General How to develop a vehicle design sequence
- Thread starter Tiikeri
- Start date
There are three very different approaches that come to mind
Method 1 (GDW's approach for Striker): do a LOT of research, and work out reasonable formulae for how much of what does the thing. Then extrapolate forward. (this did, however, lead to mainframes on ship with the power of Apple III's.)
Method 2 (Marc's approach in t5): do a semi-abstract system that generates "good sounding" numbers that play well.
Method 3 (Firefly RPG, Serenity RPG): Built like a PC, with modifiers that work for the story approach.
There are hybrids of these, and maybe a few more core approaches.
Method 1 (GDW's approach for Striker): do a LOT of research, and work out reasonable formulae for how much of what does the thing. Then extrapolate forward. (this did, however, lead to mainframes on ship with the power of Apple III's.)
Method 2 (Marc's approach in t5): do a semi-abstract system that generates "good sounding" numbers that play well.
Method 3 (Firefly RPG, Serenity RPG): Built like a PC, with modifiers that work for the story approach.
There are hybrids of these, and maybe a few more core approaches.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
Method 2 is also represented by a Traveller design system published in Space Gamer. It has about the detail level of CT High Guard and about the same process.
Method 3 is also seen in the original Star Wars RPG, where fighters and ships use essentially the same mechanics as people.
Method 3 is also seen in the original Star Wars RPG, where fighters and ships use essentially the same mechanics as people.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
I will put in my "odd man out" views on developing a design sequence.
First, you need separate design sequences for ground, grav, aerial(non-grav), nautical, and space vehicles. No one sequence for all. Second, spend some time researching actual vehicles, and how they could be converted into Traveller-compatible versions. Look for common denominators, and do not forget to pay close attention to power requirements. Ignore Traveller rule requirements for space, and then see if you can come up with a sequence that will design, reasonably closely, actual vehicles.
Look at some cross-sections of actual vehicles that you are thinking of designing, and see how much room everything takes. If you are near a military museum or park, go take a look at the vehicles, and if you can, get inside of them. Generally, you will find that there is not a lot of excess room for people.
How early a Tech Level are you thinking of will be a factor as well. For nautical vehicles, Tech Level 4 is the steam era, and Tech Level 5 was also pretty much the steam era for high-powered ships. Steam plants require boilers, which take up a lot of space. Coal or oil fuel does likewise. Crew requirements for coal-fired ships were high as stokers and coal heavers were needed to both feed the furnaces, and move the coal to bunkers adjacent to the furnaces.
Civilain vehicles are not going to have armor, and not all military vehicles are going to have armor. Armor does not take up volume so much as it adds a lot of weight to a design. For non-grav aircraft, armor should be quite limited and extend to the protection of the pilot, and maybe a bit to the engine.
There are books on naval architecture online at archive.org which give a good idea of what goes into a ship design.
Edit Note: I should add that I am not a fan of design sequences.
First, you need separate design sequences for ground, grav, aerial(non-grav), nautical, and space vehicles. No one sequence for all. Second, spend some time researching actual vehicles, and how they could be converted into Traveller-compatible versions. Look for common denominators, and do not forget to pay close attention to power requirements. Ignore Traveller rule requirements for space, and then see if you can come up with a sequence that will design, reasonably closely, actual vehicles.
Look at some cross-sections of actual vehicles that you are thinking of designing, and see how much room everything takes. If you are near a military museum or park, go take a look at the vehicles, and if you can, get inside of them. Generally, you will find that there is not a lot of excess room for people.
How early a Tech Level are you thinking of will be a factor as well. For nautical vehicles, Tech Level 4 is the steam era, and Tech Level 5 was also pretty much the steam era for high-powered ships. Steam plants require boilers, which take up a lot of space. Coal or oil fuel does likewise. Crew requirements for coal-fired ships were high as stokers and coal heavers were needed to both feed the furnaces, and move the coal to bunkers adjacent to the furnaces.
Civilain vehicles are not going to have armor, and not all military vehicles are going to have armor. Armor does not take up volume so much as it adds a lot of weight to a design. For non-grav aircraft, armor should be quite limited and extend to the protection of the pilot, and maybe a bit to the engine.
There are books on naval architecture online at archive.org which give a good idea of what goes into a ship design.
Edit Note: I should add that I am not a fan of design sequences.
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and you also need to determine why you are doing it: combat requirements, just chrome or story telling elements, realism or good enough, etc. How are you planning on using the system?
Before starting most things, you do need to know what you are going for. Vague requirements lead to vague plans
Before starting most things, you do need to know what you are going for. Vague requirements lead to vague plans
I'm pretty much a fan of the MgT2 Vehicle Design sequence, going so far as to fudge in Striker armor numbers and weapons.
It's approach is to just quote a performance number for money spent and TL, doesn't even force you to define is it fuel cell/MHD/IC/fusion. Fast dev, get straight to play, yet you have concrete numbers and volume/tonnage carry capacity.
The only problem I have with it is it doesn't work out well for ATV generation as described classically.
Looked at the Striker jet engine numbers and decided like a lot of the tech level changes, it suggests incremental power increases rather then what it seems to actually be.
For jets thats a factor of 3 for thrust per lb of engine pet TL increase, so I have them be A Thing until at least TL11-12 (but limit optimal performance to one atmosphere/G-size combo, emphasizing the defensive advantage of local air forces vs. the expeditionary flexibility of grav vehicles).
It's approach is to just quote a performance number for money spent and TL, doesn't even force you to define is it fuel cell/MHD/IC/fusion. Fast dev, get straight to play, yet you have concrete numbers and volume/tonnage carry capacity.
The only problem I have with it is it doesn't work out well for ATV generation as described classically.
Looked at the Striker jet engine numbers and decided like a lot of the tech level changes, it suggests incremental power increases rather then what it seems to actually be.
For jets thats a factor of 3 for thrust per lb of engine pet TL increase, so I have them be A Thing until at least TL11-12 (but limit optimal performance to one atmosphere/G-size combo, emphasizing the defensive advantage of local air forces vs. the expeditionary flexibility of grav vehicles).
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I think the MGT2 VDS is a pretty good match to the vehicle combat sequence i.e. pretty abstract in both cases. No point in having a detailed hi-fidelity VDS if you then use rangeband combat and cinematic mechanics.
I dislike both so don't use MGT2.
With respect to CT/Striker aircraft design sequences the frustrating thing is that GDW didn't carry through on the interface combat in the rules. I still to this day don't really know how they intended aircraft agility/MPs, grav fighter agility and spaceship agility to interact.
I dislike both so don't use MGT2.
With respect to CT/Striker aircraft design sequences the frustrating thing is that GDW didn't carry through on the interface combat in the rules. I still to this day don't really know how they intended aircraft agility/MPs, grav fighter agility and spaceship agility to interact.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
There are a few ways to do this.
1 - get one of the existing vehicle design systems (top of my head the ones I have Striker, MT, FF&S, MgT vehicles, CE vehicles, T5, GURPS vehicles, EABA Stuff) and adapt to Traveller stats if necessary
2 - take an existing vehicle in the real world and sci fi it - replace wheels/tracks with grav modules, weapons become laser turrets, rapid pulse plasma guns and the like
3 - use the vehicles in CT to reverse engineer your own system - this can be based on spaces/modules or tons take your pick.
4 - pick up lots of different sci fi games and steal their vehicles for Traveller.
Oddly enough I would also recommend MgT 2e vehicles - it has its quirks but in general it is a very quick and useful design sequence. You can always use referee fiat to modify whatever you design.
1 - get one of the existing vehicle design systems (top of my head the ones I have Striker, MT, FF&S, MgT vehicles, CE vehicles, T5, GURPS vehicles, EABA Stuff) and adapt to Traveller stats if necessary
2 - take an existing vehicle in the real world and sci fi it - replace wheels/tracks with grav modules, weapons become laser turrets, rapid pulse plasma guns and the like
3 - use the vehicles in CT to reverse engineer your own system - this can be based on spaces/modules or tons take your pick.
4 - pick up lots of different sci fi games and steal their vehicles for Traveller.
Oddly enough I would also recommend MgT 2e vehicles - it has its quirks but in general it is a very quick and useful design sequence. You can always use referee fiat to modify whatever you design.
and you also need to determine why you are doing it: combat requirements, just chrome or story telling elements, realism or good enough, etc. How are you planning on using the system?
Before starting most things, you do need to know what you are going for. Vague requirements lead to vague plans
Its for realism. For making how things work matter. Its for making things make sense. Dont remember which vds it was, but it went something like your vehicle has a good quality, so now pick a bad quality. I utterly reject that way of doing things. Great ideas posted so far. Any more suggestions on how to learn to do this from a game design perspective would be great.b
Then your best bet would be to at least look at a lot of the resources Timerover51 puts out there: he bases a lot of what he does on real world resources, so for TL 0-8 at least, we have real world vehicles you can look at. Although I feel that there can be future development of materials, power plants and other technologies that we just can't see. Extrapolation only gets you so far - look at the can of worm :CoW: for computers (and I am still a big computer Traveller fan but there is already a thread on that so stopping that chain of derailment)
Now I've used Striker to get pretty detailed vehicle specs. How realistic they are may be up to interpretation - I write software and just know how to put gas in the car, so that's as far as I know vehicles in the real world. However: my games only really require the basics: how fast, how far, what happens when it gets hit. The what happens when it gets hit we play more cinematically as my players don't want to get into the nuts and bolts (and I've tried...) I've also got the Modern D20 rules but have not really looked at them.
So other than Striker, I've not used any detailed vehicle design system as my players always seem to want whatever is on the lot, and they never even go to the 2nd lot to price/spec compare. All off the shelf and rarely anything custom.
I'm working on that based on the realization that ortillery was at best abstracted, yet even a missile coming in at a delta vee of 4 has an absolutely outrageous speed that most breathable atmospheres are going to cause burnup before impact. Between that consideration and limiting time missiles are subject to PD fire, it means ortillery platform ships are VERY close to the planet.
So since I feel a need to get a concrete number for ship bombardment missiles, I'm going to by extension be coming up with related ship/aerospace vehicle values.
Design for what you need:
- If your vehicles weigh tonnes (thousands of kilograms), then don’t waste time calculating a 1 kg vs a 10 kg radio in the vehicle.
- If your movement, combat system requires kph and some version of “Vehicle HP”, then your design system only needs to focus on kph and hp. Don’t waste a lot of time calculating values (like ground pressure or weight to HP ratio) if the game mechanics do not use them.
- Wherever possible, simpler is better. Complex rules get used less than simple rules.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
That is so definitely true.
Sure, simpler is better - but with modern spreadsheets you can design even a CT/Striker or TNE/FF&S vehicle in less than five minutes and have as much or as little detail to use in your game as you like. All it would take is for the rules designers to have a page where you can download their spreadsheet. Back in the day they could have had it on Delphi/Compuserve/AoL but sadly they didn't so we had to build the spreadsheet from scratch.
- MANY people use CT:HG to design Starships.
- FEW people use TNE: FF&S to design Starships.
- BOTH HG and FF&S have spreadsheets to speed the process.
Why do people still prefer the CT/MGT simpler design spreadsheets over the complex Striker/FF&S spreadsheets? I posit because most people inherently prefer SIMPLE over COMPLEX. (... and I am a gearhead who loves the power that FF&S provides to customize "outside of the box", but admire the innate elegance of a "simple" rule.)
I prefer CT:HG cause it has some items that don't show up later (particularly repulsors) but more importantly I'm not constrained by rule XYZ to reimagine what the numbers mean rather then being stuck with exactly a 3m sensor dish or whatever.
Easier to extend my own whackadoodle gearhead thing onto a simpler structure then swallow or have to undo someone else's version of gearhead.
It turns out that the key word was fundamentals. When i seached for space architecture or space ship design or space architecture the results were about 3d modelling, computer games, and engineering schools. Once i searched for design fundamentals, then the manuals and textbooks started coming up.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Then again, to use a spreadsheet requires a program like Excel to run it. Not everyone has or likes to use Excel. (I despise it by the way, as does my accountant wife.) Then you do have to manage to read the spreadsheet on the computer, unless you have a printer that can print long sheets. I do my design the hard way. by hand. So simpler is better, unless I decide to get a bit more detailed, and even then, I look for simpler ways, like using an existing vehicle.
I'd argue it has everything to do with the fact that the games people use the designs for are popular, rather than the inherent characteristics of the design systems. Virtually nobody plays TNE space combat anymore ergo virtually nobody uses FF&S. I can't use a FF&S warship to play High Guard, or at least it would make a lot more sense to just use HG Shipyard to design it.
I too like elegant rules. But for me HG is combat by spreadsheet. I can't stand the lack of manoeuvre. Give me Battle Rider any day and twice on Sundays.
