Hey all,

I need some advice on vehicle construction.

The system I have now lets the person designing the vehicle to choose the metric tonnage of the vehicle first. This would be the final loaded weight of the vehicle with all components. In a sense this would be the ammount of allocated spaces for distributing weapons / armor/ ect.

The first problem i'm having is with speed and the realistic size the powerplant would take up in the vehicle. This is how im doing it.

lets say your vehicle weighs 1.5 metric tons. (a typical passenger car for today). And your desired speed is 100 meters per game segment( a game segment is two seconds...so 50 meters per second) roughly 180 kph. So the equation im using is as follows ...

take the desired speed in meters per segment (100) and divide that by the weight of the vehicle(1.5) which results in...66.666666666. We round that up so that we have a result of 70. I was thinking that 70% of the vehicles weight (systems and all) would be used up with this type of powerplant. If you multiply the weight of the vehicle again by 70% you see that the engine and engine systems take up 1 metric ton of space on the car. leaving .5 left for other items.

Does this seem like a somewhat realistic way of calculating engine weight and speed? Anyone have any suggestions?

Dunnigan's How to Make War series has an entire chapter to evaluating the different main components of naval vessels (both combat and merchant) in terms of the mass and volume occupied for things such as power plant, armor, weapons, etc.

Its specifically targeted at naval ships but may provide some good guidelines for you. I've liberally ripped off the ratios for designs in various space games I've done.

Hi Stram,


My advice on vehicle construction of the type implied by your formula is to avoid it as long as possible. The implication I have based on your formula is a generic set of sums/algorithms that master the way all vehicles are created.

I think it is less of a headache and more productive to create a bunch of individual vehicle types (per setting) with the appropriate game-information and frame some basic customization requirements that allow the 'tweaking'.

I'd say abstract the detail, or outsource the brainwork to BTRC's Vehicle Design System. It's under the CORPS section, called VDS.

I thought your game was about the people, not their boats.

In other words, I don't think it adds anything valuable to your design to have a detailed vehicle construction system.

Hey All,

Yeah, it's kind of funny just the other night we descided that it would be easier for all involved to just have 'base' vehicles that fall within the rules and spare everyone the arduous task of building and figuring out a system like that.

Its really not necessary for the game. At first I thought that a 'universal' set of rules would require a universal set of construction rules for everything..even weapon construction...but now I think maybe thats just to much. Maybe a suppliment later on.

thanks