On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Not really. It just increases the amount of automation required. (And probably ignoring vehicles generally non-nonsensical maintenance rules, but that's not a real problem.) I played many games in a setting where the ships were huge (~200,000 traveller dtons), but the crews were small -- typical commercial freight only ships were six or eight, and could be run, if only for short periods, by just one. Reasonably hard science -- ftl, but no artificial gravity, or reactionless thrusters (though the reaction drives were probably a bit too efficient > > 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. > I had containerized freight. Big containers, about 1200 cubic meters each, potentially with their own power and climate control, if required. ships had a hundred or so, depending on what their route was, and trade off on reaction mass v. cargo. As for the fewer tech levels in 4e, it's important to remember that you have lots more than 12, because the "magic" comes at different times, different varieties, and the combinations give you a lot more granularity. My setting was TL10ish, but would eventually get to TL11, but it would never have antigravity, artificial gravity, reactionless thrusters, time travel, or ftl drives other than what we had. But you can build *lots* of different TL10 settings, by allowing different sorts of superscience, and by adding different aliens or not. A setting with reactionless drives and no ftl is very different from one with ftl and no reactionless thrusters. A totally hard setting is very different (and can be very, very strange, see, for instance transhuman space.) again. A setting with FTL comms is different from one without them (whether or not it's got ftl travel.). And adding other superscience changes things similarly. -- David Scheidt [email protected] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
