The Grand Cluster and the Moment Drive

Back in Late 2021 I ran a game by the name of "Called from Exile". It was a high-powered game with sweeping scope, in a setting designed to accommodate homages any science fiction franchise I wanted. We had a lot of fun with that game, and I loved the resulting setting... or settings, as the case may be.

Here, I share the Faster-Than-Light system, which is key to making the setting work, and the broad brushstrokes of "The Grand Cluster"

Spaceships Armor Table

 My Small Armor Table for Spaceships (really for robots as spaceships) has gained attention, and I've received a request for version that covers sizes more typical of a spaceship. And so I've built and now present a table of armor values for spaceships. It should make finding the armor values a lot easier. The image below is an easy reference, but the text version you can highlight, copy, and so-on, is here. 

The DR given is the amount of dDR per system of armor. Not the DR! See Gurps: Spaceships 1 pages 10-13 for more information on spaceships armor.

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, Mecha, and general space opera. 

I hope you enjoy building and flying your spaceships!

PaverGuard Striders

Paverguard creates not only the most popular series of battlesuits in the xenospiral edge of colonized space, but heavier walkers as well. While their battle-suits keep you safe, their Striders allow you to exterminate the vermin that threaten your home!

Earlier, I wrote a post detailing a bunch of power-suits for use in a TL10 frontier setting with hostile alien beasts. In this post, I will be building the next step: TL10 combat walkers. These will be built using the method described in Walkers and Power Armor. 

Paverguard's strider series are quite a bit lighter than true mecha, but are still quite heavy and have cockpits rather than being mere suits, providing a huge strength boost and heavy armor. At weights below 3,000 lbs or so, Paverguard recommends its signature battlesuit line. (That's the natural point at which this armor method begins to be more effective than the battlesuit formula)

Spaceships Missiles by Weight

In this post I discussed how much damage guns in spaceships should do. Its seen a fair amount of traffic, and I find myself constantly going back to it. The post generally comes to the conclusion that the damage for a given caliber and the ammunition weight is correct, but that the size of the weapon and its amount of ammunition is off, and suggests buying guns and ammunition by weight. While analyzing missiles is much more complex (and something I keep on putting off), we can use the same assumptions spaceships did to buy missiles and their launchers in the same fashion. These are the two principles:

• Missiles weigh twice as much per shot as kinetic weapons do, and do the same damage
  
• Missile launchers weigh the same as a gun firing a projectile half the size

These are rough approximations, but they give consistent results within the spaceships system. I'm using it for my current game, and the numbers seem to work out. I hope you find it useful as well!

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.

Vehicle	ST/HP	Hnd/SR	HT	Move	Lwt	Load	SM	Occ	DR	Range	Cost
Oceanic Fishing Boat	200	0/4	13	.5/14	30 tons	9 tons	SM+5	2+6	15 DR	3640	$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.

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!

Robots as Spaceships: Walkers and Power Armor

So what is the difference between a combat walker and power armor? They seem to be a simple continuum starting with simple armor that strengthens the user and ending with giant mecha. Its not that simple though, and the more I've worked on making power armor and walkers work in Robots as Spaceships, the more distinct the two things become.

• Power armor is worn, Walkers are piloted. 
•  Power Armor only needs to bear its own weight and not get in its bearer's way. Walkers need to bear the weight of the pilot.
• Power Armor must have its knees, elbows, shoulders, and hips in the same location as its wearer. Walkers can have these locations in the same places, but often do not.
  

Of course, art breaking that last rule is not exactly uncommon, but we can call that cinematic, and judge if it is a walker or power armor on a case by case basis.

Robots as Spaceships: Armor Options

In a previous post, I compared Gurps: Spaceships armor to the very best personal armor in Gurps, and came to the conclusion that spaceship's armor was weak, especially T8 body armor and ultra-tech armors. Since that post, I've participated in a few conversations about spaceships armor in Gurps. I still think that its on average weaker than it should be, but how much weaker depends on the context. Here, rather than advocating a single "one size fits all" armor tweak, I'm going to look at options for getting the sort of armor your game needs. 

• Deflection Boost
• Uncheap Armor
• Simple Armor Facing
• Awesome Future Armor

Robots as Spaceships: Flyers

Not all robots are bound to the ground or to the water. Some of them can fly! Here we look at the various options Gurps: Spaceships provides for atmospheric locomotion.  Some options we might want are missing: propeller systems are the most notable. Others we want to adjust the stats on a little, and still others we just want to understand properly. Most of the time we will be adjusting speeds down in the name of modeling real or fictional vehicles: the new lower speed we call "Downshifted".

While this article is part of robots as spaceships, its probably just as useful when building vehicles, and I suspect I'll come back to it more in that context than for robots.

Robots as Spaceships: Quadcopters

In the last decade or so, consumer robotics has aquired an all star: the Quadcoptor. When we talk about a drone now adays, we're almost always talking about a quadcopter. Perhaps no robot has ever been produced in such numbers and made so available to the public.

In our Robots as spaceships system, this just means we need to use the helicoptor rotors from Spaceships 7, right? Well, we could. But quadcopters don't have the same performance as real helicoptor rotors, and they have very different costs and mechanics. They don't cost the same amount, and they don't move in the same way. Quadcopters use a very different steering mechanism from traditional helicopters. Helicoptors steer mechanically using "swashplates", while quadcopters vary their power to different propellers. The Quadcoptor method is more difficult to pilot and less power efficient than a true helicopter. Its also much simpler and cheaper to produce, and with modern electronics, piloting it is no longer a major issue.

So lets build a system for quadcopters in spaceships.

Robots As Spaceships: Swimmers

As a sequel to terrestrial motive systems, we will be looking at aquatic motive systems. This time, we will be looking less at cost, and more at speeds when using small size modifiers. We will be inspecting Ballast Tanks, Underwater Screws, Surface Screws, and Flexibody Drive-Trains. All of these systems are from Pyramid #3/34

Robots as Spaceships: Terrestial Motive Systems

There are many jokes about physicists and frictionless vacuums. Space is the rare environment that is a frictionless vacuum, and that makes calculating spaceship movement strangely simple, if foreign to those accustomed to terrestrial movement. When on the ground, a host of forces acting on a vehicle create a complex environment to move through.

A complex environment many of us have an intuitive grasp of, and we notice when things are a bit off. We plan to use Spaceship's Motive systems in a lot of our robots, and its worth tweaking a few of the numbers.

In this article, we'll be looking at tracks, wheels, and legs, the simplest and most common motive systems for robots in fiction (along with hovering, which suspends disbelief about its performance along with everything else). Legs come from spaceships 4, while wheels and tracks come from Pyramid  3/34.

Robots as Spaceships: Responsive Movement

In our analysis of the Gunbot, we noticed two ways that robots could move. About half of them moved similar to humans, with a base move of 5 and a very similar top speed. They could move as far as they wanted in any direction, but they had a very low top speed. They moved like a person. The other Robots have very small base moves but much larger total moves. They took a few seconds to get up to speed. This sort of movement we will call "train-like".

Spaceships uses train-like movement, with the minor exception of leg systems, which start off person-like but get more train-like as leg systems are added. Its likely that both types of movement can be engineered and each will be engineered for different purposes.

Spaceships: How Much Damage Should Guns Do?

by Mohamed Baki

Its been noted that kinetic weapons in spaceships are among the most powerful weapons in Gurps, and they contribute greatly to the "Eggshells with Hammers" paradigm worked out by gurps spaceships. When I scaled spaceships down to SM+0, a major battery didt 15 dice of damage, either as a crushing explosion or with a (2) armor divisor. I'd love to have that kind of damage as a SM+0 player, but I'd dread it as a GM, and it kind of breaks my sense of immersion

Here, we're going to figure out what the weapons damage SHOULD BE, in order to play nicely with High Tech and Ultra Tech. We will be comparing damage, weight, and caliber. While range and rate of fire are also important, I will be ignoring these for now, much as I did in last week's look at beam weapons.

Edit: a post covering how to use these numbers for missiles has been published

Spaceship Weapons: How Much Damage Should Beam Weapons Do?

Gurps spaceships is an extremely flexible system that lets us build not only spaceships but a wide variety of vehicles. Unfortunately, it seems to produce "Eggshells with Hammers": Ships able to trivially pierce each other's defenses, with even dedicated defensive designs struggling to survive a single hit. This has often been attributed to scaling problems, but when I built a SM+0 "Tank Bot" all the problems remained: it was an eggshell with a hammer.

In a previous post, I looked at how tough spaceship's armor should be. I hadn't planned on exploring the weapons systems, but a few folks expressed interest, and I decided to dig into the topic.

So if spaceship's weapons are off, how much are they off, and what should they look like? Here we will look at the damage for one of the weapon systems, and compare it to the Ultra-tech book. Spaceships has two types of weapons: beams and projectiles, and it treats them very differently. This post will discuss lasers, but posts on the more difficult topic of kinetic weapons are coming. Beam weapons are the less troublesome of the two attacks, and this post will focus more on comparison than on changes.

Robots as Spaceships: Between SM's

Spaceships categorizes craft by their SM, which is a tool that appears in GURPS again and again because its so useful. However, when we get to human-scale objects, we find that each SM cover a huge range. This is just fine for calculating hit penalties and mana costs, but it falls short as the sole number determining something's size. We need a more fine grained system for determining spaceship sizes.

As it turns out, I already built one, when working with sea monster sizes. We want to go smaller than the monster table, and its nice to have the ST built into it (we're using a very different method for determining ST), so we have an adjusted version. We've also added a base cost to each of these size entries, so that we can use relative and base costs easily.

Weight	SM	Strength	Base Cost		Weight	SM	Strength	Base Cost
5 oz	-5	ST 2	$.015		100 lbs	+0	ST 17	$5
8 oz	-5	ST 2	$.025		150 lbs	+0	ST 19	$7.50
12 oz	-5	ST 3	$.035		200 lbs	+0	ST 20	$10
1 lb	-4	ST 4	$.05		300 lbs	+1	ST 23	$15
1.5 lbs	-4	ST 5	$0.075		500 lbs	+1	ST 27	$20
2 lbs	-4	ST 5	$0.10		700 lbs	+1	ST 30	$30
3 lbs	-3	ST 6	$0.15		1000 lbs	+2	ST 36	$50
5 lbs	-3	ST 7	$0.25		1500 lbs	+2	ST 45	$75
7 lbs	-3	ST 7	$0.35		2000 lbs	+2	ST 50	$100
10 lbs	-2	ST 8	$0.50		1.5 tons	+3	ST 56	$150
15 lbs	-2	ST 9	$0.75		2.5 tons	+3	ST 65	$250
20 lbs	-2	ST 10	$1.00		3.5 tons	+3	ST 70	$350
30 lbs	-1	ST 11	$1.50		5 tons	+4	ST 79	$500
50 lbs	-1	ST 14	$2.50		7.5 tons	+4	ST 92	$750
70 lbs	-1	ST 15	$3.50		10 tons	+4	ST 100	$1,000

We'll refer to each of these vehicle sizes by their weight, and generally throw a motive type in the description as well. So our Gunbot is a 200 lb tracked robot.

This set of weights is still pretty rough-grained, but for any weight we choose, there will be a stat line within 20% of it. This happened because we used the size/range table for weights rather than lengths. This spread of numbers works well with Gurps, and has a lot of support.

We can now build a wide variety of robots at these sizes. Of particular interest is the 100 lb to 1000 lb range: there is a big difference between walker that weighs 300 lbs with the human onboard and one that weighs 500 or 700 lbs. Many fictional androids will be made at the 100 lb or smaller mark, and are correspondingly cheaper.

Lets get out there and build all of the robots we can think of! At least in our games. I take no responsibility for any actual robot legions of doom.

Robots as Spaceships: Scaling Costs

So far, we've been playing around with a SM+0 robot, and extrapolating all the costs for systems much smaller than the creators of spaceships ever intended. This method works, but we can make this simpler, while doing so gain many more options for robot sizes. Many otherwise similar robots will differ mainly in size and gear tacked on at the end. Rather than buying systems at the size the spaceship will be, we will build the spaceship at an easy to calculate abstract size, and then scale it to the size that we need.

While this is being presented as part of the robots as spaceships series, this is a tool I've been using for a long time when building spaceships. It simplifies table look-ups, and gives us a lot of power and flexibility we can use to build spaceships that aren't exactly on the SM benchmarks.

Spaceships: How Tough Should Armor be?

In preparation for my robots as spaceships project, I built a "Tank Bot", a small tracked vehicle meant to carry a gun into battle. I was surprised that the famed "Eggshells with Hammers" paradigm didn't go away. My SM +0 robot had 60 lbs of TL 8 armor that gave it a paltry 10 DR. I came to the conclusion that armor as described in spaceships doesn't just not scale well, its not strong enough even without scaling. It doesn't protect the spaceship, and it doesn't compare well to the numbers given in High Tech, Ultra Tech, or even Low Tech. Here, I'm going to discuss what the damage reduction on the armor types given in spaceships should be, by doing a book by book comparison of how the spaceship's numbers compare to the armor in High Tech, Ultra Tech, and yes, even Low Tech.

We're going to show that spaceships armor is weaker than it should be, but more importantly, we're going to find out how strong it should be.

Borlo FTL

 In my Borlo campaign, my design of Faster Than Light (FTL)  travel was very important, even though the players never left the planet's surface. How easy or difficult it is to get somewhere shapes  the culture and game-play of a setting.  I really liked the system. It lets you cross the galaxy in a month, but it takes weeks to get to any particular place. My favorite consequences include:

• It creates massive frontier areas where communication and transportation is possible but slow
• Travel times are unpredictable 
• The ideal route for a merchant (or any other spaceship) is often to visit a new world.

  These features make for good gaming: The PC's are often isolated from help or stodgy management, but if they need to leave a world, they can do so quickly. Colonization occurs in many places all at once instead of growing shell of planets that quickly go from one hundred to one billion people. How does it do this? I now present to you: the Borlo FTL system.