I really don't like deck plans and unless you are doing a "dungeon in
space" you don't need them.  A flow chart or node list of areas on the
ship is what I do.

On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 6:07 PM, Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 03Apr2018 1034, Douglas Berry wrote:
>>
>> An ancient grognard approaches, clad in the ragged remains of FASA deck
>> plans, sheets of paper filled with arcane scribbling and broken scientific
>> calculators. About his neck, a copy of Fire, Fusion, and Steel II is hung
>> with a heavy chain.
>>
>> I am about to speak heresy. Brace yourselves.
>>
>> You don't need deck plans. Hardly ever. They take up space, are never
>> right, and frankly, speaking as someone who has designed countless
>> starships since High Guard first came out, people rarely give a damn.
>>
>> Let me repeat a point. They never come out right, but the ship design
>> sequences are far too granular for that kind of fine detail. We can argue
>> to the end of time about why computers take up so much space, or what
>> percentage of stateroom tonnage goes to common spaces, but in the game, it
>> does not really matter.
>
>
> I agree that this level of details isn't needed on the maps/plans. I have
> found a degree of details in descriptions of staterooms helpful in providing
> atmosphere. For example, in my current campaign I described the staterooms
> in some detail in order to show the players just how tightly packed in
> everything was, even by starship design standards (their new ship being a
> 'high-performance' 'Solomani' design, two flavours that both tend to mean
> 'cramped').
>
> I also did a low detail set of plans, because the ship was a tail-lander,
> and some of the players found my text description hard to follow. How they
> did I'm not sure, seeing as it was basically "A conical shape, the decks
> stacked on top of each other in the following order, from base to nose..."
>
> I did say I was going to do a more detailed deck-by-deck plan, but the need
> for it never came up, so I never did. I have found, like you, that they are
> almost never needed. These days I use GURPS *Spaceshsips* for ship design,
> and I find that placing the twenty systems that it gives each ship in a
> roughly 'ship-shaped' arrangement gives enough detail, as a rule.
>
> --
> Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
> Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief
>
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--
Some of us have a little bit of Crazy and some of us have a 40,000 liter
drum filled to the brim of the stuff - and you don't know how much Crazy
there is until it's awake - by which time it's waaaay too late to try
and cram it back in the box. -- Simon the BOFH