Johannes replied to me: > You could have tractor beam traps on the ground. The ship comes too close > and the IFF is not responding correctly, it gets held. Someone with a > proper authroisation has to realease it.
At TL11, you could easily have 100 tons thrust on a 20-ton ship. A tractor beam to hold that ship is 161 tons for 500 yds. range and a whopping 5,121 tons for 1,000 yds. range. > Something the party has picked up (because it is a valuable technological > artefact that needs to be analysed at home) in some way sabotages the > ship. A self-inflicted technobabble damper. You can do that a few times before the players get paranoid :-) > The cave so suitable to hide the ship does have a hidden door that locks > the ship in, and the enemy has the remote control. I'd only do that if they fail some rolls. > Some spy sabotaged the ship controls. Or the power plant. A hyperdrive ship has power cells. If they are full, they can handle life support for a long time, but engine use can drain it quickly. How do you get a spy in? A logical timebomb from Earth? That could help to make the spy last longer, because there are more suspects. Or an infiltrator from the "low-tech" villagers who need the help of the heroes. OTOH, I learned from painful experience that it is a good idea to give a parked ship "plot immunity". If the party does the stupid thing and doesn't leave any player characters behind to guard the ship, that is good for the flow of play. > Whenever possible i make the opponents amateurs, it makes GMing much > easier. What works especially well is amateurs who try to compensate their > lack of experience with refining their plans more and make them ever more > elaborate and complex. That gives the party something to find out, and my > own errors are hard to distinguish from the intentional errors of the > villians. The Goa'uld have millenia of experience at intrigue and back-stabbing. > With security there often is a discrepancy between what is in the protocol > and what is actually done. If the pcs are for some reason not in a > dedicated high end high security prison, this can allow the pcs an out. If the prisoners are awaiting the personal attention of the Evil Overlord, few henchmen would dare to slack off. Perhaps the other way around -- the special prisoners get the golden cage, which has a few gaps. > There might be more parties at work then the pcs and the EO. The EOs > guards might steal on the job for instance, maybe they switched a working > security gadget for a damaged one, to sell the working one on the black > market, and then reported equipment failure but the replacement has not > yet arrived. Or they need extra hands to move thier loot, and they figure > prisoners at gun point would do just fine. With Jaffa, it could always be that they don't understand how the gadget works. They look like medieval villagers with a few ancient gadgets and a old masters teaching young apprentices. I don't believe that is a way to create a scientific mindset. > Or just the stereotypical guard > who attempts to rape the party member with most unarmed martial arts > skills. Or one who tries to interrogate the prisoners to get their secrets and earn brownie points. > Or maybe a chief minion of the EO does not want to give up the command of > the elite forces yet, for one reason or an other, and so attempts to keep > it a secret, that the mission objective is reached already. Fits the setting. So what does all that tell me? * Insert some single points of failure, like a single power plant. That can be justified by the extra weight of separate systems in a small ship. * Some spare passenger seats to allow the occasional NPCs. * Make it small or cramped enough that bunking down inside is not attractive. * On the other hand, a separate cockpit could allow all sorts of mischief. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
