"rules with ability" Topic

to do ships never built or what ifs?

any rules that allow you do do stats for that?

I imagine all would. Most rules probably already have never-built ships in their lists or have provision for making your own stats.

GQ III has a supplemental list for the ships lost to the Washington Conference.

All rules I've ever played make it easy to figure out some ships, harder to figure out others. Playing GQ2, I found it pretty easy to generate stats for the WWI Italian Caracciolo class super-battlecruisers and various French quad-turret monstrosities, because the guns were already in use in other ships and the defensive values and speeds are simple calculations. I think it would be pretty easy to do those ships in GQ3/FAI as well.

The hard part is generating stats for things that the authors didn't bother to research, like unusual guns or defensive schemes.

I would expect some of the hyper-detailed rules (Seekrieg, maybe Command at Sea) to have supplements that include the "what if" ships that never saw action or never left the drawing board.

- Ix

Pretty easy to work out stats for GQ 1 and 2, I suppose, and IIRC, some people already did that.

Dead easy for Fletcher Pratt. Just run the formula.

The Admiralty Trilogy series does include a lot of never-builts and it has formulas for working out the damage values and armor for ships. Their data annexes cover almost all the guns for different countries. If the weapons aren't in the annex, then there are formulas for working out the damage.

I think most other game systems have a way to come up with a reasonable value for ship stats.

General Quarters 1 and 2 (and probably 3 as well) are easy to do SDS (ship damage summary) stats for, but you need access to reference material such as the Internet, Conways, or Janes.

The GQ rulebook gives you the formulas for AF (guns), and the DF (defense factor) of large ships (cruisers and larger)is simply the standard displacement divided by 2000; for destroyers and smaller just extrapolate from the SDS included with the rules. Armor classification (BA, BB, etc.) is subjective, but again you can extrapolate from the SDS included with the rules. Any of these stats can then be further tweaked (moved up or down) to account for personal preferences.

I am prob gonna use FAI for WW1 and GQ 3 for WW2.