Design Process

A multi-step process, where each step takes a month of game time. There are at least three steps, so designing a plane takes at least three months. In order to design aircraft in Crimson Skies, you must have the pulp schtick Professor applied to aircraft.

Draw the plans

First, you must design the plane as normal, using the system in AAWs Aircraft of North America. The design process takes one month. At this time, the Special Characteristics of the plane are chosen. The Design Difficulty of the plane at this point can be no higher than the designers Fix-It skill. The only cost is the designers time.

Build a prototype

This takes another month in a well-stocked factory. The designer then rolls Fix-It against the Design Difficulty; failure wastes another month. The cost of the prototype is the Final Price, paid once for initial materials and once per month for work-in-progress. Thus, the minimum cost is at least twice the Final Price.

Flight Tests

Then it is time for testing, a daredevil procedure that takes another month for each attempt. You can keep this up as long as you like.

You must have at least a month of flight tests. If you are satisfied with the original design, a result of "no change" is good enough for you and you may end testing at this point.

The test-pilot makes a Drive test and the designer makes a Fix-It test, each against the Design Difficulty of the plane.

Award 0 points for a fumble, 1 point for a failure, two points for a success and three points for a critical. Total these scores for the pilot and designer and read the result in the following table.

Changing Special Characteristics is how you improve the plane. Note that each time you Change Special Characteristics, the Design Complexity may change, and all later rolls will have a new difficulty.

Survival rolls are Death Tests made using Perception + Speed. Those things that modify bailouts also modify this roll.

Dice Rolling in Crimson Skies

All the dice-rolling rules above are for Feng Shui. In CS, the difficulty is a base target number that you reduce by your skill rating (Natural Touch for pilots) to find the final target number. You need to have a special skill in Aeroplane Design on the usual 0 to 10 scale of Crimson Skies.

Subtract three form all CS difficulty numbers except bailout.

Make three testing rolls for the pilot and three rolls for the designer; award 0 points for a failure and 1 point for a success. Thus, 0 to 6 points are possible.

Survival rolls are the same as bailout rolls, you use Sixth Sense plus Quick Draw. If you would make it on a die roll of 1, you don't have to roll.

Design Complexity

Design Complexity is calculated as follows:

Sum of:
(round all fractions up)

Acceleration
Deceleration
Top Speed
Maximum Gs
Number of Guns /2
Total armor /100

± bonus for Special Characteristics

Final Price

The dollar price of an aircraft is 2d10 * $100 plus $500 times the initial complexity.

Design Tactics

When initially designing a plane, you must add sufficient Special Characteristics to give you a Design Complexity that you can match with your Fix-It skill. This often means you may have to add more flaws than you would like to have, but you can work those off over time.

If you design a plane with a low Design Complexity, it is much more likely to be finished with minimal cost and on time.

Considering how very hard it is to improve more than one point of Special Characteristics, you should most often add in all the multi-point characteristics you want the plane to have in the original design. You can the add or subtract single-point Special Characteristics as you go.