You game, you like sci-fi; eventually the two will meet. After my short-lived creative genre crisis, I’ve fastened to space opera again — though now a new crisis has arisen: am I a fool for liking Indy IV ?!?! (We’ll cover this later) Starships are as essential to the setting as laser battles, exotic aliens, and midi-chlorians … nah, still can’t swallow them, and therefore become a Jedi?

One of the first systems for this I dealt with was Alternity Sci-Fi RPG’s Starships supplement. Twenty-nine pages of telling you how to do space travel in your stories — in case you’ve never seen Star Trek, stupid — and EVERYTHING associated with it. I’ll give them props for laying out all the options, but there’s a section on realistic 3D vector combat that shows you how to calculate relativistic time dilation — really, that‘s fun? Then we’ve got Twenty-eight pages on actually designing your chariot to the stars ROOM by ROOM — like Queer Eye for the smuggler guy – with a choice of ONE HUNDRED and THIRTY ONE different sub-systems to buy, not including manufacturer warranty — cause if your having adventures no sane business will cover ya.

“I like the kick of an Antimatter reactor, but Dark Matter Collectors are cheaper to run; but, in a pinch I may not have enough mass at the moment to induce star fall. Still, with the Texasian occupation of Uranus Ring antimatter prices are up to 75 kilo-yen per mega-gram! Why not just dip my BALLS IN CARBONITE!?”

Fuck that. Han Solo was able to have kids, but why risk it? On the opposite side is Spirit of the Century Pulp RPG’s take on vehicles, which feature a toughness rating and speed rating … that’s it, a paragraph. They include rules on gimmicking up gadgets that can be applied to all devices but it’s all very light, too light in some ways. If an X-Wing has 4 toughness slots, does a Star Destroyer have 400? Let’s add some more. Speed is already done for us. Good speed is better than Average speed, duh.

Yoda: “With the Force, size matters not; but SURE as SHIT helps a big ship does.” Going by the Description Ladder we can grade a number of ship sizes but without the need for precise geometric progression:

Average size would be the smallest in the neighborhood of 10m, an SUV to a Rebel Alliance A-Wing — the starfighter category.

Fair would be the next step: The Falcon, A Boeing 747, The Serenity from Firefly you’re general tens of meters range.

Good can represent the lower hundreds of meters for your Klingon Birds of Prey, Rebel Alliance Blockade runners, and THE Space Battleship Yamato/Argo (265m).

Great is your half-kilometer monster – some icons live here: Moya from Farscape, The Battlestar Galactica, and Sovereign class NCC-1701-E Enterprise.

Superb are the 1 to a few klicks mamas: The SDF-1, Imperial Star Destroyer, and Babylon 5 Vorlon Cruiser.

Fantastic scale, we dont see a whole lot of it as it composes the general “We’re Fucked!” category: Borg Cube, Super Star Destroyer, Independence Day City Killer (without Norton Anti-Virus)

My idea on handling the size difference — besides Yoga’s suggestion above – is to have the smaller ships accuracy and evasion raised by the difference, but a large ship doubles the damage dealt and halves the damage taken per difference. So, The Falcon (Fair size) against a Star Destroyer (Superb) gets +3 to hit and to evade the Imperial ship, but the damage shifts it deals are divided by 6 (2 x 3) to affect the Destroyer’s stress and if the Imps hit the Falcon by 1, it’ll take 6 damage!

All ships start with Average speed, their size, and 3 to 4 stress slots. Like any character in fiction we add detail to make them distinction. Spirit gives us suggestions for modifications to add in it’s Improving Things rules, plus we can feel out some specifically starship packages.

Ships will also have Aspects like characters, which give 4 pts for upgrades above the Average standard and a FATE point for dramatic license. Take the Deep Space Nine Napoleonic nightmare Defiant class escort.

Had we stuck with Alternity’s system you’d need to read FIFTY-SIX more posts like this one. I know you would, but I don’t want to write that much. And, I’ve got a movie to re-watch.

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