Stocking your Life Pod

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Earth is such a place too. Biological compatibility may be assumed and this would have been the case with every other world previously discovered in the network.

The Sahara desert is so amazingly earth-like you'd think it actually was on the earth!

[ericthered]

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.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by ericthered

The pod itself is steerable, so while you can't go home, you can at the very least choose the biome you crash in. .

You can try but the rules in UT are not all that friendly.

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.

[Crystalline_Entity]

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!

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity

Does the pod have any sort of sensors? U!

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.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

It's been 38 years since I bought a solar-powered calculator at Sears. So that proves that portable solar power is sufficient to all purposes? No, it mostly demonstrates how some devices (like LCD calculators) use very, very low amounts of electric power.

My example shows that a very lightweight flexible solar cell is enough to keep at least three modern power-hungry electronic devices charged: my iPhone, Kindle, and a Garmin InReach. Such, that, y'know, one might posit that future solar cells would be similarly light and maybe sufficient to keep a few B cells topped off. :) Hell, UT has the Partisan Needler, which will smelt a 1"x2"x3"block of iron into 140 rounds of 3mm ammunition (it's described as a "foundry") and then fire it all, on a 10-hour solar charge! (Granted, it's TL10...)

I love widgets like that.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

UT does have a hundred lbs of paint-on solar cells that would cover 800 square feet and provide full "external" power. It's the lightest and cheapest option at TL9 for such a level of power. It's just not that good an investment in a life pod.

This is helpful. There is a gap there, though. As mentioned, the solar cell in UT is described as providing essentially unlimited wall power. There really should be some sort of smaller survival solar cell, like my modern one, or maybe something more expedition-worthy like that Goal Zero stuff that you see everywhere. I think someone mentioned the one in High-Tech, which is TL8 so maybe half the weight at TL9?

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by acrosome

My example shows that a very lightweight flexible solar cell is enough to keep at least three modern power-hungry electronic devices charged: my iPhone, Kindle, and a Garmin InReach. Such, that, y'know, one might posit that future solar cells would be similarly light and maybe sufficient to keep a few B cells topped off. :) Hell, UT has the Partisan Needler, which will smelt a 1"x2"x3"block of iron into 140 rounds of 3mm ammunition (it's described as a "foundry") and then fire it all, on a 10-hour solar charge! (Granted, it's TL10...)

I assume it machines them out of the block, though at TL10 it could just have nanites strip iron from the block and build the darts like a 3D printer. Whatever the actual mechanism it's obviously a very small and extremely specialised robofac coupled with a very optimistic effective solar power system. That gun must be absolutely black when charging.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by acrosome

My I think someone mentioned the one in High-Tech, which is TL8 so maybe half the weight at TL9?

I chased down the HT reference but it's not all that helpful. It recharges "a battery" in " couple of hours". It's pretty much as rules-light as UT about numbers.

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.

[AlexanderHowl]

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.

[safisher]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I am also leery about the difference between HT and UT batteries.

I've enjoyed this discussion, and I don't want to derail it from Fred's specifications, but I do want to add comment for those not following his provisions.

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.