The Nubian Design Collective's Whole Vehicle Crafting Handbook

Yes this thread is back. When the ffg forums shutdown i moved it over to legends of the galaxy then they shutdown.

For those of you not familiar with the nubian design collective’s whole vehicle crafting handbook, you can either look for the old thread on the first page of the archived AOR forums, or… to save your time…
It’s a community effort intended to be the minimum departure from the RAW vehicle crafting rules in fully operational (AOR engineers sourcebook) needed to replicate 95% of official ships with a 95% quality match. I.e. you can use these rules to ensure that your homebrew ships aren’t over the top insanely overpowered compared to official ships.

In the current draft of the rules i provide an example of what a character optimized for crafting can produce when he tries to break the system, and is willing to do crafting grind and churn until he gets the dice rolls he wants. That example is a worst case for how overpowered these rules will let you get. And thats only achievable with a character designed/ optimized to try to break the system

Here are the always current links to the docs hosted on media fire

https://www.mediafire.com/file/2w9oicv7s63dhmg/TheNubianDesignCollectivesWholeVehicleCraftingHandbook.pdf/file

https://www.mediafire.com/file/ybl46t4cq4wmhs4/TheNubianDesignCollectivesWholeVehicleCraftingHandbook.pptx/file

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Welcome back, bud! Glad to see the latest links to the files. I’ll make sure we have them hosted on the site.

Thanks! What was you ffg forum handle? I don’t recall “marlow”

I think it was “MarlowK” or something to that effect. He wasn’t really active, only showing up about the time it was going defunct in order to promote the Discord and this forum.
(Not that he made an account for the purpose, that was just the first I remember seeing him.)

Yeah I wasn’t very active on the forum - but founded the Discord with some others years ago.

So… the biggest hole/ToDo in the nubian design collective rules is pricing. Salamar_dree and one other guy was helping me fill out a big spreadsheet on Google drive that i am intending to use as the data needed to solve a big least squares problem to figure out what everything should cost to replicate RAW vehicle prices. The spreadsheet hasn’t been worked on in a while and i don’t have time to do it. 3 kids under 5 chews through a lot of time, i have a hard time getting my 40 hours of work in mosts weeks. Anyone willing to help fill out the spread sheet?

I’m not up to speed on the project, but I’m willing to pitch in when I’ve got the time. Can you give me a quick rundown? My understanding is that you just need the legwork of “building” the RAW vehicles and recording where the costs are divergent?

The main issue I see with pricing from a conceptual standpoint is quite simply that most prices don’t really make sense. Leaving aside the economic issues, the prices given for various ships and vehicles are rather arbitrary.

Secondly, there are practical narrative implications for cost. What materials make up the ship? How hard to acquire? Where was it built? How large a quantity was built? etc. Another factor is the “DIY” aspect of the crafting rules. DIY jobs are almost always going to be more expensive than full production, and that’s even more true with ship projects. Just as an example, if set up costs 5 and you make one unit, then that’s unit price+5, whereas if you built fifty units, it would be unit price+0.1.

In conclusion, I basically suggest that prices should (at least almost) always be higher than “list price” for crafted versions, usually substantially.

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“Building” the official ships is it and letting me know about stuff that isn’t quite covered by the crafting rules.

You’re right but one of the options on the crafting tables is Efficient Construction (50% off) and the assumption is that all/most official vehicles have Efficient Construction on all 3 core components and assembly.

And ive added mass producible crafting upgrades on each core component and mass production crafting on the assembly. Other things like weapons and life support are presumed to be off the shelf items.

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So I should assume that any official vehicles I “create” have Efficient Construction? Any “base roll” I should consider, meaning X Advantage/Y Triumph, or ignore narrative results aside from EffCon?

You’ll also need mass producible/mass production. Assume difficulty has been reduced to simple through schematic/assembly plans, and the number of advatages etc are part of the spreadsheet take a look here

Email eliaswindrider@gmail.com so i can give you write permissions.

Gotcha. I’ll take a look at it, and I’ll probably be able to figure out any more questions I might have.

You mentioned legends of the Galaxy’s forum shut down, did they give any notification of why ?

No, i came back after a few months absence and it was gone.

Hello! Like what I see in the current version of the Nubian Collective Handbook and am excited to help make it even better! :)

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Where are the stats for Weapons listed? How many HP they take, etc… thought they would be in Fully Operational, but I do not see them. Examples in the Handbook make use of them so casually it is clear the list of them must be somewhere blatantly obvious I am just not seeing. :)

Probably in the CRBs under Chapter VII: Starships and Vehicles, in the attachments section. There may be some specific weapons that come from splat books or are unique to certain vehicles.

The biggest price problem I see is the “Patrol Ship” frame. It seems like it would fill what I called “Heavy Freighter” in my own homebrew, as there definitely seems to be a thing in between freighter/shuttle and Corvette going by published ships. But those intermediate ships are less than half the price of a Corvette usually, but the patrol boat frame has the same materials price as a Corvette???

Would make sense to drop that down to 200,000 credits, as that is nicely between 75K for shuttle/Freighter and 500K for Corvette.

Then there are the TBD prices… I really want to use Modular Pods, but those seem like a work-in-progress.

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The weapons stats and weapons prices/rarity are both in all 3 CRBs, in the Vehicle section. Unfortunately they organized it weird so the stats are near the beginning of the Vehicles section and the price/rarity/min silhouette are in the last page of the vehicle attachments.

Many homebrew rules are written with the assumption that Players/GMs are familiar with at least one Core Rule Book.

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Hello @KaliBra

I haven’t worked on this since my last post, but at the time i was being assisted by forum posters to fill out spread sheets of what it’d take to rebuild official ships using these rules. There’s a link to the spreadsheet above in this thread. The idea is to use the summary sheet as data entry (read in a csv, probably using the pandas python package) for a too be written python program that essentially solves the least squares problem (which would figure out the pricing of all the options that will minimize the sum of squared error in ship prices). That is a principled way to get pricing right, so from the beginning of this project on the FFG forums that had always been the plan (i haven’t even TRIED to get prices right yet)

Sorry for the long gap in posting but ive got 3 kids, my oldest is 5, and having 3 kids 5 and under doesn’t leave much time for hobies, i haven’t done my taxes yet this year and right now my hobby is watching season 3 of the mandalorian.

Hello @Esentia

There are 2 ways you can help, first point out official ships that you can’t closely replicate with the existing nubian design collective rules. Second, volunteer to enter data into the spreadsheet above so i can have the data i need to actually price everything to make the rules replicate the official ships prices as closely as possible