Yet another shot at making starships...

[vanir]

Yes I think we're confusing a pragmatic approach to starship construction in our gaming with life philosophies here. It's great to be inspired and obviously certain things inspire me too, but let's keep focused on the fact I am talking about how one might approach starship construction in SW, the manner which has worked very well in our campaigns which have involved a whole lot of starship engineering.

We always run space based campaigns that invariably move onto large fleet construction over time. We combine scouting campaigns with business development, colonisation, research, our characters frequently look at the SW universe and come to the conclusion that's a great adventure to have, usually starting out as small time robin hood style pirates and try to secure a privateering license among independent backwater systems and eventually contact the rebellion.

The road we always go works into a lot of starship construction, from early modifications to starfighter engineering (modifying existing starfighters is an engineering feat in our games), then finally we move onto starship construction. Some of our party characters are always engineers and medical techs, usually aliens with some talent and we try to develop that angle by cultivating alien contacts on their homeworlds, which could one day crew our starships. We use a lot of droids.

And we simply developed a rule set for starship engineering and kept refining them. We tried lots of different approaches. It became very overcomplicated very easily. We took a back to bones approach to clean things up and came at it with a doctrine for construction in the (ancient) Old Republic period and found the Starship Costing Chart method of starship construction is easily the most apt for the Rise of the Empire (or late Old Republic) onwards.

Essentially before putting the stats of a ship together you draw up the kind of thing you're looking for visually with this ship. Decide its size, main armament/feature and approximate mass for scene construction purposes. Then for the ancient Republic period you use crew complement as the guiding principle. They have monster crews back then, far less automated systems since it's all pretty new tech. Everything, all your stats for the given ship which looks the way it does, is heavily influence by the crew requirements.

But for later era the governing principle is credits. But this is no sweeping statement, it means essentially starship construction, the cruisers where all the money in the industry lay costs whole sectors worth of industrial resources to produce significant numbers. Simply the project to develop a new cruiser would be beyond most small system budgets, many buy off the line from the Core Worlds.

The same rule applies to characters, perhaps building a custom medium transport.
Firstly forget what they want to call it, you should form an image of precisely want they want to build and then reclassify it accurately. Most players wanting to build a custom vessel based on a medium freighter as a base are actually constructing a light cruiser with the combat value of a military corvette. This is not a cheap thing to do, remembering that if engineered from scratch a vessel is built to maintain the equipment with which it is originally fitted, that means high powered systems won't experience mishaps in the same way as jury rigged modifications, when building a high powered freighter from blueprint, the power requirements might very well be that of a military vessel, effectively reclassifying the ship design. Players can claim it is a modified transport design all they want, a gunship is a gunship.

But essentially if that's what the players want, and they can cope with the consequences, if they have the credits for it, probably in the region of 10 million or more for an uber 75m starship along the lines I've just abstracted, well the credits are theirs to spend.

The construction system does use the Construction Points framework, it's just that when the GM is making new starships you need the visual image of the new starship, and you need a target maximum cost for the kind of fit you're looking for in it.
If you use the costing as a guideline you wind up with a very balanced warship. When using the construction system to reproduce the X-Wing, CEC Gunship and other major starships including a Star Destroyer the final costing projected for building it to spec is virtually identical to the listed cost for each of those craft. As a bonus you can use this system to price existing starships if they don't have cost listed, it is extremely accurate.
But it takes engineering requirements into account. Various classes of internal hangars and the additional cargo requirements for capacity, structure and power requirements. When you talk about starship masses and cargo capacities in SW engineering terms you're really talking about power requirements.
For example, starfighters generally power most of their systems directly off the engines, although they have auxiliary power. Transports, light scouts and small frigates use the smallest ship based power core reactors. Light cruisers and bulk freighters and other deepspace haulers use the full sized reactor engineering facilities. In one sense you think in terms of your power requirements and build the ship around those. Just as you tick off construction points you raise the cost on the chart.

Old republic starship construction throws this out of wack somewhat. Everything is centred around the tech level which is really Information Age for all intents and purposes from about 4000BBY back. Energy weapons are only beginning to appear, droids are around, etc.
And the main governing limiter in this age is the prohibitive crew requirements of starships. Even light transports have minimum requirements of about 5 crew and ergo each class of vessel is effectively built much larger representing more ancient power capabilities and older tech. The stats for a Rebellion era tramp freighter will be identical to a medium cargo hauler in the 70m hull class and four crew requirement, with the cargo capacity and range of a light tramp freighter.
The smallest personal vessels getting around were usually Courier ships and light scouts, essentially star travel was in some ways less affordable since without a light cruiser which is very expensive, it's next to impossible to get around in the same way you can in the later galaxy, with something as inexpensive as a stock light freighter.

So there's two very different themes in starship construction for the two eras, but these general themes have worked really well for us. I love the construction points system I downloaded.

You just have to exercise some self governing and set a credit outlay for each given ship and stick to it. If you just work from an open pocketbook you can literally build fleets of uber game breakers. But that couldn't really happen with a good GM because credit cost is a limiter, because industry costs money and nobody has an open pocketbook, not really.

[ZzaphodD]

[Bren]

Vanir, your most recent post makes it seem that you have other criteria aside from just the number of credits even in the Rise of Empire/Rebellion period. If that is the case then philosophically we may not be in disagreement, since my point was credits alone is insufficient to represent the necessary complexities of starship design.

[vanir]

No I'm referring to the Starships Pricing system by Krapou (navigate to Play Aids in the left panel) which is a complete construction point based system using a pricing table. I just assumed this was one of common use since I found it on my first d6 SWRPG resources google.

Essentially the construction points represent credits cost. You can have as many construction points as you want, but it quickly gets unaffordable or inappropriate for a given class of vessel.

[Bren]

[Fallon Kell]

I use Krapou's system too, mostly. I bend the rules where I think it is appropriate. I don't think a ship's speed should be limited by inverse proportionality to it's hull size. Bigger ships can mount bigger engines. A penalty to maneuverability makes sense due to the increase in torque forces on longer ships (although this can be overcome) and that larger vessels are easier targets. Now larger engines and more powerful RCS systems are more expensive, and that should be reflected in the cost of the ship.

The greater limitations occur in making a smaller ship perform better in a slugging match. (To borrow a quote from another space opera, "This is a heavyweight fight and the Dawn's only got the tonnage to last a few rounds!") As we've already pointed out, a CR90 can't mount a Death Star superlaser, because they're much larger than Star Destroyers. A superlaser could mount a corvette, but the corvette wouldn't be able to do much besides serve as a command post.

I think a sound system would have theoretical limits to things like speed and maneuverability which don't change between ship sizes, and then limits to the power of shields and hull and size of weapons suite that change with the size of the ship. Each size of ship would be limited to a number of Construction Points, with engineering difficulties increasing as the total points approach maximum. This would keep capabilities in constant tension with one another, but not make a mile long ship with a quarter of a cubic mile of total engine volume any slower than a 10 meter ship with 2.5 cubic meters of engine volume.

I am working on generating a starship construction system of my own that would really make sense to me, but I'm finding it a monumental task and am gaining vast respect for Krapou and Wing Commander Luna and others who have taken on such a difficult project.
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Or that excessively long "Noooooooooo" was the Whining Side of the Force leaving him. - Dustflier

Complete Starship Construction System

[vanir]

Just making a star destroyer move around like a 1Dman medium cruiser would take a ridiculous amount of power and those huge engines. On top of this they can get around at 60MGLT, that's 24 spaces in 5secs at the drop of a hat. And its firepower and support capabilities, the power requirements and overall mass being moved is astronomical, heh.

Inertia is the resistance to acceleration, mass driven. Forcing that bulk to move nearly as fast as a Y-Wing in the same space of time is an unimaginable increase in relative power output.

It is right that small craft are much faster than cruisers over short distances in realspace if taken to the limit. Technology has a finite limit equal in both cases but the smaller one has further to go before hitting it due to less inertia, much less power requirement.
So capitals are slower than starfighters at the upper range, but obviously faster than commercial transports by a good margin and pay in crew requirements and expense by comparison.

[Bren]

[Fallon Kell]

[ZzaphodD]

Original post updated, you know, the actual topic..
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My Biggest Beard Retard award goes to: The Admiral of course..