So the winner, by a squeaker, was economic ships, and so I’ve been up to my eyeballs in ships this week, and I think I’m done for awhile. I have two still unpublished, the Serenade-Class Tramp Freighter (I bet you can guess what inspired that), and a Lithian freighter (a translation of the Prosperity), but I’ve had it with ships for a little bit, so they’ll have to wait.
The Arrow-Class LASH Freighter
The Arrow-Class LASH Freighter
A direct translation of the Ricardo-Class LASH Freighter from GURPS Spaceships 2, this was such a neat concept I wanted to include it. The idea is you have a ship that goes through FTL but then doesn’t (or hardly) moves through real space, and lets automated shuttles do the real space transportation and receives the next batch and then jumps. I allowed the Arrow to move, but only slowly, and I think it has more utility than I might have expected, as it can transport other ships at higher speeds as well. A neat idea! I put it under the Syntech umbrella (as they love neat ideas that may not be practical, and automation). The price per ton is higher than the Aldeberan, but still comes in under $500 per ton, which makes it surprisingly affordable, more so than I expected. For the name, I went hunting for alternate economists to name it (I usually name the translations in a way that it’s pretty easy to track back to what it was originally), and I found one named Kenneth Arrow. Perhaps not the best name for an economic, rather than military, ship, but it felt fun and cheeky to do.
The Frontiersman-Class Frontier Freighter
The Frontiersman-Class Frontier Freighter
In all of my discussion of freighters, I often suggest they would do poorly in space filled with pirates. Okay, well, what sort of freighter would you send to a place full of pirates? GURPS Spacehips 2 would send the Regulus, so I translated it. In this case, I made some minor changes to the armament to better fit the Psi-Wars mechanics, assigned it to Startrodder (they do a lot of your pioneer stuff) and gave it heavy armor rather than a force screen (more to do with how old Startrodder stuff tends to be old). I tend to imagine it in places like the Phoenix cluster, though it might be on the edges of the Glorian Rim too. The Regulus is named after “Large, Bright Stars” but so is the Aldeberan, so I shifted to pioneer themes.
This one is less practical; it clocks in at around $1500 per ton. That gun is expensive! This means it’ll struggle to justify things like livestock and, in practice, it’s “just” a very large tramp freighter. But life on the rim is hard, I guess.
Shuttles
The Delta-Class Shuttle was inspired by the Alpha-Class shuttle in GURPS Spaceships 2, but with some modifications and stripped down somewhat and adapted to Psi-Wars mechanics. Specifically, it flies like a plane, though it has some contragravity assistance. The Ranger was entirely new, and inspired by the “Phantom” from Star Wars Rebels. I had noticed that the Regulus had a shuttle bay, and that made sense: farms aren’t going to have massive cargo processing facilities, so the shuttle carts the grain up and down, but there may be pirates, so they’d have weapons and armor, then you get something that looks like the Phantom.
One eagle-eyed reader noted they had the same price while the Ranger was better. Actually, the Ranger is closer to $1.6 mil and the Delta is about 1.45 mil, so there’s a difference, but I imagine most people are fine with rounding, especially since Westerly tech tends to get a -10% discount (Startrodder and Redjack have “more bang for your buck” than other corporations). The Ranger also has bigger wings that take up more room and requires a longer take-off than the Delta, and this matters, but they tend to fall below the radar of most gamers, so I’m fine with the Ranger being a better shuttle than the Delta for adventurers, but I don’t expect players are going to shop much around for what shuttle they’re going to get. I don’t imagine players are going to care much at all about any of these economic ships, honestly. I could be wrong, though.
The Turbo came late, as I was working on the Yachts and it occurred to me that rich people wouldn’t want a generic Delta or a stinky Ranger. They’d want something cool, and I remembered the racing ship from the Expanse. I could imagine someone with plenty of money paying top dollar for a shuttle with fighter engines on it, and so the Turbo was born! Frankly, the Drifter is better if you want to maximize your speed, but the Turbo can carry your sportscar and a couple of attractive you want to impress with your spoilers and red paintjob, while the Drifter is just stripped down speed.
The Yacht Update
After the discussion of slow travel speeds, it occured to me that people buying yachts are doing so because they’re willing to pay top dollar for the fastest travel times. So, I’ve upgraded 4 yachts, the Prestige-Pattern Shuttle, the Ronin-Pattern Battle Yacht and the High Roller. The only real change in all three was a rating 3 hyperdrive, which sometimes raised costs (Well, it always raised costs, but sometimes I had arbitrarily rounded up, and the cost was sometimes too small to notice) or required additional mass.
Wait, that was 3. What was the fourth? Oh, of course, the ever popular Nomad. I did more than just upgrade the speed of it, because obviously it needs to be able to be the fastest ship in the galaxy, so yes, you can get Rating 4 on it. But I also did a more thorough and careful examination of the modules and carefully audited each one; this resulted in some changes, but everything should be clear now.
The Taj-Mahal Xanadu
The Xanadu-Class Luxury Yacht
The Taj-Mahal class yacht from Spaceships 2 is one of my favorites. I used it all the way back in iteration 3, and I believe it showed up in some of my “playtests.” I had forgotten about the Taj Mahal Black. That might be an interesting option to build out later. Anyway, it was an old friend I wanted to bring back as a surprise culmination to this wiki-week. I needed a corporation to attach it to, and it doesn’t feel quite like an ARC or Syntech ship, and it’s too nice for Stellar Dynamics (which are tediously boring and generic), so I conjured up Grand Federal LLC, a corporation that worked primarily for the upper classes of the old Galactic Federation, a sort of non-Maradonian ARC that was subsumed into/destroy by the Imperial Combine, giving these ships a little bit of a sense of the nostalgia I feel for them given their early inclusions in the Psi-Wars canon.
Is That It?
Hardly, but it’s all I have for now. As I said, I also have a Lithian freighter based on the Prosperity, the Serenade-Class Tramp Frighter, and a few more yacht ideas. A cut down, Syntech corporate executive “private jet” yacht would be nice, and I feel like the Empire needs an elite, high speed corvette for jetting around troubleshooters, auditors and imperial knights more than ever, but I’ve been up to my eyeballs in spreadsheets for the past couple of weeks and I’ve fallen behind in other things so I’m going to stop here.
Happy wiki week!