On Sat, 19 Oct 2013, Onno Meyer wrote:
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.
If you want all the party members to have a crew position at the scout,
and assume a party of 4, why would the fighter work with 2 crew?
Would a hoverbike work with the intended TL?
* 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 big fighting ship, being able to fight many gate ships. Protects against
an invasion through the gate.
A ship just large enough, to outgun and outrun any gate ships. To hunt
scouts.
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.
Declaring it a genre convention is sufficient sure. But it's more elegant
to have some techo or other babble to justify it as well, even if you are
candid as to why thats there. Whenever the background allows it, i find a
reason, why the pc of the absent player is absent too.
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
That sort if invites the quip, that even if humans have written all the
software, they propably don't understand it anyway.
Actually one could argue, that if the software is a mix of ancient alien
and human software, the alien part might be better understood. The alien
software will be intensivly researched and tested and all findings will be
written down immediatly. There will be no last minute bug fixes either,
because regardless if it's a bug or a feature, the software stays as it
is.
You'd need to spend much resources on quality management to get the amount
of testing and documentation on ordinary software and the lowest bidder
propably cuts corners.
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