What 4e Vehicles .pdfs do people want to see?

[Kale]

Unconventional aircraft: Blimps and balloons from different eras (civil war to modern day to near future), ornithopters, fixed-wing aircraft with unusual propulsion systems (like rockets! or human pedal powered), maybe some ultralights or hang-gliders, both modern and old designs.

Covert vehicles: Disguised armored cars (one company can armor up a Toyota Camry with no visible outward changes), light assault aircraft like the Piranha or the Super Tweet, mini-submarines, insertion gliders/stealth glider pods, small helicopters like the AH-6, etc. Maybe include some rules for no-landing extraction and the like.

[Ragitsu]

Originally Posted by Kale

Covert vehicles: Disguised armored cars (one company can armor up a Toyota Camry with no visible outward changes), light assault aircraft like the Piranha or the Super Tweet, mini-submarines, insertion gliders/stealth glider pods, small helicopters like the AH-6, etc. Maybe include some rules for no-landing extraction and the like.

I saw a sub-compact a while back that looked like a giant orange. That'd fit right in Florida.

[Evil Roy Slade]

Autoduelling vehicles. In every other GURPS game I have ever run, vehicles are of secondary or tertiary importance. In an Autoduel game,they are front and centre.

[davester65]

How about starting with a book with rules for stating out real world or even fictional vehicles to 4E. After all, you guys must have your own rules for doing this that will give consistent results.
How about putting those rules in book form similar to GURPS Spaceships. Then you can come out with different books of vehicle designs based on whatever theme works best for you. Doing it by TL ranges (say pre-industrial, then industrial to modern, then futuristic/scifi) might be the most logical. Although doing it by vehicle types might work as well.
Or, even do both, start with the former to cover the basic and most common designs. Then do the latter to go into less common, more unusual designs.

[cybermancer2k1]

Originally Posted by davester65

How about starting with a book with rules for stating out real world or even fictional vehicles to 4E. After all, you guys must have your own rules for doing this that will give consistent results.

Seconded. In fact, I'm surprised that SJG hasn't issued at least an official PDF conversion guide to tide us over until Vehicles comes out.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Langy

All the talk of a VDS has been about people wanting the one that's actually being produced. It might have been a reoccuring misconception a few years ago when the VDS wasn't announced, but since I started using these forums I've seen nothing like that.

Really? At least two (and possibly three, as I still can't tell if Figleaf23 is being facetious or not) posters in this very thread seems to think there's a secret VDS.

Originally Posted by davester65

How about starting with a book with rules for stating out real world or even fictional vehicles to 4E. After all, you guys must have your own rules for doing this that will give consistent results.

Originally Posted by cybermancer2k1

Seconded. In fact, I'm surprised that SJG hasn't issued at least an official PDF conversion guide to tide us over until Vehicles comes out.

I'm afraid there is no such system. David Pulver and HANS used extrapolation from first principles for the vehicle stats in Campaigns, Ultra-Tech and High-Tech. Bill Stoddard apparently just converted 2e stats (without any special conversion tool) for Fantasy.

EDIT: And Kromm has said that they don't want authors of the Vehicles series slavishly following an "official" VDS anyway.

[DemiBenson]

Originally Posted by Mgellis

It appears that the plan for 4e vehicle books is to publish them as .pdfs, each one featuring a related group of vehicles like "World War II fighters" or "Motorcycles."

Okay, here's my question...

What 4e Vehicles .pdfs do people want to see written and published as e23 e-books? What is the wish list of the Hive Mind? :)

Mark

Honestly, I find the categories they have for most of the vehicles are waaaay too specific for the page count. I'll take an example of something I know pretty well: Motorcycles.

Motorcycles first appeared (in very late TL5/early TL6) as safety bicycles (i.e. modern-form bicycles) with attached steam engines to boost speed. By mid TL6 (in 1920s) motorcycles could already go faster than 100 mph. Nowadays, sports bikes can easily go faster than 200 mph, although a gentleman's agreement between the manufacturers limits speeds to 200 mph for non-racers.

Once you give brief history and examples of the major types of motos in each TL bracket, you're done with stats - the entries of each of the major categories are all pretty similar from a game mechanics perspective, despite the heated discussions amongst moto riders.

To add variety (by which I mean page count), you could do what High-Tech does with modern firearms: history and example of an exemplar, and list abbreviated stats (just some variances) for similar ones.

Now, the adventuring section is where you could pad out to whatever degree you need: the simple form would discuss some ways that PCs could use motos to emulate action in movies/TV/books, with a list of penalties for typical stunts. The long form would go into more detail on stunts and penalties, perhaps some special rules for moto races and rules for crashing (PC damage, how recoverable the moto is, etc), cultural attitudes towards motos and riders and how that affects PCs through the ages, moto gear, and templates for the myriad kinds of riders (e.g. bikers, one-percenters, scooter-riding mods, cafe racers, retired Goldwing tourers, urban riders, stunters, racers, etc).

Now, that I'd buy. Or write.

But the one on the wishlist is Modern Motorbikes, which sounds incredibly boring - as I mentioned above, once you cover one example of each category of moto, you've pretty much got them all covered because they're just not that different. The e23 wishlist format asks for

Each supplement will describe 7-15 closely related vehicles of a particular era, nation, and/or class (preferably all three).

with

One- to two-page description of each vehicle, including crew, crew skills, and components.

In order to make the required 16-32 pages, it would have to be overly detailed - most GMs won't be interested in the minutiae, and are more likely looking for broader details like "The heros are in a car chasing a motorcycle-riding villain. Can they catch him?" or "How hard is it to maneuver a police motorcycle up a building's internal emergency stairs?"


Mind you, I think most of the rest of the example titles would be equally hyper-detailed.

• Cold War NATO Fighter Jets: Unless you're playing a game of fighter aces who, bizarrely, get to choose their own fighters for each mission, few games are going to involve more than a single type of fighter jet. And I quite believe that any GM who runs such a game will already know enough about the subject to look up any relevant stats and communicate to the players. A better book might be "Cold War-Era Fighters" which would give the GM fighters for the aces and their enemies, and doesn't need to be limited to USA/USSR conflicts either - Korean War, Vietnam War, or the covert drug war of the later 20th century all make for decent stories.
• WWII Axis Tanks 1944-1945: Same sort of thing. Either the GM wants "a tank", and the specific kind isn't that important ("German tank that the heroes capture"), or it is important, and the GM already knows all the relevant details ("Has to be a Panther Ausf. F, not a Panther II, and certainly not a Tiger II").
• Patrol Boats: Ok, this could be interesting, but only if it were a broader look at patrol boats through the ages and not limited by era and nationality.
• Sports Cars of the 80s, 90s, and 00s: Once you get past a small number of examples (like 8 or 9), then it turns into gamer-related teen boy fantasy material... which is fine, but not something I want to buy.

Ultimately, is the game about the toys, or the people? The Spaceships line is a pretty good balance: Spaceships 5 has 30+ ships in 23 pages, which takes up slightly more than half the book with the rest being game-related (adventure seeds, special skill rolls, etc).

Demi

[Langy]

or it is important, and the GM already knows all the relevant details

This doesn't follow. I might know I want an M1A2 Abrams for my Iraq War game because that's what I heard about on the news (or whatever), but I haven't the faintest idea how much armor an M1A2 carries, in GURPS terms or real-world ones.

Armor, handling, stability rating, and health are all statistics that aren't obvious even for people who know the real-world vehicle very well. Load, occupancy, and speed/acceleration are all things that are easy to figure out if you have the real-world stats - it's those other ones that are difficult.

[Mailanka]

A book on modern cars and motorcycles.

A book on designing my own guns (not strictly a vehicles book, but hey)

A book for designing my own ultra-tech vehicles, particularly military vehicles

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Langy

This doesn't follow. I might know I want an M1A2 Abrams for my Iraq War game because that's what I heard about on the news (or whatever), but I haven't the faintest idea how much armor an M1A2 carries, in GURPS terms or real-world ones.

Langy: Check out this website http://www.members.tripod.com/collinsj/protect.htm

M1A2 SEP (2)

Against KE (ball, APFSDSDU, any solid impactor)
Turret: 940-960 Glacis:560-590
Lower front hull:580-650

Against CE (Chemical Energy; basically HEAT and explosive jets)
Turret: 1320-1620 Glacis:510-1050
Lower front hull:800-970

the values are in mm of RHA equivalent. And 1mm of RHA equivalent is about DR2.75 (at DR70 to the inch). You'll have to play with the armor divisors, levels of hardened, etc, if you want that level of detail.

So for KE impacts, the M1 on the turret is about 950mm RHA equivalent, or DR2612 (!). I'm sure you can do the rest of the math. :-)

Harder to find are the "non-critical" angles, like turret sides, but they're usually pretty thin, relatively speaking.