyway. I haven't even read Vorkosigan.

[SalsaDoom]

Eric! :D

Thank you again for this awesome spreadsheet, it makes my life so much easier when it comes to making ships (I make a lot). Especially thank you a million times over for expanding the sizemod up to +30 :) I make use of that ability frequently ;)

Additional thank you for adding the SS7 rules! :D

Now if I could have options for half-modules or even quarter modules.. ;)
Or actually a really sweet option would be for the ability to "trade up" or "trade down" weapons... in my campaign ships tend to run rather large, for example, a Battleship-sized ship is SizeMod +24, which works great until I realize that I'm dealing with literally 10,000,000,000 peripheral guns :) Somewhere between 50,000 and 160,000 would be fine, lol. Right now I make the ship in Excel 2k, then export and tweak it through a few programs manually. Its still massively more simple :) Thanks again Eric!

EDIT: Speaking of exporting, is there an easier way to do this? I'm looking for some fairly simple HTML output ideally... actually the exact stuff thats printed. If only windows could print to html or something.

[panton41]

Originally Posted by SalsaDoom

EDIT: Speaking of exporting, is there an easier way to do this? I'm looking for some fairly simple HTML output ideally... actually the exact stuff thats printed. If only windows could print to html or something.

Excel 2010 can export to HTML, but a generic HTML printer is probably impossible since printers tend to deal with the file as usually PostScript, XPS, PDF or a simple image while HTML needs to know the complexities of the underlying formatting. (Mostly so it can make a mess out of it, the best HTML code is hand HTML code.)

[SalsaDoom]

Hmmm, thats largely true. Even linux can only print to pdf or ps. pdftohtml from the poppler-utils package mangles the output in ways that make me sad.

Right now I use a windows tool called PDFCreator from sourceforge, which works quite well. Then I copy it to my linux machine, where I use a awful little program called 'pdfedit', it does the job but is somewhat ancient, crufty, and rather slow. Its quite a bit of work just to tweak some numbers around. If I could export the data I wanted (ie the printed area) to another spreadsheet or anything that could be edited it would be a lot easier.

EDIT: Actually you can, I think I instinctively over-engineered my solution. You do have to re-adjust the formatting but you can select and copy the data into another excel2k spreadsheet and edit it.

[panton41]

My biggest complaint about this spread sheet is that it doesn't have the most useful format for presentation. The worksheet page is excellent and works well for on-screen presentation, but for a printout it doesn't fare as well. (Tons of "extra stuff" on the sides that doesn't fit well.)

If I were to overhaul it I'd probably remove the second spaceship form at the bottom and put the extra settings there and have an additional book that was a printer-friendly version that repeated the data from the worksheet.

That said I've batted the idea of an actual program to do this for a while, but it's kind of fizzled. I'd like to do it in a cross-platform language, but Java doesn't support some of what I want to use and I don't know Python that would probably be my #1 choice. (Plus Python isn't the most cross-platform of languages when it comes to building a GUI.)