The shiptools suite is a collection of programs to aid in Full Thrust ship design, fleet building, and fleet record sheet printing. The package is written in Perl; Windows users may download this from ActiveState, but Unix users may well find it's already installed. The package will run on any system with Perl, Perl/Tk and the Tk-GBARR package installed; it is developed under Linux but has been successfully run on Solaris, Windows, MacOS X and FreeBSD. Thanks to Jerry Acord, there is now also a Windows binary-only version available, which will run on any Windows9x-or-later system and does not require that Perl be installed. It's a lot bigger, of course...

Note that Matthew Caron is maintaining an updated version.

The latest version is 0.19, released on 24 May 2002; this fixes a bug with Sa'Vasku ship costs which mysteriously showed up some time in February but nobody noticed until now...

Download the latest version (about 45K)

Download the Windows version (about 3.6 megabytes)

View the documentation

Download the Fleet Book ship designs

Buy me something because you like the software

There are three major parts to the shiptools suite: the ship designer, the fleet manager and the record sheet printer. All have graphical interfaces in Perl/Tk:

This is the ship designer. loaded with the example ship from FB1. All official FT rules are supported.

Below is the fleet manager - this has been greatly improved in v0.17, allowing listing of available ships by race, nationality or class. The ship can be previewed before being added to the fleet, for the benefit of those of us who can't remember the exact loadout of a Vandenberg/T... Here I've selected the Nea Rhomaioi fleet, so the list-box only shows NR ships. (See John Atkinson's NR pages for more details about them.)

Shown inset is the ship arming box. Ships with variable loadouts (those with fighter bays, missiles, or Phalon pulsers) are armed during fleet generation.

The final step is the printing of a fleet record sheet. This needn't be interactive - all the choices have already been made during the ship and fleet design stages, so just select the fleet file and printer settings.

Immediately below is a record sheet for the fleet being edited above. Note that the resolution you see here is much less than what you'll get; the converter outputs record sheets in postscript, and will take advantage of whatever printer resolution you have available.