Nyrath
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Posts posted by Nyrath
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Re: Star-Trek-Gate-Wars 5
Are there innate power level issues between the universes. Would you want to play a guy with a submachine gun' date=' some high explosives, and combat training, if someone else had a phaser? Would a Jedi apprentice really Worph Worph.[/quote']This is the Hero System we are talking about, here.
Just ensure that the various player characters are built on roughly the same amount of points and everything will automatically sort itself out.So you will have a submachine gun, some high explosives, and combat training, while the other guy will have just a phaser. You can set an explosive booby-trap and still have a submachine gun and combat training. The other guy can set an explosive booby trap with his phaser, and then will have nothing.
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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?
Variant: A couple of the supply ships actually did make it to the colony. The crews were killed and eaten' date=' and the ships scrapped and recycled. The PCs may find some of the remains of the ship that survived. They may find a journal of a doomed crewman and discover the truth that way.But if the PCs include a doctor or laboratory technician, perhaps the PCs will discover the truth when the doctor/lab tech finds traces of digested human flesh in the colonists' stool samples.
[/quote']
A doctor can also suspect something if many of the survivors suffer from Creutzfeld Jacob disease or kuru. These generally can only be spread by cannibalism.
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Re: Free-flying cyborg insects steered from a distance
That's not in the article... you're just messing with me' date=' aren't you?[/quote']I'm just messing with you.
But it will probably be sooner than we think.
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Re: Free-flying cyborg insects steered from a distance
How long before the same thing can be done to a human being' date=' and when would the devices be small enough that they would be entirely internal after surgery?
[/quote']About six months
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Re: MESSENGER Went Into Safe Mode Approaching Mercury
It is also common to have a safe mode for the spacecraft's computer.
If the computer actually crashes, your spacecraft has suddenly been transformed into a $425 million pile of flying junk.
The computers are designed so if there is any glitch, it abruptly reverts to a safe mode so that the problem can be remotely fixed by mission control. This is because you cannot send somebody from Geeks On Call to Mercury orbit.
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17895-freeflying-cyborg-insects-steered-from-a-distance.html
For the first time, researchers have controlled the movements of free-flying insects from afar, as if they were tiny remote-controlled aircraft.By connecting electrodes and radio antennas to the nervous systems of beetles, the researchers were able to make them take off, dive and turn on command.
Just think of the possibilites...
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http://www.universetoday.com/2009/09/30/messenger-went-into-safe-mode-approaching-mercury/
The MESSENGER spacecraft went into safe mode just before its closest approach of Mercury on Sept. 29. Although the instruments were taking data as the spacecraft came near the planet during this third flyby of the mission, after going into safe mode, no further data or pictures were obtained.And thus the hidden staging base of the invasion force from the dreaded Blortch Empire had its secrecy maintained. A simple artificial cosmic ray to crash the MESSENGER's computer, and us puny humans will have no warning of the coming invasion...
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http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24186/
Astronomers thought they knew why one otherwise ordinary star is shooting away from the Milky Way with a speed that exceeds the galactic escape velocity. Now they're not so sure...or some hyper advanced alien civilization is using the star as a titanic spacecraft...
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Re: How do you build Drives?
In the "Renegade Legion" series of wargames, there was FTL communication that was faster than a starship. But the communicator was a titanic orbital installation.
So they were prime targets during times of warfare. Take out a few key comm units and you can cut off large sectors of the Empire from direct communication with Imperial Terra. So they were often the centers were interstellar battles occured.
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Re: How do you build Drives?
In "A Step Further Out" Vol 1, Jerry Pournelle sez that for "The Mote In God's Eye" her and Larry Niven worked out the Alderson drive in detail and then lived with the resulting limitations.Boiling it down - the Alderson Drive (named after Dan Alderson at CalTech who worked out the equations) posits the existence of a "fifth force", distinct from the nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity.
Yes, but you appear to be missing the point.
The Alderson Drive was created with the express purpose of making starship combat possible. This is a natural outgrowth of the resulting limitations.
From "Building the Mote in God's Eye"
Travel by Alderson Drive consists of getting to the proper Alderson Point and turning on the Drive. Energy is used. You vanish, to reappear in an immeasurably short time at the Alderson Point in another star system some several light-years away. If you haven’t done everything right, or aren’t at the Alderson Point, you turn on your drive and a lot of energy vanishes. You don’t move. (In fact you do move, but you instantaneously reappear in the spot where you started.)That’s all there is to the Drive, but it dictates the structure of an interstellar civilization.
To begin with, the Drive works only from point to point across inter*stellar distances. Once in a star system you must rely on reaction drives to get around. There’s no magic way from, say, Saturn to Earth: you’ve got to slog across.
Thus space battles are possible, and you can’t escape battle by vanishing into hyperspace, as you could in future history series such as Beam Piper’s and Gordon Dickson’s. To reach a given planet you must travel across its stellar system, and you must enter that system at one of the Alderson Points. There won’t be more than five or six possible points of entry, and there may only be one.
Star systems and planets can be thought of as continents and islands, then, and Alderson Points as narrow sea gates such as Suez, Gibraltar, Panama, Malay Straits, etc. To carry the analogy further, there’s tele*graph but no radio: the fastest message between star systems is one car*ried by a ship, but within star systems messages go much faster than the ships.
Hmm. This sounds a bit like the early days of steam. Not sail; the ships require fuel and sophisticated repair facilities. They won’t pull into some deserted star system and rebuild themselves unless they’ve carried the spare parts along. However, if you think of naval actions in the period between the Crimean War and World War One, you’ll have a fair picture of conditions as implied by the Alderson Drive.
If the Drive allowed ships to sneak up on planets, materializing without warning out of hyperspace, then there could be no Empire even with the Field. There'd be no Empire because belonging to the empire wouldn't protect you. Instead there might be populations of planet-bound serfs ruled at random by successive hordes of of space pirates. Upward mobility would consist of getting your own ship and turning pirate.
This system works so well for allowing interstellar combat that it was immediately adopted by several wargames, most notably StarFire.
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Re: How do you build Drives?
Lois freely admits she handwaved the physics for interstellar travel in oder to get on with the story.In the same way, a game master should handwave the physics for interstellar travele in order to create the desired strategic and tactical situation.
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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...
Of course they are related. But they are not the same thing.Yes, I stand corrected on that.
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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...
Of course, Larry Niven in his THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TELEPORTATION did include a clever way of turning a teleport drive into a weapon of mass destruction.
Ordinarily, when you turn off the teleport drive, your ship becomes quote "stationary" unquote (actually, it reverts to the same relative velocity it had before it turned on the teleporter, which can be difficult to explain to non-technical people).
So Niven said do the following:
[a] move your ship near a planet with high gravity (e.g., Jupiter, but any planet will do)
Aim the nose of the ship at the planet
[c] Let the ship fall to the planet a distance equal to one ship length
[d] teleport the ship backward one ship length
[e] go to step [c]
The ship is constantly accelerating towards the planet, but it never reaches it. By keeping this up for a month or so, your ship will acquire quite a huge velocity. The larger the planet's gravity, the faster the ship will accelerate.
Now you can use the teleport drive to move the ship over to the target planet, turn off the teleport drive, and the ship promptly crashes into the planet with civilization destroying force.
Of course, according to the law of conservation of mass-energy, you'd expect that the energy required to run the teleporter drive would be a larger than the energy of velocity that the ship has acquired.
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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...
Then I suggest that you use some form of "micro-jump" drive.See post 99 above for the basis. I don't know if it was Larry Niven or Poul Anderson who first showed such a thing, but the idea goes back 50 years or so.
I dunno if Poul was the first, but I did read about such a drive in his short story "Margin of Profit " which was published in 1956.
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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...
Force=Mass x AccelerationMomentum=Mass x Velocity
They are related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum#Linear_momentum_of_a_particle
But it does not change the fact that a teleport drive would not create a kinetic energy weapon
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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...
If you have teleportation, you can rig a ship that teleports to its own front end. Your speed is limited by the speed of the teleportation process. However, there's no actual motion - when the drive is turned off, you simply stop.(I don't know who thought of the concept originally, but Larry Niven explored it in, "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation".)
Yes, that would have the advantage that the ship is no longer a weapon of mass destruction. Good call.
You see, the devastation we have been talking about is caused by momentum. If you remember Newton's laws, F = MA or momentum equals mass times acceleration.
But with this drive, the ship's acceleration is zero. The act of teleporting the ship changes its position, but it does not accelerate it.
So you can zip through the solar system really fast, but you cannot destroy planets by ramming them.
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Re: Cartography of Non-Spherical Worlds
There was a microgame wargame by Metagaming back in the 80's that was set on a toroidal (donut-shaped) asteroid with a black hole in the "hole." I cannot remember the name of the game' date=' now.[/quote']Well, as it turns out the name was "Black Hole". In the introductory story, the black hole is accidentally discovered by an astronaut named "Winchell Dunkin", who was named after me.
Of course' date=' they just used a normal hex map and allowed movement off of any map edge to continue on the opposite edge, but still.[/quote']Yes, that turns the map into the functional equivalent of a torus.
In SPI's StarSoldier, one of the scenarios has the map linked top to bottom, to simulate an assault on a cylinder shaped asteroid.
But more the point, in Metagaming's The Air Eaters Strike Back, the game map has tiny world maps of some of the larger solar system moons.
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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...
Unless a ship with a reactionless drive is powered by wishes' date=' it still has a "burn" limit based on how much fuel it carries for its powerplant, right?[/quote']Yes, as I said here:
A reaction drive can only accelerate your rocket until the reaction mass is all gone.A reactionless drive obviously does not have that limitation.
Presumably it does require electricity or other power, but that is a much easier limit to overcome.
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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...
EDIT: So it's not that there's a fundamental difference between a rocket and a reactionless drive that makes the latter more dangerous' date=' it's just that the former runs out of reaction mass and that limits its maximum velocity.[/quote']Yes, but that is putting it mildly. Using a reaction drive to accelerate something to 90% c with a super-duper technomagic antimatter beam core rocket still means that your rocket will be 99% reaction mass and 1% rocket
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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...
Isn't the other limit on the reaction drive that it can only accelerate the vehicle to the same velocity forward as the velocity of the exhaust out the back? Or am I thinking of something else?You are thinking about the Bussard Interstellar Ramjet. The ramscoop causes drag.
A reaction drive with no ramscoop is not subject to such a limit.
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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...
I guess I didn't realize that a reactionless drive (ie' date=' no reaction mass ejected out the back) automatically allowed accelleration to any physically possible velocity.[/quote']A reaction drive can only accelerate your rocket until the reaction mass is all gone.
A reactionless drive obviously does not have that limitation.
Presumably it does require electricity or other power, but that is a much easier limit to overcome.
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Re: Cartography of Non-Spherical Worlds
Remember those "Traveller RPG" planetary maps that were unfolded icosahedrons (20-sided die)?
You can turn the planetary maps into such maps using a commercial plug in called "Flexify 2". It works with Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, and other graphic programs.
http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify.html
(scroll down to icomap)
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http://publish.uwo.ca/~pjstooke/plancart.htm
This is a series of maps of various tiny moons in the Solar System (e.g., Phobos, Deimos, various asteroids).
Print a hex grid on top and you are good to go.
Could come in handy if you were making an Asteroid Miner campaign, or trying to re-create the short story "Hide and Seek" by Arthur C. Clarke.
And here are some planetary maps
Just ensure that the various player characters are built on roughly the same amount of points and everything will automatically sort itself out.
[/quote']
Star-Trek-Gate-Wars 5
in Star Hero
Posted
Re: Star-Trek-Gate-Wars 5