GURPS Traveller Ship Construction

[Werner]

I noticed the format of ships makes the hard to modify, they don't do spreadsheets when they list ship stats like T20 does, instead of having a table, they just list everything the ship has and you have to go through the ship construction rules to find the masses and cost of everything, it is a poor design if you have to flip back and forth in the rulebook if you want to pull something out of a scout ship and add something in, and recalculate the totals. I was trying to see what happens if you replace the maneuver and jump drives with a reaction drive from GURPS Space and see what acceleration and maximum delta v that it has, a lot of work is involved and often you have to extract the information out of paragraphs rather than tables, with T20 it's easy, it's right there in the design table, everything is in nice neat columns I could input into my spreadsheet and get the totals.

 

[tjoneslo]

The trick was by the time GT:Starships came out the author (Tom Bont) and I had built GURPS Vehicle Builder, which allowed you to modify the ship on the fly with the different components and output the paragraph format very easily. We were assisting the other authors so no one needed to build their own spreadsheets.

 

[TravellerFox]

The trick was by the time GT:Starships came out the author (Tom Bont) and I had built GURPS Vehicle Builder, which allowed you to modify the ship on the fly with the different components and output the paragraph format very easily. We were assisting the other authors so no one needed to build their own spreadsheets.

GVB is a godsend that can't be understated. I've been using GVB (even got a few additional and modded templates!) for a while and discovered all its intricacies.

If I had coding knowledge, I would make a GVB II... but alas, I'm kind of pants on programming (blame HTML5 for that).

Funnily enough, I just posted a missile design I made almost entirely from GVB with some post-export modifications recently... and have been toying with two alternate timelines for Traveller that fuse Traveller with GURPS: Transhuman Space primarily (with some additional species from other works like a particular kangaroo-looking alien from Titan AE... with some races from Master of Orion).

One has its backstory still in a bit of flux (partially because reality is constantly trying to steal my notes), but the other is that the US has a more successful socialist movement (based on De Leonism, though in this timeline it's less socialist/communist in the Marxist sense and more a mixed-economy state with strong regulations and a strong government to enforce said regulations, though some rights and freedoms have changed or were outright eliminated) with the fallout from that.