As usual, I will eagerly hop on board for a good heresy.

If you've ever been aboard a working (wet) ship, you'll know that deck plans, accurate or not, can't capture the semi-organized cluttered chaos involved. A passageway might be two meters wide on paper; in reality one side of it is lined with storage bins stacked two- and three-high, with a few odd bits of equipment on top of those. And in what's left of that corridor, there's a pipe that runs out of the floor and into the wall placed in exactly the right place to trip you, and a wiring duct that crosses the ceiling at just the height required to give a running tall person a concussion. The engine room might look like a big space with a well-defined blob of machinery in the middle on the deck plan; it's actually a three-dimensional maze of narrow passages, ladders, access panels hiding little tunnels into the guts of the machinery, and so on and on.

I really like Douglas's idea of a flow chart and descriptions of the aspects of the spaces that will actually matter for combat (or getting through them in the dark, in zero gee, in vacuum, or some combination of these, or whatever other evil emerges from the GM's fevered brain).

On a working ship at anything less than an Iain Banks level of technology, space is *always* at a premium. You'll seldom be able to walk five feet in a straight line without bumping into something. On big high-class passenger liners, passenger spaces (especially common areas) *may* be a partial exception -- but even those will be smaller and more cluttered than an equivalent facility in a groundside hotel.

On Mon, Apr 2, 2018 at 3:34 PM, Douglas Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
An ancient grognard approaches, clad in the ragged remains of FASA deck plans, sheets of paper filled with arcane scribbling and broken scientific calculators. About his neck, a copy of Fire, Fusion, and Steel II is hung with a heavy chain.

I am about to speak heresy. Brace yourselves.

You don't need deck plans. Hardly ever. They take up space, are never right, and frankly, speaking as someone who has designed countless starships since High Guard first came out, people rarely give a damn. 

Let me repeat a point. They never come out right, but the ship design sequences are far too granular for that kind of fine detail. We can argue to the end of time about why computers take up so much space, or what percentage of stateroom tonnage goes to common spaces, but in the game, it does not really matter. 

So, a suggestion. Flowcharts. Make a flowchart of the ship, with each area labeled. show how each area is connected. You can add notes about the maximum combat range in that area, if it counts as being cluttered, etc. So you are no longer agonizing about where to place the freshers in each stateroom.

This even works for big ships. You can create boxes like "crew quarters, 24 bunkrooms" and in your notes, you'll know what's there. It speeds things up.

Playing with shapes and colors gives you quickly legible results. I use triangles for mission-critical areas: the bridge, engineering, turrets, and the like, and yellow for restricted areas. 

Pitchforks on the left, torches on the right, please.

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