[gurps] My first experiments with Gurps Spaceships 4e - a Mecha

[Jon Lang]

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Onno Meyer <Onno.Meyer at gmx.de> wrote:
> One of the problems is that the twenty available slots are used
> for both mass and volume, but five percent of the mass in armor
> won't come close to five percent of the volume, while five
> percent of the volume for passenger seats won't come close to
> five percent of the mass. Basically, an armor module and a
> passenger module should be able to share a 'system space' in
> the design, but that would lead to a complicated list of mix
> and match.

The "system spaces" are standardized on mass, and volume isn't really
tracked.  I _could_ see a possible way of implementing a setup whereas
modules have volume ratings which get added up to supply a final SM
adustment.  However, such a setup would be unlikely to have any
practical effect: the only real effect of different overall volumes
would be a different SM; and achieving even a one-point adjustment to
the SM would be rather unlikely (to reduce your SM by one, nearly half
of your systems would have to be "high-density", with no contribution
to volume worth speaking of; to increase your SM by one, your systems
would collectively need to contribute 36 spaces worth of volume rather
than 20).  I'm willing to allow that the SM might be off by as much as
a point; it seems a small price to pay in order to not have to track
volume.

(For the record: if a one-point shift in SM is unlikely, a two-point
shift would be nearly impossible to pull off: -2 SM would require at
least 17 high-density systems, while +2 SM would require 112 spaces
worth of volume instead of 20 of them.)

> The other side of the coin is that the designer doesn't HAVE to
> track both volume and mass, and that the players don't have to
> remember the stats and capabilities of half a dozen different
> sensors or navigation instruments.
>
> Spaceships is for a free-wheeling, non-obsessive style of play
> and that doesn't mix with Mecha battles, I think :-)

You might be surprised.

-- 
Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang