Hi!

I have been working for some time now on a spreadsheet that would aid me in creating Starmada X: Starships. Yes, yes, I know that Dan has written a very nice tool for this sort of thing, and others have even added fighters to the mix...

But what I wanted was a tool to help me develop fleets easilly. You see, I wanted a way to store some baseline data on a race/nation (tech levels, weapon designs, fighter variants, available special equipment, and so on). This would then propogate into the design sheets -- yes, that is a plural sheets -- so that I can set the racial characteristics once, then go about the task of designing all of the ships for that race, ensuring that I design them consistantly -- if I say that a laser is a 12/4+/1/1/1/No Range Modifiers once, I want it to say that every time... and if I change the weapon design, I want it to update my ships automatically.

I think I have it.

But I want to be sure that it works well, and has no major bugs. So, I am offering you this tool to test -- please let me know (in this thread) if you discover anything that is out of wack; build designs with this tool, then compare them to the same design in Dan's SXCA tool, or the SXCA with Fighters tool.

I am still working on a set of instructions for using this thing. But here is a reader's digest version:

The workbook contains, initially, three worksheets:

[*]Nation: This is the worksheet where you enter the national data. Anything you enter here will have an effect on the ship construction sheets.[*]Tables: This is the central repository of all of the various lookup tables; equipment, weapon modifiers, fighter options, tech level modifiers, arc modifiers, and so on. The charts in this worksheet as designed with the idea of expanding upon them for personal use.[*]Template: This is the starship design template. Before you use this workbook, copy it (right click to worksheet tab, select Move or Copy, then click on the Make a Copy checkbox). Once you have a copy, rename the copy wo the name of the ship class you are about to design. This way, you will always have a blank sheet from which to start your next design. Additionally, if your universe and/or race always includes certain items (such as the hyperdrive), set theose in the template, and they will automatically propogate into your copies.

Now, this sheet does a couple of things you may not be used to:

[*] Hyperdrives: The 10% bonus for not having a Hyperdrive is added to the available SU at the start; if you have a Hyperdrive, then this bonus space is used up. This approach allows you to create ships with multiple hyperdrives, for redundancy, to simulate many sci-fi universes[*]Fighters: Fighters are available. On the Nation workbook, the fighters are designed. The first fighter can be given a class-name, but it must remain a Basic Fighter. All others can be edited to your heart's content. Once you go to a ship design sheet, it will keep track of the number of fighter bays that have been installed; you may then select what fighters fill those bays -- any that are not used, become the Basic Fighter type by default.[*] Weapons: In the ship design sheet, you select a weapon, and all of that weapon's characteristics (from the Nation workbook) are then applied for you. In the arcs section, each arc has two boxes: the larger box to the left is where you put in your arc (up to six characters); the second smaller box is where you put in the number of weapons that you have from this battery that are in that arc. In other words, the 12 slots you have for each battery, can hold as many as 5 weapons each... making for a limit of 180 weapons on one ship...

That is about it... if you have any questions, let me know. And please -- feel free to ask. No such thing as a stupid question and all...

[*] 0.0.1 thru 0.0.5: Several attempts at doing this that failed miserably. More than a month of working on the last two versions had me nearly ready to give up. What you see is the result fo that work... and the fact that I did not decide to chuck the concept out of a window someplace...
[*] 0.0.6: I discovered a small glitch in the fighter logic; fixed. I discovered a small bug in the printing of hulls, engines, and shields greater than 10; fixed.
[*] 0.0.7: Anti-Fighter Batteries are not available after being selected on the Nations tab; fixed.
[*] 0.0.8 Discovered an error in the formula for generating the base Defensive Combat Rating; fixed.



[*] 0.1.0 Added KEB support from the VBAM/Starmada crossover; created several macros to make this functionality available. Made several improvements to the starship record sheet (including the directional disgram). Ensured that all cells were making "absolute references" to make future updates much, much easier. Hid some fields in the TABLES tab that are rarely (if ever) edited. Allowed for half-steps in "Screens" level selection (so you can select a number that is not divisible by 4). Improved the way that the "Weapon Range" lookup table functions so that any range up to the established maximum can be selected (even those that are not divisible by 3; this functionality was there before, but it has been streamlined).
[*] 0.1a Two minor errors managed to crop in while I was formatting things for the 0.1.0 release. The first is the fact that the OCR was only calculating part of the weapons (not sure how that one happened); the other is the fact that the Equipment tab was counting HYPERDRIVE as a piece of equipment effected by the Tech Level... again, not sure how (or why!) that would have changed -- but it must have been me! Sorry for the inconvenience. The file has been updated.
[*] 0.1b I added a bit of space for the names of the pieces of equipment in the print form, and made those cells able to wrap text, so that the equipment names are not lost in the shuffle.

[*] 1.0 Corrected the calculations for Expendable weapons; fixed some inconsitancies in the font usage; removed the automatic adding of the "basic fighter" to fill in all fighter flights not used by other types (due to the variability of small and large flights).
[*] 1.1 Corrected the oRAT and dRAT calculations for multiple copies of the same piece of equipment. Thanks to the playtest team here at MJ12 for catching that one!

September 21 is the birthday of H. G. Wells.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

What is the status here, Dan? I am really curious -- especially after the explosion that recently took place between me and Andrew Hackard (the former head editor of Steve Jackson Games)

||>[size=100]He misunderstood my intent with a message posted on the e23 board of the SJGames messageboards... and well, let's just say some sparks flew. I managed to straighten things out with Scott Haring in short order, however...[/size]<||