Brandon replied to me: > So the Titanic was steampunk? Megacorps locked in a vicious struggle. Once they were fighting for mere money, for market share, for profit, but it has become more and more a competition for ego, for power -- the survival of the megacorp might be at stake.
The latest project -- codename "Titanic" -- is just one of the battlefields, but it has gripped public attention. Nothing must be allowed to stop the project. Not questions about the design, not the quality of the supplied parts, and certainly not the concern for the health of the workers on the yard. Perhaps our protagonists were hired to stop "Project T" by any means necessary. Or they are supposed to protect it against just such interference. Either way, they will have to dive into the slums of Belfast, and onto yards where lethal accidents are a fact of life. Now "Project T" is about to go operational, and nothing could stop it. Or has the sabotage already happened? Either way, the activity will reach a fever pitch. Does that sound cyberpunk to you? And earlier in the same mail: > To me, for a vehicle to be steampunk rather than age of steam it needs to > require a significant change in scientific progress (and likey the laws of > physics) to exist -- in other words, an alternate history. Take a cyberpunk armored limo. It might have a neural interface for the driver, or a cyberdeck for a net security specialist, but by and large it would use normal tech. The difference would more likely be that a megacorp executive is protected by lethal force, and that the threat level has risen. Johannes replied: > I would say steampunk vehicles are, what an age of steam sf writer could > come up with as future vehicles. Nice definition, but just how punk is that steampunk? Susan wrote: > I think you also have to add the "punk aspect" of very high-tech (for the > victorian) mods added because they are fashionable and new - not > necessarily useful. Often prone to unexpected effects. That would be the Making Lemons sidebar in VE. Volker wrote: > I'd say it depends on the subgenre of steampunk you are in. That is probably my problem. [...] > If there is any difference, it is in small details, things like integrated > thermantidotes, automatic doors, compartment gaslights or similar minor > touches. Environmental controls becoming more common than historically accurate? > In other cases, scale and ambition make the difference. A steampunk world > would see the most ambitious projects of the Victorian era realised. The > Great Eastern does not remain one-of-a-kind, but spawns a class of 1860s > ocean liners. I have a big ship coming up. But those are more "settings" than "vehicles" -- for the Titanic, you need a deck plan, not wMR figures. > New Tower Bridge is replicated hundreds of times on rivers > throughout the Empire. Underground trains whizz through capital cities > throughout > Europe. Good idea. The first London subways were steam lines, right? > Every dinky county seat has a pneumatic tube mail system, steam > gurney station and telegraph network. This is, of course, impossible, but it > is impossible in the small details, not the big scheme of things, and it > stays reasonably true to the GURPS tenet of TL X+n . > > Finally, you have the world where sufficiently advanced steam tech is > indistinguishable from magic. Here, vehicles of all kinds don't have a style, > they consist of style only. In such a world, there are no quotidian vehicles > because, why would there be? After all, you can have steam-powered horses, > ornithopter wingpacks, transatlantic airships, ether rockets and nautilus > submarines. Economics and physics are no constraints. Even in the > background, you have airship liners filling the sky and steel elephants > traipsing > the fields of the NWFP. Hard to cover with Vehicles. Thanks, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
