Johannes replied to me: > Propably a better startingpoint is not a tank but a mobile fort. I guess > that's more how low tech people would have thought. It definitly would be > limited to suitable geography, where you easily can use big carts.
Take a 1,000-cf vehicle with heavy wheels, 850 sf total. At TL2-4, a medium and expensive structure is 5.7 tons. DR 10 expensive wooden armor is 3.8 tons. DR 10 expensive metal is 3 tons. Make it DR 5 metal over DR 15 wood, plus some payload, and the loaded weight is about 15 tons. The ground pressure is very high, off-road speed 1/8. A pair of ST 200 tricaterops provide the equivalent of 6 kW motive power. Road speed 5 mph, off-road speed 0.625 mph. A dozen oxen would provide 10.8 kW, enough to pull 20 tons at 6 mph. That could be a mobile home with a luxury cabin, or a freight wagon with 10 tons of payload. How much do twelve oxen eat? > There is a middle ground between attacking artifacts and artificers and > keeping them off limits. It's a normal thing to try to steal them, but if > you do it so reckless, that they are destroyed you are a barbarian. IMO > that fits well with the general image of Goa'ulds. In A Song of Ice and Fire, George Martin came up with a guild/order of scholars/scribes/doctors who serve a castle and the current lord of the castle, whoever that is. In theory, that makes them neutral in petty feuds, for the preservation of civilization and knowledge. In practice, a conquering lord will distrust the old maester. > They also might look for primitive people to enslave, because that is > easy, and consider a coherent plan to educate them too much of a bother. > And arguably after a certain amount of industrialisation, tribal divide et > impera strategies don't work so well any more. It would be just enough if > the overlords believe that. The player characters could be sent on missions to unite primitive tribes. No ulterior motives, they just think that the chieftain is such a great guy that he should rule over even more primitives. On their honor as a special forces team :-) > I suppose some will have cozy positions on central worlds, enjoying the > fruits of technology, only somewhat less so then the overlords. The > overlords pet engeneer plus assistants would be a template. If you want to > go really cliche, they also research terrible weapons of mass destruction. Can one "court artificer" with a few henchmen maintain a technical civilization? How many practitioners do you need to keep a science rather than rote learning? Can the pet engineers of different Evil Overlords talk to each other? > Class and caste borders would be good start. If fraternisation between > classes is discouraged, who will tell a peasant about the scientific > method? Too many castes, and there are too few members of each caste in the base of each Overlord. How many Jaffa did a typical Goa'uld have? > There also could be multiple mines on one planet. Yes, I was too much in the series paradigm of one-town worlds ... > Are the overlords gods who bless the peasants with aqueducts and such, and > attempting to get thoose without them is blasphemy? Who builds and maintains the infrastructure? If it is the local tribe under the command of the Evil Overlords, they'll know how the artifacts were made. And during the construction the locals can rub ellbows with the EO. If the workers are ferried in for each project, how do you keep the workers from mingling with the locals? Maybe the artificers of the lords are the only ones who can build awesome arcs and mile-long tunnels, but the miller will be tempted to improve the dam, just a little. > I was mainly thinking about who is there and what resources do they have. > Settlers who come from a distant more developed place, bring some > equipment, that they can't all produce themselfs yet. They form comparably > small communities. There are natives and outlaws as opponents and propably > rivaling colonial powers as well. I would have thought that each planet has one ruler. One gate per world (more would be wasteful of scarce tech) and whoever controls it has the planet. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
