Blog: Worlds Beyond Earth

[ericthered]

Robots as Spaceships: Chassis and Cargo


This post is about how to use spaceships and the tech books to build a single piece of gear. I identify what needs to come from spaceships, what needs to come from the tech books, and I talk about arranging seating.

[ericthered]

Robots as Spaceships: Between Size Modifiers


I have a relatively small post today, featuring an expanded and extrapolated table of Size Modifiers and Relative costs for spaceships in the SM-5 to SM+4 range.

[ericthered]

Robots as Spaceships: Arms, Legs, and Mecha


Here I discuss how to turn a spaceship into a humanoid robot. Or into any of a number of forms. I talk about how to customize the arm and leg spaceship systems beyond the simple forms found in the books. Whether you need spider vehicles with light weight legs or an robot with an arm twice its length, this article will give you the tools you need to build any robot limb you need!

[ericthered]

Spaceship Weapons: How Much Damage Should Beam Weapons Do?



When I looked at how tough spaceships armor should be, I was asked when I would cover the weapons systems. I hadn't planned on doing so, but I said I'd give it a shot. This is the first look at weapons. Its the easiest look as well.



So how does beam damage in spaceships compare to Ultra-Tech?

[ericthered]

Spaceships: How Much Damage Should Guns Do?

This is the second portion of spaceship's weapon analysis. It took some digging to get there, but I was pleased with how clean some of the results were. I was also surprised by how much damage they should be doing.

So how much damage should spaceship guns be doing?

[ericthered]

Melee Weapon Packages for the BAT

A while back in a discussion about modular templates, I expressed the opinion that it was simpler, easier, and better to adjust Action 4 to fit other genres than to build new modular templates. And some one said, "what about low-tech"?

this doesn't cover all of low tech, nor even all of low-tech combat, but here are a number of packages for the BAT based on the martial arts book. I hope you find them useful!

[ericthered]

Robots as Spaceships: Responsive Movement

In which I propose a rule for giving up speed for acceleration when using spaceships. Its fairly simple, and I look forward to using it later in the series.

[ericthered]

Robots as Spaceships: Terrestrial Motive Systems


Pyramid 34 has some awesome systems for making spaceships into ground vehicles. We plan to use them for making robots a bit smaller and less grand than your typical spaceship.

Here, we look at options to tweak the terrestrial motive's system's top speeds and costs to emulate more genres, including slowing down the top speeds.

[ericthered]

Robots As Spaceships: Swimmers


continuing our look at spaceships motive systems, today we look at aquatic transportation. While with terrestrial motive systems we focused on adding options, especially for tweaking speeds and costs, today we mostly look at miniaturizing aquatic propulsion, as well as looking at some quirks of ballast tanks that come up when you don't have to have human's aboard.

[ericthered]

Robots as Spaceships: Quadcopters

In the last decade or so, consumer robotics has acquired an all star: the Quadcopter. We look at why Quadcopters are different from helicopters, and how we represent that in a spaceships system.