[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by johndallman

The rules for skill familiarity are in a box on B169. As written, they apply to operating equipment, but various skill descriptions, notably Mechanic/TL, make it clear that they also apply to maintaining and repairing equipment. B169 says you need eight hours of practice with a piece of equipment to become familiar with it. I've been reading some manuals for historical equipment, and getting rather dubious about acquiring real-world familiarity with something big, like a TL6 heavy bomber or TL7 warship, in eight hours.

Now, familiarities are an optional rule in practice. Some games use them, some don't. Heroes in cinematic games are usually naturally familiar with everything they run into. The default cinematic realism style of GURPS makes them optional, and acquiring them in a day-long montage is OK. However, a gritty cinematic or realistic game makes it plausible to use them, or at least make gestures towards acquiring them, even if you don't list them all on character sheets.

So, some sort of rule on how one acquires familiarity with big, complicated pieces of equipment seems like a good idea. But it's not obvious how to define such a rule. It has to be workable for fictional machines and vehicles, where one simply can't look up how many kinds of maintenance crew are required. I'm willing for familiarity for maintenance to have a different learning time to familiarity for operation. But we don't have many numbers defined for all equipment.

We have cost, and using that is going to need some kind of log scale. We have the number of people required to operate something, but the advent of computers reduces the need for crew while increasing overall complexity, so that's not very good for maintenance familiarity. What else? Weight is a poor guide to complexity.

For maintenance, take cost, divide by $1000 and round up. That gives us a number with a range between 1 and a few thousand. Apply that to the linear measurement column of the speed/range table, read off a speed/range penalty, take its absolute value and add 1. That's the number of days you need to acquire maintenance familiarity, so that's 1 day for things costing $2000 or less, 2 days for $3000, 3 days for $5000, and so on. An $8M helicopter is 21 days. An $18K speedboat is 7 days. This is looking vaguely plausible.

For operation, I'm tempted by the idea of days equal to the number of people you need to operate the equipment. But those are actual days of using it. Pilots usually spend much more time becoming familiar with an aircraft, but there are comparatively few hours of flying in there, because aircraft are expensive to operate. Does that work?

I think you’re overthinking it. First, familiarity works only on the skill being used to operate the equipment, but you may need more than one skill to operate all of the equipment and second, if it’s different enough to need more than eight hours to learn to operate and maintain it’s probably not a familiarity but a, perhaps generous, default from the old skill to the new skill. For example, you could drive a tractor-trailer which requires Driving (Heavy Transport) from your default of Driving (Automobile) with a Familiarity: Stickshift and you are at a penalty to operate it because it takes a fair bit of strength and you’re trying to maneuver a big, awkward vehicle. OTOH, once you open the hood, you probably should get a better default to maintain it. It still uses a battery to get started, it still has an engine with pistons and it still has a transmission. And, on that third hand that keeps showing up, you probably are going to have problems with those air brakes until you get your qualification.

For example, you have Driving (Tracked) and are familiar with operating heavy construction machinery: bulldozers, backhoes, maybe forklifts. Now someone plunks you down in a tank and wants you to drive it. You have a familiarity penalty (maybe). There’s the right tiller bar, left tiller bar and brake. So, the basic controls for moving it about are all there. You didn’t usually make pivot turns with your construction equipment because it tears up the sod but you did it once by accident, so you know the basic principle (pull back on one tiller bar, so that track is reversing while pushing forward on the other tiller bar, so that track is moving ahead. Ideally, you match speeds on both tracks); and now they want you to do it on purpose. The gauges are mostly the same but moved around a bit and up; you push a button, rather than turn a key to start; there’s a blackout setting on your headlights and they’ve added a big handle in red to flood the engine compartment in the event of fire. After eight hours of driving a tank, you should be fine. If they drop you into an APC after and ask you to drive it, you shouldn’t suffer a familiarity penalty at all.

OTOH, you don’t have Gunner skill at all. You can’t spend 8 hours familiarizing yourself with the tank’s gun and expect to do anything with it. Same for the driver’s machine gun, separate operating skill.

Now let’s consider maintaining your firearm. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re dealing with a light machine gun, rifle or pistol, the basics remain the same, scrub out the barrel, the chamber and the gas tube (if the weapon has one); run a cloth through the barrel, chamber (and gas tube) to pick up what you scrubbed off; check to make sure it’s clean (you got it all); if not, repeat until it is; once it’s clean, run an oily cloth through it to oil the barrel, chamber (and gas tube). You use the same kind of cleaning tools for all those weapons: a cleaning rod to scrub with (and maybe for the cloths); one or more bronze brushes for scrubbing the three parts out (depending on whether the parts are different sizes); a slotted jag to hold the cloth; a bottle or vial of gun oil; a packet of cloths; and maybe a cord pullthrough to substitute for the cleaning rod. The primary difference will be the length of the cleaning rod, which may unscrew into shorter pieces to conserve space. The box magazines all strip the same way and they all need the same items cleaned. The only maintenance familiarity you need is in field stripping the weapon so you can get at the barrel, chamber (and gas tube) to clean them. Most militaries can teach the actual field stripping and assembly in ten to fifteen minutes, even for land-based artillery pieces; the rest of the time is practice. I don’t have any problem believing 8 hours would remove the familiarity penalty. By the time you’ve spent eight hours field stripping a weapon, you can usually do it blindfolded. In some militaries, stripping, cleaning and assembling the weapon while blindfolded is the qualification test.

It’s a similar thing for switching between guns [artillery pieces]. Going from a 105mm towed to a 155mm self-propelled gun required less than 8 hours familiarity training for me. Okay, the traversing telescope is physically bigger but otherwise unchanged; the elevating mechanism is exactly the same; turning the handwheel moves the turret as well as the barrel, interesting but no difference for me doing my job; the cradle locking strut has been replaced by the cradle locking strut, okay bigger, heavier, swings the opposite way and I have to unclamp and unclamp the ring to get it around the barrel but not that different to operate; loading, okay, loading’s a problem.

The barrel has to be level in order to load, two men to load the projectile because it is heavy, mechanical rammer to shove the projectile home, load the propellant separately, elevate the barrel and the commander loads the primer. Definitely different, but nothing 8 hours practice won’t take care of.

Just touring a Leopard tank though, I was reasonably sure that I could operate the gun: set bearing here, set range there, elevating and traversing handwheels there, open breech this way, load as per usual, lanyard for firing there. The big thing familiarity would do for me there is: “Watch out for the recoil. It’s cramped in here. If you don’t want the breech imprinting you, stand here or crouch there when you fire.”

Anything that takes more than eight hours to switch between is probably a different skill rather than a familiarity of a skill you know. Going back to firearms, cleaning a flintlock musket isn’t going to require a different kinds of cleaning tools or a different principle of cleaning than an M16. It will probably require more elbow grease because black powder residue really sticks to the barrel and you may have to settle for what you’d consider ”dirty” in an M16 when you’re finished but it’s still the same thing, even allowing for the difference in TL.

OTOH, Beam Weapons is an entirely different skill. Operating it is still probably line up the sights and squeeze the trigger, so I can fire it (once anyway) but if I try disassembling the “guts” of it, I’m probably lost.

Someone with Beam Weapons skill only has familiarity penalties because he knows, at least in principle, what he is looking at: “Okay, power source here; capacitor; um, collimating tube?, I think; focusing unit; sealing lens. Looks like the focusing unit is tilted a bit and the sealing lens is cracked, should be no problem. Give me three minutes.” even if he’s looking at a blaster rather than a laser.

If blasters are different enough in operating principle from lasers, it may be: (looks inside), What the H-E-double hockey sticks is this this stuff?” Which is why familiarities are optional.