Johannes replied to me: > There is however an other problem in that setup. Either prospectors have > to sell data on duds as expensivly as on motherloads, or miners will know > what general the prospectors will sell them by how they try to sell it.
Several ideas here: The prospector visits a bunch of asteroids with roughly similar orbital data and spectrographic composition. The home office on Earth can then advertise "sector xyz surveyed, 96 are duds, 3 are possibly interesting, 1 is a motherlode", perhaps even with detailed assay results -- this doesn't give the info which of the rocks is the good one. Or the price is usually expressed in percentages of the profit, not a flat fee. My current baseline draft is a 100-ton ship, Ewt 30 tons, fuel 37.4 tons, load 32.6 tons, 60 mps, 4-8 crew. The assumption is that the players are the entire crew, no NPCs, and after a few rock-hopping adventures for startup the crew will find alien ruins, pirate bases, whatever. The next size down are a few numbers, not a real draft yet. A 10-ton ship, Ewt 5 tons, fuel 3.4 tons, load 1.6 tons, 53 mps, 2 crew. It is an awkward size for adventures unless the group are just two players and the GM. Then it can be used like the 100-ton ship, just with less margin for errors. More likely, it will be crewed by NPCs, from crusty comic relief to damsels in distress to crusty homicidal maniacs. The next size up from the baseline is a 1,000-ton ship, Ewt 250 tons, fuel 425 tons, load 325 tons, 71 mps, 60-80 crew. This is so big that most of the crew are NPCs. Adventures could be find the traitor, what is eating the NPCs one by one, assault the pirate base, get down to Titan or Pluto or so with an all-PC landing craft. 3E Vehicles doesn't do asteroids well, but the need for gravity could explain why someone builds a station in the belt -- call it a 100,000-ton ring-and-hub design, most of that cheap metal armor and cheap structure to represent locally refined raw materials. Think of it as the admin center and R&R base. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
