Thursday, January 27, 2022

A Fishing Boat using Spaceships

In one of my games it turns out I need a boat for crossing back and forth in the North Atlantic. I've done a lot of work in spaceships, so I figured I build the boat using spaceships and the alternate spaceships options from pyramid #3/34.

VehicleST/HPHnd/SRHTMoveLwtLoadSMOccDRRangeCost
Oceanic Fishing Boat2000/413.5/1430 tons9 tonsSM+52+615 DR3640$183K

The ship is a 30-ton hull. Its systems are: 1 combustion engine, 1 screw propeller, 2 fuel tanks, 3 steel armor, 1 control system, 1 engine room, 3 systems that combine to make a single SM+6 habitat system with two bunk rooms lacking life support, 3 more combined habitat systems forming a freezer, and 6 cargo. 

I bumped up the DR from 10 to 15. If you look at the armor table for steel alloys, you'll see why: it follows the standard range table progression until it drops from 2 strait to 1. Since we are using DR instead of dDR, I figured 15 was appropriate. I don't foresee the boat being shot at too much... but then again, it probably will pick up at least one bullet hole somehow. If we are worried about this, we can justify raising the armor by 5 using deflection boost.

Double checking our boat against the Nordhavn 40, a few things stand out. Our price is a little cheaper, from the single boat I found for sale, but its within about 20%, which is a lot farther off than we could have been. The speed is way too high, which doesn't surprise me, as spaceships often gives generous performance numbers. In play I'll probably be using the 7 knot speed of the comparison boat. As for the other numbers... They're harder to find, which is why I used the spaceships design system rather than digging around for proper stats on trawlers. 

Its nice to have this tool available. There are surprisingly few ships statted out in gurps, so I'm posting this in hopes someone will find it useful.

Thursday, January 20, 2022

Robots as Spaceships: Small Armor Table

I've been calculating armor values for small spaceships for a while now, and its quite doable, but its a bit tedious, and if an error is made it can be difficult to catch. So I've build a page of armor values for small spaceships. I'm looking forward to being able to reference it. The image below is for reference: if you text you can interact with, highlight, copy, and so on, click here.


 
The DR given is the amount of DR per system of armor. Each system of armor is 1/20th of the total weight.

The weights follow the size/range table, which gives us three divisions in each size modifier. For more stats on spaceships of that weight, see Between SM's

The TL number is given because its useful when working with the "Boost" numbers for adjusting armor, also explaining the example armors that go up to a theoretical TL 15. The numbers I find myself checking the most are 6, which is basic Steel and thus the cheapest option, and 13, which is "Awesome Future Armor" in TL 10, which seems to be a great spot for Battlesuits and general space opera. 

I hope you find this table useful, and I hope you enjoy your robots!