Pak Protecters in GURPS

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

To judge Pthssspok's overall IQ, you also have to look at where, and how, he failed. And Pthssspok makes a couple notable errors in IQ-based skills that suggest, to me, that their IQ can't be absurdly high. First, of course, is the fact that they clearly rolled more poorly than Brennan did on Psychology, to work out the probable human reaction to Tree of Life, allowing Brennan to get the drop on Pthssspok. In fact, Brennan speculated that Pthssspok still thought Brennan was just behaving like a "normal" Protector, killing a competitor to ensure his own bloodline's monopoly on the transformation.

Second, though, and much more hugely, is Pthssspok's flub of a roll in the first place, putting Brennan into his cargo hold with inadequately secured Tree of Life. Pthssspok looked at Brennan and, knowing what an untransformed breeder looked like, decided that Brennan wasn't related, to the point where they were surprised that Brennan had eaten the root and undergone the change. That, to me, is a major failure, if not a critical failure, on Biology, or Physiology, or something. I doubt very much that anyone trained in even TL 8 levels of those skills, when presented with an example of Homo sapiens next to one of Homo habilis, wouldn't instantly conclude they were closely related. Pthssspok doesn't even have the excuse of living in a universe where "parallel evolution" turns up humanoids on every world, because Niven was always pretty careful about having aliens be alien in Known Space, with very clearly different body plans.

I'm not so sure that the second roll should be considered a flub. Pthsspok's mission was to bring tree of life to the breeders of earth. Protector motivations really warp their thinking. I think Pthsspok very intentionally turned Brennan into a Protector. Yes, he knew he'd die, but he'd accomplished his mission. Why would be want to survive?



Misjudging the human reaction to tree of life is a different matter, and a little harder to explain. Certainly, Pthsspok was working with a very alien mind, and that inflicted a heavy familiarity penalty. It would have been nice to study human society first, but I suspect his purpose got the better of him there. Protectors are depicted with very high intelligence but some very crippling self-control issues.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Kzinti STL flight was the gravity polarizer,

I'm reasonably certain that the Kzinti must have had some other form of STL propulsion besides the gravity polarizer. Niven never exactly made it super-clear how it worked, but its description in Protector implied that it was only useful when it was going "downhill" - i.e., towards a gravity source. I'd assume it works by somehow negating the effect of all other sources of gravity on your ship besides the one taking you in the direction you wanted to go. That works fine if you're in the outer solar system and want to get inwards fast, but for getting back out, it's a lot worse - you'd have to turn off the local star's gravity and rely on other sources to pull you back out, but that would be slow in almost all circumstances - the pull of gravity from Alpha Centauri, say, when you're at Sol, is so slight that even if you discount all other sources, it would still probably take years, if not decades or centuries, to get to anywhere you'd want to engage your hyperdrive.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that Kzinti must have had other propulsion devices besides the gravity polarizer on their ships. Those could have been reactionless as well, of course. But I think that the Kzinti don't necessarily need to not have reaction drives at all in order to learn the Kzinti Lesson. I think simple ignorance and hidebound-ness is probably sufficient - they had never used reaction drives that way, and so never thought of their potential. And their survey of human space wouldn't have tipped them off, because humans didn't use reaction drives that way either, at that point, and didn't think of them as weapons. It's just, humans were much better at adapting and innovating once we needed to study war once more.

Originally Posted by Bruno

As much as the Kzinti are poster children for hidebound and impulsive, they aren't totally stupid. Possibly a little stupid though.

Yeah, I'd peg pre-Man-Kzin Wars Kzinti at something like a racial IQ of 9, and both Impulsive and Bad Temper with fairly low self-control numbers: 9, if not 6. Whereas by Louis Wu and Chmee's time, the self-controls on both were probably up to 12 or 15, with many individuals buying one or both disadvantages off entirely, and the racial IQ might have bumped up to 10.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I think Pthsspok very intentionally turned Brennan into a Protector.

If you assume the narrative written from Pthsspok's perspective is at all accurate (it's hypothetically Brennan's reconstruction of what Pthsspok would have thought and felt, but I don't see why Brennan would be lying to us here), they definitely did not intentionally turn Brennan into a Protector. After encountering Brennan for the first time, Pthsspok thinks "His native captive smelled wrong... He was not of those Pthsspok had come seeking. Where were they, then?"
"They had not come here. The natives... would have offered little resistance to colonists, judging by this one sample."

And then, later on, after finding Brennan in the roots, Pthsspok thinks: "With a kind of bewildered fury, Pthsspok thought: 'How can I get anything done if they keep changing the rules?'".

I think it's pretty clear from those quoted bits that Pthsspok had concluded that Brennan was not a breeder, and was surprised when he ate the root and began the transformation.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Misjudging the human reaction to tree of life is a different matter, and a little harder to explain. [...] Protectors are depicted with very high intelligence but some very crippling self-control issues.

I'm not sure which mental disadvantage would represent Pthsspok's blind spot here, though - I don't think it can be something like Delusion (breeders will always want to make the change to Protectors), because then Brennan's behavior doesn't make sense. Brennan clearly thought that Pthsspok would work it out, given time, and acted to kill them first - if Pthsspok had a full-blown Delusion, I would think that would prevent them from coming to the correct conclusion for much longer, allowing Brennan to keep them alive and helpful for a concurrently long time. Indeed, I think any mental disadvantage enforcing that Pthsspok discount the psychological impact has the same problem - Brennan clearly thought it was not going to take long for Pthsspok to figure out the problem, hence his precipitate action.

[temp]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

So, my feeling is that Pthssspok must have been rolling their Biology or Physiology at default there, and must have had an effective skill level lower than 10, and probably notably lower, for that kind of failure to be probable.

Not quite sure I buy your logic here. The plot of the story just wouldn't work if Pthssspok "made those rolls". There's a quote out there: "Once again, Probability proves itself willing to sneak into a back alley and service Drama as would a copper-piece harlot." ...

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Nope.
Anyway, my memory of the story is that the Kzinti were using a "gravity polarizer" (which they may have stolen from the Kdatlyno). There ship was able to maneuver to rendevous in deep space with the Human STL ship.

In PROTECTOR, it says "the gravity polarizer would not lift him against gravity" and it's stated that the ARMs are unable to turn it off in order to remove the ship from Mars for study. "The gravity polarizer seemed beyond human understanding" so that explains why they are not using it 250 years later when the Kzin find the Angel's Pencil in "The Warriors". This is also in interstellar space and the Kzin are doing hundreds of G's, so this gravity planer seems distinct from the Pak's gravity polarizer.

IIRC, "The Survivor" in Man-Kzin Wars IV reveals that the Kzinti got their tech by serving and then overthrowing the Jotoks; Kdatlynos were a later conquest.

Originally Posted by Bruno

Kzinti STL flight was the gravity polarizer,

What the Kzinti use is also referred to as an induced gravity drive and a gravity planer.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

I don't think that feat is necessarily explained by high overall IQ, though. Pthssspok wasn't "baseline" when it came to starship engine maintenance. They were not only involved in the construction of their own ship in the first place, but they had also controlled the ship's drive manually through their entire voyage, at least using far less automation than a human would be comfortable with. Pthssspok's point levels in Mechanic (Fusion Drive) must have been enormous, simply from on-the-job training! And even if they didn't have any levels at all in Engineer (Fusion Drive), their default from Mechanic would have still have been quite good.

Drive engineering was Pthssspok's specialty, along with various branches of physics.

To judge Pthssspok's overall IQ, you also have to look at where, and how, he failed. And Pthssspok makes a couple notable errors in IQ-based skills that suggest, to me, that their IQ can't be absurdly high. First, of course, is the fact that they clearly rolled more poorly than Brennan did on Psychology, to work out the probable human reaction to Tree of Life, allowing Brennan to get the drop on Pthssspok. In fact, Brennan speculated that Pthssspok still thought Brennan was just behaving like a "normal" Protector, killing a competitor to ensure his own bloodline's monopoly on the transformation.

Pretty much the only Psychology skill it's possible for Pthssspok to have is Psychology (Pak Protector), because he's never in his life encountered (or even imagined, prior to arrival at Sol) a non-Protector sapience. He has zero frame of reference for how a human might act. Particularly since Pak have traits like Hidebound and Incurious that survive the transition, and Pthssspok undoubtedly has.

Second, though, and much more hugely, is Pthssspok's flub of a roll in the first place, putting Brennan into his cargo hold with inadequately secured Tree of Life. Pthssspok looked at Brennan and, knowing what an untransformed breeder looked like, decided that Brennan wasn't related, to the point where they were surprised that Brennan had eaten the root and undergone the change.

He knows full well the second he sees spaceships that they can't be crewed by breeders, and aren't crewed by Protectors. Therefore, despite superficial similarities, these aren't breeders, QED.

That, to me, is a major failure, if not a critical failure, on Biology, or Physiology, or something. I doubt very much that anyone trained in even TL 8 levels of those skills, when presented with an example of Homo sapiens next to one of Homo habilis, wouldn't instantly conclude they were closely related. Pthssspok doesn't even have the excuse of living in a universe where "parallel evolution" turns up humanoids on every world, because Niven was always pretty careful about having aliens be alien in Known Space, with very clearly different body plans.

The idea of breeders mutating is anathema to Pthsspok; his entire existence is devoted to making sure it doesn't happen. It's much, much easier to believe that convergent evolution produced superficially similar aliens than that he has failed so utterly before he even began.

So, my feeling is that Pthssspok must have been rolling their Biology or Physiology at default there, and must have had an effective skill level lower than 10, and probably notably lower, for that kind of failure to be probable.

I feel that psychological and situational disadvantages cover that adequately.

Much of their intelligence is better portrayed by giving them other "smart" traits, such as the list I suggested, and assuming that they frequently have a lot of points sunk into skills as well.

I added several of them to the revised template; Oracle and Gadgeteer I'd say are optional traits that Protectors from the right sort of background can buy, but aren't part of the basic package.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by temp

Not quite sure I buy your logic here. The plot of the story just wouldn't work if Pthssspok "made those rolls".

Actually, I'd argue it would, at least the Physiology roll to spot that Brennan was clearly a Pak descendant - Pthssspok could have easily decided that he needed a "local guide" and thought that a fellow Protector would be easier to deal with, and deliberately induced the change. Clearly, that version of the plot would make sense, given at least one person in the thread was under the impression that's what happened!

Originally Posted by temp

There's a quote out there: "Once again, Probability proves itself willing to sneak into a back alley and service Drama as would a copper-piece harlot." ...

Perhaps, but once you start going down that road, it swiftly becomes impossible to make any strong statements about a character's abilities based on what happens in a story. If Pthssspok's mistakes all stem from failures at significant skills at dramatically significant times, how do we know his successes don't come from equally likely critical successes, rather than actual abilities?

Also, I'd argue that if we're following typical dramatic laws, it's actually more consistent for Pthssspok's failures to be in skills they don't know, rather than random dice failures on skills they do have a very good level in. In general, dramatic stories tend to over-emphasize the competence of characters who are supposed to be highly talented/skilled/etc. Take action heroes, for example. Can you remember a time when someone like that flubbed a task they were supposed to be good at? Dropped a gun in the process of fast drawing it, for instance? Or tripped while they were running down a street pursuing a foe? Similarly, "smart" or "genius"-type characters almost never seem to make gross errors of fact or have brain farts where they just can't remember some little obvious thing. For competent people, failures like this are usually supposed to tell us something about them - if a smart character makes an obvious mistake, it's to show us that this is an area of weakness for them in some way. And I feel, in Protector's case, that the best reason for the failure to identify Brennan as descended from Pak is that Pthssspok lacks biological training.

Or, of course, we could assume that Larry Niven is, and always has been, rather garbage at biological stuff. That's honestly the most likely explanation, to my mind. :-) But that pretty much kills any possibility of using anything in his writing to do a conversion, so I think we can discount it for now.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

Which magic drive was that? The original drive was actually described as quite a bit less effective than Pthssspok's, with the trip taking far longer than Pthssspok's ramjet design allowed. I believe it was described as an ion drive, actually, though a real-world ion drive probably wouldn't produce even the performance they got. Remember, though, that their trip took so long that some of the Protectors actually died of old age, which wasn't thought possible up until then.

That was the drive I meant. I was talking about the original Pak in the Solar System, our (and all the monkey/apes) distant ancestors.

Supposedly, theyu took a piece of asteroidal rock, 2 miles long and a mile in diameter, IIRC, hollowed out a few chambers to hold themselves and a few thousand Pak breeders, mounted a fission-powered ion drive on it, and came to Sol. They supposedly (IIRC) got the thing up to about .16c.

OK, at .16c you get from Pak to Earth in about 180,000 years, give or take, it's not close enough to c for relativistic effects to matter much. But I have my doubts about getting to .16c by ion drive, and then there's the issue of energy. Assuming a density of about 3 tons per cubic meter, a rock 2 miles long and 1 mile in diameter masses pretty close to 20 billion tons. If we're generous and assume it was half-hollow, that cuts us down to 10 billion tons.

So, ten billion tons as .16c is a kinetic energy of 1.7* 10^17 kilowatt-hours, actually more because I didn't bother to allow for the minor relativistic effects.

So, 1.7 * 10^17 kW-h is the equivalent of millions of tons of U-235. Plus they have to decelerate again when they arrive. Plus I'm assuming perfect efficiency and neglecting what relativistic effects there are at .16c.

Maybe it's theoretically possible, but I don't think it would work.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

I'm reasonably certain that the Kzinti must have had some other form of STL propulsion besides the gravity polarizer.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

What the Kzinti use is also referred to as an induced gravity drive and a gravity planer.

I think the Kzinti tech is best rationalized as an advanced version of the Pak tech. Which explains why humans were still stuck with torch ships until they bought the FTL drive off the Outsiders - it was even more incomprehensible, particularly when mostly melted by fusion drive.

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

But I think that the Kzinti don't necessarily need to not have reaction drives at all in order to learn the Kzinti Lesson. I think simple ignorance and hidebound-ness is probably sufficient - they had never used reaction drives that way, and so never thought of their potential. And their survey of human space wouldn't have tipped them off, because humans didn't use reaction drives that way either, at that point, and didn't think of them as weapons.

Did they scout human space? I had the impression they stumbled on the colony ship, and basically screamed and leaped - as is typical for Kzin. Certainly when they made Telepath pick the brains of the humans, they couldn't get anything that wasn't in their minds already. However, the idea that their exhaust was a navigational hazard with lethal consequences WOULD be in the minds of the crew, much as a car driver understands that hitting people with their car is lethal, even if they don't think of the car as a weapon. Telepath was in such miserable shape I don't think he could have made the mental leap of "... therefore they could point it at us" but I feel he was negligent for not mentioning "their backwash is totally murderous, don't fly there".

[warellis]

How in the world did the kzinti have a drive that could push 200 G's and yet several hundred years later humans were still putzing around on 20-30 G's at best?