Blood and Space

[Outlanders]

Howdy, all....

Has anyone picked this up yet? If so, what are your first impressions? I have to pay off a few $$ on my credit card before I can purchase it. Thank god payday is only 3 days off...

Chris

 

[trancejeremy]

I just bought it. I'm not usually into PDFs, but this sounded really cool, and I knew it would bug me until I bought it. So I bit the bullet.

First glance, it's actually pretty cool, except I'm a bit baffled on the starship section.

The hull sizes are a bit screwy to me.

First of all, they only list the ship sizes in 2 dimensions. For instance, a Dreadnaught is 7500 ft by 200 ft. This is 250 Blood & Space tons. Since I only know 2 dimensions, I can't figure out how many cubic feet it should be, but if it's 7500 x 200 x 200, it should be 300,000,000 cubic feet. That would be 3 Million Gross Tons in the real world ( 1 ton = 100 cubic feet)

Or in Traveller tons, that would be 600,000 tons (they use 1 ton = 14 cubic meters, or about 500 cubic feet).

In any case, I don't understand how a ship that big can only be 250 tons. Unless their ton is far bigger than anyone elses. But even then, it says a certain hull which is Dreadnaught sized can only have 40 crew members plus 20 passengers. That's, er, odd. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10 on the hull dimensions, that's still, well, odd.

(Real world cruise ships sometimes hit 100,000 gross tons, and they carry at least 2000 people. This dreadnaught is probably much much larger, but only carries a fraction?).

Again, maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, as I haven't read the whole thing, but it seems odd.

It also would have been nice if they had used the Dragonstar hull sizes (which are just an extension of d20s). Instead, they use something like regular d20 sizes, only re-defined. A bit confusing.


Anyway, after reading it some more, it does seem like their ton is larger than real world or Traveller style tons, and it's more abstract, but the large ships do seem to be smaller than they should. For instance, both Huge and Capital ships have the same number of tons, despite Capital being at least 3 times bigger.

I mean, if a ship is 3 times as big, it should have three times the tons capacity, logically.

Seems to work okay for the smaller ships, though.

The combat system example seems to be at odds with how it's described. It says in the rules that it's newtonian, but in the example, the ships move a number of hexes equal to their acceleration. I'll have to re-read it again, I guess.


I do like the new classes. (BTW, one of the new classes is "Hauler", not "Hualer", like the RPGNow site says. )

 

[ColonelHardisson]

You bring up something that I've noticed in just about every starship game I've ever seen, RPG or otherwise, from Full Thrust to Traveller - the ships always seem way too dinky, especially when compared to real-world "wet navy" ships. A lot of starships in these games would be dwarfed by a real-world WWII-era fleet sub. That's what seems odd to me. Maybe some of these game designers need to pick up a copy of Janes Fighting Ships for inspiration? I know spaceships and "wet navy" ships will be vastly different, but sometimes it seems they undersize spaceships in these games by orders of magnitude.

 

[Vigilance]

Hey Guys

You're misreading the Ship Sizes table. The tonnage listed is NOT the tonnage of the ship, it is the maximum cargo space a ship of that size can have, and is really only provided so the GM can have some help in designing his own starships.

 

[Vigilance]

I just bought it. I'm not usually into PDFs, but this sounded really cool, and I knew it would bug me until I bought it. So I bit the bullet.

Cool! I'm glad you gave it a try

First glance, it's actually pretty cool, except I'm a bit baffled on the starship section.

The hull sizes are a bit screwy to me.

First of all, they only list the ship sizes in 2 dimensions. For instance, a Dreadnaught is 7500 ft by 200 ft. This is 250 Blood & Space tons. Since I only know 2 dimensions, I can't figure out how many cubic feet it should be, but if it's 7500 x 200 x 200, it should be 300,000,000 cubic feet. That would be 3 Million Gross Tons in the real world ( 1 ton = 100 cubic feet)

Or in Traveller tons, that would be 600,000 tons (they use 1 ton = 14 cubic meters, or about 500 cubic feet).

See previous post on this.

In any case, I don't understand how a ship that big can only be 250 tons. Unless their ton is far bigger than anyone elses. But even then, it says a certain hull which is Dreadnaught sized can only have 40 crew members plus 20 passengers. That's, er, odd. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10 on the hull dimensions, that's still, well, odd.

40 crew UNITS. Not crewpersons. The Crew chapter provides crew rules. Each crew unit is @ 10 people.

In the starship facilities section, you can add passenger facilities to make a passenger ship, and can in fact turn a ship with a lot of cargo space into a passenger liner. The goal of the system was to let people make any ship, and I think we succeeded.

I do like the new classes. (BTW, one of the new classes is "Hauler", not "Hualer", like the RPGNow site says. )

Glad you like the classes.

 

[trancejeremy]

You bring up something that I've noticed in just about every starship game I've ever seen, RPG or otherwise, from Full Thrust to Traveller - the ships always seem way too dinky, especially when compared to real-world "wet navy" ships. A lot of starships in these games would be dwarfed by a real-world WWII-era fleet sub. That's what seems odd to me. Maybe some of these game designers need to pick up a copy of Janes Fighting Ships for inspiration? I know spaceships and "wet navy" ships will be vastly different, but sometimes it seems they undersize spaceships in these games by orders of magnitude.

Well, Traveller is actually the exception (along with Star Wars), if you look in certain supplements. High Guard and Trillion Credit Squadron.

Ships in that go up to a million tons. Those suckers are big.

They also did the supplement Azhanti High Lightning, which was a small military ship of only about 60,000 tons. Small, yet it came with about 20 sheets of deckplans.

 

[trancejeremy]

40 crew UNITS. Not crewpersons. The Crew chapter provides crew rules. Each crew unit is @ 10 people.

In the starship facilities section, you can add passenger facilities to make a passenger ship, and can in fact turn a ship with a lot of cargo space into a passenger liner. The goal of the system was to let people make any ship, and I think we succeeded.

Yeah, I realized that eventually. But it's tricky, because in some cases, the listing actually is individuals (for smaller ships), but in larger ships, it's a crew unit (it says a crew unit is 5 people)

And the passenger listing is apparently in individuals as well.

It's the combining of the abstract and the actual that confused me. I don't understand why you couldn't just list the individuals for all sizes, less confusing that way.

While I like the idea of the ship design system, I still think it scales up poorly - it only seems to work for small ships.

I mean, why does Huge ship, which is 1300 feet long, have the same amount of max cargo as a capital ship, 5000 feet long? Even if it's just cargo space, surely a ship 3 times as long (and twice as wide) would have some more cargo space. Just by simple logic, it should have 6x as much cargo space

I also don't think you can make any ship.

Take for instance, from Star Wars, the ship Kuari Princess, a passenger liner. It's about like a real world cruise ship, and carries 3500 passengers.

The biggest corporate ship hull in B&S has 100 tons of cargo (and is large sized, only about 300 feet long). The Cruise Suites facilities takes up 15 tons and allows 85 passengers to be carried. If all 100 tons were devoted to Cruise Suites, that would only hold about 550 passengers.

This actually seems about right for a ship that size (about 300 feet long, the Kuari Princess is 1500 feet long). But why can't you let people make a big civilian ship? In real life, the biggest ships are civilian. The only big military ships are carriers.

 

[trancejeremy]

I have a very preliminary (but fairly long) review of it at...

http://www.geocities.com/nofrills_reviews/d20bloodspacepdf.htm

Like I said, very preliminary.

 

[PosterBoy]

Wow, thanks for the in depth review. We'll certainly take a lot of that into consideration when we revised it before printing.

We've gotten a ton of great feedback.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Well, Traveller is actually the exception (along with Star Wars), if you look in certain supplements. High Guard and Trillion Credit Squadron.

Ships in that go up to a million tons. Those suckers are big.

They also did the supplement Azhanti High Lightning, which was a small military ship of only about 60,000 tons. Small, yet it came with about 20 sheets of deckplans.

Yeah, you're right about Traveller. High Guard and Trillion Credit Squadron do accomodate the really big ships. I guess I had the small traders and the like that are the common ships in that game on my mind. Star Wars too. But many games, especially those that are dedicated starship combat games - that is, ones that are not a supplement for another game - seem to undercrew the ships. At least, that's my perception. Maybe automation really comes into its own in the future.