General Quarters WWI SDS collection

One of my continual complaints about GQ is that it takes far too long to play, especially considering it's level of abstraction. One of the things I've done to speed up play is color-code the SDSes and dice so that the relationship between them is more obvious. I use a white d10 (smoke and splashes) as the straddle die, a red d6 (fire) for the "armaments" die and a blue d6 (water) as the "hull" die. On each SDS, the row of armaments boxes is colored red and the row of hull boxes is colored blue, which makes it easy to correlate the dice with the areas they affect. I also painted my gunnery range finder sticks to correspond with this color scheme.

The SDSes do not strictly conform to the GQ rules as writeen, but contain some changes to reflect a number of my favorite house rules and modifications (many borrowed from other GQ gamers):

The ship's speed is adjusted 2 ways:
1. The ship's speeds are correct for a turn representing 6 scale minutes at a sea scale of 3.2" to the mile (1 cm on the table equals 1" in the rules equals 250 yards). The standard GQ rules cut all speeds in half to make game play fit into the playing area. This is unnecessary with 1:6000 scale miniatures using "centimeter scale", since the entire battle of Jutland could fit onto an 8'x12' table.
2. The reduction in ship's speed with each hit is non-linear, at rates of 100%, 93%, 80%, 50%, 25%. This progression isn't quite a proper curve (I should have done 100/90/75/50/25), but I had already made a few hundred SDSes before I noticed that mistake, and so far I haven't found a way to adjust the data programatically. I do it all by hand, a very sore hand after making or correcting a lot of SDSes.
Each SDS has a row of 18 ammo boxes, for tracking ammo expenditure.
I added a box for tracking fires (not so easy to do with on-table props in 1:6000 scale).
I added the ship's type in the upper right corner - the armor value doesn't always accurately reflect this.
I removed the "aa" value, for no better reason than I could never figure out how to derive it. It's irrelevant for me anyway, since I don't play with aircraft and MTBs on the table. 1:6000 scale is too small and I find that the results of aircraft and MTB encounters are best left to automated campaign mechanisms.
I added a little historical trivia (the ship's class, the year of completion, and the year of destruction), just enough to help with quick scenario building.
I added tertiary batteries to a lot of the big ships built before the Dreadnought era (battleships and cruisers).
I use a house rule that pre-dreadnought era ships with big "semi-heavy" artillery batteries can combine the main and secondary attack factors if they use the secondary battery range finder. This ability is indicated on the SDSes by white AFs for the main and secondary batteries.

Below are the results of this work:

A diagram explaining how to read the SDS
The Austro-Hungarian navy Also includes the Göben and Breslau
The French navy Be forewarned that nobody makes miniatures for some of the really old ships in this collection.
The Italian navy
The British Mediterranean fleet Most of it anyway, plus some hypothetical extras I threw in...

Feel free to print and use these as you will.

All of these collections except the British include hypothetical ships that were never built - mostly dreadnoughts and battlecruisers, but the Austro-Hungarians include 3 cruisers as well. There are no SDSes for destroyer or cruiser flotillas, since I've never liked those rules.

I decided to make my SDSes reusable, so I print them out on white paper, mount them on self-adhesive magnetic sheet, cover them with self-adhesive plastic lamination, and mark on them with grease pencils ("China markers" in the office supply stores). It's a lot of work, but it makes it easy for players to transfer ships to each other without erasing any current damage, and it means I only have to print them with expensive inkjet ink once (rather than each time I play). On the other hand, it makes reprints expensive and time-consuming, so consider carefully before you go overboard like I did.

A note about these documents

All of my documents are in Open Office formats; the versions for download here are PDFs made from those originals. If you want the editable Open Office version of any document, just email me and ask, and I'll send them to you. I don't have them in Microsoft formats, nor am I willing to convert them for you. You are free to do that yourself (Open Office can save documents in MS formats, with some loss of complicated formatting), but first you will have to download and install Open Office... and of course, once you do that, there's no reason to use Microsoft Office anymore.

For those who don't know, Open Office is a semi-clone of Microsoft Office that is almost as fast, nearly as easy to use and just as powerful. Best of all, it's free, and it always will be. You can download it for any major operating system from www.openoffice.org.

Mail your input to Ix (fathom at armory dot com).