One of the benefits of a game like Full Thrust is that you can build your own ship stats for your own miniatures or even build your own variants. If you play SFB there are so many possible ships to use that there really isn’t any need to build your own. Not that this stops anyone. Full Thrust though has extensive rules for creating novel ship designs and sometimes that is part of the fun.
Being a game of a certain age, Full Thrust has a lot of tools built for it. With few exception these are built in Excel or Open/Libre Office and they all look like hell. This is through no fault of the developers who have all done great work. It is just that Excel, and its clones, don’t really give a shit if anything looks good. While it might get the job done, Excel doesn’t really have any desire to do it in a way that makes the results reader friendly.
I am, as you may know, pretty particular about how things look and so Excel and Open/Libre Office are not tools that I would use to create my own ship builder. Apple ships the Numbers spreadsheet app with every Mac and iPad and so I am using it to build my own tools.
One thing I like about Numbers is that it makes it quite easy to create distinct tables on the same sheet so that you can split information into discrete parts and make it easy to see and interact with that data. I can break out the Hull and Drive data so I can easily see how much space and cost those section are using. This really isn’t easy to do with Excel.
Even with the visual and organizational issues that the various Excel builders have, I might still use one of them but almost all of them don’t have the weapon options from Cross Dimensions and so I would either have to fudge the stats or add them to these other tools. And if I have to start editing an Excel file I might as well build my own and make it work well for me.
This has been what I have been up to for the last few days. I started in Numbers and then moved to Filemaker. I might actually still be using Filemaker but I thought that I would distribute this after I was finished. My version of Filemaker is older and distributing cross platform versions of it is a PITA. So I thought that I would give the Base database tool in Libre Office a try. That didn’t last long. It is a horrible tool and seems to be made without end users in mind. Building even simple data entry tools was a PITA and they forms looked horrible. Ghastly stuff. You’d be better off using Google Docs.
So back to Numbers. I have looked at a few other people’s tools for some example of how to get weapon selection and editing working and I think I have a solution that will be easy to implement and also be simple to expand if I want to.
Pile of dice 
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