04-26-2022, 01:34 PM | #31 | |
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: The Athens of America
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Re: Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff
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04-26-2022, 06:24 PM | #32 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff
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Note that a WWII 'Liberty' ship, considered small today, displaced (i.e. massed) about 16,000 tons loaded, and had a volume of over a million cubic feet (so 2,000 - 3,000 displacement tons in Traveller terms). Even in the Star Wars universe the Falcon, presumably with less internal free space than the stock freighter she once was due to the much more powerful engines, etc., seems to only be profitable to operate when running spice, guns, fugitives, and other illegal cargoes. That said, I agree that Traveller ship sizes are not the model to use if you want a Star Wars like atmosphere, where ships are common, cheap, and not these massive, fuel hogging, bricks of crysteel that can happily skim gas giants and swim in oceans without damage (and that's the civilian ones).
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04-27-2022, 04:17 AM | #33 |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff
The inspiration for the Falcon, wasn't freighters, it was the DC-3 (6,000 lbs of cargo).
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04-28-2022, 12:52 PM | #34 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Sweden, Stockholm
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Re: Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff
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There isn't really anything terribly expensive about (producing) shuttles compared to cars aside from some of the materials used to make the starship engines, and the minimal plating.
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04-28-2022, 01:09 PM | #35 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff
"Durasteel" is the name of a common construction material in Star Wars (alongside Plasteel, although Durasteel is IIRC higher-grade, which is why I suggested it for armor plating). "Life support field" is basically a version of a force field that doesn't protect the vessel at all, but does keep atmosphere in (think of the fields over the hangars in Star Wars, which allow ships to fly through but keep the hangar pressurized so you don't need EVA gear to move around in it, or go through an airlock to access the rest of the ship). Essentially, it gives the ship Sealed and Vacuum Support without needing the advanced engineering necessary to typically give a ship those traits - so if you can make a generator for such a field on the cheap, you can make a space-worthy vehicle similarly on the cheap.
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04-28-2022, 06:11 PM | #36 |
Join Date: Nov 2005
Location: Renton, WA
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Re: Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff
I like the suggestion of just adding a divisor to the prices to get Spaceships to where you want. Honestly, I can't see this impacting the game except for how available a ship is for the group.
You can of course just hand-wave pricing and give the PCs a ship. Or a lease on a ship with what you consider a reasonable monthly payment to keep the crew flying and hungry for more adventure. You can and likely should just make it up. Sure, the economics in Spaceships likely had some relation to real-world counterparts. But since most of this hasn't been invented yet (especially Star Wars levels of technology), tuning it to fit your setting/campaign is much preferred to following some artificial requirement to adhere to what is in the books. It's a toolkit not a dogma. :-D |
05-02-2022, 06:10 AM | #37 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Sweden, Stockholm
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Re: Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff
Maybe just dividing stuff works, but it isn't like I want them to be able to buy huge weapons and stuff cheaply. That stuff is fairly expensive in-setting. It is just basic ship frames, engines, and control systems that are cheap.
It is a bit like the price difference between buying a car and buying and armored jeep with a weapon mount. A quick glance at the other space ship threads gives me the impression ships are mostly the kind of things huge companies and nations build, and I'm guessing their high-TL ship components are going to get more expensive than modern rockets, not cheaper? It really doesn't sound like a system meant to handle a setting where a bunch of random pirates that live in an asteroid build ships. Do you think it will be useful?
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05-02-2022, 06:38 AM | #38 |
Join Date: Apr 2022
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Re: Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff
Handwaving is pretty good in a spaceflight rich setting.
If it's too expensive then who can afford one? Not many, and if it's precious then they're usually expensive (and strong) for a reason. Making adventures less common. And giving everyone a great income so people all over the galaxy can buy ships that cost million credits each, well that's just pushing the problem around anyway. Spaceship material is super cheap, super durable, and simply has a weakness to spaceship weapons, like blasters, torpedoes, etc. Solves it pretty well. So what if spaceship material is as common as bubblegum? If blasters are also common. Bam, presto, now you have your mopeds and cars in space. Car >>>>>>>> human and many small animals. But also car <= other cars, metal spikes at high velocity, rocks, etc. Now put that into space. In comparison to an unarmed human or animal, a spaceship is unassailable. But agains other spaceships and spaceship weaponry, it's like chucking a stone off a highway overpass into a windshield. And just like cars are different, like, you wouldn't want to ram a little city shopping car into some massive titan of a jeep for example, you can still have you really fancy destroyers and gigantic capital ships. Last edited by Lovewyrm; 05-02-2022 at 06:42 AM. |
05-02-2022, 06:55 AM | #39 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff
It can make for a decent jumping-off point and unified design system if you aren't comfortable just fiating everything. Given how you've described things, you'd probably want to decide what components are in those dirt-cheap civilian ships (probably Control Room*, some type of power plant, some type of drive, a single module of steel armor to allow it to be streamlined**, maybe a Force Screen generator and some Fuel Tanks) and apply an appropriate cost reduction to those, but have either a lesser cost reduction - or use full cost - for "military" equipment (Enhanced Sensors, ECM, Weapons Batteries***, better armor/power plants/drives/Force Screens, etc).
*The Control Room includes basic sensors. **Spaceships requires at least one module - 5% of the vessel's mass - be armor for a ship to be streamlined; this is both for game balance (the negative consequence of being streamlined is reduced armor DR), and a bit of realism (a streamlined vessel needs more of its mass to be the outer frame). Note I'm assuming you want streamlined spaceships, but that's not strictly necessary. ***You can, of course, have separate civilian and military tiers of weaponry. I remember the spaceship design book for one of the d20 Star Wars settings separated the weaponry into blasters, lasers, and turbolasers. The blasters, with red beams, were cheap and thus what the Rebellion used. The lasers, with green beams, were more expensive (but also more effective) and were what the Empire used. The turbolasers were similar to the lasers, but even more powerful and only mountable on capital ships.
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05-02-2022, 10:15 AM | #40 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: traveller
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Re: Handling cinematic spaceship fights and other sci-fi stuff
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To first order, the costs of a non-combatant starship are hull, engines (FTL and STL), and power plant.They don't have to be squishy: something more like wood or nacreous shell is also possible. If these come cheap because they can be grown, your costs are reduced to the add-ons (controls, habitats, etc.) that are an order of magnitude cheaper. Instead of parachronics being invented, early deep space voyages discovered a species of parachronizoid (IW, p. 73) lurking in interplanetary space. By hollowing out unused space and implanting simple control interfaces, they were able to harness the creatures' teleportation and world-jumping abilities. Your random pirates can exist because their ships are largely self-repairing, given enough time, energy sources, and feed stock. It also makes salvaging non-bio systems easier, because they are mostly self-contained. They can be treated more like commodities than is usually possible with ultra-tech manufacture. GURPS Spaceships works pretty well for this. You would want Spaceships 7, which adds a lot of biotech options to what's in Spaceships 1. Last edited by thrash; 05-02-2022 at 10:18 AM. |
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gurps 4th, gurps spaceships, sci fi |
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