Johannes replied to me: > > 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. > > > > There is a lot of space underground, and you don't need to have stick a > lot of it out. I was thinking of a permanently installed device here, not > some trap set specifically for the pcs. Either part of a Goa'uld security > system, or something left from the Gate builders, that some Goa'uld > managed to reactivate, or it just sits there and occasionally catches a > ship of any faction.
An automated trap would almost be like a force of nature. A technobabble problem, some heroics, some die rolls, a technobabble solution. But then I wondered if a tractor ship wouldn't work after all: - Gates are a much faster way of travel than hyperdrive, but gates don't go everywhere. There is a strong incentive to make as much of the trip as possible through the gates, and only the rest by ship. - On established routes, there are scheduled ships between the last gate and the destination world. But if there is an established route, why is there no gate directly at the destination? - More likely, the ship goes through the gate and on from there. This requires enough space around the gate (an explanation for all those gates in cleared areas?) and a ship which fits through the gate. That gives plenty of different ships with roughly the same size. Think Panamax ships or passenger cars which just fit into parking slots. But there are larger ships as well. Once you "break" the gate dimensions, it makes no sense to think small. You could have gate ships in the 20 ton range and "police interceptors" in the 200-ton range. Think Puddle Jumper/"Needle" Death Glider/Dart vs. Al'kesh/Tel'tak vs. Ha'tak. * Gate Fighter, one or two seats, relatively big guns. * Gate Scout, seats for a dismount team, some weapons. The party ship? * Gate Transport, more people, unarmed and unarmored. * Gate VIP Transport, one or two passengers, strong defenses. * Guardship, easily capable of handling any gate ship. * Freighter, big enough to deploy a gate. (A problem, VXi16 gates are much bigger than SG gates.) * VIP Yacht, with luxury quarters, command and control, strong defenses. > A burgler in the parked vehicle indeed can induce party splits. You could > mitigate the danger, by giving a reason for the security of parked ships, > a tight security system, that needs a stated list of components to switch > off (electronic key, password, fingerprint.. ) and then have the party > find out who did it, by reconstructing who could get at which component > when. Nah, just declare at the start of the adventure that the players wont be "punished" for failing to leave somebody to guard the ship. Comparable to the question how you deal with players who are absent for one evening -- yes, Bob is still here, no, he doesn't have any helpful suggestions, yes, he made the Hiking roll to keep up. > Yet an other idea would be to have command codes, that allow you to remote > control the ship. You'd need some explaination, how the enemy got at the > codes. Time to decide who built the gate ships. Ancient gate builders or modern humans? Do the humans fully understand their ships? And even if it is a human-made craft, have they written all the control software or is some from an ancient relic? How many lines of code, total? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
