Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 10-29-2009, 07:41 AM   #1
Mandavar
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Default [Spaceships] Stating Lost Fleet Ship classes

I was searching the forum for stats of Lost Fleet ship types and could not find anything. So I am starting this thread to discuss some basic design parameters.


The Lost Fleet is composed of:
Destroyers
Light Cruisers
Heavy Cruisers
Battle Cruisers
Battleships
at least 2 different types of Fast Fleet Auxiliaries

FTL:
All Ships have a jump drive, activated at specific Jump Points the ships can travel in Jump Space to nearby Star Systems (travel time some days to 2-3 weeks depending on distance). There is a maximum jump distance, so only a small amount of star systems is reachable from one specific start system. Ships arrive at the corresponding Jump Point in the target system (Choke Point). Jump points are moving inside a system (not really in orbit I think but not unmoving either). Jump points are rather large, big fleets can use one while staying in formation. Jumping uses no significant/hindering amount of energy, it is just not an issue in the series.

There is also a faster FTL travel method, Hypergates. Not every system boasts one, only strategic important or political heavy weight systems got one. The traveltimes are 10-100 times faster then per jump drive and it is possible to reach every system with Hypergate from every starting Hypergate. These gates are external means of transportation for ships, also big enough to allow fleets to pass them easily.

Forcefields:
Alls ships feature Forcefields which can be recharged, but this takes some time

Weapons:
Beam weapons for close range, Homing Missles for maximum range. Grapeshot (Metal shrapnel) is used to breach shields, as ships travel at high relative velocities and impact of Grapeshot salvos cause the metal to vaporize and stress the forcefield considerably.
Capital Ships also have a Null field generator, very short range, very long recharge time, creates a moving field which destroys all matter by counteracting the forces between molecules. (add technobabble here)

In system drives:
Ships can accelerate in a few minutes to fractions of the speed of light, standard travel velocity is 0.1c. For some reason accelerating way past 0.2c is not considered an option. For combat the relative velocity between the enemy and you should be below or at 0.2c because after that the automatic targeting systems become messed up due to relativistic effects. If you do not want to be hit to hard during enemy contact, going with higher relative speeds is an option employed often.
The in-system drives must be reactionless, because you need no reaction mass to operate them, only "Fuel Cells" which are produced by the Fast Fleet Aux. Ships.
Partial damage to some "Propulsion Units" is possible, the ship is slowed but not crippled.
Civilian ships have much slower acceleration capabilities.

Crew:
Ships tend to be crewed not to operate the ship, that is highly automatic, but to do damage repair and maintainance. Each ship has very high self repair capabilites given time, crew strength and raw materials, for "fuel cells", Missiles and special repair parts the Fast Fleet Aux. ships are necessary. Each ship boasts a huge amount of escape pods for the huge number of personal. These pods can reach almost any in-system location (and land on planets) and have hibernation chambers for long term survival.

Gravity:
There is artificial gravitiy on all (war-)ships, some orbital habitats are built without for economic reasons. Internal dampeners compensate the acceleration of the ships, but there are situations when they are the boundary for the maximum acceleration.

I think I put all the important information from the setting together, now please help me with your Spaceships knowledge :)

Thank you all!
Mandavar is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-29-2009, 07:50 AM   #2
Mateus
 
Mateus's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Curitiba - PR (Brazil)
Default Re: [Spaceships] Stating Lost Fleet Ship classes

I love this series. I will try something and put here for sugestions =). But now I am finishing the plannig of my Spy/Horror/Conspiracys Cinematografic game.
Mateus is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-29-2009, 07:51 AM   #3
Ulzgoroth
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Default Re: [Spaceships] Stating Lost Fleet Ship classes

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mandavar View Post
Crew:
Ships tend to be crewed not to operate the ship, that is highly automatic, but to do damage repair and maintainance.
This is the norm in Spaceships. All ships can be operated by control station crew/network AIs without regard for whether the workstations are manned. Workstation technicians perform maintenance and tend to be drawn on for damage control parties.
__________________
I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident.
Ulzgoroth is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-29-2009, 12:52 PM   #4
Langy
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: CA
Default Re: [Spaceships] Stating Lost Fleet Ship classes

Ships in the Lost Fleet series normally only do Fast Passes and they travel so fast no human can operate the weapons in time, so all of their gunners are AIs, pretty much.

For the ship 'fuel cells', I'd just make them reaction drives. They never specify how the drives work, but they do run out of fuel often enough - I'd stat them up as Super AM Plasma Torch ships but with the delta-V of Total Conversion Torch ships. They should have around 60,000+ miles per second of delta-V. Make the Auxilaries able to produce the antimatter in nice pre-packaged units and call those 'fuel cells'.

The Grapeshot weapons are just normal electromagnetic guns firing proximity shells. At the relative velocities we're talking about - 38,000 miles per second or so's the normal 0.2c fast pass - those grapeshot shells will one-hit-KO any vessel they hit unless they've got crazy amounts of armor, so ships in Lost Fleet need said crazy amounts of armor. Because they don't kill any ship in contact with them, grapeshot guns are likely firing the minimum sized shells available - 2cm bullets, doing 3d damage at 1mps. That's still 114,000 dice of damage at the typical fast-pass velocities, though. Don't think it's possible to survive that.

*shrug* The Lost Fleet series is horribly unrealistic in most of its science, so why's this any different? *sigh*

Oh well - if you want to keep the stated speeds, just rule any hit by a grapeshot weapon while going at a decent relative velocity will demolish the ship without bothering to role. At least due to the high relative velocity such hits should be pretty rare.
Langy is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-30-2009, 01:36 AM   #5
Mandavar
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Default Re: [Spaceships] Stating Lost Fleet Ship classes

Grapeshot is most often employed to soften the force screens. The screens can develop spot failures which can then be penetrated. So maybe the way to go is model the Force screens accordingly. Like they can take several hit from grapeshot and even after getting through the energy of the grapeshot is lowered by the shield.

Also damage on the ships seems to be highly localized. With weapons doing this amount of damage you would not expect to be able to inflict partial damage to any system (weapon batteries are routinely taken out partially). Maybe some kind of overpenetration and a very compartmentalized ships structure sealing of the damage of a passing round?

Also Destroyers and even Light Cruisers get often smashed in the first firing pass after very few hits, so we are only talking about survivability for the capital ships. For them often more than one firing pass is needed to pierce the shields and after that they are easy prey.

I honestly do not know how to model this with spacecraft, thats the reason for coming to the Forum-Hive-Mind :)

------------------------------------------------------

I just remembered another problem: the missiles can follow a target if it misses it head on. With using high speed passes like in the series, this means the missiles must have a huge delta V capability.

Dont get me wrong, I love the Lost Fleet series, I am thrilled by the battle descriptions taking into account relativistic speeds and the problems of formation coordination with signal travel times in minutes to hours, but technologically there are quite some holes in the story ..

Last edited by Mandavar; 10-30-2009 at 02:37 AM. Reason: Another problem
Mandavar is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 10-30-2009, 03:36 AM   #6
Snoman314
 
Snoman314's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2009
Default Re: [Spaceships] Stating Lost Fleet Ship classes

The force screens you describe sound like they could be modelled without too much difficulty using some of the design switches in spaceships, for example partial, would allow parts of the screens to fail like you described. As Langy points out though, damage at relativistic velocities is truly huge, so you will have to house rule stronger shields I think. Don't forget the cosmic design switches for screens and armour as well though.
Snoman314 is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
lost fleet, military sf, spaceships

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 11:07 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2025, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.