d20 Future Warships

[Johnny Angel]

I discovered Peter Fuesz' Warships Excel Sheet at Tequila Starrise, which allows easy creation of starships using the Alternity Warships rules. I've added a sheet that basically converts the results of the ship generation into something usable by modified d20 Future rules, with something of the look of the Blood & Space sheet.

There is more to do on this sheet, and I invite critique. Here are some of the assumptions I have made and other issues:

1) I have observed that in general, the hull points listed for d20 Future ships tend to be equal to the Alternity Warships hull points of the same class of ships times ten. Therefore, in converting I just multiply.
2) I have also observed a rough correlation between the averages of defense dice in Warships and the DR of the same category of armor in d20 Future. I have assigned each armor a DR equal to the average of the defense roll with modifiers times ten. I have included all three categories of damage for when I get around to putting together rules for various armor effects.
3) The movement rate has been fudged by adding the acceleration and the maneuver stats from Warship. This means that bigger ships will need bigger engines to keep up with smaller vehicles, which I like. But this is a kludge, and in any case, feel free to argue with the principle.
4) I have indicated damage only for those weapons which have an equivalent in d20 Future, as I have not managed to come up with even a rough corelation between Alternity damage and d20 damage. If you have any clues here, I'd love to hear about it. A sufficient number comparisons seem to be more than a coincidence that I suspect the d20 damage is also derived from Alternity damage by some formula
5) Range increments are given in meters, assuming a 200m combat grid. Alternity is metric, Star Wars is metric, and by god my soul is metric.
6) Space is given for crew assignments. For my purposes, I find it better to assign actual PCs and NPCs to stations, and let them roll on their skills, rather than mess with this Crew Quality system.
7) The price of the ship is given in Concord Dollars. I haven't worked out the formula to convert numbers of dollars to purchase DC, and these prices go right off the charts in the d20 Modern book. Feel free to enlighten me.
8) I have implemented an ad hoc system of computer system quality with three levels of bonus -- +1, +3 and +5.
9) Weapons picked on the ship generation sheet appear in numbered slots on the d20 sheet. You assign them to gunners on the Weapon Systems sheet by typing the slot number in the first column, and putting the name of the PC or NPC controlling the gun and his or her ranged attack bonus in the 6th and 7th colums respectively. Maybe later I could streamine it with a crew sheet and some of those pull-down menu gadgets.
10) There wasn't a built-in function for choosing missiles, bombs and mines, and I have only added lines in the Weapon Array sheet to enter these by hand.

So far, this is plenty good for my purposes, as I needed to be able to take ship data from Star*Drive modules and make playable d20 Future ships from them -- which at this point means that only scout and escort class ships have been tried out. But I might as well keep improving it. This doesn't deal with BlackFurredBeast's question about determining actual physical dimensions, but you'll note that 1 Warships hull point buys you 24m^3 of cargo space. If we assume that 1m^3 of that is taken up with walls and such trappings, make it 25m^3 per Warships hull point, or per ten d20 Future hull points. You can distribute the three dimensions as you see fit. Indeed, the dimensions listed for the same class of ship seem to be all over the map in Alternity Starships, and my best guess is that it has to do with the dimension of height which is not indicated in the given footprints. Or, you know, they could have been just making it up.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

God bless you, my son.

When d20Future eventually gets delivered, I was just going to use the Warships rules and that very spreadsheet and "tack it on".

When I have more time I'll see if I can't play with it and give some constructive feedback.

--fje

 

[Piratecat]

Mr. Angel, you're damn cool.

 

[Justin D. Jacobson]

And so the circle of life continues: WOTC releases a product that is immediately savaged by critics for being incomplete; industrious fans and third-party publishers fill the void; criticism fades to silence.

Good job!

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I discovered Peter Fuesz' Warships Excel Sheet at Tequila Starrise, which allows easy creation of starships using the Alternity Warships rules. I've added a sheet that basically converts the results of the ship generation into something usable by modified d20 Future rules, with something of the look of the Blood & Space sheet.

There is more to do on this sheet, and I invite critique. Here are some of the assumptions I have made and other issues:

1) I have observed that in general, the hull points listed for d20 Future ships tend to be equal to the Alternity Warships hull points of the same class of ships times ten. Therefore, in converting I just multiply.
2) I have also observed a rough correlation between the averages of defense dice in Warships and the DR of the same category of armor in d20 Future. I have assigned each armor a DR equal to the average of the defense roll with modifiers times ten. I have included all three categories of damage for when I get around to putting together rules for various armor effects.
3) The movement rate has been fudged by adding the acceleration and the maneuver stats from Warship. This means that bigger ships will need bigger engines to keep up with smaller vehicles, which I like. But this is a kludge, and in any case, feel free to argue with the principle.
4) I have indicated damage only for those weapons which have an equivalent in d20 Future, as I have not managed to come up with even a rough corelation between Alternity damage and d20 damage. If you have any clues here, I'd love to hear about it. A sufficient number comparisons seem to be more than a coincidence that I suspect the d20 damage is also derived from Alternity damage by some formula

I'm sure you noticed the "super-Amazing" firepower weapons in Alternity Warships. IMO spaceship weapons need a total rewrite. They need to be standardized, using a balance technique that doesn't depend entirely on wealth. (Alternity used "hull points" and "power" to balance weapons and other pieces of starship equipment as well as it's cost.)

I suggest writing stats that look a bit like this:

Mass Cannon (ultralight) - damage etc.
Mass Cannon (light) - damage etc. Something you'd find on a kroath sphere (subtype fighter).
Mass Cannon (superheavy) - damage etc. Really, a mass cannon (or laser, or whatever) being fired by a dreadnought should be more powerful than one fired by an escort vessel.

You might not need to use up so much space either; maybe each firepower category simply doubles the damage, or something like that.

My suggestion is to use the weapon dice x 10 (being sure to change something like d4+2 to xd8) but that doesn't solve the problem of Stun/Wound/Mortal. Of course, this will go up with the size of the firing ship.

For armor, increase the hardness (by a set amount) for each level of "armor tougness".

Needless to say this makes a fight between a large vessel and a small one not last too long ... assuming the big ship hits. But that's kind of the point.

5) Range increments are given in meters, assuming a 200m combat grid. Alternity is metric, Star Wars is metric, and by god my soul is metric.

Use both. Easier for everyone concerned.

6) Space is given for crew assignments. For my purposes, I find it better to assign actual PCs and NPCs to stations, and let them roll on their skills, rather than mess with this Crew Quality system.

Hallelujah! I tried to stat out the fighter pilots, and found I couldn't, unless he's really multi-classed.

Speaking of which, I'm unsatisfied with point-defense vs missiles. It shouldn't be a flat out 20% block. There should be a skill roll involved.

7) The price of the ship is given in Concord Dollars. I haven't worked out the formula to convert numbers of dollars to purchase DC, and these prices go right off the charts in the d20 Modern book. Feel free to enlighten me.

Please don't bother with this. No player can afford a ship anyway, so giving out costs/Wealth DCs is kind of pointless. I'm sure you'll do it anyway, but honestly I can't ever recall actually using the cost of ship systems when building Alternity ships.

8) I have implemented an ad hoc system of computer system quality with three levels of bonus -- +1, +3 and +5.

This needs to cost something - I forget if it did cost anything in Alternity. Maybe each level of computer system would take up a weapon slot, or a sensor slot, or something like that?

9) Weapons picked on the ship generation sheet appear in numbered slots on the d20 sheet. You assign them to gunners on the Weapon Systems sheet by typing the slot number in the first column, and putting the name of the PC or NPC controlling the gun and his or her ranged attack bonus in the 6th and 7th colums respectively. Maybe later I could streamine it with a crew sheet and some of those pull-down menu gadgets.

Hmmm...

10) There wasn't a built-in function for choosing missiles, bombs and mines, and I have only added lines in the Weapon Array sheet to enter these by hand.

Hmmm...

So far, this is plenty good for my purposes, as I needed to be able to take ship data from Star*Drive modules and make playable d20 Future ships from them -- which at this point means that only scout and escort class ships have been tried out. But I might as well keep improving it. This doesn't deal with BlackFurredBeast's question about determining actual physical dimensions, but you'll note that 1 Warships hull point buys you 24m^3 of cargo space. If we assume that 1m^3 of that is taken up with walls and such trappings, make it 25m^3 per Warships hull point, or per ten d20 Future hull points. You can distribute the three dimensions as you see fit. Indeed, the dimensions listed for the same class of ship seem to be all over the map in Alternity Starships, and my best guess is that it has to do with the dimension of height which is not indicated in the given footprints. Or, you know, they could have been just making it up.

No need - I've done something similar and it works out very easily. The trick is to use the Star Wars size system (instead of making 90% of the ships Colossal). On "starship scale" a fighter is Tiny (I think), a fleet carrier is Large and a dreadnought is Colossal.

With the exception of Ultralights, they all fall into one size category - eg superheavy is colossal. Heavyweight is Gargantuan, Mediumweight is Huge, Light is Large...

As a result, you don't actually need to know the dimensions of an Alternity ship. You know it's class (eg heavy ship) so you know it's in the Gargantuan Range (1024-2048 feet in it's largest dimension).

Needless to say, this changes a few things, like the bonuses granted by targeting systems, autopilots, grapple checks, pilot checks...

Using sizes like this makes fighters really hard to hit... that's why you have point defense guns. They wouldn't suffer size penalties to hit.

One last thing, I'm trying to work out a different Missile system. I didn't like the one in Warships (the salvoes were cool, but the excessive range calculations) but I didn't like the one in Future either. I think I'll have them force Pilot checks (against a certain DC) for half-damage.

Actually, here are the sizes (Star Wars gives them in metric).

Dimunitive: 16-32 feet. Launch.
Tiny: 32-640 feet (10-20 m*). Fighter, orbital shuttle, courier.
Small: 64-128 feet. Fast freighter. (I assume a cutter and strike fighter would fit in here.)
Medium: 128-256 ft. Escort, scout.
Large: 256-512 feet. Light ships.
Huge: 512-1024 feet. Mediumweight ships.
Gargantuan: 1024-2048 feet. Heavyweight ships.
Colossal: 2048+ feet. Superheavy ships.

* In case you wanted to avoid a step of math.

PS you'll notice that the star freighter and colony ship actually fall in to the Gargantuan category. You could just bump them to Colossal if you wanted - that makes things easier. (Minotaurs are only 7 feet tall but they're still Large. See my logic? )

 

[Johnny Angel]

(Psi)SeveredHead wrote:

My suggestion is to use the weapon dice x 10 (being sure to change something like d4+2 to xd8) but that doesn't solve the problem of Stun/Wound/Mortal. Of course, this will go up with the size of the firing ship.

I don't know if I want to link weapon damage to ship size except through the mechanic of hull points and power supply. d20 Future has this thing where the quality of your targeting computer is a function of your ship's size, and not determined independantly. Odd.

Use both. Easier for everyone concerned.

We saw what happened when NASA tried that.

This needs to cost something - I forget if it did cost anything in Alternity. Maybe each level of computer system would take up a weapon slot, or a sensor slot, or something like that?

They do take up hull space, but the same hull space no matter the quality. The prices are different, but given that nobody could possibly afford a spaceship anyway, as you pointed out, why not go crazy and max it out?

No need - I've done something similar and it works out very easily. The trick is to use the Star Wars size system (instead of making 90% of the ships Colossal). On "starship scale" a fighter is Tiny (I think), a fleet carrier is Large and a dreadnought is Colossal.

The thinking behind the ship sizes seems to be that there would be just one scale, so that a spaceship gets the same size category you'd assign to a creature of the same dimensions in terms of its AC mods. Its attack mods, however, are based on the assumption that it's an actual person (i.e., a Medium-sized creature) firing at that Colossal beast, so the relative size of ships doesn't factor in attack bonuses -- only how big the ship is relative to a person. While I like the one-scale idea, I don't like the fact that you hit the wall so quickly. It would appear that the universe itself has an AC of 2. Of course, the universe has a lot of hit points.

I think they also mean for the insane numbers of damage dice to be on the same scale with personal combat damage. This opens up the possibility of making fighter jets useful against dragons with no further conversion needed. Neato. Conveniently, they list the average damages, because by the time you're slinging that many dice, you're going to be hitting pretty close to the averages anyway, so why bother rolling?

 

[Olive]

I think this is cool, but to be honest I haven't figured out how it all works yet (being totally unfamiliar with the Alternaity rules).

One comment: I do think it is worth keeping the prices intact. My planned campaign is going to revolve around the PCs getting a small, crappy trading ship. I'm hoping that at least part of the campaign is going to revolve around trying to improve the ship, and wealth DCs for parts are absed at elast in part upon the base cost of the chasis. Unless this is soemthign that's been changed and I'm there for missing it.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

(Psi)SeveredHead wrote:



I don't know if I want to link weapon damage to ship size except through the mechanic of hull points and power supply

Well, it's your project, but I'd like to point out that this is precisely what Warships did... only the mechanic they used was "damage upgrade" instead of "more dice".

d20 Future has this thing where the quality of your targeting computer is a function of your ship's size, and not determined independantly. Odd.

It's for balance reasons, not realism. (The benefit is half the size penalty.)

We saw what happened when NASA tried that.

Fortunately there's only one of you.

The thinking behind the ship sizes seems to be that there would be just one scale, so that a spaceship gets the same size category you'd assign to a creature of the same dimensions in terms of its AC mods. Its attack mods, however, are based on the assumption that it's an actual person (i.e., a Medium-sized creature) firing at that Colossal beast, so the relative size of ships doesn't factor in attack bonuses -- only how big the ship is relative to a person. While I like the one-scale idea, I don't like the fact that you hit the wall so quickly. It would appear that the universe itself has an AC of 2. Of course, the universe has a lot of hit points.

In Warships, it was really hard for a dreadnought to hit a fighter ship. There's a reason why they included those modifiers. I think Star Wars does it very well, and the rules support a fighter shooting at a human, or a dragon if that's what you want to do.

 

[nobodez]

well...

We could always pull a page out of Dragonstar (don't have th book with me, but it's in the Starfarer's Handbook, and since I bought the set, I actually have a page to spare, so...) Riiiiiiiip!

Okay, basically, you put in more size categories, up to like C6 (i think that's C in SW), and the penalties just go from there (much like the awesome or C+ sizes in d20:spelljammer and the ELH respectively).