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In-Universe Ship Builder

Aaron Fox

SB's Minor Junker Descendant and Hunter of Nazis
Author
So, a pet project of mine is a ship builder that I wanted to use for a future project to ensure that ship designs stay consistent. Now I have been working on a system to make simplified stats to create spaceships with.

Now the universe is mostly Physics+, universes like Traveler and Sword of the Stars are known Physics+ universes (basically, as the name implies they're Physics plus extra) and is very 'hard' on the SciFi scale.

Now, I want to keep it as simple as possible. I do have a prototype on Google Sheets (commentary approved link, i.e. you can make commentary on it if you use this link) but I'm having second doubts...
 
Well, I was thinking that three components are required:

  • Ship Mass
  • Ship Volume
  • Ship Surface Area
Ship Mass is god as ships are only rated to be so massive, ship volume helps determine how much stuff you can stuff into a vessel, and surface area is important in external component placement and armor...
 
Yeah, I should go into more detail here.

Ship mass is pretty much as it says, the total maximum mass of a spaceship. Every module, every reactor, every fuel tank, everything requires mass. This has side effects on things like maneuverability, the ship's structure (pushing a vessel to a combat speed of 10 Gs puts a lot of stress on a 950,000 kton starship), and the ship's ability to take recoil to name a few.

Ship Volume and Surface Area utilize the same data (specifically length, width, and height for the most part) but in different ways. Now Volume is how much giblets you can put into a vessel, which includes storage spaces, crew facilities, ammo bunkers, among other things. Some weapons are very volume intensive (VLS and torpedo cells anyone?) while others aren't.

Surface Area is for all the external bits and heavily determines how much your armor weighs. Having a starship with a surface area 87,500 square meters is going to have less mass to it's 5 meter thick armor plate than a vessel with 175,000 square meters in surface area. Now going larger is a necessary evil due to what I'm thinking of when putting external giblits onto a design. Now more surface area is a necessary evil for putting larger turrets or turrets with multiple barrels onto a ship design... and this is partially due to how armor works, which is inspired by Sword of the Star 2's armor model.
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(the inspiration: Sword the Stars 2 armor 'matrix', the green bars represents armor you can ablate away while the blue bar represents 'Armor Resistance', which can no-sell various weapons outright if you play it right, and further enhanced with certain technologies or upping in ship size)
Basically armor has this attribute that no-sells a certain grade/tier (based on being on a certain class, although I haven't completely decided on the specifics) and below. Basically a weapon of -for the sake of argument- the 'small' tier can damage/penetrate 'small' tier armor but is no-sell-ed by 'large' tier and up armor and the weapon's capabilities are halved when facing 'medium' tier armor. This means in order to slap ships with weapons that can harm vessels within a certain grade/tier of armor, you'll have to sacrifice a lot to get that weapon fitted...
 
Are you aware of GURPS? They have a fairly in depth spaceship design system and have done Traveler books in the past.

It may give you some inspiration.
 
Are you aware of GURPS? They have a fairly in depth spaceship design system and have done Traveler books in the past.

It may give you some inspiration.
Well, that is one thing that I've been consistently pointed too, and my dad has quite a few of the first edition rule and equipment books for Traveler... but I don't want to lean on Traveler too much.
 
Would a Nexus: The Jupiter Incident style armament/equipment system help out in this instance?

In Nexus: The Jupiter Incident (an underrated game by all accounts, not perfect but damn impressive for it's history) a ship of a certain size only has so many slots available to it, and each slot is designed for specific modules. Guns came in 'normal' and 'heavy' types -with the corresponding effectiveness, tracking, and costs thereof- with special weapons and 'flak guns' (basically rapid-fire PD lasers) rounding them out. Also some vessels can mount a system called a 'Datascanner' which is used to parse special information like weaknesses and what not (although using this system will force you to lower any shields you have) which required a mount able to fit them. Other slots include weapon and auxiliary power generators, engines (be primary, secondary, or 'special'), shield generators, sensors, E-War systems, stealth generators, among other things.

Would that be simpler?
 
Right now I'm thinking on how to make the ship builder but I have a good idea on how combat in-verse would be like:

Now combat in this universe is a mix of 'soft' sci-fi and 'hard' sci-fi. 'Soft' in the fact that you can maneuver around at 10+ Gs in combat without much hindrance to the crew but 'hard' that things like mass, fuel, and energy and heat management actually matter. While effective range is limited by various factors -particularly ECM, relative speed of opposing sides, round/missile velocity, and the ability to gain a targeting solution- but generally combat is 100-400 Megameters (or 100,000km to 400,000km) for most of the weapons available, with point defense systems tending to peter out at 100 Mm (i.e. PD Missiles).

While warships tend to be the 'bread and butter' of combat, it doesn't mean things like strikecraft don't exist. They're actually useful against enemy missile barrages and if they can get into range they can damage things like sensors, weapon barrels/emitters/accelerators, thruster arrays, among other systems or damage ships with anti-ship munitions. Most ships in-verse tend to have at least a 'basic' hanger to house a few shuttles and a flight (i.e. 4) of light fighters, partially as a method for transfers from and from planets and/or other vessels and a small anti-seeker/strikecraft escort.

Now there are three types of weapons: Energy (basically any particle, plasma, or laser weapon), kinetic (any coil/railgun), and 'seeker' (i.e. missiles of all shapes and sizes). Each of these weapon types have their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, kinetics are useful because they don't require as much 'secondary mass' (i.e. heat management systems, power plants) as energy weapons but take a lot of volume and mass. Seekers are similar but have the second longest range next to particle beams, but have very low ammo capacity compared to kinetics. Energy weapons have low initial mass and volume with extensive reach, they pay for it through the nose in other systems like heat management and more power plants to power them.

Now weapons have a 'normal', 'heavy', and 'spinal' types of mount. 'Normal' is faster firing, lighter, and takes up less space compared to 'heavy' mounts, but 'spinal' mounts can't have turrets and can -at best- fire in a small cone for anything other than seeker weapons.

In terms of defenses, there are four: Countermeasures (i.e. sensor decoys, flare-chaff dispensers, ECM), armor (slabs of composite whose statistics -i.e. mass, thickness, effectiveness against energy and kinetics) differ from species to species), shields (the strengths and weaknesses of which differ from species to species and model to model, but can be overloaded both by conventional and less-than-conventional means), and point defense (weapons that are tasked to defend the vessel they're on). In order to do more than cosmetic damage to a ship, you'll have to penetrate the defenses. Countermeasures are there to at least 'muddle' electronic means of detection or to fool seekers to not hit their target. Point defense generally is to ensure that enemy seekers and strikecraft don't get close and are generally decent at their job at worst. Shields is a mix between 'mass-less ablative armor' and 'must be X powerful to register' types and can be hard to disperse without shield-piercing or shield-draining weapons. Armor requires you to penetrate in order to damage the innards of a ship and is the most mass-intensive of the defense options, but is easily the cheapest overall as they require very little energy at most, with no energy required being the most common...
 
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