07-15-2018, 12:40 AM | #51 |
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: Stocking your Life Pod
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07-15-2018, 06:19 AM | #52 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Stocking your Life Pod
If every planet has earth-like flora and fauna, some carefully chosen tech will make getting food a lot easier.
A chemical analyzer that tests organic matter for nutrition and toxins will be nice. A scanner that can locate large animals and a long range gun to shoot them will provide food the urbanites will actually eat. We've mentioned a cook stove, right? The pod itself is steerable, so while you can't go home, you can at the very least choose the biome you crash in. Different pods may be optimized for different biomes. I'm not 100% sure what the best biome to land in is. tropical simplifies food and shelter, but exposes you to disease. Forests will have more edible vegetation (fruit), but plains make hunting easier.
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Be helpful, not pedantic Worlds Beyond Earth -- my blog Check out the PbP forum! If you don't see a game you'd like, ask me about making one! |
07-15-2018, 08:18 AM | #53 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Stocking your Life Pod
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The pod's AI is given Navigation (Space)-12. Simple successs drops you (safely) 5Dx100 miles from your intended target. Subtract 200 miles per margin of success with a minimum of 1 mile (also the result on a Crit Success). Failure drops you somewhere on the planet with a Crit Fail being a potentially fatal disaster. Being even 200 miles off target in California could land you either on the beach, in the desert, in woodlands or the mountains. The whole 1700 miles would just barely put you on the right continent. If I were the pilot with abetter score in Navigation thna 12 I'd mostly concentrate on avoiding big deserts or really large bodies of water. If the continent was like an uninhabited North America I'd aim for somewhere in the Great Plains.
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Fred Brackin |
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07-15-2018, 09:13 AM | #54 |
Join Date: Jul 2015
Location: England
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Re: Stocking your Life Pod
Does the pod have any sort of sensors? Ultra-tech seems to make it sound like it relies on library computer data though, which might be better than sensors for a known world, but useless if you're heading towards an unexplored planet. It would be hard to determine a good landing site just from looking at a planet as you hurtle towards it.
Even with a simple camera, photographs from orbit/as you come in to land might be useful for getting the general lay of the land. More detailed sensor analysis would probably be a bit harder but still useful - for example, working out the axial tilt of the planet and which season your proposed landing site it in - plenty of places are perfectly pleasant in the summer, but if you're still there in winter it'll be covered in two metres of snow! |
07-15-2018, 12:26 PM | #55 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Stocking your Life Pod
As the concept has evolved I beleive that the urgency to board the pods has diminished. You'll come out of the spacegate roughly around the local equivalent of the L4 pt with hyperdrive and main power dead. The ship's passive sensors would probably still work though and you'd have until the life support or other critical system on the main ship failed to use those.
The main ship is stil not meant to support life for an extended period of time even with the power on. Normal trips are measured in days. With it off evacuation is an inevitable need. You'll probably have some time to take pictures but I still wouldn't count on a precision landing.
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Fred Brackin |
07-15-2018, 03:01 PM | #56 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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Re: Stocking your Life Pod
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I love widgets like that. Quote:
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I'd need to get a grant and go shoot a thousand goats to figure it out. Last edited by acrosome; 07-15-2018 at 03:16 PM. |
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07-15-2018, 05:49 PM | #57 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Stocking your Life Pod
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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07-15-2018, 06:08 PM | #58 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Stocking your Life Pod
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I am also leery about the difference between HT and UT batteries. That's at least 4x power-wise by the Laser and Blaster Design article in Pyramid 3/37 but UT power cells also do much more than some HT batteries. A UT B cell would not only run your Small Computer for 20 hours. It would run your Mini Laser Torch for 3 minutes. You could burn through a lot of stuff with one of those in 3 minutes. Were I actually at the point of running this I might wave my hands and say something like "Your solar recharger will recharge 1 B cell per day" even though I have no idea if that would be right. However at this point my certainty that an E cell will recharge 1000 B cells counts for a good bit.
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Fred Brackin |
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07-15-2018, 07:00 PM | #59 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Stocking your Life Pod
There is a wide range of what is potentially habitable for human beings, so being dropped on a habitable planet does not mean that your pod will have the supplies that you need for that particular world. For example, a planet with a 720 hour day could be perfectly habitable for human beings (such as a planet in a resonance orbit around a MV star), it would just be a horrible idea to depend on solar power because you are only going to have 450 hours without usable sunlight (90 hours of evening, 270 hours of night, and 90 hours of morning). Now, you could just make every world like Europe, but that gets really boring after a while.
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07-15-2018, 09:29 PM | #60 | |
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: Stocking your Life Pod
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A UT solar charger is mentioned in Pyramid 12 (which also has the TL10 shelterpack): "Adding small solar panels to gadgets lets them trickle-charge in daylight. It costs 20% of the cost of the power cells. Recharging could take a few days to weeks, depending on the device’s surface area relative to power capacity." There's also some figures in GURPS Vehicles 2e, which I'd say you could use as a ballpark at least. That would put a UT solar charger at twice today's (TL8) output, per weight. If we assume a x4 battery capacity, you need a double-sized solar panel to keep up. So, a couple of Goal Zero Nomad types at TL9 will do for most applications. Call it, $125, 3 lbs. each. |
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