Grav Pong

[safisher]

How do you assess damage or skill penalties for grav pong, that is using grav plates to repel boarders?

[Rupert]

I use UT79 "Crossing a Gravity Gradient", and B434 "Gravity and Acceleration", plus falling rules is a long corridor suddenly turns into a long shaft. B350 "Different Gravity" will probably also apply. This assumes what I call 'standard' grav plates - ones that can only change the amount of gravity they produce over the course of a few 1/10ths of a second and can only readjust once per second or so. For characters with good stats, assuming the gravity doesn't completely reverse or pull them down a 'shaft' it's mostly just a nuisance.

If the plates were able to vary their effect extremely rapidly and were fairly strong, I'd treat it like a graviton beam (UT129), and set an amount of damage everyone inside the field would take each turn. Unless really powerful the damage would be fairly low (possibly only 1 HP/turn), but when added to a high base field so people can't easily get out of it, quite dangerous nonetheless.

[safisher]

Originally Posted by Rupert

I use UT79 "Crossing a Gravity Gradient"

I was looking for that text and forgot it was in UT! I did find the detailed free fall article in Pyramid, though. I hadn't thought about the gravitron gun. I was really wondering how fast the plates can shift. If you "fall" down a long corridor, say 15-20 yards, your enemy could then turn around and make you fall the other direction. Several of those would kill you pretty dead, unless you are in heavy armor. Also, it is assumed the max is 2g or 6g?

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by safisher

I was looking for that text and forgot it was in UT! I did find the detailed free fall article in Pyramid, though. I hadn't thought about the gravitron gun. I was really wondering how fast the plates can shift. If you "fall" down a long corridor, say 15-20 yards, your enemy could then turn around and make you fall the other direction. Several of those would kill you pretty dead, unless you are in heavy armor. Also, it is assumed the max is 2g or 6g?

UT reckons the maximum is normally 1G. Traveller is all over the place, from what I recall. TNE was something like TL-9G. In my Traveller game I use GURPS' TLs, and map Traveller ones onto them:

TTL GTL
9 9
10 9
11 9
12 10
13 10
14 11
15 11

GTL12 is for ancients and suchlike. For grav plates I assume a maximum of 2G at TL9, +2G per TL above that. That's positive and negative, and if there's a contragrav system as well, that can bring the 'base gravity' down to zero. Thus if you're in a nice Imperial TL11 ship when Virus decides you need to go, you get slammed into the ceiling at -6G, then the floor at +6G, then the ceiling, and then (I assume minimal sideways adjustment - just enough to dampen minor thruster acceleration, etc.) the grav compensation goes off, as do the grav plates, and the main drive comes on at 6Gs, and down the hallway you go...

My players don't take the grav-chutes, or even the lifts. Ever. They also avoid long corridors in ships and stations that are even remotely suspect. Funny, that.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Rupert

My players don't take the grav-chutes, or even the lifts. Ever. They also avoid long corridors in ships and stations that are even remotely suspect. Funny, that.

Wear a grav belt.

If grav pong were actually a popular tactic -- or even if it's not -- then grav belts probably have inertial sensors (your TL8 smartphone has one; they're neither big nor expensive) and their own "station keeping" mode that would counter external gravity fluctuations. Set it for 1G net and walk down the corridor regardless of what the grav plates do.

[Anthony]

In general the way boarders are going to prevent grav pong is by disabling the grav plates before entering a segment, and/or disabling ship's power so everything shuts off.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Wear a grav belt.

If grav pong were actually a popular tactic -- or even if it's not -- then grav belts probably have inertial sensors (your TL8 smartphone has one; they're neither big nor expensive) and their own "station keeping" mode that would counter external gravity fluctuations. Set it for 1G net and walk down the corridor regardless of what the grav plates do.

That'd work vs the gave plates, but most likely not on the end of the corridor coming at you with 6G acceleration. Mostly my players go with the 'fry the plates, get to the power system, kill the power' method. That just leaves the locally powered anti-boarding emplacements, and any robots the ship/station has converted to meat-killers. Oh, and any nasty little traps that've been set, like where when the grav plates die the claymores go off and the nerve gas is deployed. Hope you had a properly armoured vacc suit (and that you get out of the gassed areas before the robots with the armour-openers get there).

Virus makes for the nicest SF dungeon crawls.