Johannes replied to me: > Feighters can be huge. Cargo can work as barrier. It might be stored in > odd patterns, if you want to save space, need to unload only part of it at > the next destination and at each destination get some new cargo to be > fitted in.
Hello Johannes, I had this idea that researchers would stumble across alien scout ships, not freighters or liners. Big freighters travel between industrialized worlds, not in the wilderness, so the first clues come when mankind (?) expands to the fringes of the precursor (?) space. > Passanger liners can be large too, especially if traveltimes are long. Unless the FTL rules allow for misjumps, passenger liners would be even less likely to be out on the frontiers. Or we're talking about colonizer ships. > A belter operation might be done with one carrier mothership with a proper > drive, and a lot of processing ships/pods, that are dumped on a promising > astereoid and extract resources and put them in a more convenient shape > for transport and be picked up later. It might be that pods might be > accessed via other pods, so the mothership does not need many airlocks, > while the pods need them anyway, because processing operations require > much EVA. A mothership with many pods some of them destroyed can be > mazelike too. That would work for jump FTL carriers, too -- the jump ship carries insystem ships, which could carry orbital shuttles. The subcraft have the same size and shape, to fit into the standard cradles, but internally they can be quite different, depending on their role. Confusing for the researchers. > Ships might be modular. Take a frame, propably some extensions of the > frame, some drive modules, a bridge module, passanger modules cargo > modules ect. The arrangement of some of the modules might be historically > grown, some might have incompatible or defective connections and you need > to walk around them through other modules, some of them might have been > damaged since the ship was in use. That's difficult with the Vehicles rules as written, because the bridge isn't supposed to come off :-) > Regarding map vs stats. If the vehicle is supposed to act, i need stats. > If the action happens in the vehicle, i need a map. Yes, the mistake was that the GM didn't anticipate action in/on the truck. Zan wrote: > Or if you want to get weird and Transhuman Space'ish, the ship could be > nothing but high-TL computer systems. The "passengers" are all upload > copies and the only interface is for one or more of the explorers to > upload themselves. Possibly by accident. Possibly by horrific and bloody > brain slicing. :-P > A lost battleship could have carried thousands of people like a modern > carrier and be quite large. Hello Zan, something like Iain Banks' Culture warships -- they had some quarters, but the organic beings were passengers, not crew. * Organic beings from a low-AI TL10 culture would be quite surprised to find luxurious quarters, by their standards, but no control room. * On top of that comes a TL difference. TL10 has reactionless thrusters, hyperdrives, and fusion, but force fields, contragrav etc. come as a puzzle. * As far as VE is concerned, unmanned vehicles have much denser engine rooms than crewed vehicles (VE14/15). Are vehicles with passengers but no crew unmanned as far as this rule is concerned? I tend to read it that way, because of the words "crew station", not "seat". * Mega reactionless thrusters can provide more thrust than grav compensators can cancel. A temporarily unmanned robot ship would have quite an advantage. A robotic variant of the TL15 cruiser -- same size, twice the mass, a lot more firepower. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
