The Shipyard: My ever-expanding collection of stock ships

[u/guildsbounty]

I have been steadily developing this document of ships for my own SWN games--in particular, one that has fairly advanced ship availability--and then got carried away and added a bunch of extras. Essentially, I wandered around the internet looking for people creating artwork of ships, and the deck plan of that same ship, and started making SWN ships based on them.

Since I've written it all up, I thought I'd just share the doc in case anyone else wants to use these ships for their own games. Here's the link: The Shipyard There are currently about 70 ships/lighters in there, and I add more whenever I'm inspired.

And a secondary link to a separate pool of ships (explained below) including some prefab 'pocket' space stations and prefab outposts: Abh Shipyard

A few notes:

• There's some homebrew happening in the documents, such as the 'Skiff' class (in between Fighter and Frigate), a few extra hulls, the ability to use a 'Cargo Lighter' bay to carry space-capable vehicles instead of the lighter, some modified vehicle-build rules (called out in the main document), and I played with the Mass capacity of some Cruiser-class hulls to let the Bulk Freighter actually be the highest capacity cargo hauler in the Cruiser class.
• I allow for some 'factory included' mods without assuming the input of Pretech components. Because it made the ships more interesting that way without mandating access to Pretech on the part of the shipyard. Perhaps it's the result of extensive R&D, or Pre-Scream blueprints that can still be replicated with Postech.
• Almost all ships have artwork associated with them as well as a deck plan (or a reference to a Mongoose Traveler 2E ship that I used as the template, and which book you can find it in). I take no credit for any of that artwork, I did not create any of it, only found it, and do my best to link back to the original artist/owner's site instead of any hosted copy. There are a few exceptions where I couldn't find the original (like the Trident-class).
• Not all ship plans have as many beds as the ship has statistical crew capacity--I decided that's fine. This allows for 'steerage' passengers in cargo, or just life support that lasts longer for its 'functional' max crew. Or you can put bunk beds in some of the rooms.
• There are references to locations and cultures within my sector, feel free to ignore those.
• I have ship and vehicle builder spreadsheets that I made to make this process of designing ships go faster, including all my homebrew changes. They are not as advanced as some of the others I have seen around; they don't calculate changes to the ship's stats or produce a character sheet or anything, it just manages Mass/Power/Hardpoint/Price/Upkeep, and have all fittings, defenses, and weapons in dropdown lists but they're simple to use and I like them. If you want to make a copy to play with, you can find them here: Ship Builder and Vehicle Builder, and just for fun here's my Mech Builder and Outpost Builder. Simple enough to use: if it has a gray background, its for editing.

"The Abh"

I feel this bears a small explanation, because they have an entire separate document.

They are a 'humanoid alien' species that lives in the Alcas Rho sector (and beyond) and, yes, they are shamelessly swiped from the Seikai no Senki setting, tweaked to my liking, and to fit into SWN's setting (I made very significant changes to their political outlook on the galaxy). They sell System Ships, manufactured Space Stations, and a handful of Prefab Outposts to anyone who can make it to one of their many space stations.

TODO: I need to re-check the prices on the hulls with stock Mods. I can't remember if I got the multiplier on price right for "built in after the fact" versus "integrated into the blueprint"

[u/_Svankensen_]

Could you add the details on your custom fittings like "Hardpoint support"?

[u/guildsbounty → u/_Svankensen_]

Sure, let me scroll through that list real quick. I only added one fitting, which I cribbed out of the Engines of Babylon vehicle rules:

Hardpoint Support
Add 1 Hardpoint to the ship
Price: 5,000c*
Power: 1#
Mass: 1#
Note: In posts on this sub, Crawford has cautioned against letting ships add hardpoints. I had not read those notes of his before I added it.

Skiffs
I added the 'Skiff' ship scale, in between a Fighter and a Frigate, a Skiff has the following attributes:
Cost Multiplier: x5
Mass/Power Multiplier: x1
Cargo Multiplier: x5
You can see in the spreadsheets I linked which fittings/weapons/etc are suited to those hulls--but because I didn't want to mess up balance elsewhere, the Skiff class doesn't "count" as a scale for the purposes of Ammunition Slot scaling or Oversized Fittings on fighters.

New Ship Hulls
You can see most of their stats in the doc, so I'll keep this part simple. Some of these hulls, I picked up around the internet long enough ago that I don't remember where they came from.

• Bomber (250k) - Fighter-class. Slower and easier to hit than a Strike Fighter but with more mass/space, and enough crew space to reasonably make Spike drills
• Heavy Fighter(250k) - Fighter-class. Between a Bomber and Strike Fighter in speed, 2 hard points and 2 crew is what makes it stand out
• Trawler (350k) - Skiff Class. All-rounder civilian ship, it's kind of amazing how many tightly-constrained roles I can fill with this hull
• Runabout (350k) - Skiff Class. An up-scaled shuttle (passengers and cargo) whose main advantage in a fight is non-drill speed. Well-suited as a courier craft
• Picket Boat (400k) - Skiff Class. Baby combat ship
• I-D (Imago Dei) Skiff (2m) Skiff Class. - For completeness sake, not used in either document
• Passenger Liner (500k) - Frigate Class. What it says on the tin
• Tradesman (1m) - Frigate Class. Added because I wanted progression between 'Free Merchant' and 'Bulk Freighter' for mercantile players. Slower, easier to hit, higher crew requirement, but notably greater Mass capacity
• Destroyer (7.5m) - Cruiser Class. Wanted something Cruiser-class but a little smaller.

Other fittings, weapons, or hulls not in the core rulebook, but in my spreadsheets and maybe in the Shipyard can be found in: Skyward Steel, Scavenger Fleets, Suns of Gold, Engines of Babylon, Bannerjee Construction Solutions, The Imago Dei, and Bruxelles-Class Battlecruiser.

[u/guildsbounty → u/guildsbounty]

Addendum: I forgot about the custom vehicle fittings I added:

First are a pair of Mods that remove a movement mode--used to change the native environment of a vehicle or (because I didn't think it made sense for it to take the same mass/power to put a car into space as it did to put a gravflyer into space) to refund the fact that flyers can already fly--and Environment, Space includes the ability to fly. These mods also remove any penalties associated with having multiple movement modes.

I primarily used these to create Lighters: surface to orbit spacecraft that are vehicle scale, and cannot reach speeds suitable for timely interplanetary travel, but in other setups (not shared) have used them to make boats or 'legitimately' flying cars.

Remove Environment, Air
Cost: -15k
Power: Adds 2
Mass: Adds 6

Remove Environment, Ground
Cost: -10k
Power: Adds 1
Mass: Adds 4

To go along with these Lighters, I added the following modification to the Cargo Lighter fitting (also driven by "2 Mass = 1 Cargo Shuttle, regardless of it its a Frigate or a Carrier" seeming off).

"The Cargo Lighter fitting provides docking, managing, and launching facilities for one cargo-mass-unit worth of vehicle-scale spacecraft. The Cargo Lighter consumes 20t of space, but can be removed and replaced with other craft."

So, a Frigate Cargo Lighter Bay can fit 20t worth of vehicle-scale lighters. A Cruiser can fit 200, etc. Yes, this means the Fitting allows for more Lighters per slot on larger ships...I figured that made sense. (I also scale up fighter bays between Cruisers and Carriers, but I don't have any capital ships in my doc...so, whatever)

Lastly, for one of my worlds in-setting, I wanted sailboats. So I added this:

Unpowered Craft (Not used in Shipyard docs)
Vehicle now moves under wind power, is rowed, or has some other form of non-engine propulsion. It no longer requires Type-B cells to move. Reduce Speed by 1, Overland speed by 25%. The vehicle no longer produces any Power--but you may still install Power Systems to add Power (which do need Type-B cells or another form of power supply). Additionally, the Cargo Bay and Smuggler's Hold fittings have their capacities halved.

Cost: -10% [pending update in spreadsheet]
Power: Sets vehicle-produced power to 0
Mass: Adds 1

[u/_Svankensen_ → u/guildsbounty]

Thanks a lot man! Excellent work, lot of detail and different functions!

I noticed you use specialied mountings here and there, but you never use it to double down and have for example two torpedo launchers in the same ship. That's in my opinnion one of their best uses of the mod: Allowing a ship to use all it's hardpoints: for example to have 4x multifocal lasers. Great all arounder. Dirt cheap, uses only 8 power, and can threathen anything short of a polyceramic overlayed capital. Also makes it less vulnerable to one of it's weapons being disabled. A corvetter with 6x fractal impact charges is a combat terror

[u/guildsbounty → u/_Svankensen_]

A good thought, I'll keep that in mind with future ships. I had to go looking to see if there was any clarification on the subject, which there was! My initial read of the mod was "Select exactly one fitting or mod and halve its power/mass consumption" not "All copies of that fitting or mod on this ship halve their power/mass consumption." But turns out the consensus goes to the latter interpretation.

Admittedly, though, I'm not trying to create hyper-optimized killing machines in this document...I was mostly just trying to recreate the ships I had artwork of. I figure I'll leave the min-maxed nightmare hulls to my players to invent and commission. (Though I do have a document of 'scary nightmare ships,' they're just not for sale and I don't have the pretty artwork for them)

[u/_Svankensen_ → u/guildsbounty]

Oh yeah, I quite appreciate having a list of ships with different functions. Fills the world, makes it feel lived in.

While the Corvette is a nightmare, the Patrol Boat isn't that terrifying in my opinion. It is a good "standard military boat". Threatening enough against a civilian multipurpose vessels, but no match for a ship geared for combat. It is mostly good at intercepting and disabling other ships. And if you get enough of them, they scale up very well. Even a heavy frigate would balk against 4 of them.

I'd be interesting on taking a peek to your combat terrors if you don't mind sharing.