04-03-2017, 05:58 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Harlem, New York
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[spaceships] i'm giving her all she's got, captain!
The equivalent of extra effort for spacecraft?
For Spaceships tactical combat, I'm tempted to set up a cinematic rule where components requiring fuel or power (engines and shields in particular; weapons seem a little more abusable) can yield +50% effect for +100% cost (so double power or fuel consumption) for a turn on a successful Engineering roll. Presumably still the +100% cost but no effect on a failure; or more dramatically, it works for the turn and then is disabled. And definitely no effect / disabled on a critical failure. Theory is, if you're really desperate to reach that planetoid this turn, or the shields have to hold out long enough to launch your escape pod, it's worth a shot, but not a sustainable tactic. Is this close to something in RAW or Pyramid I should check out? And if not, how does it sound? |
04-03-2017, 06:07 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: [spaceships] i'm giving her all she's got, captain!
I'm unaware of anything in RAW that's similar, but it doesn't seem like too bad of an option (although in most cases it should certainly be treated as cinematic or superscience). As for weapons, +50% output (3 MJ -> 5 MJ, say) isn't as bad as it sounds - it matches up to roughly +15% damage, or +50% RoF (+1 to hit, at best), depending on if you're making it fire "hotter" or faster.
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04-03-2017, 09:45 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: [spaceships] i'm giving her all she's got, captain!
If you want a purely cinematic rule you can of course built it as you want. The basic RAW answer is Machines and Extra Effect in powers 160 as Anthony said.
Tales of the solar patrol has a different methodology where overpowering drives caused stress to the components+radiation and require hard engineering rolls with bad results for failure. In the end it comes down to what effects the GM wants to achieve in things like risk/reward ratio and effects on failure, but the rules for extra effort for machines are a good place to start. |
04-04-2017, 01:55 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: [spaceships] i'm giving her all she's got, captain!
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04-05-2017, 03:10 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: [spaceships] i'm giving her all she's got, captain!
Erm, there's already a rule for this: Increase Power / Emergency Power / Emergency Thrust on Spaceships p. 52.
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04-05-2017, 08:27 AM | #7 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: [spaceships] i'm giving her all she's got, captain!
I remembered Increase Power and Emergency Power (each of which grant increased PP), but not Emergency Thrust. That only covers increasing thrust, of course, but it would probably be OK to expand this to other systems. That gives double output, rather than +50% - double output for beam weapons means around +30% to damage.
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04-06-2017, 10:55 AM | #8 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: [spaceships] i'm giving her all she's got, captain!
I suspect the problem is that in real life, unlike in RPGs, very few people habitually run anything at 100% of its design performance. Thus ships go everywhere at maximum trials speed and handling, rather than in the more sedate manner practised by navies with limited budgets and service interval targets (and, more prosaically, we all like to keep the rev counter on our cars out of the red zone). "giving her all she's got" occurs when these precautions are abandoned...
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04-06-2017, 01:47 PM | #9 | |
Join Date: Apr 2017
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Re: [spaceships] i'm giving her all she's got, captain!
Quote:
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04-06-2017, 03:01 PM | #10 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: [spaceships] i'm giving her all she's got, captain!
Depends on how you define design performance. Most industrial equipment does get run at pretty close to its designed performance -- its just that it's not designed to perform at 100% of capacity.
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