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Have you ever actually used the rules for designing your own ships in any Sci-fi RPG?

If so, what's the weirdest thing you ever designed with any rules?

What was the goofiest?

I used "Star Strike" , which is space ship combat for Spacemaster.
It has a VERY detailed space ship design system.
I didn't design much that was weird or goofy though.

More recently I used the ship design rules that come with the "Stars without number" Scifi RPG.
I designed several space ships.
One of which was kind of odd. Not so much in the physical design itself, but in that a Powerful "Unbraked" AI controlled it.
In SWN, unbraked AI are pretty dangerous, as they sort of go "skynet" on humans.. ;) .

It had been modded by it's previous owners so it was sort of braked, but it wasn't a very good job and kind of made the AI functional at a much lower level, but also unstable..
If at any stage that bodge job of braking it was broken, the crew would have had a powerful, unbraked and very angry AI on their hands which had access to all systems on the ship.

I remember using the rules for Star Frontiers and FASA's Star Trek. They were easy. Doing the same in Traveller and 2300AD were a pain. I only really remember the huge freakin warships I made for Star Trek, trying to outdo those dreadnoughts.

Isn't shipbuilding in Traveller (the original) a game unto itself?

I've used the starship construction rules in Mekton Empire and the Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator Starship Construction Manual 2nd edition.

With Mekton Empire I made a lot of ships based off stuff in Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato.  With Star Trek, I mostly made photon missile boats.

I made up a starship with Mekton Zeta Plus once which was supposed to have an AI in human form walking the halls, controlling it.  But the way I wrote it down, the first person who saw it just saw the "'oid" multiplier on one page and thought the entire ship turned into a girl, and since I didn't have Expanding Plasma anywhere, he thought I had created a 2 mile long starship that turned into a 10,000 foot tall girl.

I've made a lot of strange things with the StarCluster ship design tools, mostly testing them out to see just how strange I could make a ship. Probably the strangest was an "Ark", with cold sleep storage for animals, and an enormous nature park.

-clash

I guess this is also a chance to mention my homebrew starship game.  Some friends and I made just about every starship we could think of in that.

Someone made the smiley ship from Heavy Metal.  Mechanically, it wasn't very interesting.  It just had good movement and a few level 3 weapons (phasers).  But it had a lot of hull.

One guy made an Imperial Star Destroyer which he declared was pink and captained by a clown.  So it wasn't really an odd starship design, but it was certainly an odd player.

One of my favorites was a Klingon D-7 (old TV style) with hidden panels in the wings which would raise up and reveal a dozen photorp launchers.  

Between several of us, we designed most of the ships from Star Control.  One player had the Spathi Intruder in his official fleet.  He took particular glee whenever he could get behind an enemy flagship and use the B.U.T.T. missile.

Tramp Freighters from Westend d6 Star Wars (by M. Rein-Hagen too!) Does that count?

Yes.

First did that for Space Quest (https://rpggeek.com/rpg/1967/space-quest) - I seem to recall designing a ship was more or less required to be able to play the game. I liked the 3D star maps that you generated in Space Quest. It beat the 2D maps most space games used.

Traveller - most of us know how that goes. High Guard was helpful for capital scale naval vessels.

FASA Star Trek. Our campaign was in between TOS and TNG so I made a fair number of ships (either new or upgrades) to flesh out the fleet. After a year or two of play our crew was promoted from a Scout Ship to the Saratoga, an experimental vessel with an AI central computer named SARA. (something Artificial Rationcinating Architecture).

WEG Star Wars - modified a fair number of tramp freighters and designed a fair number of capital and other ships though much of that was less system based and more just sticking numbers that seemed reasonable. Several of the game canon ships had numbers that didn't seem to make much sense so I changed a fair few of those as well.

Quote from: RPGPundit;831193Have you ever actually used the rules for designing your own ships in any Sci-fi RPG?

Yes.

Quote from: RPGPundit;831193If so, what's the weirdest thing you ever designed with any rules?

An Auxiliary Personnel Transport for Mongoose Traveller which is in an asteroid hull that can cannibalize its own hull to manufacture equipment for the personnel  it transports. I'm working on it now....

Quote from: RPGPundit;831193What was the goofiest?

 I keep converting some stuff from old TV shows to WEG Star Wars. A couple of examples are attached below.

I use the heck out of starship design systems.

The weirdest/goofiest stuff I've done wasn't for an RPG, but rather using the design sequences in the old Silent Death tabletop space combat game. I think I.C.E. might have had an RPG based on that setting at one time, I'm not sure....

I don't have those ship designs any more, but I think the weirdest thing I did was a dedicated "blockade runner" ship. Big engines, lots of defensive systems, and some serious weaponry facing aft. Anyone pursuing that ship had a bad day. It was called the Hail Mary. Basically useless for anything else, but unstoppable when it came to blockade running. (Seriously, nobody ever stopped that ship. :D)

The goofiest ship ever is the PCs' ship in my current Savage Worlds campaign: a decrepit old salvage vessel with the all too fitting name of Coprolite.

Never designed a "weird" ship, but the one I liked best was the Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV) for GURPS: Traveller - actually got that one in the book. 100t. no-jump, high maneuver ship used in high-traffic starports/systems for rescues, fire, medical emergencies, etc.

I like design systems and Fire Fusion and Steel and GURPS Vehicles are my favorites.  Spacemaster Privateers gets honorable mention for having more errors and errata than the 600 page entirety of Traveller V.  But I haven't really done any weird ships.  A garbage scow converted into a mercenary transport.  A free trader that's been gutted and up enginned and upgunned into a gunboat.  A colonial transport and assorted subcraft.

I have designed three different vehicle design systems for Galactic Adventures, Galaxies In Shadow, and Incandescent and I'm well on my way to a fourth.

Quote from: David Johansen;831317Spacemaster Privateers gets honorable mention for having more errors and errata than the 600 page entirety of Traveller V.

Lol at Privateers, I bought the books many years ago and WANTED to like it, but it was such a mess I just gave up on it.

Star Frontiers: Great system. One ship was an Explorer that we outfitted with alot of Masking Screens. These were water pumped onto the hull which froze. We turned the ship into a small comet to cost in past an enemy blockade.

Universe: Pretty nice system. Oddly straightforward for so convoluted a game. Created a well armed freezerliner and made a fair profit running a line between several populous systems. The passengers were all in steerage suspended animation pods.

Mekton Zeta Plus: The sheer versatility of the system meant you could make some pretty nice ships that did or did not turn into giant robots. One player made a ship that disguised itself as a skyscraper. And rented it out...

Back in the 80's I bought all the Traveller books and spent I-don't-know-how-many hours trying to figure out and design some ships. After long hours I ended up with something that was 90% the same as what was in the books. Upon realizing this I gave up.

Used the Star Frontiers rules to make a couple ships, just basic freighters to see how they would look.

Used the Robot Warrior (Hero) rules to make a few ships but the system was meant for that scale and they came out... distorted. The Star Hero rules cleaned up the problems which Robot Warrior couldn't fix.

Quote from: danskmacabre;831318Lol at Privateers, I bought the books many years ago and WANTED to like it, but it was such a mess I just gave up on it.

It's a quite a bit simpler than Mega Traveller or Fire Fusion and Steel or GURPS Vehicles.  Just full of errors.  There was a guy who tried to codify and correct all of it on the ICE forums a couple years ago but ICE's staff really doesn't care about SPAM so they didn't encourage him with as much as a pat on the head.

Really, it's a nice game, just phenomenally badly organized and edited due to being the last real product of the original ICE's bankruptcy.  Well, at least we got Blaster Law and Future Law in the end.  

Of course, the fans hated the new setting and hated Silent Death The New Millenium's TNE style trashing of the original setting.  (BUGS!  The BUGS were there all along!)  Personally, the new setting was under developed but very well thought out in terms of playability.  

The evil empire was overwhelming the good federation  so they were handing out letters of marque in hopes of cutting the enemy's shipping out from under them and the races were all easy to grasp: animal people and the space ships didn't need fuel, the pacifist, vegitarian bear people were slowly going crazy, androids couldn't plug into the senseweb without dying, and the noble wolf people were being bombed into the stone age on defiance and thus attempting to immigrate there en-mass.  What more do you really need to know?

Once played in star trek with the awesome ship builders book. We saw how much power a reactor produced and since you couldn't run more warp engines we built a ship with two reactors (Didn't say we couldn't_ and had all the power you need during a fight which if you ever played it you know is important.

Eventually we played the campaign in an experimental 3 warp nacelle ship. It was broken wrong fun :)

It used to provide me with good, lonely fun.

MegaTraveller inspired me with the pictures of giant capital ships, but the ship design rules (so far as I can remember) seemed to be missing a lot of rules, such as rules about how many crew you needed to have, or how many control surfaces they needed to be provided with. I remember flipping through the capital ship reference and wondering how they decided to put in 23 tons of holographic control plates or whatever it was.. it seemed opt-in.

AD2300 was also fun, and similarly in need of an edit. Ships are made out of cylindrical pieces, and their apparent surface area determinesyour radar return.  One day it occurred to me to stat the Millennium Falcon (which is a very short, very wide cylinder that flies edge-on) - since the game is 2D, this left a minuscule surface area for the volume. There also seemed to be a missing rule prohibiting you from armoring your ship up to level 10 (meaning, 0% chance of damage) - so, a nearly invisible pie-plate that, at best, can have its guns shot off.

Quote from: David Johansen;831411It's a quite a bit simpler than Mega Traveller or Fire Fusion and Steel or GURPS Vehicles.

Never seen any of those.

Quote from: David Johansen;831411Just full of errors.  There was a guy who tried to codify and correct all of it on the ICE forums a couple years ago but ICE's staff really doesn't care about SPAM so they didn't encourage him with as much as a pat on the head.

I was already pretty happily running Spacemaster anyway at the time, so I wasn't really that interestd in going to a new version of SM.
I remember attempting character gen and it was so disorganised I gave up and walked away from it.

Quote from: David Johansen;831411Of course, the fans hated the new setting and hated Silent Death The New Millenium's TNE style trashing of the original setting.

I wasn't that keen on the setting either TBH. I was quite keen on getting into the Silent death games and would have if they were more compatible with the original Spacemaster.

Quote from: David Johansen;831411The evil empire was overwhelming the good federation  so they were handing out letters of marque in hopes of cutting the enemy's shipping out from under them and the races were all easy to grasp: animal people and the space ships didn't need fuel, the pacifist, vegitarian bear people were slowly going crazy, androids couldn't plug into the senseweb without dying, and the noble wolf people were being bombed into the stone age on defiance and thus attempting to immigrate there en-mass.  What more do you really need to know?

The intelligent animal races I thought were kind of stupid and it also turned me off the game in general.

Still, I did actually buy some of the supplements and use some ideas from them in SM. so it wasn't a total disaster.

I built a lot of stuff using Car Wars that could almost make it to outerspace.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;831538I built a lot of stuff using Car Wars that could almost make it to outerspace.

I spent many hours designing car wars vehicles, then Duel Track was released, and then we had:

METAL ARMOR, MAN
GAS ENGINES, MAN

And I wasted even MORE time building cars.

Doctor Deathwish's patented Armor Remover made at least a point of metal armor pretty much mandatory.  :D

That's a bit of a derail, so new thread here: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=32369

Quote from: Matt;831200Isn't shipbuilding in Traveller (the original) a game unto itself?

It pretty much is, yeah.

Jeezu, man... if a space based Sci Fi game DOESN"T have ship design in it I consider it a failure.  

Hell, I'll take pissant abstract systems like the one in Firefly over nothing.

Of course, a bad system just pisses me off. Not a broken system.. that can be fixed or worked around, but a bad system.  My current doghouse game (that is: The game is "in the doghouse") is Ashen Stars, and a good chunk of that bad feeling is the slapdash stupid of the starships.

Of course a bigger chunk is the beyond idiotic 'pure meta' rules for the cybernetics equipment.  

As far as weird designs?  Well, I've used High Guard to design starships that were notionally meant as floating cities, generational ship style self sustaining worlds.

The Rules don't really allow for that per se, and its hard to determine the best way to design a deck full of shops and restaurants and the like, ditto things like parks and agricultural/hydroponic levels, but that's what made it fun.

Quote from: Spike;831841As far as weird designs?  Well, I've used High Guard to design starships that were notionally meant as floating cities, generational ship style self sustaining worlds.

The Rules don't really allow for that per se, and its hard to determine the best way to design a deck full of shops and restaurants and the like, ditto things like parks and agricultural/hydroponic levels, but that's what made it fun.

Dude, I've got conversions for the rules for closed loop life support aboard ships and stations! Hell, I can email you most of them if you want to stay with Classic or Mongoose Traveller.

A lot of play from either version of Starships of the Galaxy, for d20 Star Wars.

Part of why I asked the question is because ship-design has never been of any interest to me.  I really don't care if it is in a sci-fi rules-set or not.  Of course, I want to have stats for ships, but I don't have any need to have a set of (usually very complicated) mechanics for how to build them.

Quote from: RPGPundit;831979Part of why I asked the question is because ship-design has never been of any interest to me.  I really don't care if it is in a sci-fi rules-set or not.  Of course, I want to have stats for ships, but I don't have any need to have a set of (usually very complicated) mechanics for how to build them.

99% of ship design mechanics are made up statistics anyway that "GMs" try to equate to reality. I can never read through a complete section of the ordeal. In reality, players just don't care what their ship is made of. You think any of them read the space rules for the game? No.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;83198799% of ship design mechanics are made up statistics anyway that "GMs" try to equate to reality. I can never read through a complete section of the ordeal. In reality, players just don't care what their ship is made of. You think any of them read the space rules for the game? No.

...on page 3 of a discussion among players who did, in fact read the space rules, the starship rules, and design rules for same, in multiple RPG's.

Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;832033...on page 3 of a discussion among players who did, in fact read the space rules, the starship rules, and design rules for same, in multiple RPG's.

Oh you with your reading the posts in the thread and your facty facts...;)

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;83198799% of ship design mechanics are made up statistics anyway that "GMs" try to equate to reality. I can never read through a complete section of the ordeal.

Jeebus, dude! 99% of ALL rules mechanics are made up statistics by the author of the game! It doesn't matter if they are pulled out of someone's ass, it matters whether they work or not at bringing the fun into the game.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;831987In reality, players just don't care what their ship is made of. You think any of them read the space rules for the game? No.

You don't actually play a lot, do you?

Quote from: jeff37923;832051You don't actually play a lot, do you?

Well, he is a Traveller fan :D

Quote from: David Johansen;832053Well, he is a Traveller fan :D

OK, I laughed. :D

Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;832033...on page 3 of a discussion among players who did, in fact read the space rules, the starship rules, and design rules for same, in multiple RPG's.

"Players" as in not the "GMs". BBSs are filled mostly with GMs, DMs, Storytellers, etc. Most players don't ever visit these sites.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;832098"Players" as in not the "GMs". BBSs are filled mostly with GMs, DMs, Storytellers, etc. Most players don't ever visit these sites.

I also play RPGs.

Quote from: Bren;832113I also play RPGs.

What he said. I'm here because I play, when I don't GM. (I also build starships.) ;)

Quote from: Bren;832113I also play RPGs.

I would hope so.

Doing more playing than GMing, the last several years, actually...

Yes.

I've used the ship design rules in Traveller, GURPS, and I've used Star Fleet Battles as a spaceship combat system and made ships for that.

In none of those did I make anything particularly weird of goofy, that I remember. Maybe the large freighter loaded with powerful explosives and equipped with a capable AI pilot and used as a pirate decoy. It did it's best to escape capture and then when the pirate caught up, self-destructed and vaporized both. It didn't need the AI pilot, which was a waste and highly annoyed the pirate player, justly so.

The above brings up a good point: some design systems encourage more weirdness/goofiness than others. The SFB example above is excellent!

Slightly off-topic: the starship design systems I've used were mostly pretty straightforward in what they allowed. OTOH, I used to play a lot of Car Wars  which was tailor-made for what can only be called shenanigans.

Never bumper-trigger your ejection seat. :D

Yeah, I always just wing it with ship design on those occasions I need to use something different from the standard templates.  Of course, I do that with a lot of other stuff too.

Well, that's what's nice about good construction systems.  If you just want to choose cool elements from the parts list, you can.  If you would rather engage in the solo mini-game of the full construction system, then that's there too.

Sometimes I'll "wing it" if the need for a new ship type comes up during play. But I'll go back and do a proper design spreadsheet for it afterwards, for future reference.

Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;832662Sometimes I'll "wing it" if the need for a new ship type comes up during play. But I'll go back and do a proper design spreadsheet for it afterwards, for future reference.

Same here! I'll note what I described the ship having, and work around that.

-clash

Thought this might be useful.

http://criticalshit.org/2015/05/15/on-the-taxonomy-of-spaceships/

And Merzo's is LEGENDARY. I use this site for lots of stuff. Beware - it is HIGHLY distracting to productivity.

But it's perfect for this thread to get an idea of scale of ships.

http://www.merzo.net/

Quote from: tenbones;832682Thought this might be useful.

http://criticalshit.org/2015/05/15/on-the-taxonomy-of-spaceships/

And Merzo's is LEGENDARY. I use this site for lots of stuff. Beware - it is HIGHLY distracting to productivity.

But it's perfect for this thread to get an idea of scale of ships.

http://www.merzo.net/

This looks cool. Thanks!

Of course, I wing NPCs too, and spells, and items, and powers, and all kinds of other shit.

Rogue Trader for WH40K has a neat ship building system. You have to balance space (from the ship's hull) and power consumption from the ship's power generator - the engines.

Starships of the Galaxy is a great book that I've had lots of fun with.

I've never been able to play either game, but man, the ship building is fun. I mainly just made a "regular-ish" kind of ship the PCs could use and nothing more.

The only ship design change I ever needed in SFB was to equip the D7C with an FA/RA Photon pair. Well, that and put the FH-L/FH-R disruptors back on the D7W...

And ADB can just quit with the 'D7 boom could never withstand the shock!' nonsense. Make the boom out of reinforced HandWavium if it lets you sleep better!

The original Klingon X-ship DX class had fore/aft photons. I assumed the reason they did that, and that others wanted to, was because of the Klingon ship photons in the Star Trek films, which they weren't supposed to have license to. I also assumed the real reason they stopped doing that was because someone (Paramount and/or FASA) asked them not to, and/or they were afraid of their lawyers.

I loved Star Fleet Battles, but I thought the ship designs eventually got to be too similar between different empires' fleets, and there were too many modern wet-navy references. However the system is very detailed, and all the ship classes mean there's an over-abundance of references, and they are pretty well balanced and make sense. That can give the basis for making up ships for a sci-fi game universe for a RPG, even if it's not supposed to be Star Trek at all. I found it pretty easy as a SFB player to make up ship designs and/or adapt the given ones, for a RPG setting.