I'm thinking that photons and disruptors would become ballistas, plasma weapons to cannon, phasers to heavy crossbows. Not sure on most other details.
Interesting idea? or just really really stupid and fraught with legal issues?
(in other words, if you want to play a star trek game, then play a star trek game. why would you bother replacing star trek equipment with spelljamming stuff?)
find a comparable class in SJ and then 'convert'
(in other words, if you want to play a star trek game, then play a star trek game. why would you bother replacing star trek equipment with spelljamming stuff?)
Um, because it is fun? Isn't fun the whole point of these games?
Has anyone tried converting Star Fleet Battles into Spelljammer terms?
I'm thinking that photons and disruptors would become ballistas, plasma weapons to cannon, phasers to heavy crossbows. Not sure on most other details.
Interesting idea? or just really really stupid and fraught with legal issues?
Spelljammer missed out on a lot of useful D&D ideas that were confined to the Mystara D&D rules. Building big magic allows you to build spaceships, massdrivers, flying saucers, deathrays, ect.
eg. Flying Saucer
ironform spell (L7) x 2 covers 1000cubic feet each side of the flying disc. enchant the frame (both ironform with fly and create air), and the third "stoneform (L6)" frame component with create air, fly and crystal ball spells to create an omnidirectional pilot navigation interface x 5000 for big stuff, and what ever and you have a flying saucer for your drow.
Now all you need is a recon team of five Drow with Rayguns (Blackmoor Lightningbolt wands) and you have Aliens...
If you want the Starship Enterprize then work out the frame areas of every surface, declare the warpdrive to be some immortal artefact and waza! D&D MEETS METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA.
Um, because it is fun? Isn't fun the whole point of these games?
I'm not a fan of putting science fiction elements into Spelljammer as it is supposed to be a fantasy game, but if you want to do a Star Trek/Spelljammer crossover you should have a look at what has already been done. The people doing the version I linked too never finished it, which is probably why it is on Beyond the Moons drawing board.
Although I'm not interested in going down this route myself, I have seen other people who like this sort of thing. I'm pretty sure I saw a small spelljammer ship that looked very similar to the Galileo shuttle craft. So if you really want to do this then I'd suggest you do some research with a search engine to avoid reinventing material that someone else has alredy done. You might also try gettting in touch with the other Trek fans as they might be willing to restart their efforts or at least pass un-uploaded notes to you. You might also want to think about joining the Spelljammer - Into the Void yahoo group as they are usually very happy to discuss strange things that make SJ purists shudder.
I would like to know why you want to do this, out of interest. You seem to want to suck the sci-fi weapons out of Star Trek, so what are the elements you want to keep?
Do you want to keep a large powerful organisation like the Federation of Planets? (You could build up something like the Company of the Challice, Pragmatic Order of Thought or the Seekers instead.)
Do you want to use the characters from TOS, TNG, 9SD, Voyager, Enterprise? (Spock could be turned into an elf and Dr McCoy could be turned into a cleric.)
Do you like the trek ships? (They may well be too large to be powered by Spelljamming helms. Plus Trek ships tend to be enclosed ships designed to keep out vaccum and SJ ships tend to be open to the air envelope.)
Whatever it is you are trying to keep, you will face some problems adapting it to the fantasy universe of Spelljammer. To avoid breaking the universe you will probably need to throw certain elements of Star Trek away. If you tell us the bits that are most important we might be able to help you keep those. So far I'm guessing that you are not too attached to the weaponry. That is good because Star Trek weapons (and/or warp speed) would probably make a ship far too powerful.
If you are just looking for flavors of Star Trek you might be able to lift some inspiration from your favorite Trek material and "change the names to protect the innocent".
If you kept the Trek elements down to a minimum you could probably make some interesting stuff. The saucer seperation design of Trek ships is something that might be interesting to attempt in SJ. One part of a ship would be docking with another instead of landing (as per normal). Although this seems to be looked at as sci-fi the sort of coupling mechanisms used by the Command Module and Lunar Module of the Apollo spacecraft is probably something that could be copied by Gnomes.
However, if you are going to use everything from Star Trek then you are starting a very long job that from past evidence may be very difficult to complete.
As I said, I want to downgrade weapons to their fantasy equivalents. And except for their cutting edge (by their standards) weapons, they will be the non-magical versions. Photons, disruptors, plasma launchers get replaced by ballistas and cannons. I'm not quite sure what to do with their seeking weapons, or what to do about the blatantly stupid physics of the catapult in Spelljammer. Personal phasers generally get replaced with crossbows or primitive gunpowder handguns.
Starship shields are done away with. Instead, the amount of shielding represents the general construction quality, which converts into extra hit points. Most ships are made of wood in this altered reality.
The stuff I want to keep is the political organisation, especially the idea of multiple large empires, although I want to heavily downplay the amount of control they actually possess inside their claimed borders.
I also want to keep the ship designs, although with heavy modifications. For example, the entire saucer section of teh Federation ships will have an open top deck, which makes for an impressive amount of space to hold topdeck weapons. Ditto for the Klingon forward boom section.
As for races, I want to swap them with fantasy equivalents. Klingons become orcs, Romulans (and Vulcans) become elves. The Orion pirates would make great halflings I think.
So basically, ships and background are the primary areas I want to keep.
One primary issue is what to do about the propulsion system. I want to keep the usual Spelljammer helms, but that leaves the engines redundant. Replace them with sails and rigging?
eta: regarding ship sizes, my aim is to balance heavy cruisers (such as the Enterprise) as being around the 100-ton mark. I realise in terms of total crew size and physical dimensions, this shrinks them dramatically, but I suspect the SJ rules and weapons strength would mnake for long boring battles otherwise.
The Lance of Vanya
Boltship Class
Description: 200' long ship of iron with Mass driver making up the 160' at the front. It is designed to fire a 26 kiloton Iron Bolt (160' long, 30' diameter bolt) from orbit at planet based targets.
Shipweight: 50 KT
Cargo Capacity: 10 Tons
Speed: 36 miles per day
Crew: 10
Hullpoints:30,000
ArmorClass:-10
Bolt Damage: 200' radius- 20d6, 400' radius-10d20,...
To hit roll: Natural twenty required without skill modifiers to hit target. miss results in off target by 8 mile hex....
Regarding Warp Cores: Immortal Artefact to which the Crew must sacrifice a million GP/day to power shipflight.
ok, my primary source material is not intended to be the TV/movie series, but rather ADB's Star Fleet Battles game. Byebye Spock et al.
As I said, I want to downgrade weapons to their fantasy equivalents. And except for their cutting edge (by their standards) weapons, they will be the non-magical versions. Photons, disruptors, plasma launchers get replaced by ballistas and cannons. I'm not quite sure what to do with their seeking weapons, or what to do about the blatantly stupid physics of the catapult in Spelljammer. Personal phasers generally get replaced with crossbows or primitive gunpowder handguns.
Sounds do-able. I think you should talk to that SJ yahoo group I mentioned.
I'm not sure what "blatantly stupid physics of the catapult in Spelljammer" is supposed to mean. You might need to explain what you think the problem is.
(If you ask 100 different people what "the problem with Spelljammer is" you get a 100 different different answers. I've seen lots of different complaints, but I've never met anyone who complained about catapults before.)
Starship shields are done away with. Instead, the amount of shielding represents the general construction quality, which converts into extra hit points. Most ships are made of wood in this altered reality.
If you are going to make wooden ships extra strong, then maybe you should use mastercrafted material or a special wood. Alternatively you could create plated ships.
I think the interesting thing about your Trek-sized ships is that they almost qualify as a small village.
Trek shaped ships are already available from other SJ fans, but I don't think anybody has made ships in the original scale. You might need to shrink those ships down a bit if you want to make them fit into the SJ universe. Otherwise conventional helms might not work.
I think that (apart from The Spelljammer) the Elven Amarda and Ogre Mammoth are the largest ships in SJ. And the propultion method of the Mammoth is supposed to be something that is no longer known.
The stuff I want to keep is the political organisation, especially the idea of multiple large empires, although I want to heavily downplay the amount of control they actually possess inside their claimed borders.
You almost have that in SJ already. Existing empires include the Elven Imperial Navy, the Scro Fleet and the Vodoni Empire.
However if you want additional empires, I'd suggest you look to existing SJ organisations and bump them up a bit. The Company of the Challace or Pragmatic Order of Thought would make a good Star Fleet like organisation. In fact you could give them both Star Fleet style ships and have the Company ships act in a much better organised fasion than the POTs.
I also want to keep the ship designs, although with heavy modifications. For example, the entire saucer section of teh Federation ships will have an open top deck, which makes for an impressive amount of space to hold topdeck weapons. Ditto for the Klingon forward boom section.
I'm sure you could also put open windows and weapon hatches all around the edge of the saucer section. You might even be able to put small under-slung decks on the bottom of the ships and create places where a balista can shoot down.
As for races, I want to swap them with fantasy equivalents. Klingons become orcs, Romulans (and Vulcans) become elves. The Orion pirates would make great halflings I think.
If Vulcans turn into elves then Romulans (who are depicted as evil vulcans) are going to have to be turned into drow. If you don't do that then every elf fan will groan at you making evil elves and every drow fan will bug you to death.
Don't forget that Spelljammer gives you a bunch of new fantasy races to play with. The Klingons could just as easily turn into giff.
So basically, ships and background are the primary areas I want to keep.
One primary issue is what to do about the propulsion system. I want to keep the usual Spelljammer helms, but that leaves the engines redundant. Replace them with sails and rigging?
Replacing the engines with sails and rigging will spoil the look of your ship. On a standard ship the sails and rigging only provide manouverability (MC) - the helm provides all propultion (SR).
If you replace the naciles of the Enterprise with gigantic wind turbines then they can give you a method of turning the ship (that is an alternative to ship-sails). Wind turbines would also give you an excuse to keep the engine room (which could be filled with tinker gnomes running a gigantic steam powered boiler).
I know this introduces a bit of Steampunk into the mix, but I can't see another excuse to keep the engine rooms. Not unless you swap all the helms for the dwarven forge style of helm.
eta: regarding ship sizes, my aim is to balance heavy cruisers (such as the Enterprise) as being around the 100-ton mark. I realise in terms of total crew size and physical dimensions, this shrinks them dramatically, but I suspect the SJ rules and weapons strength would mnake for long boring battles otherwise.
100 tons is the limit of what a Major Helm can push, so you'll have to make that an absolute maximum unless you invent another type of helm (or "rediscover" the "lost" type of helm that powered an Ogre Mammoth).
To be honest you are changing so much about the ships that reducing them to the size of an Elven Armada (or even making them smaller) doesn't really matter. A smaller ship will be a lot easer to design the deck plans for.
One interesting feature of Star Trek (unused until TNG) is that the saucer section can separate. So you might want to put a second helm onto your ship and build in some sort of docking mechanism.
Conceivably you are moving toward a Warhammer 40,000 Setting? Where the Ships are realy big and the Weapons Planet Smashing...
I don't think so. I think he wants realy big ships with standard SJ weapons. He said the saucer section of a ship, like the USS Enterprise, would be an open deck, so it could probably have dozens of catapults and balista on it.
The Lance of Vanya
Boltship Class
Description: 200' long ship of iron with Mass driver making up the 160' at the front. It is designed to fire a 26 kiloton Iron Bolt (160' long, 30' diameter bolt) from orbit at planet based targets.
Sounds interesting, but he said he wants his ships to be powered by conventional helms and use conventional weapons.
this is, of course, problematic, if you are launching a catapult at a target, say, 4 hexes away from a ship with a gravity plane 90 feet across at another ship with a gravity plane 90 feet across. at best, you're looking at probably 90 feet of the travel time being influenced by gravity (possibly even in different directions, if you shoot low). basically, "catapults" as we know them on earth would not really work anywhere near the same in space. something more along the lines of a ballista which hurls rocks (i'm pretty sure there's an actual name for such a thing, in fact) which has a much flatter, less gravity-dependent trajectory would be much more reasonable.
Catapults: the problem with these is that they break teh laws of gravity. SJ has a set of well-defined rules regarding how gravity works - towards the gravity plane within the ship's area of effect, towards the planet near planets, and nothing at all in other areas. catapults fire their missiles in a parabolic arc, which relies on having a constant gravity field.
Advanced computers or magic could of course calculate the necessary effects they changing fields would have as ships maneuver in battle, but that effectively means you won't have a non-magical catapult anymore.
Except as planetary assault weapons, catapults can't work within the limits of the fantasy physics that have already been defined.
Shields: the ships are made of wood, but not exceptionally strong. Rather, a ship that has very good shelds for its size would be represented as having an armoured/heavy hull, and a ship with very weak shields for its size would be represented as being of flimsy construction.
Scale: Genuine trek ships are much to big for the SJ scale. I intend on rescaling them so that heavy crusiers (such as the Enterprise) come out at around 100 tons. I'll then calculate crew and stuff based off that size.
Elves: Conceptually, of course the Romulans are drow inthis altered reality of mine
Helms: I'm working on a system for designing helms where you can have almost any size of ship. It always seemed ridiculous to me that there should only be exactly two sizes of helm. My helms are going to be rated for speed and maximum hull size. This should cover those dreadnoughts and battleships seen in the game. Of course, any helm powerful enough to push such a massive ship would be very heavily guarded, as well as rare (maybe only an average of one in a crystal sphere). The helm is the one area where I want magic to be a required part of ship operations.
Those warp nacelles: making them into Gnomish steampunk wind turbines might work for one race, but I'd have to do the same for all (altering the flavour from fantasy to steampunk). I suspect rigging and sails is the only way. I'll just need to figure out how...
Jaid, youre right. I missed your reply as I was writing my earlier post at the same time. Some kind of weird direct fire slingshot based off a ballista but firing rocks woudl be a spelljammer "catapult".
warp engines:
http://www.spelljammer.org/ships/helms/alternate_helm.html gave me teh answer. Those warp nacelles are actually accumulators which slowly absorb the ambient magical energy present in deep space (possibly only while in the flow?) This of course also means the ship's helmsman no longer nees to be a spellcaster. Ship's mana stores are essentially unlimited as long as those accumulators are intact. But go on a tight leash if they are disabled. Most ships will have some mages as part of their crew, both for their value as spellcasters, and as a backup energy source if the accumulators should fail.
All you need to do is acknowledge that fact that the parabolic arc doesn't work in wildspace...and then look for a solution to make the device work without that arc.
Spacefarers could work out (as soon as they have their first space battle) that catapults work differently in wildspace. If they survive the battle :P they could redesign the groundling catapult to make it release the shot slightly later. This would give you a catapult that fires in a trajectory that is parallel to the gravity plane. I believe that modification would make it work in wildspace.
Once that redesign was successfully worked out I'm sure that a catapult that fires in either a straight line or a parabolic arc could also be made. The weapon crew could make some sort of angle adjustment to the catapult when entering or leaving a planet's gravity field.
On an asteroid base like the Rock of Bral, the catapults could have complex adjustments that allow the weapon crew to fire shots out in a variety of different angles. They might even have catapults that fire at much higher angles than used in real life catapults (although I suspect that the area directly above Bral might become a bit of a blind spot where conventional weapons are concerned).
let's say you are designing your catapult to fire horizontally (ie level with your local gravity field), such that the projectile will continue horizontally (ie in a stright line) after it leaves your local field. You'd need to adjust the precise angle depending on how far each specific catapult is from the edge of your gravity field, but that's doable.
It gets complicated when entering the field of the other ship. Assuming it enters the other ship's field top-down, gravity will njot deflect the shot at all.
At any other angle, the shot will be deflected toward the ship's gravity plane (whether the shot is on the upper or lower side is irrelevant here). So the shot would initially fall short... but then the plane will push the previously "falling short" projectile back "upward". That gravity plane effectively acts as a lens which focuses missile fire on the ship. And it would work for just about any missile that moves slow enough to be affected by gravity during its flight time.
Practical consequence: catapults (and other weapons that fire slow projectiles (anything that would have to be parabolic under Earth-gravity to be usefull fired)) should treat any Spelljamming ship with a gravity plane (ie not Mystaran ships' one-directional gravity) as being a size class larger when making hit rolls.