Generic Question Thread

[Eltharon]

Unless you're talking about a specific part of your game world, MREs are pretty easy to acquire, a google search will get you a bunch of online distributors that will ship in bulk (http://www.thereadystore.com/mre?gcl...FdhL5QodsH3k3A for example)

As for amounts, I believe its about 2000-3000 calories a day that a combat ready man needs, a little less for a woman. My off the wall guess would be maybe six pounds, but I recommend looking up nutrition facts and doing the math.

[Ragitsu]

Originally Posted by sgtcallistan

On cheap rations: given water and a fire source, dried pasta seems an excellent source. Dried mixed vegetables also. Mountaineers use such stuff, but soldiers are famously picky about good rations, and would probably prefer meat as well.

Considering they'll have to rely on Survival/Urban Survival otherwise, i'm sure they'll like whatever they can get ;-).

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Hm...I take it canned food has a poor weight to nutrition ratio?

[capnq]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Multiple topics aren't that bad, you know...

In fact, multiple topics are often preferred, especially for questions that others are likely to look up later for reference.

It saves people time to look at just the questions they want to read based on the thread title, rather than click on a vague grab-bag title to see if there are any questions inside that they could help with. That's why you see "use descriptive thread titles" so often in forum rules stickies.

If I'd been pressed for time, I wouldn't have opened this thread, and expanding on Ulzgoroth's comment is the only thing I have to contribute to the discussion.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Ragitsu

Hm...I take it canned food has a poor weight to nutrition ratio?

Canned food is full of water. Water is heavy. You don't want to carry water around if you can get it locally.

[Ragitsu]

Good point. I'll try to avoid those in the future.

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Next question. Why does the Rule of 20 (Campaign, 344) exist? What importance does it play in the game, and how big of a potential imbalance can it cause if one disregards it?

[Ketsuban]

Originally Posted by Ragitsu

Next question. Why does the Rule of 20 (Campaign, 344) exist? What importance does it play in the game, and how big of a potential imbalance can it cause if one disregards it?

IIRC, it's there to stop people absorbing penalties to success rolls by buying insane amounts of stat.

[weby]

Stats are way powerfull normally allready, but at higher point levels they get.. overly so.

Lets take a IQ 30 char without that rule:

That character could without any training/knowledge:
do all your book keeping in minutes: accounting IQ-6=24-9 for -90% time=15

Be able to reliably fool someone inhumanly smart(IQ 25) into thinking you are their spouse/child/parent having seen that person once: acting IQ-5: +1/iq dfiference, say 5(30-25). -15 for familiarity= 15

Let you know the secret doors in an alien building: architecture: iq-5 alien:-5=20-

just to give some examples for few skills that start with A...

[Ragitsu]

Thank you, Ketsuban and weby. I now understand why that rule is important.

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Going back to explosives for juuuust a second: there's this example of an explosive from the story below that i'd like to be available to my players.

Mine involved making high explosives.

I stayed about half a mile off from everyone else, because like all things involving chemicals and the ilk, this was rather dangerous. No point in taking out the entire camp if I made a mistake. I don't make mistakes, mind you. Miscalculations, perhaps.

We didn't have real high-quality materials like we did back when I fashioned homemade claymores for the guys on base. Or the time I made that anhydrous fuel oil truck bomb and we blew the **** out of that hotel in Cuba when we ran out of plastic explosives. No, the best I have at my disposal is fertilizer, old leaded gasoline, and a few other odds and ends I could scrounge up. The most powerful for size-to-energy ratio I could easily make was nitroglycerine. You know, the stuff they would use in dynamite. There's a problem with that. Nitroglycerine is shock and heat sensitive. If say, I was walking along with some in a jar, and I dropped the jar, it could go off. If you had some in a car, and the road was bumpy, it could go off. If you walked on a carpet with socks on, and touched the nitroglycerine, it could go off. If you left it out in the sun...you get the idea.

People used to try to stabilize it by mixing it with sawdust and wrapping it in paper. Dynamite. It worked, sort of. The nitroglycerine I could make wouldn't be as pure or effective, but something that explodes, well, is something that explodes.

I could make a boring old fuel bomb too, but those don't work so well for IEDs (military slang for Improvised Explosive Device). Maybe if I wanted to remove some barracks or whatnot. IEDs are devastatingly effective. They were used against the United States during the last big terrestrial war, and a few years before that. You think something is a pile of trash, or a rock, and it's not. It's a bomb. Bad ****. Funny how the tables turn, and members of what used to be the most technologically advanced army in the world who could call an airstrike or missile down in ten or fifteen minutes, who could annihilate entire countries at the press of a button, who could say a few words on a radio and then a few minutes later have a huge airplane with miniguns and a 105mm mortar demolish anything you pointed at, we who used to be the titans of this world - we are reduced to making bombs like members of some third world **** guerilla army. We are humbled under the thumb of a metal tower.

Of course, that's thinking a bit more in the long run. We had four artillery shells salvaged from one of the old battlefields that I had been carrying around. Shells fail a lot more often than you would think, and they are very safe to carry around. So, for the time being, we had instantly high explosives in a convenient vessel. Our foes in the war would often use cell phones to detonate the IED; we obviously didn't have that option. The best bet was a length of wire and a battery. It's not that hard to rig up.


...


We did it.

The group went silent as a tomb under the twilight sky. The throb of the APC's engines was heard, quite faintly at first. The throb turned into a whine as it picked up speed. We had set up the IED at a curve in the road. There was a pothole that we dug deeper, and covered with a thin layer of dirt. The gods of damaged roadways were with us. It was directly in the middle. The 105mm shell would do plenty of damage to a vehicle on either side of the road. We had concealed a wire over to my position on the cliff. When I touched the lead to the battery, the current would be completed and my device would explode instantly. I hoped.

The APC was going a good forty miles an hour or so when it came into view. Everyone inhaled and held their breath. People tensed. Some covered their ears. I smiled. They didn't slow for the corner. I fired off the IED.

It was a satisfying explosion. The instant before you set off a bomb, you can see it in your mind. You can see the explosion, tearing through metal and plastic and sending shrapnel into flesh and tearing people apart.

...

I set my Mosin down, and ran over to the smouldering wreck of the APC. The door was blown half off, so after we set up in position, I gave it a good kick and opened it with the tip of my boot, raising my 1911 and flicking off the safety as I did.

No survivors. There was a hole in the bottom, a long, jagged crack, and the soldier who was sitting on it was liquidated. Almost literally. Small chunks of him lay around the crew compartment. The second soldier was a lot more recognizable, but still very very dead.

Using the rules from High-Tech, how would one construct such a remote capable anti-vehicle improvised explosive (realistic or otherwise)? Is it true the shell would be that devastating?

[Kromm]

The intro of Land Mines (High-Tech, p. 189) rates rigging an artillery shell into an IED as an Explosives (Demolition)-2 task. It doesn't differentiate between trigger types. Command detonation (like your wire leading to a battery) is the easiest in real life, though – I've actually built a command detonator for a fuel-air bomb as a hobby project, and it worked fine despite me using my IQ default. It certainly wouldn't add any extra penalty.

Artillery shells are plenty deadly for the purpose. Looking at shells in the 100mm to 120mm range on pp. 140-148 of High-Tech, we're talking about 5d×5 to 6d×5 cr ex. Those are mostly TL6-7. Some TL8 shells are far more powerful.

A shell like one of those going off under a vehicle would generate a confined blast between the ground and the vehicle's underbelly. Damage would thus be ×1.5 (High-Tech, 181). For the damage range above, this would average anywhere from 131 to 157 damage, depending on the shell.

An APC with underside DR in the 35 range (p. B464) is doomed. A vehicle up-armored against mines might have DR 40-70 (see High-Tech, pp. 238-244), and not be a whole lot less doomed. Everybody inside is assuredly dead. Any vehicle lighter than a proper tank is crippled and possibly a write-off.

[Ragitsu]

Thank you, Kromm, for your once again quick and thorough answer. You do your products a great service :-).