Fixing Military Vehicles -- The Thread

[apoc527]

I'd like to make a comprehensive thread to "fix" all the issues people have discovered with the Vehicle Design System. I'm particularly interested in fixing Military Vehicles, but we should do both.

There are three main areas to look at:

1. Design Sequence
2. Stock Designs
3. Combat Rules

The combat rules are contained in the Core Rulebook, but I believe they require some modification once the design rules are taken into account. The biggest thing, which I've brought up in other threads, is that the Hull/Structure damage system works well with less than 10 of each, but begins to break down as the numbers get higher.

For the design sequence, others have already identified the main areas of concern:

A. High TL armor is too heavy.
B. The Turbine power plant is too good (or the Fusion system is not good enough).
C. Sloping armor is worthless.

The stock designs can be fiddled with after the design sequence is fixed.

I'm hoping that Klaus Kipling, rust, and others with experience using the design systems will chip in their ideas for fixes.

 

[apoc527]

Here's what Klaus Kipling said a while back:

There's a few issues with the sequence, though most of them involve just getting practised with the system.

However....

Hull and Armour:

The better materials are too heavy to be worth it. Less so with hull, but the bonded armours are heavier per armour-point than crystaliron. Space-wise for armour is negligible, so this means TL12+ armour is disadvantageous.

Solution: reduce weight for the bonded armours; in terms of the vehicles in the books, this will reduce their masses, and therefore increase the listed speeds.

Also, sloping and supersloping are a waste of effort, with a vehicle both slower and less armoured than if it hadn't bothered.

Eg: a 100m3 MBT, with supersloping, has only 80m3 to play with, but still weighs as much as a 100m3 model, for a gain of 20% of armour, which may only be worth 6 or 8 points.

The 100m3, w/o sloping, can use that 20m3 to add the armour it would gain from sloping, which, of course, adds mass, but little volume. The 19m3 left can all go into powerplant and fuel.

Conversely, an 80m3 tank, w/o sloping, would be superior in both speed and armour to the supersloped 100m3 version.

Sloping may give a slight advantage when it comes to ground pressure, but the extra powerplant more than makes up.

Solution: don't use sloping... Wink

Powerplant:

Turbines compared to fusion are too powerful. Especially when turbines over 10m3 get a x1.5 efficiency boost, and fusion plants do not. In fact, hydrogen fuel cells also get the x1.5 at 10m3, and have the same fuel efficiency as fusion.

Solution: increase the power rating for fusion, by % increments per TL, rather than by 2 points/TL. This will then increase the speed of the grav vehicles.

I've puzzled over the design sequence for a bit now, and these are only my feeble ponderings based on redesigning the same vehicles several times to get the best out of them. Be interested to note what other folk have noticed. Smile

Ammo needs a little work, too. No way 40 rounds for a 35mm railgun should take up a volume 3 times that of 40 rounds of 120mm anti-tank!

 

[Vile]

Solution: don't use sloping ...

This is actually my favourite solution. I think sloping crosses the line of what is useful in game terms vs. the extra complication it introduces - even if it did work.

 

[apoc527]

Re: sloping--

I was doing some comparisons about sloping using GURPS Traveller: Ground Forces. One option that might be extremely simple to employ and could "fix" sloping is to give them a higher armor modifier.

Sloping would become Armor x 1.25
Super Sloping would become Armor x 1.5

I'd have to see how that works out, but it might work.

 

[apoc527]

Klaus's fix for armor:

http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=41242&highlight=vehicles

To restate in basic form:

Superdense -- 16/1% armor value
Bonded Superdense -- 20/1% armor value, weighs 10,000 kg per m3.

 

[apoc527]

Fix for fusion power plants:

I noticed that the power per m3 goes up by 2 at every TL for the Turbine. The same thing is done for Fusion power plants, but instead of a constant increase of TL within the table, it actually goes Fusion 8, 9, 12, 15. Thus, I simply increased the power per m3 for the TL12 and TL15 fusion plants to 28 and 34 respectively. This gives them the same +2 per TL progression that the Turbine benefits from.

I have no idea if this will fix the problem, but it seemed logical and really quite simple.

 

[BP]

I don't have these books... but one thing I noticed was 0.1825 m^3 and 1687.5 kg. Are they for real?

I have no problem with math and numbers (I routinely use complex number systems, matrix algebra and 128-bit floats) - but I also see absolutely no need for this type of spec in a roleplaying game. Just looks laughably silly to me.

If that is the game mechanic in these types of books - well then I'm not interested at all... if I were designing this way - well, I wouldn't, which is the point - I would just use real world and forget about a game system.

 

[apoc527]

Actually, those numbers don't appear in the book. They were calculated by Klaus Kipling for use in his analysis, but that's all.

That said, the books require a calculator for sure. I am using Excel, building a vehicle generator assistance program as I go.

 

[rust]

Most points have already been mentioned, my "favourite bug" are sub-
marines and other vehicles (e.g. walkers) designed to submerge: They
need a weight of at least ca. 1 ton per cubic meter to do so, and therefore
the system should include ballast tanks or other means to make such ve-
hicles heavy enough to submerge.

In GURPS Transhuman Space - Under Pressure a ballast tank of 1 cf adds
a weight of 62.5 lbs and costs twice as much as a normal fuel tank, be-
cause it need pumps etc. to fill and empty the tank. Something like this
could easily be added to the Traveller system.

 

[GJD]

Could a hi-tech sub use gravitics to make itself heavier? Enhancing the effect of gravity on itself, rather than negating it as normal CG does?

Might make for overcomplication, though. If you CG fails at depth you could rocket to the surface....

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

There is a term for that... it's called "Fail Safe".

 

[BP]

Traveller gravitics affecting bouyancy might not work - but the concept of an M-Drive is interesting

 

[rust]

Could a hi-tech sub use gravitics to make itself heavier?

Even if it could, I suspect that this would make "silent running" impossible,
because a working gracitics device could probably be located by sensors.

 

[BP]

Wouldn't other tech allow submarine detection anyway (speaking of higher TLs, of course - like densitometers or NAS)...

Though, to be honest I'm having a hard time figuring Gravitics would work to reduce bouyancy - Traveller gravitics appear to be used more for 'pushing' and manuevering (again 'pushing').

Regarding using gravitics in submersibles for drives - though some fish have been measured with acceleration of >1.5 G's IIRC, I wouldn't figure a 6G M-Dirve would have that effect in water (operating at those specs in gases and near vacumm normally).

 

[rust]

Wouldn't other tech allow submarine detection anyway (speaking of higher TLs, of course - like densitometers or NAS)...

The problem is that gravimetrics are already a common sensor techno-
logy on military submarines, in fact they have been for a couple of de-
cades, although the technology was secret until the end of the Cold War.
So, unless the grav technology would work in a very "magic" way, even
TL 7 / 8 sensors would be able to discover a submarine using gravitics
to dive.

 

[BP]

I would assume gravimetric devices could detect the submarine anyway if sensitive and close enough.

However, TL 7/8 gravimeters detect the changes in acceleration due to the force of gravity - not gravity 'directly'. Gravitic drives work more directly on gravity to generate motion - they don't neccessarily increase the mass or change the gravitational attraction of themselves or the surrounding matter. Giving gravimeters no advantage?

 

[rust]

Giving gravimeters no advantage?

Could well be true, but without any knowledge of how a grav drive works
I could only make some rather uneducated guesses ...

 

[BP]

Ha ha! rust we all know you're educated!!! :lol: