TL11 and Species advantages

[Crzyraccoon]

So I'm on my develop on a TL11 Space Oprea/Military I'm making playable alien species and I need to know, what archtypes or type of species will fit best in a TL11 setting, especally in combat?

The big, strong orc isn't going to be much useful when armor penetrating lasers fill the battlefield but a speedy raccoon will, or is that true?

I just don't want to create obscure unbalance and make every species playable.

[Ulzgoroth]

Strength is quite useful for carrying around gear and weapons if you don't have powered armor and exoskeletons to make biological muscle unnecessary.

That said, being big is in almost all respects bad. It makes you easier to hit, and doesn't come anywhere near letting you carry enough thicker armor to make up for it. Being small, on the other hand, is awesome.

DX is always good as long as you actually have biologicals engaging in direct combat. Which may be questionable at TL11, but you are probably assuming it.

Personal mobility advantages don't do much good, since they can be replaced or bettered by personal mobility hardware.

The benefits of IQ in a technology-dominated battlefield should be obvious. Will is also useful (if you're using Tactical Shooting combat psychology anyway), and by the book so is Perception, though I'd suggest that technical aids should be able to make that redundant too.

Interestingly, HT actually may be more useful than at lower levels. A lot of weapons are either piercing, and thus subject to the Body Hits rules from High Tech, or tight-beam and thus should be. Consequentially despite the high damage values, there's a considerable chance that you'll be shot (right through) but not actually knocked out or killed. High HT lets you stay in action briefly after taking that hit to improve your chances of making it back to somewhere with proper medical care, which can then have you back in action fast.

[Flyndaran]

Star Wars is Space Opera, yet has big strong primitives aka Wookies.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Star Wars is Space Opera, yet has big strong primitives aka Wookies.

Star Wars can't be reasonably rendered as TL11, doesn't care about balancing races, and barely makes any pretense of having combat run on realistic rules.

That said, it's certainly the case that at the very space opera, not so much science fiction end of the scale big strong primitives are fairly common and often not just there to be chopped to bits by automatic weapons. However, for that sort of fiction you need some combination of cinematic rules switches and a tech base that looks shiny but doesn't work like any sort of remotely plausible ultratech.

[Flyndaran]

Space Opera is a sub-genre of Science Fiction.
And nothing perfectly fits Gurps tech levels.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Star Wars can't be reasonably rendered as TL11,
.

Sure it can. It has forcefields, blasters, anti=gravity, full AI that can be housed in a human-sized chassis.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Sure it can. It has forcefields, blasters, anti=gravity, full AI that can be housed in a human-sized chassis.

Force fields are TL^, Star Wars blasters have nothing to do with what GURPS Ultratech calls blasters (and also don't perform like what GURPS calls plasma guns despite having corresponding technobabble), antigravity is TL^. Their AI is only allowed in droids and shows no evidence of acting like a digital mind in any substantive way, but that could support claiming a half-crippled TL10 in computation...

[Varyon]

There are adjustments that can be made that will make big strong races more viable in ultratech settings. A big one is going to be having important gear that doesn't scale down well - if the smallest portable shield generator that can be made is 100 lb and is itself SM-1, it's more-or-less off limits to a small race, is a struggle for humans, and is a heavy but carry-able burden for larger creatures. Accelerator tube limits might make the best beam weapons only make sense as sniper rifles for humans (as the barrels have to be extremely long), while larger characters could more comfortably use them as assault rifles or similar. There may be ways to justify certain medical tech working better for larger characters - if you can make bionic organ replacements smaller than their originals, you may be able to give larger characters greater redundancy (which can help justify things like IT:DR). Rescaling the weapons vs armor scheme can also help - if a typical weapon does 6d(2) damage and typical armor is DR 40 (or hardened DR 20), that means a typical hit is going to do only a little damage. The SM+1 equivalents of those items are going to be 9d(2) damage and DR 60, the former of which will punch through typical armor fairly readily for serious damage, while the latter will render your character nearly immune to typical weaponry.

Having lots of combat occur in winding corridors that are still large enough for larger races to use comfortably can also help, as it increases the chances of melee coming into play (and that's where the big strong guys shine). There are also other ultratech schemes that similarly make melee more viable - a big strong giant could probably do well in a Dune-like setting.

[Ulzgoroth]

The problem with trying to make being big viable by making desirable equipment large is that there is nothing stopping small creatures from using large equipment. If the available technology makes the size of a car, for instance, be an optimal scale, then trolls the size of a car can kit out in that niche...but goblins the size of racoons can use car-sized mecha, which will use the same equipment and outperform the car-sized troll. And the pilot can likely bail out unharmed if the vehicle is disabled.


Being big is valuable when muscling stuff around with actual muscle is a key part of your activities, which is historically true and remains so in modern-day warfare. But at TL11, robotic muscle is both available enough and dextrous enough that it can substitute for biological on favorable terms.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

The problem with trying to make being big viable by making desirable equipment large is that there is nothing stopping small creatures from using large equipment.

At the very least, a troll has to pay less (in terms of both outright cost and energy consumption) for his backpack shield generator than an uplifted racoon has to pay for his troll-mech with built-in shield generator. There are also niches that can make being a troll a more feasible option - a battle mech is much more noticeable to the authorities than a troll is, the battle mech probably exerts much greater ground pressure than an encumbered troll (meaning it's less usable with weak ground underneath), and it may require an unfeasible amount of maintenance to keep it up and running. There's also the fact that TL11 space opera doesn't necessarily mean agile mechs - Star Wars has been shown in the thread to be arguably a TL11^ Space Opera setting, and the mechs we see there are typically rather clumsy.

You do bring up a good point, however. If being big is to have any advantages, you need to put serious restrictions on the ability for smaller characters to make themselves bigger. You'll also probably want to give larger characters certain Advantages with a significant discount (such as is seen for ST, but perhaps to an even greater extent) and/or outright make high SM a Disadvantage (and low SM an Advantage).