How do you do Mecha!?

 Frankly, one of my "entrance points" into using GURPS:Spaceships was the fact that I love Mecha. Despite barely watching the genre anime - there's something extremely enticing to me about the concept. I prefer my mecha to be agile armored humanoids, than walking tanks bristling with weapons. 

Working with mecha in GURPS:Spaceships caused me a few problems, actually. The system itself and the add-ons presented in Spaceships 4 and Pyramid: Vehicles (#3-40) do pretty ok job at making both "tanky" and anime-style mecha. Although, it all works well, I  still need to introduce some changes to tweak things to my liking.

For example, when I got to making a Mecha campaign (still unnamed, unplayed and Un-GM-ed), I hit a question of turn lenght and mecha speed. The campaign was to be mecha centered, so to me, there was no sense in using standard hexes and 1-second turns. I wanted normal mecha to take around 1 hex in the system, and not move one hex per turn (Mecha in Spaceships normally have Move 10/10). 

So, we will use the 5-second turns together with 10-yard hexes, so mecha would move at 5/10 hexes a turn. This is used for ground combat - aerial or space combat is done with simplified space combat from Spaceships.

Then, for mecha weapons I do not always want the best weapons, but rather ones I deem appropriate. But Spaceships weapon systems are designed by mass and it's not really possible to make a 1.5 ton mecha pistol. So what do we do? Well, we do what any GURPS GM may do when they're in a pickle - just say that it is! 

Treat '"Mecha pistols" as a smaller system (that is, they take one-thrid of a system installed.) and use UT pistol stats, just upscaled using Damage +1 or more column, and then divide it by 10 to get D-Damage.
You can actually use the same method for other lighter weapons. 

The rule of thumb here, is that you treat "small" weapons (Bulk -3 or smaller, excluding several cases) as smaller, and "normal" weapons are full systems. So a mecha assault rifle would be a full system, while an SMG would be a smaller system. 


 Also, when designing mecha, I also use Modular Mecha to allow for player customization. Treat the Spaceship mecha, as a base vehicle, and slightly remake the DP table, to not include the entries that may conflict with the base design. 


At the end of the day, I do not do a lot of special things with my mecha designs.  


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