Onno Meyer wrote: > Jonathan wrote: >> Sci-fi vehicles that can manage short-term flight but not sustained >> flight sometimes refer to fuel restrictions; but more often, they >> refer to jets that run hot and need a cooling off period. Since >> overheating is one of those issues that GURPS Vehicles glosses over, I >> can see where the difficulty lies. > > A way covered by GURPS: lift engines rather than vectored engines. > They provide only lift, not forward propulsion. GURPS Mecha covers > jumps with these lift engines.
If you go reactionless, you could also handle this via power cells: design it so that the suit doesn't generate enough power to keep the drives going nonstop, but that the suits incorporate power cells sufficient to the task of powering the jets long-term. That said, my own preference would be to design the jump jets to work in conjunction with the battlesuit's legs. Figure that the jump jets have two settings: low-power and high-power. At the low-power setting, they generate between 0.5 and 0.75 G of lift: insufficient for the purpose of flight, but factored into the suit's jumping calculations for jet-assisted lifts (by subtracting the jump jets' lift in G's from the local gravity). The main benefit of the low-power setting is that the suit can keep it up indefinitely. Note that this approach incorporates the "hang time" described in the novels: with jet assistance, not only will a suit have a faster velocity when he pushes off; but he'll also drift through the air as if he were in a low-gravity environment. Plenty of time to make observations, acquire targets (and be acquired as a target), etc. At the high-power setting, the jets generate between 1.0 and 1.5 G of lift, allowing for true flight; but the power requirements outstrip the suit's capabilities, requiring the use of energy cells and giving a very limited duration to the flight. This is what Rico is referring to in terms of jumping in mid-air: kicking the suit from a low-power jet-assisted jump to a high-power short-term flight capability long enough to change the suit's trajectory. A side benefit of this model is that the suit can recharge its "jump juice" whenever it isn't using jet-assisted jumps. > hal wrote: >> Maruader & Command suits with basic stealth >> Scout with advanced... > > Done. On the subject of Marauder vs. Command vs. Scout: the book indicates that the latter two are twice as fast as the former. This most likely is taking jump capability into account, since rapid movement is generally described as being "on the bounce". As such, you don't necessarily need a scout to be able to run twice as fast as a marauder; you just need it to be able to jump twice as fast. > Jeff wrote: >> Ground movement has to be at least as fast as normal sprinting or the >> "you just wear it" aspect is lost, and the suit actually holds the >> wearer back, deviating from the text. > > 15 mph are about 7.5 yards per second. Not quite olympic, but good > enough for government work. Sounds good. BTW, this is one of those areas where 4e's approach to battlesuits has an edge: they start with the pilot's physical capabilities, and go from there. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
