Utility Closet: Spaceship Character Sheet

The last campaign I ran was space opera, set in the Endless Space universe. Being space opera, the players had a starship of their very own. It was more than a means of transportation – it was where they hung their hats and charged their power cells, where they slept and kept their stuff, and where they brought their prisoners (my players were quite sensible about not fighting to the death). The main problem of starships is that they have all sorts of statistics and resources to keep track of; power, fuel, reaction mass, rations, weapons, ammunition, etc. It got confusing for me to keep track of these on separate papers or files, so after the campaign ended I drew up plans for a record sheet to use if I ran another space opera game.

I posted it a while ago on the official GURPS forums, with minimal interest shown, though the one person who replied had some very useful input. Now that I have a blog that people seem to read, I thought I'd share it to a wider audience. This is only the second iteration, so I'm mostly looking for feedback, critique and improvements at this point; what more would you want in a spaceships' character sheet? Tables for quick references? More empty boxes for keeping track of miscellaneous things? Have I left out something huge? Obviously there's lots of empty space; my hope is to be able to fill it while keeping the sheet both attractive, simple and clean, and useful. Please let me know in the comments!

Utility Closet: Armour Design Spreadsheet

David Pulver's armour design system is one of my favourite things in GURPS Pyramid, since I'm a perennial tweaker. One of the things that annoys me about it is the fact that it's spread across three publications, requiring flipping between several if you want to make something that uses materials or rules from more than one. To ease the issue, I've collated all the information on body surface areas, constructions and materials into one Google spreadsheet. Enjoy!

Please note that I deliberately didn't include explanations of the numbers or the actual rules themselves, as that would probably count as republishing GURPS content, which is in violation of Steve Jackson Games' online policy.

Utility Closet: Balance Calculations for Damage, Armour and Penetration

Balancing damage and armour in GURPS is complicated. GURPS Pyramid 3/77 gave us the Combat Effectiveness Rating, or CER, to help mitigate this with a system that mimics the way CR works in Dungeons & Dragons. It's imperfect, obviously, since a single number can't accurately encapsulate how much of a threat a monster or bad guy is, but it's a welcome addition for rule-of-thumb balance in a system where one of the common worries for new GMs was combat balance. While reading through GURPS Ultra-Tech over the few years I've been playing the system, I've put together a few easy formulae to help understand the interactions between damage, armour divisors, penetrating damage and injury that can help a gamemaster understand what kind of threats they're placing in their players' path, so I'm sharing them with you down below.

Warning! This blog is finally living up to its namesake. Under the break you'll find mathematics as complicated as a square root! This is because we need to calculate a standard deviation, although I've done all the hard work and these calculations require absolutely no understanding of statistics beyond knowing what a mean or average is. All of these can be done with the basic calculator on your phone or computer. Bear in mind also that I have dyscalculia – if I can do it, so can you!