An Idea for Starship Creation

[segnett]

I had theorized that it may be possible to create a Starship Creator using the Authoring Kit, or possibly using the Content Editor. Problem is that I ran myself in circles while trying.

I was hoping to make a basic starship creator as a place holder until an official one came about. I'm wondering if anyone else has had the same thoughts as I have, or if they have even attempted it?

I thought I was making headway, til I got confused with doing the scaling and speed. And then I realized that I had added all of the facets to an existing game system...I thought I was making another selectable game system within Cortex. Is that even possible?

I obviously have confused myself greatly, and any help and direction would be awesome.

[Mathias]

Let's list out what needs to be changed for starships vs. characters:

Add spaceships as an option for type of character on the configure hero form
Attributes range from d2-d12
Attributes have different descriptions
Record Dimensions
Record Tonnage
Record Speed Class
Record Fuel Capacity
Add Quirks as a category of things to add
Add a Spaceship category to assets/complications, and make sure that they don't show up for regular characters and only these show up for spaceships
Add spaceship assets/complications
Add a spaceship category to skills
Restrict skill list for spaceships to spaceship skills only
Correlate max skill points to Intelligence
Skills have different descriptions
Calculate Complexity
Revise Life Point calaculation for starships
Add a spaceship category to gear/weapons (with restrictions)
Add spaceship gear/weapons
Add a way to set spaceship armor
Calculate Price
Calculate Maintenance Cost
Revise summary
Revise character sheet

Unfortunately, less than half of those are things that a user could change. I'm afraid the authoring kit won't help (except as documentation for the code you'd need), since the data for the Cortex files is packaged. Changing many of those things would require the raw structural files, and of course the structural files can't be changed in the editor.

Also, since the character sheet/summary changes are one of the things that isn't user-alterable, I'm not sure what the use of adding an interim fix for spaceships would be - you couldn't print the finished ship.

Sorry about this, I know you want spaceships in HeroLab. I want to add them, too, but there are quite a lot of things on my to-do list.