Jon wrote: > Personally, I prefer the TL11 option, in terms of power and thrusters. > I'd rather have a setting where "air cars" tend to be found more on > affluent "core worlds" than on struggling "frontier worlds", and even > then tend toward streamlined and/or winged designs over "flying > bricks". OTOH, spacecraft as "flying bricks" are perfectly > acceptable. I prefer cargo ships that can be at least as much cargo > as ship.
Hello Jon, for practical reasons, I like ships where the player characters are the entire crew -- or crew and "permanent passengers" as in Firefly -- without permanent NPCs in the crew. That puts a cap on the size of the ship. That could be handled with sufficient automation, but I also like a limited number of different shipments in the hold. If there is something wrong with a load, I want a few red herrings, not a few hundred. Roger wrote: > As a sort of corollary to this, I'm _very_ wary of reactionless > thrusters. Reaction drives, even super-efficient total conversion > thrusters, still need reaction mass, and there's a limit to just how > much delta-V you can squeeze out of them. Reactionless drives, apart > from breaking physics which I can live with, automatically give you > planet-killing weapons: just plug together a drive and either a > high-power reactor or solar panels, and wait a few months or even years, > and you can slam into a planet at relativistic speed. And most settings > have at least one group - and it doesn't have to be a big group - that > would be willing to do this. Yes, there are ways round the problem, but > I'm not really entirely convinced by any of them. Hello Roger, there is a flip-side to that. A reaction drive that can get up to decent speed with limited reaction mass is an awesome beam weapon, too. Niven called that "the Kzinti lesson". With reactionless drives, you can technobabble your way out of the immediate effects, at the cost of a planetkiller later on. Or make it pseudovelocity, even if that raises the question how you match velocity with a different world. Mike wrote: > Agreed on focus or lack of it. > > As well as FTL2448 Hello Mike, could you refrain from cross-posting to many different mailing lists? Cross-posting means people on any one of the lists get only part of the conversation, and what I post on one list may not be intended for a different audience. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
