Hal replied to me: > As for myself? I'd prefer the more "gritty" approach to > Sci-Fi ships. I would have LOVED the Star Trek series more had they not > included transporters :(
Hello everybody, as Roger pointed out, there is a "shiny vs. gritty" scale that depends not just on the TL, but I believe the tech level plays a role here, and I want to nail it down. * TL10 has super reactionless thrusters which are marginal for a surface landing. Add the thruster itself, vectored thrust, and the power plant, and you get 0.4 lbs. of engine per lb. of thrust. Some worlds might have a slightly higher gravity than Earth, so we're talking about half the loaded weight for engines and power plants alone. Add grav units (8 tons at this TL) and the FTL drive, and there is little left for payload. What you get is a Firefly, where a big ship carries just a little bit of cargo, and the default planetary vehicle is a ground vehicle. * At TL11, even standard reactionless thrusters allow a surface landing. With vectored thrust and fusion power, 0.085 lbs. per lb. of thrust. A starship could easily get 50% payload or more. Either that, or you can make it faster with a multiple of the normal FTL speed. Still, flyers need either expensive reactors (minimum one ton, too) or expensive power cells, so there will be plenty of heavy-duty ground vehicles and a few light flyers planetside. Star Wars, in a way. * At TL12, contragrav gives a small saving for ships that can pull a few G, as vectored thrust is no longer required. The big difference is that most planetary vehicles will fly, too. * TL13 gives the VXii force fields for small ships, with all their exciting options. Shaped force screens allow bricks to land, and manipulator fields help to unload. Of course I could write a TL10 ship with fancy computers and microbot repair swarms instead of grizzled mechanics, but it would remain a marginal design, where every pound counts. And a TL12 ship might have leaky hydraulics, but it would still have the raw power to overcome little things like atmospheric drag. Jon wrote: > Warp Drive, sure; but leave out as much of the other > Treknobabble as possible. I find warp extremely difficult to handle, as far as game mechanics are concerned. When ships in warp meet each other or pass by a planet, one-second turns just don't work. Roger replied to Jon: > >To be fair, Star Trek wouldn't have gotten off the ground if they hadn't > >had transporters. > > To me they're kin to artificial gravity. We can't do convincing zero-G > on a TV budget, so we'll say there's gravity; Not just a question of special effects. Imagine how Kirk would look if the Beautiful Alien Princess had to tuck him into a gurney after landing. Unless they had spin, which complicates the ship design. Roger replied to me: > Firefly was claimed to be in a single star system, but there's nothing > in the actual series to confirm that - it could have been the more > fictionally-conventional approach of multiple systems, without any > script changes. A movie or TV series can leave some details open -- FTL drives or the lack thereof, speed, limitations and side effects. In a novel, we expect some explanation, and in a game we want consistent rules ... > 4E, I think sensibly, lists stardrives as TL^ - so they can be plugged > in wherever seems appopriate. But it has fewer TLs at the high end, so I'm trying to find out what you can do with seven TLs from the invention of FTL to the end of the scale. Consider the seven Scout Singleships -- all roughly the same concept, but the first scout had to do without gravity, without redundancy, even without an airlock. The last one got 20 G accel with compensators to match, a teleport projector so it won't even have to land, and DR 3,000. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
