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Old 02-19-2012, 07:56 AM
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Tegyrius Tegyrius is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pmulcahy11b View Post
I wold love to have Excel spreadsheets for weapon and vehicle creation in T2K13. Someone made some for me for use with T2K 2.2. My personal Excel-Fu in nonexistent, and I can't even fix or add to the spreadsheets I have except by organized fudging. Anyone out there with high Excel-fu belts able to help me out?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Targan View Post
If I may offer my (albeit limited) assistance here, the main things you'd need to start with for the weapons creation spreadsheets would be a bunch of drop-down tables to reference to, and access to (or being able to reverse-engineer) the algorithms that the designers themselves used to create their T2013 weapon stats. In the latter regard I think Tegyrius' knowledge would be invaluable, but that knowledge may also be proprietary commercial information.
Two items here.

First, Targan is unfortunately correct (it's not usually unfortunate that he's correct, just unfortunate in this instance). The ballistics formula and other design bible material are proprietary parts of the Reflex System. After 93GS ceased operations, ownership of Reflex reverted to Keith. While RPG.net wisdom is that you can't copyright game mechanics, I'm hesitant to test that beyond my own very limited (and "fair use") forays into supporting the remnants of the fan base. I'm even more hesitant about any action that would undermine any weapon- or vehicle-oriented products that a future owner of Reflex might want to release. I'm aware of four fans or fan groups who've attempted to contact Keith to secure the rights to the system, so that is still a going concern.

Second, a confession: the actual use of formulae, as opposed to guidelines and polite suggestions, is pretty limited. The ballistic characteristics themselves are the result of a formula Justin Stodola produced after I gave him a range of desired effects (which were, in turn, based on expected wound thresholds) and asked him to give me a ballistics calculator that produced those results for solid projectiles. We use the same formula for everything from .22 LR to 125mm tank rounds, albeit with some reducing constants applied for anything above the heavy machine gun class of ammo.

Values for body armor and light vehicle armor, in turn, are "engineered" off of the ballistic values, based on real-world performance. This is why one of my last actions as a member of the design team was to release a major erratum to vehicle armor values - I initially failed to do that for vehicles and we had a problem with battle rifles being able to take out MBTs with lucky hits. As several fans have inferred since, the original vehicle AVs in the core book, as well as those for MBTs and similarly heavy armor, use the same equivalencies that GDW used for the 2.0/2.2 rules.

For the rest of the small arms creation, a couple of other lesser formulas exist, but just as much of it involves comparing real-world performance data to established guidelines and going, "enhh, looks right in this light."

Sorry, guys. I know it's not the answer you were hoping for but it's the best one I can give at this time.

- C.
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Last edited by Tegyrius; 04-08-2012 at 05:26 PM.
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