In remembrance of all the joy, and misery, of past games. Leave your offerings here.
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rydi
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Post by rydi »

If you guys want more detail and discussion about your roots, the Gf, then that's fine. Also, if everyone agrees to the 'mini game', we can have a forum where we detail the worlds we came from, and the cultures there, in return for points.
you beat me to it. i was planning on doing exactly that.
There hasn't been war within the GF for hundreds of years, so sure, there have been disputes about territory and all that jazz, you can put whatever you want in your history and that's fine.
tell me if i'm seeing this right, because this is how i thought of it: a big, monolithic government that controls the majority of the galaxy, but that is still finding new races and incorporating them, and in which several races have yet to join. the only war would come from primitive backwater worlds, and would likely draw the attention of the federation if it became at all widespread.
I am very much trying to hit the feel of old black and white pulp sci fi epics. Lensman, if any of you have read it, the original star trek, battlestar galactica, heck, even star wars, to a degree.
black and white pictures have alot of grey in them. basically, even though "black and white morality" fiction is pretty cut and dry, there is still room for complexity in morality. which of course you know, just saying it so that people don't get the wrong idea and devolve their plot ideas.
So yes, on to the big decision. The more I think about it the more I like the idea of setting up a 'better' resource for ship design. i am going to have to do so anyway, merely to be able to create a variety of ships and vessels, such that they would be representative of the tech levels and ideology of the races that you'll encounter.
i like the mix/match tech much better. and if you have to make one anyway, a builder would be great. but if not, then don't worry about it, as i'm very certain we can muddle through.

also, you could use many of the same devices for bio or magi tech, just changing the way they work a little, adding new limits/enhancements, etc. you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. also, though i haven't looked at all the rules, i don't think converting the money to a point buy is really all that necessary. though from what you said before, power drain stats are likely a must.
Here's my background so far. Any recommneded tweeks?
a whole herd of pudu. other than that, i like it. sounds like a fun character.
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Rusty
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Post by Rusty »

I think you've got the picture pretty good. sure there are 'grey areas', but the basic idea for the GF is that they have somehow built a right and good government, and yes, new races are being found from time to time, and they would be backwater worlds that, even if they had a very high tech level couldn't overthrow the GF, and unless they are opressing their people the GF would invite them rather than conquer them, using their superior diplomacy and reason skills in favor of weapons.
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Thael
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Post by Thael »

well as far as the ship building goes I do have one comment... this past weekend when at Game HQ I noticed a traveller gurps book that was dedicated to a single ship design... granted it was a modular premise but the book was thicker than most of the D&D complete books and it was all focused on the ultimate build-to-suit class of ship... if we want I can get it and we can use that and just have it look like we want (it was not very aesthetic really)...

character number crunching down to the last pieces (just 1 non-combatant shell and a few points to spend on main) and I am done... will get to work on the ship either tonight or tomorrow...

Cheyne... If I am using the laptop for the cartographer then its specs are:
P3 542Mhz with 256 RAM
and if that is not sufficient then I guess I will get off my lazy ass and reinstall windows on my desktop and use it... I know it will handle it... there is also spare moments at work as well
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rydi
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Post by rydi »

http://www.profantasy.com/

go to the above site and see what specs are required. you will probably want the desktop though, seeing that my desktop sometimes has slowdown w/it.
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durden
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Post by durden »

I want a swimming pool...
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Thael
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Post by Thael »

well the laptop could run it but it would not be very happy... might work for display only... do actual drawing and design on the desktop... great now I have another reason to install windows... again... for the billionth time... I hate OSRI... fuck you microsoft
That which is not dead can eternal lie and with strange eons even death may die
My Color is Blue
I value Knowledge, logic, and deceit. I love to pursue wisdom but also to manipulate and deceive. At my best, I am brilliant and progressive. At my worst, I am treacherous and cold. My symbol is a water droplet. My enemies are green and red.
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Post by Rusty »

Thael wrote:well as far as the ship building goes I do have one comment... this past weekend when at Game HQ I noticed a traveller gurps book that was dedicated to a single ship design... granted it was a modular premise but the book was thicker than most of the D&D complete books and it was all focused on the ultimate build-to-suit class of ship... if we want I can get it and we can use that and just have it look like we want (it was not very aesthetic really)...

character number crunching down to the last pieces (just 1 non-combatant shell and a few points to spend on main) and I am done... will get to work on the ship either tonight or tomorrow...

Cheyne... If I am using the laptop for the cartographer then its specs are:
P3 542Mhz with 256 RAM
and if that is not sufficient then I guess I will get off my lazy ass and reinstall windows on my desktop and use it... I know it will handle it... there is also spare moments at work as well
sooo...unless you guys are dead set on the TL10 only ship then there's no need to go ahead and build it...FTFT
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rydi
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Post by rydi »

i don't understand... shouldn't we start building it so that it will be ready some day?
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Rusty
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Post by Rusty »

well, earlier in the thread I asked if we wanted to go flat out with traveller or if we wanted to use a blended system. I can build the blended system during break...

I seemed to get the impression from you and chris that you'd rather go that direction, and I'm pretty unhappy with traveller so far and I've had to patch it two or three times already.

Meh, go ahead and start I guess, worst that can happen is you get practice with the system.

things are getting confusing, I think it's an artifact of using the forums. God what I wouldn't give to be able to talk to everyone at once and make sure they all heard me.

Ok, thael can go ahead and start building the ship, but I've said that I'll be releasing updates to the ship builder from time to time, and that will include rather suddenly TL 9 - 12 stuff, so you may have to rehash your ship concept at some point. That's fine with me, I'll put off any combat encounters until your ship is totally done, or beyond.

Anyone with a character can start playing whenever. Once I'm getting two or three people active in character, we can have our first couple things happen. We can completely fudge certain things, like crewmen running in to report things if it turns out that there aren't any crewmen. Besides, you guys should meet eachother and get to interact before anything happens.
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Post by durden »

Does Gideon have sand in his vagina?

Or are we talking about a mesh ship with some TL 11 ^ goodies?
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Rusty
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Post by Rusty »

yeah, I thought we were of one mind about having a mix of TL 9, 10, 11, and 12 stuff. The fix I did for the TL10 MT array is actually supposed to be a TL12 piece of equipment, and traveller can't handle force fields very well, so it's kind of a mess right now.

yes, there's sand.
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Post by durden »

To be honest, I am really not going to get deep into shipbuilding right now, as I've said before. I like the idea of it being a group project, but I don't have much to contribute right now. Anywho, I'd be okay with using Gid's ship if we can't get another going. Besides, we'll likely wreck it right away and need to make a new one.
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Thael
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Post by Thael »

blended... mmmm
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My Color is Blue
I value Knowledge, logic, and deceit. I love to pursue wisdom but also to manipulate and deceive. At my best, I am brilliant and progressive. At my worst, I am treacherous and cold. My symbol is a water droplet. My enemies are green and red.
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Post by Rusty »

so, a few things that came up in conversation with cheyne just now should be reiterated on the boards

In some game systems, ship building is plug n play. Unfortunately, however generic gurps is, and at least in traveller, ship building is not that way. Currently, you get a fixed amount of thrust from each unit of maneuvering drives, and a fixed amount of power from each unit of reactor. Both of these weigh, as does everything else, and maneuverability and sub light acceleration is thrust divided by mass. So, designating a dozen units of space to m-drives is all fine and good, but if you're heavily armored it might be a lot less thrust than you might think. The whole traveller ship building system screams "put me in excel". I built one in word just accounting for how much I thought I'd need of each thing, and it wound up immobile and used too much space. Here's a few things I'd like to change.

power output is currently linear relative to total number of spaces dedicated to reactor. This is wrong. The idea of a fusion reactor itself defies this idea, and it's a relatively *easy* fix, as long as we are using a spreadsheet like excel to do our computations for us. The volume of a reactor is what would determine it's output, and as we all know, the volume of a sphere increases faster than it's area. when i retool the builder I'll include computations to determine power output from volume, after enough spaces have been spent to accommodate containment and utilization facilities. this will wind up with one continuous reactor of a given shape, bounded by the longest dimension of the ship, which will produce more power per unit cost and mass than the current system uses. This might seem overly complicated, but it's no more complicated then the system already is, the system uses total surface area to determine the base cost of armor, which makes sense and is how it would really be. Using a similar system, we can build reactors instead of merely allocating spaces. Also, we can build several reactors, and multiply the output linearly, but in this way contain the reactor more efficiently, and go beyond a single reactor bounded by longest dimension. maneuver drives also currently produce a fixed thrust per unit, this may make more sense I guess, but we can incorporate multiple types of maneuver drive into the system, and provide rules for pushing them beyond a fixed number. Since we're already having to deal with a decent amount of math, and I have the math background to develop it, I'll try to come up with a more consistent builder that has enough options to allow variety, versatility, and realism. I'll have a little time to work on this over the weekend, and I'm formulating ideas about specifically what would be good and useful, and how to do it in excel.

once I've got a builder I'm totally happy with I'll send it to you guys, and you can build whatever you want. I rather specifically do not want to know the precise capabilities of your ship, so I'll include a page of the builder that has the only report that I need, and someone can screen shot it or cut and paste it into something else and send it to me and I'll be happy.

The first few events in the story only require you to have things like sensors, a way to get on and off planets, and a way to get on and off ships. A few other things too that you will *definitely* have.
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Post by Avilister »

Could we not invent a matter/anti-matter reactor, call it a warp core, give it some neat strobing lights, and assign Jordi to tell us when we're about to have a breech?

Edit: Also, the warp core was thin but very tall. It's a real space saver!
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