Excel Old School Robot Designer

[Arkathan]

This is a Robot Designer, based on GDW's Book 8 Robots.
Something to tide us over until the new robots book later on.
It uses the formulas from Book 8 but weapons and some skills from the current edition.
Some liberties were taken in the updating, so don't expect this to recreate the examples in the back of Book 8 verbatim... especially since you cannot do that with pen and paper, using Book 8.

Updated on 8/23 to fix a bug with large chassis.

 

[Arkathan]

some examples

 

[Arkathan]

I must apologize. I missed a bug that makes large chassis robots fail to calculate weight and power.
Fixed.

 

[Arkathan]

Deleted expired link. See attachments above.

 

[Subzero001]

will there be something of the like for the new robot book? Thanks

 

[Arkathan]

I think someone else is writing one... don't know if they were planning on putting it out for public use. But that was the intent.
Just haven't gotten all the way through the book yet.

 

[Geir]

The one I used for creating robots will be available for download in the future. The output is not as pretty (in fact it's ugly, but I purposely avoided macros and had to import everything into word tables anyway), but the mechanics should (they better, or I'm in trouble) match the book.

 

[Arkathan]

The one I used for creating robots will be available for download in the future. The output is not as pretty (in fact it's ugly, but I purposely avoided macros and had to import everything into word tables anyway), but the mechanics should (they better, or I'm in trouble) match the book.

Cool. I don't use macros either.

 

[Beladan]

will there be something of the like for the new robot book? Thanks

Not sure if you caught the post that there is a spreadsheet in the download section for designing new bots as of last night.

 

[Geir]

And of course right when it got posted I was sending Matthew an updated copy. I made the mistake of copying the tabs for the example robots from an old copy and that caused some link issues. I think they're fixed, but they are based on the original, not updated blank sheet. If you have issues with those examples, you can just delete the tabs (if they say Version 1.0 at the top right). The newer file I sent (not posted) has them at Version 1.44, which is current.

An aside bridging two projects: I designed a 4 Space vehicle survey pod for the equipment section of the World Builders Handbook and then decided I wanted a robot version too, so I made a Size 8 robot and gave it pretty much identical properties and options (plus arms and a fancy brain). The robot was much more expensive (no surprise), but I was able to match performance characteristics for the vehicle drive and armour values and still fit it all in the robot, so my strategery (that really should be a word) of making robots by merging vehicle and battledress construction processes does seem to hold up pretty well.

 

[Arkathan]

Looks like I'll be making my own version. My Excel is older, and doesn't support the new functions used in the free download.

 

[Geir]

Looks like I'll be making my own version. My Excel is older, and doesn't support the new functions used in the free download.

Sorry. It does rely very heavily on xlookup, but I suppose you could resort all the tables, remove spaces, and maybe get vlookup to work. It would be ugly, though. At least you could harvest the tables for data when building your own.

 

[Arkathan]

Sorry. It does rely very heavily on xlookup, but I suppose you could resort all the tables, remove spaces, and maybe get vlookup to work. It would be ugly, though. At least you could harvest the tables for data when building your own.

Oh, I'll be stealing the heck out of your tables... and your formulas, but index-match doesn't need the re-sorting that vlookup does.