Question about starting equipment and TLs

jneedler · 03-03-2017, 10:02 PM

Hi, just starting a campaign, and have questions. Our group has the "GM's decision is law" rule, but we are also new to GURPS and trying to understand the intent of the Basic set.

Campaign: we are playing a campaign set in the Firefly universe, which gives us some very complicated TL (Tech Level) situations. We called the 'overall' TL of the universe TL 10 ($50,000 average starting wealth), though obviously some TL sectors are different (Transportation is TL 12) and the overall TL of some planets are significantly lower.

For starting characters, mostly TL 8 and some TL 9 weapons are available (again, average starting wealth at TL 10 is $50,000). If a character buys the TL 8 Auto Pistol, .44M as starting equipment (listed cost of $750 on page 278), is there any adjustment to that price in a TL 10 universe?

The Basic Set gives an example of converting higher TL equipment costs to a lower TL campaign setting (page 27), but doesn't give an example (or any expressly stated ruling that we found) on converting lower TL equipment costs to a higher TL setting. Is that because the Pistol remains at a fixed cost across TL 8, 9, 10, etc (which makes it cheaper as a percentage of starting wealth each subsequent TL increase)?

Related question: what about equipment that DOES increase in TL? The Pistol technology remains the same (and has the same effectiveness). However, the TL for personal electronics WILL change each level, and a TL 8 computer will be virtually useless in a TL 10 world. Is there a guideline, formula, etc, for items like that, or do we need to just completely invent the price of a personal computer at TL 10?

Thanks in advance!

Dalzig · 03-03-2017, 11:04 PM

Once you pass TL8, you're looking into the realm of GURPS Ultra-tech. That book helps flesh out details for TL9 and above computers, including their price, power usage, complexity, software. It looks like TL9 computers are assumed to be much more efficient as a $100 TL9 computer is 20x faster (Complexity 4 vs Complexity 3) than a $1000 TL8 computer.

How useful a TL8 computer is in a TL10 world depends on what you want to do with it. It will run the exact same programs as it used to since its complexity hasn't changed (see B472, Computers). The main problem is that it won't be able to run higher complexity programs needed for TL10 skill-use. You don't want to design a TL10 spaceship with a TL8 computer. You might be able to use a TL8 computer to hack into another TL8 computer.

With all that said, I don't think there's a general rule for what does and does not become cheaper as the world's TL increases. It's pretty well understood that computers get extremely faster at the same time they get extremely cheaper. A TL8 firearm is already pretty efficient and increased technology can't really do much about it.

You pretty much have to examine each technology and consider if there is actually a more efficient means to produce it.

Anaraxes · 03-04-2017, 06:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jneedler

If a character buys the TL 8 Auto Pistol, .44M as starting equipment (listed cost of $750 on page 278), is there any adjustment to that price in a TL 10 universe?

No; just use the book price.

Quote:

The Basic Set gives an example of converting higher TL equipment costs to a lower TL campaign setting (page 27), but doesn't give an example (or any expressly stated ruling that we found) on converting lower TL equipment costs to a higher TL setting. Is that because the Pistol remains at a fixed cost across TL 8, 9, 10, etc (which makes it cheaper as a percentage of starting wealth each subsequent TL increase)?

Exactly. Increased wealth is reflected by having more GURPSbucks, not across-the-board decreases in fixed prices of goods using a deflationary fixed currency in the price lists.

Quote:

The Pistol technology remains the same (and has the same effectiveness). However, the TL for personal electronics WILL change each level, and a TL 8 computer will be virtually useless in a TL 10 world.

Actually, handgun technology has improved since TL7. Not huge differences that are obvious in the real world unless you're an enthusiast, and it's not always about the damage in RPG combat, with factors like reliability and weight improving, not to mention cost that we've already covered. But a TL8 pistol is a better piece of gear than a TL7 pistol. You're assuming that there won't be any more pistol improvements, and also projecting the very current-day notion that personal consumer electronic gadgets must necessarily improve by leaps and bounds, just because they did over the past 20 years -- even though PCs have vastly slowed down their rate of change in that time, and even smartphones have already levelled on what features people find worthwhile throwing into the devices. It's not just about transistor size or metallurgy, but also the needs of the users and what they value. A transhumanist technology singularity setting is at least as much about the change in the people as it is about the tech.

The TL8 computer will continue to do what it does just as well as it did when it was made. That's not "useless", even if it's not as good as analogous equipment designed for the same niche -- if that even changes, as it hasn't for handguns. The TL8 computer might or might not interoperate with the newer stuff; that depends on whether the engineers are keeping standard interfaces. (TCP/IP is a TL7 technology, and there have been newer and putatively better things invented and internationally standardized since then, but we're still using it to run the Internet, and no one has serious plans to change that.)

Those kinds of factors might be true in a future setting. Or they might not. Which leads to my main point -- most GURPS books are not setting books, and that's particularly true when we're talking about Ultra-Tech. The books aren't definitions of pre-designed worlds to be used as-is, off-the-shelf. They're catalogs sampled across a wide variety of possible settings.

There's really no such thing as "a TL10 world", as though they were all the same, have exactly the same tech base, a uniform tech level across the board in every application of every technology, and most importantly for cautionary purposes -- not everything labeled as "TL10" is even expected to simultaneously exist and be balanced against other TL10 gear. The TL numbers are rough approximations of what you might expect, but the group (or GM alone, if that's the way he does things) needs to go over the options and figure out what tech actually exists in their setting and what it does.

Firefly doesn't exhibit much advance in weapons tech, for instance. Even spaceships are mounting autocannon when they have weapons at all, and portable lasers are one-off prototypes. There's also not much in the way of personal gadgetry depicted that I recall. It's not just a frontier effect, as even the wealthy Tam family on the central planets with their force-field fences have pretty mundane tablets, and the networks are email, video conferencing, and database lookups. There aren't any computers beyond TL8 that I recall. Maybe they just don't get any better, or at least the inhabitants of the 'verse have more urgent things to occupy their attention than making incremental improvements in stuff that's already good enough.

So whether or not there's an awesome TL10 Moore's-law-projected-for-a-century computer in the setting or not is really up to how you want the setting to feel, not whether or not there's a line item in a table in a rule book.

Emerald Cat · 03-04-2017, 10:40 AM

According to Ultra-Tech, the defining characteristic of TL10 is the rise of robotics. Apparently, the Alliance deploys androids as agents. But you never see anyone else using drones or robots. Therefore, I would call Firefly a TL10 where the Alliance is enforcing safetech restrictions on the general public.

Varyon · 03-04-2017, 10:50 AM

Personally, I'd be tempted to call Firefly TL 9, with some TL 10 medical and maybe computer tech in the hands of the Alliance, and a lot of superscience. First, while the weapons mostly resemble modern firearms (sometimes with a bit of aesthetic regression to look more like what you'd see in a Western), many of them... aren't. Mal's pistol, for example, was apparently a Gauss/Conventional hybrid (can fire using magnetic rails or can fire conventional shells).

As for superscience, we've got holograms (sort of doable, but not in the manner seen in Firefly), terraforming (again, doable, but not to the extent or at the speeds seen in Firefly), artificial gravity, and the reactionless pseudovelocity drives used by the spacecraft. There's probably other stuff, too.

...

As for the original question, no, there's not really a set price reduction for using lower tech gear. However, there are workarounds. Ultra-Tech has price-reducing options for computers of lower complexity than the default for the TL, which can represent computers from a lower TL. The various Armor Design articles from Pyramid have price reductions for using some armor materials at later TL's, often on the order of 1/2 cost at +1 TL and higher (no additional reductions at later TL's). The fact is, things are too variable for a general rule. In the case of firearms, at TL 9 the smart electronics, caseless design, and electronic ignition aren't really complicated enough to really justify much of an increased cost, so TL 8 firearms without those aren't likely to really see a price reduction, for example.

jneedler · 03-04-2017, 11:03 AM