[PnP] Ships, Yo!

[Scott Adams]

At 05:42 PM 1/31/08, you wrote:
>The one major thing that I need to hammer out is a decent way to  
>handle "ship hit points", primarily for ramming, magic spells and  
>monsters, but also for seige gear and ship weapons.
>
>I have my shipwright sheet and I'm going to try and play with numbers  
>on that.
>
>In your opinion, going with the "Bireme" standard, how many hits  
>should it take to founder a bireme?  Not crack it in half, but take  
>enough damage to have it take on more water than can be removed,  
>eventually turning it into a floating hulk?
>
>
>Last year I found a good Ramming site with some good rules and info so have the file somewhere.  But I've come up with 3 versions of hit points.  A Basic hp for the entire ship, hp for each area (ie side, front, aft, sails, interanl), and a more generic system using levels of degree.

Sorta like Gamma World uses for its system.  In that like Good is degraded to poor or medium.  I've honestly not decided on the best system yet. But likely will use oen or all (in varying Ref determined ways) for the final rules I come up with (eventually sigh).  

Problem is you have to look at it bottom up.  So the smallest canoe might be 1 hp for the whole ship or for each side.  But a bireme or trieme (tri should be top of the line for hit points) should be like say 100 hps with the average ship (ie merchants) being say 50.  If you can consider it in terms of that a range can be defined.  But I will likely assign values based on the construction.  In that the biggest part is clearly the hull.  So I could determine it based on amount of wood (BF) for the hull needed and the quality of the work.  But that may not be a fair system either.  Either way a warship's front will always have 1.5 to 2x min more strength than the sides that's a historical fact.  I think I listed facts on the ram and speeds in one of the files I sent you.  Figuring a 1 ton bronze ram has got to be 200 hps if melted down into a door :)
Think of a door and upsize it :)  I dunno.  These things I've not been able to iron out myself.  

I have rigged up spells to cause damage via degrees and hit points so that'll work out.  But I think a general formula of BF/Hull size/Design, cratmanship, number of decks, magic protections (seaprate likely), minor details like type of wood, dimensions, displacement and type of caulking are all good factors for some formula.

So could just work up a system Canoe/Rowboat or for that matter a single log is considered a boat (so 1 hp :)).  Work up to the average ships the merchants, freighters, sailing ships, to the warships and beyond to the super fregithers which would have the highest hp.