[Dthclaw]

Cure is worse than the disease.

It leads to a sort of arms race. Who can build the most powerful anti-ship weapon/magic item/creature fastest?

And then you've got the fact that grudges are going to be dealt with between nations and cultures, but now they have much more powerful devices at their disposal.

Or, conversely, said PCs can find themselves on the business end of a ground-based anti-orbital disjunction gun.

"Move the national treasury to this location or we blast your capitol off the face of the Material Plane."
"We don't negotiate with terrorists. You have 5 seconds to break orbit."
"Or what?"
"General, by order of the King, fire."
"Wha?"
<Ship is blasted with Mordenkainen's Disjunction, and the rogue ship finds its crew sucking vacuum>

[Axel]

People, this is a scout class vessel. Minimal weaponry. I'd suggest nothing larger than a disintegration ray for getting inconvenient meteors out of the way. Similarly our shields don't need to be any more powerful than a navigational deflector screen. When we're worried about a battleship we can get into the fancy stuff. Right now we just want navigational systems.

We still need to decide on an FTL system, remember? Are we going with the limited number of charges stored in a Magicore, or the infinite number of jumps and exhausted pilot system? Or shal we have charges and an exhausted pilot?
Now, I shouldn't think the FTL drive would be safe if you want to go outside the sensor range, so the real question in that regard is how accurate are the sensors? Since the sensor range limits the range of the FTL jumps all we need to know is, how far do we want this thing to be able to travel? Or a better question might be: How fast?

Now, gravity is a good question. Maybe the crew could spend their entire trip in free-fall. You're limited to only a few months in space before you need another few months shore leave. But hey, who could stand more than a few months crammed aboard the Tarrasque, eh?

[Raven Bloodmoon]

Axel, last comment on this: I am not against a ship having a pilot. Most ships have a pilot. But the entire concept is a ripoff and we have gone with option 2.

You are right about the muscles, but isn't there a spell reverse gravity? I am sure we can just hang a mage upside down and have him cast it on the ship

With the exception of getting all the materials into orbit and assembling them, that is a great plan to have most ships unable to land. As for how the first one gets into space, how about the HDMS Tarrasque is unique in that it can fly.

As far as weaponry is concerned, can we get a flying platform first? Yikes, these are some nasty ideas here already. But yeah, lets get her flying first.

I suggest a fly spell on crystal meth. At just 90 ft per round, you'd be talking about taking 19.56 hours until the Tarrasque reached a good orbit.

So to facilitate the stardrive-building process, I will copy/paste my post from interstellar magic.

Quote

Regardless of what spell is employed to move the ship, I suggest for the sake of keeping jump counts easy to track, all jumps require one charge. Before anyone's head explodes in a plume of arcane fireworks, we can make the cost and xp required for one charge a function of the mass/volume of the ship. There are some quite simple fomulae for determining an approximate volume for a ship based on a scalene ellipsoid the maximum dimentions of which are the maximum heighth, width, and length of the ship in question. As for mass, well, that can make for more interesting things that we will need anyway if we really intend on introducing thrust calculations into this. By the way, I'll make up a spreadsheet to calculate all of this information when creating a ship. I love physics and have no qualms with that.

As for the spell used, here are the two options we seem to be toying with:

Gate
A gate spell to the Shadow Plane, where speed is limitless, a secondary spell, like a fly-on-meth spell could then blast the ship along at incredible speeds until it is ready to drop back into the Material Plane via a second gate spell.

Cost of a charge (option 1): F(l,w,h) = X * (0.75*pi*l*w*h), where X is an arbitrary coefficient, l = the length of the ship, w = the width of the ship, and h = the height of the ship.
Cost of a charge (option 2): F(w,h) = X * (pi*w*h), where X = an arbitrary coefficient, w = the width of the ship, and h = the height of the ship.

Teleport
A Teleport spell could be used to directly teleport the entire ship to the destination. This would be instantaneous, but would definitely require extensive calculations to accurately "land" where you intend. One could say that over such long distances, these calculations are necessary because the constant motion of all of the celestial bodies makes it nearly impossible to simply picture where you want to go and end up there. Your destination will have changed drastically since the last time you visited it. This is a best case senario; exploration is even more of a headache.

Cost of a charge (option 1): F(m) = X * m, where m is the ship's mass, and X is a coefficient yet to be determined by you all.

As I mentioned earlier, I am willing to mke up a spreadsheet to perform all of the calculations we deem necessary.

[Raven Bloodmoon]

Here is a thread on possible rules regarding space flight as well as futuristic surface vehicles. Please review it and we can try to settle on a final revision that can be applied to the HDMS Tarrasque.

[Axel]

The idea isn't a ripoff. I made it up entirely on my own, the fact that someone else made it up first is irrelevant. I've never seen an episode of Farscape in my life.

I don't see any reason why the Tarrasque can't use its Levitate drive to get into and out of orbit. Sure it wouldn't be the most manueverable thing in the air, but it doesn't need to be.

[Ssri-Tel-Quessir Hitokiri]

Levitate is a bad spell to use. Use something like fly instead. Because the thing is able to move at 60', it seems as if gravity, or the lack thereof (I know it is still there but negligable), does not affect it. There no longer is such a think as "escape velocity" when dealing with this.

Also, from a couple pages ago, Mord's Disjunction won't work on a golem because of that little thing called spell immunity.

I have already listed a handful of spells that might be useful in the Interstellar Magic topic. It is like the 5th post. Look at those and then get back to this.

[Dthclaw]

Agreed, levitate bad. The only thing you'd use that for is an AG drive.

As to the posts I did previously about weaponry, etc: sorry, I thought this thing was a warship, not a survey vessel.

But I have to wonder: would the golem really be immune to disjunction? I mean, this spell is capable of destroying major artifacts otherwise immune to all but one specific effect. I always figured it would be like a sort of death spell against golems.

[Dthclaw]

This could go in the other topic, but I'm on a roll (downhill, perhaps)

Instead of m for determining the value of the function, perhaps v would be a better idea. After all, it's a heckuva lot easier to figure out how many 5 ft sections there are on a ship than its total mass (and, realistically, if we're talking about teleport in zero-g, the size of the field would be the deciding factor, not what's IN the field). X could be artificial size categories (since the smallest shuttle would be at least huge, its unwieldy-and unrealistic- to assume that that a four hundred foot long vessel is just as difficult to hit as a four thousand foot ship).

I can start working on ship size categories (and their appropriate vessel ACs, since we're probably going to need to work on a subsystem for hitting a ship - honestly, the touch AC would be something like -4 zillion as it stands).

[Axel]

Mass is what throws things outta whack. Although, we could set a probable masses for each size category. Perhaps empty, standard, and crammed. Then we only need worry how much stuff and people is on the ship. For a scout ship that's probably even less to worry about, with its diminuitive cargo bay what difference would there be? If we were worried about a freighter, of course....

Now, couldn't levitate be used to provide thrust? All the levitate drive has to do is propel the ship in a chosen direction, I seen no reason you can't use levitate to push it.

[Darius]

BIG Fire elementals and water , theres your propulsion (Woe's got his golems , Ive got my fire elementals ) , that covers the weapons too , Shoot fire elementals at the opposition with orders to destroy , that way the ships armed with PGM's (Presicion Guided Munitions) or should that be EMP weapons (EleMental Projection)

You put any weapons on this sucker and the PC's WILL shoot them at something ,But you can't not put any weapons onboard because of the dangers in space(Well in a Fantasy setting anyway) , catch 22

D

[Axel]

Minimal weapons. A survey vessel is a noncombatant, afterall.

[WoeTheSinner]

Ok lets make this simple, the Scout Ship HDMS Tarasque gets 2 disintergrate rays as cast by a lvl 12 sorc, with the exception that the range is 500 ft. It can fire each ray 1 time every 1d6 rounds.

They now have a good general use weapon that can shoot at enemies or cut a hole through an asteroid. But not so powerful that they would want to go ravaging the countryside.

The only problem i see with shooting fire elementals in space is that there is no oxygen out there...now golems they don't need oxygen...we can shoot all the golems we want

[Raven Bloodmoon]

Oi....graveyard shift sucks....I'm going to be sporatic for a week, so please excuse teh sudden absences. If you prefer to use V, then the formula is as follows:

V = 0.75*l*w*h

That simple. That's the volume of a scalene ellipsoid, which is the most reasonable average volume for a ship with lenght l, width w, and height h. Whatever coefficient you shove in front of that is up to you.

I'm going to sleep now. I'll try posting more thoroughly before I leave for work.

[Axel]

Volume isn't what's important, it's mass. Mass is what produces a gravitational field and what throws off all other variables. And you can't claim they are the same. After all, a neutron star has a mass well in excess of any star but is much smaller. And let's not even go into black holes....

[WoeTheSinner]

Axel is right, its all about mass. The problem with that is you have to figure out the weights of everything on the darn ship and convert to mass. It gets too complex and is not in the spirit of the d20 system.

The simplest way to go is to do the same thing that many other RPG space adventure tabletop games using the d20 system have done...Weight classes

just like there are sizes for creatures with certain movement/reach restrictions and such there will be for ships

Fighter/Corvette/Patroll Ship/Scout Ship/Destroyer/Light Cruiser/Cruiser/Heavy Cruiser/Battle Cruiser/Fast Battleship/Battleship/Dreadnaught/Super Dreadnaught/Fortress Ship....and carriers and freighters and gunships an sensor ships and blah blah blah blah

We are not making a space D20 so I say we stick with Super Light, Light, Medium, Heavy, Super Heavy, Behemoth

Each weight class has predetermined restrictions...makes life easy and the dm can easily say this ship is medium or its light saves everyone time