Quote:
Originally Posted by onetrikpony
I think I don't understand the reason for going to the effort of converting between 3e and 4e statistics for ST, Computer complexity, and the unused stats like SS and PD.
What problem would I create if I built a robot in the 3e system and just applied used the ST statistics; (lifting and damage) from 4e basic set?
For computers it looks fine to me to choose the complexity you want and then just use the stats from UT for size, weight and cost.
Seems to me that the old "build it yourself" books could be pretty easily updated by just giving the components the stats from 4e and ignoring PD and SS.
What am I missing in ignoring the work of conversion?
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For human sized robots with little armor and stats that stay close to 10, you could reasonably use the 3e values with no change, the problems are when you start getting big. I agree with ignoring SS and PD, and I think it would work fine to just transfer computers over (although there are issues with DX and IQ mentioned above). When it comes to ST you run into problems, because that stat changed a great deal.
For an extreme example, take the Thor from 3e which has an ST of 2000 and 1500 HP. In 3e, this would cost 1160 points for the ST and 7500 points for the HP and allow it to carry 20 tons as extra heavy encumbrance. If we just transferred the Thor to 4e, that would cost 15920 point for the ST 2980 point for the HP and allow it to carry 4000 tons as extra heavy encumbrance.
So not only would the point cost be radically different, which is to be expected when changing editions, but the robots capabilities are vastly different---it can not lift 200 times more than it could before. Also, it will outclass similar vehicles from 4e. There are no mecha of its side in 4e Ultratech, but it is about the same size as the tanks in Ultratech which have only 150 HP, ten times less than the Thor.
While that is an extreme case, more reasonable examples will also have problems with conversion. The TL 9 battlesuit from 3e Robots has ST 30 compared to +10 ST from the 4e battlesuit.
Besides ST, at high TL weapons and armor should be changed (although by how much I don't know). 3e vehicles and armor tended to have a much higher DR than in 4e. The Thor mentioned above has 6000 points of semi-ablative DR while the tanks in Ultratech only have 700 points of DR. The battlesuit in Robots has 160 DR, while the 4e battlesuit is only DR 70. Converting armor and weapons is hard What you would want to do is make a new table of how much a point of DR weighs at each TL and rework the weapon creation system for 4e weapons. For weapons, some of the conversion is needed because damage of ultratech weapons has changed, and some because the weapons themselves have changed---lasers in particular worked very differently in 3e.
At modern tech levels and below I'm not sure any conversion is really needed; 3e weapon and armor values are fairly close to the 4e versions, although weapon accuracy would have to be reduced a lot.
Also, some thought needs to be given when converting between TL between the two editions, because in 3rd edition TL 7 was modern day and TL 16 was the maximum limit while in 4th edition TL 8 is modern day and TL 12 is the highest possible.