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.