I think the movie was Fantastic Voyage. Isaac Asimov wrote the screenplay, I believe.
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Marcelo Cortimiglia Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2012 2:50 PM To: The GURPSnet mailing list Subject: Re: [gurps] How large is a proper derelict? Hello Onno, have you read "Seeker", by Jack McDevitt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeker_(novel))? It brings up an interesting setting for space archeology. Marcelo Marcelo Cortimiglia ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Produção Av. Osvaldo Aranha, 99/5º Andar, 90035-190 - Porto Alegre (RS) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Phone +55 51 3308 3490 | +39 334 5232 502 Email [email protected] | [email protected] 2012/1/3 Onno Meyer <[email protected]>: > 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 _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
