On 7/4/2011 4:57 PM, Rupert Boleyn wrote: > On 28/06/2011 06:18, Onno Meyer wrote: > >> On the other hand, if the PCs are running around in small ships and >> some NPCs command much bigger and more powerful ships, that limits >> the scope of adventures -- our heroes might be able to find the >> enemy, but then they have to wait for the cavalry, or resort to >> trickery. How many times can there be a conveniently placed thermal >> exhaust port? > > This is not, IMO, a problem with ship size so much as with the size of > the political entities in the game. If big ships win battles, large > nations will have fleets of big ships and the players in their little > ship will have to hope their side's cavalry is just over the hill. > however, if small ships win battles large nations will have swarms of > them, and the PCs will still have to hope their cavalry is just over the > hill. > > To make the PCs and their ship important requires that their ship be > expensive compared to the budget a nation spends on ships. This could be > because of small and fairly poor nations (such as in a setting > recovering from an interstellar dark age), or because their ship is > fairly large and very expensive but requires a small crew. Another > possibility is that it takes a very special and rare talent to be able > to operate a spaceship - say a setting where most people have to travel > in cold sleep because being concious while a ship is warping drives them > insane (and ships use a 'stutterwarp' to move), so you can't just put > tons of backup crew on a ship, even a large one, because you need them > flying their own ship.
The small ship could be expensive because it is unusually powerful for such a small ship. The ship might be built for black ops, like the cars that Q builds for Bond. Or it might be built for specialized stealth operations (like scouting new civilizations, which might be technically advanced), but still need to be somewhat powerful (they might be hostile too), like the ships the Liaden Scouts use in the book series by Lee and Miller. In GURPS terms, these ships might be built using a rule that allows using TL+1 miniaturization at a cost multiplier. It wouldn't be cost effective to build battle fleets but for a few special ships it is. The ship might have passed out of the original builder's control. If the PCs are criminals or they picked the ship up at an auction or a scrap yard or if they inherited it. It might have hidden abilities the sellers didn't know about but the PCs find. An example of that, taken from the Liaden series again, is in Crystal Soldier where Cantra's ship was an infiltration ship built by the Enemy. The original pilot had died somehow, the next pilot trained Cantra and Cantra had no connection with the Enemy at all. But her ship had many things like extra powerful weapons, shields and an auto-doc unit that did things no one else's technology could do. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
