Vehicle stats

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ReHerakhte
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Vehicle stats

Post by ReHerakhte »

I'm trying to stat out some new vehicles for DC and I'm at a bit of an impasse. So okay, my maths are crap, it was my worst subject at school but I can't see my poor maths explaining the vehicle stats in DC for Fuel Consumption as relates to Cruise Speed.

It's easy enough to figure the stats for a realworld vehicle because you can get the real figures for fuel capacity, fuel consumption and maximum range and work it backwards to give the game stats but for the fictional vehicles in DC, there is no maximum range given so I can't apply that formula.

Maybe I'm doing this all arse-about-face so I'm asking everyone here if they think the stats are bad or if I'm a complete newb and I have fundamentally screwed it up.

The game gives the following stats for vehicles...
Cruise Speed: Travel movement in kilometres travelled in one hour*
Fuel Capacity: The capacity of the fuel tank in litres
Fuel Consumption: Number of litres of fuel consumed in one hour
* the second edition just says that it is travel movement but the original book , pg 108, specifically states that Cruise Speed "... is how many kilometres the vehicle can effectively travel per hour..."

Therefore if a vehicle has the following stats (I'm thinking of you Mazda Firefly...)
Cruise Speed: 110
Fuel Cap: 100
Fuel Cons: 6
This would mean the vehicle can travel up to 110km in one hour while using 6 litres of fuel in the process. The tank holds 100 litres, therefore the vehicle has 16.6 hours of travel on one full tank (100 litre tank divided by the 6 litres per hour consumption).
That means the vehicle can travel 1826km on one full tank (110km per hour times 16.6 hours of fuel). Now that is some phenomenal mileage and I can't imagine any real or fictional motor giving vehicles that kind of range unless they are using fuel cell technology which wasn't really in the public view when the game was written.

I can easily accept the Fuel Cons being 16, that would then give a maximum range of 688km (687.5 rounded up) for a Cruise Speed of 110 but Fuel Cons 6 seems just a little too good to be true.

Now everything seems really simple to work out but that could be exactly why it's screwing up, I think it's simple when it really isn't. So please tell me if I have completely ballsed up the maths here or are the stats screwed up?
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Re: Vehicle stats

Post by Linden »

ReHerakhte wrote:So please tell me if I have completely ballsed up the maths here or are the stats screwed up?
I reckon it's probably the latter. Some of the vehicle stats do strike me as quite strange e.g the Harley-Davidson has equal, if not superior, off road performance to the Yamaha (?) trail bike. Shurely shome mishdake?
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Post by ReHerakhte »

Cheers Linden, it was driving me nuts and I was thinking that I must have screwed up something hence my wishing for others' views on the matter.
Like you pointed out, it's not just the fuel consumption that appears shonky but I didn't want to go rewriting the vehicle entries if it was simply a failure on my part to understand the maths.

I have a handful of Russian made concept cars/one-off roadsters that I want to add into the game (their styling really suits what GDW did I think) but I just could not reconcile the stat differences between real vehicles stat'ed up for the game and the fictional vehicles created for it.
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Vehicles and stats:

Post by Phulish »

I play around with several systems and actually got a 65 GTO in my notes of my campaign I'm trying to recreate. Don't forget T2K2 stuff, especially Paul Mulcahy's site.
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Post by ReHerakhte »

Yeah Paul has some good stuff, I know of him from a Twilight: 2000 forum I used to be on (the forum closed and they all migrated to a new forum but I didn't follow) and he's always adding more to the site so it's a must visit site for me. I don't always agree with his stats but I always reference them when I'm making my own gear for DC.

In some sort of strange application of the games vehicle mechanics, the maths I have applied work near on perfect for most Twilight: 2000 vehicles when you use the T2k version (i.e. four hour travel time, fuel consumed in a four hour period). They just don't seem to work for DC even though it is basically one quarter of the value used in T2k :?

I'm either going to rewrite some of the stats for the fictional vehicles in DC or I'm going to use advanced technology to explain the phenomenal abilities they have - probably a bit of both.

And just think, this all started when one of my Players asked "How far can I travel on one tank of petrol?"
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Vehicles and stats:

Post by Phulish »

Do you have the liters per hour and the liters in the tank? i.e. 24KPL and a 100L tank equals a little over 4 hours. There are GPH to KPL conversions online.
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Post by ReHerakhte »

In most cases for realworld vehicles I find that info and convert that to game stats and then work out the maximum road range (again as a game stat) and compare it with the realworld range. If they are close enough then I'm happy.
Where it becomes a problem is when you take the fictional vehicles GDW created for DC and try to figure the road range. Like I mentioned above, you get the Mazda Firefly and it has a range of 1826km on one tank - so I'm no longer happy.
Then you get the Yugo which by the game stats has an 80 litre fuel tank - the kind of fuel tank I'd expect on a truck and it's supposed to be a Compact Car!
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Post by Zvezda »

Ohhh no, it is DC vehicle time again! Okay, first things first. The stats of the vehicles (and above all the prices compared to that of gasoline) are totally messed up. One of the T2K books has some guidelines how to make your own vehicles this works quite all right for me though it still needs some modification. The stats form the DC books work on almost no occasion. That is why we discontinued all DC vehicles about 10 years ago.
A good way to re-design the DC vehicles is to look up some similar vehicles and use their stats instead. The Cruise Speed is a very strange stat even if it would work properly. To my knowledge there is no cruise gear outside the US (Which reminds me of the Crystal Skull which features a two pedal automatic GAZ). It is quite nice to know the car’s average speed but a maximum range would be much more useful. The cruise speed, if it would be continued, should be more like the combat speed with the possibility to drive three times as fast while rolling for mishaps. Than again the Fuel Cons would need some reworking and all that without making the game more bureaucratic and difficult. Once I am at home I will look up the vehicle creation guidelines form GDW and post them.
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Vehicles and stats:

Post by Phulish »

The problem is cruise speed is all over. For a Mazda Firefly it's likely 55-66% of the max speed, for a Humvee or Orca it's 75-90% max speed. Humvees are about 80-90MPH max,governed to 65MPH, older 2!/2Tons are 65MPH in good shape. For cars that means more speed and more consumption of fuel. Unless they just "SWAG'd" the stats. so Zvezda's correct to suggest comparing stats.
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Post by ReHerakhte »

Cruise speed works... sort of... but like you guys have pointed out, the stats overall are screwed up. I intend to adjust the stats given in the book to give the vehicles a realistic maximum range but like a lot of the work I want to do on my DC world, my job/personal life is getting in the way!
Comparing the book vehicles to something in real life is definitely the way to do it I believe because I am starting to think that GDW really did make it up as they went along :?
And Zvezda, cruise speed does work like combat speed where you can drive two times or three times the listed speed. I can't remember where in the book it states that but I certain that is how it works :wink:

I've been reading up on a some of the new vehicle and fuel technologies being introduced or researched at the moment and I'm trying to integrate them into my DC world. In some cases, the fuel/motor technologies can radically increase the road range of some vehicles but even they won't explain the massive ranges you get from the vehicles in the book!

Examples of new tech include ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics Inc. researching a biofuel produced by algae. The algae actually uses carbon dioxide in the process so it doesn't produce the level of greenhouse gases that traditional fuels do. Plus it reproduces in relation to the size of its container and the food available making it basically renewable.
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Post by Linden »

ReHerakhte wrote: Comparing the book vehicles to something in real life is definitely the way to do it I believe because I am starting to think that GDW really did make it up as they went along :?
I reckon so. Although, I've never played a game where the long distance speed measurements have been important so I just pretty much ignore that part of the rules. Car chases in-game I've used the combat speeds given (plus x2 or x3 multipliers as appropriate) without too much trouble.

My DC campaign's finished now but if I was starting again, I'd be tempted to use a different game system e.g. STOCS lite which is similar to the old GDW D20 system but has a few less anomalies.
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Post by ReHerakhte »

The sad part about it is that I generally like the GDW rules, partly because I'm familiar enough with them and partly because they are, in general, reasonably quick and easy to apply. The other reason is that it makes it all too easy to pilfer gear from Twilight: 2000 and Merc: 2000 :D

When one of my Players asked how far they can go on one tank of fuel, I found one of the places where the rules fall down and that was only because they have ludicrously large fuel tanks on the cars. It makes it seem as though the car stats were an afterthought.
For example, there is no way that a compact car like the Yugo described in the book would have a tank of 80 litres - you'd have to remove the backseat - I could believe 30 litres maybe even 40 but 80 litres is the sort of capacity you see on the largest Cadillacs and small trucks.

So I suppose what I'm saying is that I don't find the flaws in the rules to be bad enough to want to use a different system but I do have major issues with their vehicle designs.
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Post by Zvezda »

I am amazed how easy the dark ones can fool you. It is so obvious that the Yougo must have a pocketdimension in it's tank. I still hanv't figured out why but that seems to be the solution. If I remember correctly Yougos have a fuel cap of like 30 litres or so. In RL I mean.
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Post by ReHerakhte »

Zvezda wrote:I am amazed how easy the dark ones can fool you. It is so obvious that the Yougo must have a pocketdimension in it's tank. I still hanv't figured out why but that seems to be the solution. If I remember correctly Yougos have a fuel cap of like 30 litres or so. In RL I mean.
:lol: :lol:
I think the pocket dimension in the fueltank is so that the Yugo can be the official transport of the Dark Invasion. Who would ever suspect that innocent looking compact car being the vehicle of choice for a DARK LORD!

However I still don't know how all the Dark Lord's minions are going to fit into a Yugo. :roll:
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Post by Linden »

ReHerakhte wrote: :lol: :lol:
I think the pocket dimension in the fueltank is so that the Yugo can be the official transport of the Dark Invasion. Who would ever suspect that innocent looking compact car being the vehicle of choice for a DARK LORD!
I reckon he'd have to put the seats well back to fit his legs in. I mean I can't imagine a Daemon getting in one of those things, never mind their boss. :wink:
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