GURPS Spaceships Design Spreadsheet

[SalsaDoom]

Eric... this is fantastic! Thank you a million times for making this :) The SM-1 and Half-size modules make life awesome. :) Especially if you and your gaming buddies have a fondness for absurdly huge warships with lots of systems.

That said though, I'm still a bit swamped by the number of peripheral guns by the time you get to the bigger SM's .. around 17 or so. By the time you get to something like SM 24 you end up with quite literally billions of point defense guns -- which has a certain appeal, "My 33 billion point defence guns open fire, bwhahaha!" but its a bit tricky to actually manage. :)

Would it be possible to have another 'layer' of guns, say, between tertiary and peripheral? Say, "quarternary" that are a SM-minus-whatever that show up past a certain SM size that will have maybe around 10,000-100,000 guns?

Thats an idea/suggestion anyway.

Thanks again Eric! Very awesome.

[vierasmarius]

A small suggestion: to have a larger number of small-sized systems on a truly massive ship, you could make "equipment pods" which are basically ships in their own right, carried in Vehicle Bays. 2 adjacent bays can fit one "ship" of SM X-2, while a single bay can hold 5 ships of SM X-4. Each carried ship would be a simple armored pod, loaded with whatever equipment is desired, but lacking propulsion or a control room. One advantage of this is that it could allow equipment pods to be easily swapped out. You could alternately declare that they are permanently installed, but are fully protected by the larger ship's armor.

So if you have a SM 24 (ginormous) Battle Ship, it could carry 5 SM 20 pods (each armed with a dozen or more SM 20 Tertiary batteries) instead of a single SM 24 battery.

The only difficulty here is that you'd need a separate sheet for the pods themselves. It works best if the bigger ship carries a large number of identical pods. Basic stats for the pods can be recorded in the Notes section of the mothership.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Yami Fowl

I'm getting a weird Drop Shadow from some boxes on the locked upper bar.
Any idea how to fix it?

No idea. I'm not using any Drop Shadows, and in fact those checkboxes are no different than the ones used in the entire Ship Options section.

Originally Posted by SalsaDoom

Eric... this is fantastic! Thank you a million times for making this :)

You're very welcome.

Originally Posted by SalsaDoom

"My 33 billion point defence guns open fire, bwhahaha!" but its a bit tricky to actually manage. :)

There's nothing saying that you have to fill all of the mounts - just take as many as are actually needed for the design and assign the rest to a Cargo Hold. In addition, you can always add a Mixed Mount to start out with far fewer Peripheral Mounts.

Originally Posted by SalsaDoom

Would it be possible to have another 'layer' of guns, say, between tertiary and peripheral?

I've thought about it. In fact, I started adding another size of weapon but realized it was going to take a lot of work to do it correctly so I wound up dropping it. It's still something I would like to do, and when I do get around to it I'll probably add several smaller sizes of weapon mount, but it's not something I'm likely to get around to too soon.

[ericbsmith]

I forgot to post this the other day when I uploaded the sheet.
Version 2.0 Release Candidate 3

-Fixed issue where weapon stats were not correct for certain sizes of weapon
-Many other minor bug fixes.

Excel 2000
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2.zip (2.08MB)
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2.7z (903KB)

Excel 2007
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2_2007.zip (2.74MB)
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2_2007.7z (2.64MB)

OpenOffice 3.3.0
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2-Ooo.zip (2.00MB)
http://gurpsland.no-ip.org/zip/SpaceshipsV2-Ooo.7z (1.75MB)

[SalsaDoom]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

There's nothing saying that you have to fill all of the mounts - just take as many as are actually needed for the design and assign the rest to a Cargo Hold. In addition, you can always add a Mixed Mount to start out with far fewer Peripheral Mounts.

I've thought about it. In fact, I started adding another size of weapon but realized it was going to take a lot of work to do it correctly so I wound up dropping it. It's still something I would like to do, and when I do get around to it I'll probably add several smaller sizes of weapon mount, but it's not something I'm likely to get around to too soon.

Thats more then good enough for me, honestly. Thats actually what I've been doing, on a large ship that actually turns out to be quite a lot of cargo space -- which is generally useful on a large ship anyway. This already does so many awesome things that I can wait a long time for the small stuff :) The smaller size components where the biggest thing I was hoping to see and its there in spades already. :)

EDIT: Actually a thought occured to me, there is an option to use Cargo for reaction mass, which really can be helpful on the more realistic sort of fuel burning designs... would it be possible to have an option to use Steerage cargo from habitates or unused turrets as reaction mass as well? It would make some of that unused space more useful. Awesome if possible :) Thanks Eric!

[DaltonS]

Just finished playing around with Candidate 3. Looks good. Just a few suggestions. Could you please

1. add the following items to the "Smaller SM" Systems list?
   1. Vehicle Dock (Half-Sized too?)
   2. Engineering
2. add a switch to suppress "Crush Depth" or convert it to Atmospheres?
3. automatically assume Streamlining for calculating Air Speed when using the Force Wings design switch? (SS7 p.23)
4. include ALL of the numbered notes in the Design Switches, Features, & Notes section?
5. fix the column headers in the HTML output? Example:

   <table border="1" cellpadding="4"><th nowrap>TL</td><th nowrap>Spacecraft</td><th nowrap>dST/dHP</td><th nowrap>Hnd/SR</td><th nowrap>HT</td><th nowrap>Move</td><th nowrap>LWt.</td><th nowrap>Load</td><th nowrap>SM</td><th nowrap>Occ</td><th nowrap>dDR</td><th nowrap>Range</td><th nowrap>Cost</td></th>

   should be

   <table border="1" cellpadding="4">
   <tr><th>TL</th><th>Spacecraft</th><th>dST/dHP</th><th>Hnd/SR</th><th>HT</th><th>Move</th><th>LWt.</th><th>Load</th><th>SM</th><th>Occ</th><th>dDR</th><th>Range</th><th>Cost</th></tr>

   PS: Is "NOWRAP" really necessary?

Thank you.

Dalton "adding his 2 bits to the wishlist" Spence

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by DaltonS

Just finished playing around with Candidate 3. Looks good. Just a few suggestions. Could you please

1. add the following items to the "Smaller SM" Systems list?
   1. Vehicle Dock (Half-Sized too?)
   2. Engineering
2. add a switch to suppress "Crush Depth" or convert it to Atmospheres?
3. automatically assume Streamlining for calculating Air Speed when using the Force Wings design switch? (SS7 p.23)
4. include ALL of the numbered notes in the Design Switches, Features, & Notes section?
5. fix the column headers in the HTML output? Example: PS: Is "NOWRAP" really necessary?

1) shouldn't be a problem
2) I'll think on that. I'll probably add an "atmospheres" listing along with the depth.
3) Already assumes "streamlining" if you have Force Wings for Air Performance 1 & 2, not streamlined for 3 & 4 (unless the ship actually has the streamlining option, in which case all profiles naturally assume streamlining).
4) What numbered items, specifically, are you seeing show up or not show up. Remember that each number does not get it's own line; some similar items are grouped together (such as all Armor/DR/Force Screen options being on the same line, or all Fuel Used being on a single line) (p.s. if you're using Excel and can give me an example ship from the ones saved that would be useful)
5)<tr> is missing, I can fix that. I think it's only missing in the top table - do you see anywhere else I missed something like that?
While NOWRAP is not needed in most cells, it is needed for some of the cells. And I didn't want to make the coding any more difficult by having to test whether it is necessary for all of them or not so I just used NOWRAP in all cells. HTML doesn't care about superfluous tags like that, and frankly I'm not too worried about them so long as it's properly formatted.

[Flyndaran]

I checked Don't filter available systems by SM and it still goes black with error about SMs when I put in a Plasma Sail.
It's because I'm making a ship larger than SM+12.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I checked Don't filter available systems by SM and it still goes black with error about SMs when I put in a Plasma Sail.
It's because I'm making a ship larger than SM+12.

Yup, and Plasma Sails are limited to SM+12. While the "Don't Filter" can make some items available at SM or TL in the drop down menu, it doesn't make up stats for them. If an item is unavailable at SM+13 then it's unavailable at SM+13.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

Yup, and Plasma Sails are limited to SM+12. While the "Don't Filter" can make some items available at SM or TL in the drop down menu, it doesn't make up stats for them. If an item is unavailable at SM+13 then it's unavailable at SM+13.

It should be possible to have three SM+12 ships with sails but connected by tethers or struts that then acts as a SM+13 ship, right?

Edit: I'm tired, and not sure if the above sentence makes sense.