What RPG has the best spaceship design system?

[Pomphis]

I believe nobody mentioned GURPS Traveller? I like it. Being based on VE2 it can be expanded at will, standard missiles may only exist in two sizes, but with VE2 one can easily add lots of other missiles. And weapons too.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Pomphis

I believe nobody mentioned GURPS Traveller? I like it. Being based on VE2 it can be expanded at will, standard missiles may only exist in two sizes, but with VE2 one can easily add lots of other missiles. And weapons too.

For the unfamiliar The Gurps Traveller system is based on Ve2 but it normally uses pre-built "modules" for stadard sized hulls.

There is a lot of support for these modules in Gurp[s travelelr: Starships both in the form of more modules and background information.

Ve2 is available for you to build you own modules, modify existing ones, build new componets for those modules or just to look up weights and costs and determing that one of item x is small in enough to go in the "waste space" of one of those modules.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Pomphis

I believe nobody mentioned GURPS Traveller? I like it. Being based on VE2 it can be expanded at will, standard missiles may only exist in two sizes, but with VE2 one can easily add lots of other missiles. And weapons too.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

For the unfamiliar The Gurps Traveller system is based on Ve2 but it normally uses pre-built "modules" for stadard sized hulls.

There is a lot of support for these modules in Gurp[s travelelr: Starships both in the form of more modules and background information.

Ve2 is available for you to build you own modules, modify existing ones, build new componets for those modules or just to look up weights and costs and determing that one of item x is small in enough to go in the "waste space" of one of those modules.

Interesting. Maybe adding some constraints on top of vanilla Ve2 would fix some issues with the system? IDK.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Both editions have issues in this area but they're worse in 3e is what I'm saying.

Could you point me where GURPS 4e slips away from the model of damage, DR, and HP implied in the Basic Set? I've been busy with other stuff with better citation these past ten years and I'm not up on the latest GURPS estoerica.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Could you point me where GURPS 4e slips away from the model of damage, DR, and HP implied in the Basic Set?

It has 2-3 models even within the basic set:
HP scales with the 1/3 power of mass.
Explosion damage scales with the 1/2 power of mass.
ST damage scales weirdly at lower ST levels but eventually becomes 1/2 power of BL.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It has 2-3 models even within the basic set:
HP scales with the 1/3 power of mass.
Explosion damage scales with the 1/2 power of mass.
ST damage scales weirdly at lower ST levels but eventually becomes 1/2 power of BL.

In GURPS, damage scales with the square root of energy.

• HP scales with the square root of cross section, which equals cube root of mass, all else remaining equal.
• Explosives damage scales with the square root of energy, which is the square root of mass.
• ST damage scales with the square root of energy, which equals the square root of BL.

Those three models are actually the same model.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by RyanW

In GURPS, damage scales with the square root of energy.

No it doesn't (see the collision rules, or the damage of energy weapons in spaceships) and the point is mostly that the scaling of damage should be the same as the scaling for hit points.

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Ve2 is available for you to build you own modules, modify existing ones, build new componets for those modules or just to look up weights and costs and determing that one of item x is small in enough to go in the "waste space" of one of those modules.

GT also includes power supply in the "modules" so one doesn´t have to track it during design, but only volume, mass and cost. This simplifies shipbuilding, but one cannot play around with power. With VE2 one can (as I did) modify modules to no longer include power supply, and track power seperately. So I can for example have PD lasers with much higher rates of fire, fighters or gun boats with energy banks with increased rates of fire for limited time, ships which do not have enough power to operate all systems simultaneously ...

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by RyanW

In GURPS, damage scales with the square root of energy.

• HP scales with the square root of cross section, which equals cube root of mass, all else remaining equal.
• Explosives damage scales with the square root of energy, which is the square root of mass.
• ST damage scales with the square root of energy, which equals the square root of BL.

Those three models are actually the same model.

ST damage does not double as ST doubles (the sw / th table is one of those legacies from earlier forms of GURPS which has never been harmonized with the rest of the system, it increases too fast), but damage from guns does scale the way you say. S.A. Fisher or that pantropes guy could go on and on about the many important limits of this model, but compared to every other tabletop RPG system I know its night and day.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by Anthony

No it doesn't (see the collision rules, or the damage of energy weapons in spaceships) and the point is mostly that the scaling of damage should be the same as the scaling for hit points.

It dawns on me that under the hood, GURPS may be trying to scale damage from projectiles and collisions as sqrt(energy/linear dimension). This would explain why damage from projectiles (at least in Spaceships and UT) seems to scale with linear dimension. So the collision rules sort of make sense if you assume linear dimension usually scales with HP. You can even sort of justify the beam numbers if spot size is correlated with beam output.

I'm not saying this is great—energy/area would probably make more sense than energy/linear dimension. But there might be a method to the madness.