What separates a Terraforming Support Shuttle from an ordinary cargo, passenger, or scout shuttle?
* A scout shuttle has only a limited payload: the scouts, their gear, perhaps a ground vehicle. The terraformer shuttle needs a more substantial payload to spread seeds or breeding stock across the planet. * Still, any sensor station helps, so the terraformer shuttle will have sensors for a close-range/detailed analysis, like laser chemscanners and multiscanners (if superscience is in, but then the mothership has FTL ...). * There won't be much in the way of surface facilities, so the terraformers can't depend on runways like ordinary passenger or cargo shuttles. * Some stuff might be seeded/released in flight, like crop dusting. But I think the only rules for that are biochem loads in warheads, and kicking rabbits out of a flying shuttle won't work, either :-) So the basic assumption is that the shuttle will set down to do the work, VTOL-style. But it needs some stuff to separate it from a rough-field-capable cargo shuttle. * The shuttle could be home to a lot of pollinator microbot swarms, but wouldn't it be less effective than supporting ground bases? Maybe one could make a case that flying to a site, releasing the microbots, and waiting for their return is more efficient than going there, dropping the hive, leaving empty, and coming back yet again empty to pick the hive up again. I don't recall any rules how the pollinator package actually works, and how long it takes. * The shuttle could be used to capture large animals. That could mean a really big stunner or paralysis gun, and the ability to take them back up. BIO22 rates containment tubes per hex of animal and not per cf, so using the scale rules for a T-Rex could be a little cheating. W23 has rules on scaling up automeds for cattle mutilation, but the listed scale doesn't mesh with VXi22. If the animal is sedated, no tube is required. The major difference between a cargo shuttle and a terraformer shuttle could be a separate, high-capacity life support system for the hold, to maintain local conditions. But how do you sedate alien life safely without studying them first? Alternatively there could be cages with their own life support, but that means I'm back to a cargo shuttle. * The shuttle could have decent decontamination gear for the crew section, in case some of the terraforming bugs turn out to be nasty. * There might be 'primitive' natives who object when their world is terraformed or 'alienformed'. The shuttle won't become a fighter, but mil-spec C3 might make sense. Also IR cloaking, sound baffling, and a chameleon skin, but no stealth or AAMs. Or I give it enough armor to survive multiple reentries, kicks from careless dinos, and the occasional hostile encounter. * I'm thinking about TL10 vectored reactionless thrusters. The payload ratio is worse than for fusion rockets, but at the scale I'm thinking about the shuttle fleet could use up gigatons of water. Comments or suggestions? _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
