Johannes replied to me: > >> Would a hoverbike work with the intended TL? > > > > At TL11? Vectored reactionless thrust. A hovercraft can be done even > > earlier. > > > > Then it could be used for gates that lead into buildings or for regular > transport between worlds you own. [...] > Alternativly a mission pattern for scouts could be to go through the > nearest gate that is still in neutral territory, so it would not be > blocked by a gate defender, and use its FTL drive to get to the target > world. The scout hunter could be defence against that.
So how about these TL11 concepts? * An open single-seat flyer, Lwt 1 ton, 50 cf or so, with the look and feel of Niven's Ringworld. Before TL12 contragrav is unavailable, so it needs pretty hefty reactionless thrusters in a large hull for the heroes. * A FTL-capable, gate-sized ship, four crew plus some passengers, Lwt 10 tons, 1,000 cf, look and feel like an armed helicopter (a Hind?) for the heroes. * Perhaps something much like it, but for alien abductions. Or it is the same. The good guys in a repainted raider? * A gate-sized, aerospace/orbital fighter, one or two crew, Lwt 10 tons, 1,000 cf, fast and agile to pass gates at high speed. For the heroes or for the villains? * A sublight patrol craft, 100 tons, weapons and tractor beams to hold gateships, plus boarding parties. For the villains. > Part of technological development in software is to come up with ways to > make software maintance easier. Design and documentation patterns, open-source libraries which include other libraries, deployment tools which automatically reload the right files from the web ... I recall the old days of DOS when you selected the OS files on the floppy to maximize room for programs. Johannes replied to Eric in another mail: > The reason for legacy code it most often, that there are not the resources > and the manpower available to write it new. You could get such a > situation, if you want to run some computer controlled alien hardware from > a human computer. Say mankind has examples of the stardrive, but they don't understand the theory. They also have the alien microchips and the ROM with the code. Where does the quantum logic stop and the quantum manipulation start? > An interesting matter would be how much we trust the software. If we find > archeological evidence, that the aliens have throughly tested the > function, is that good enough, or do humans need to do their own tests? Would the historic documents list the backdoors? And in the stereotypical setting the ancients are gone. What killed them? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
