Ultra-Tech Armor Climate Control

[Tzeentch]

-- For anything serious I would wear a skinsuit (p. UT178) with the other armor. Presumably you could at least get the climate control without wearing a sealed helmet.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Tzeentch

The draft numbers were basically $50, 0.5 lb. per level of Temperature Tolerance with a power consumption of 5 watts per level.

Realistically, it's going to be nonlinear; as the temperature differential goes up, the efficiency of refrigeration drops (in a way that's roughly linear), and the quantity of environmental (as opposed to body) heat which leaks through insulation and needs to be gotten rid of goes up (also in a fairly linear way, unless temperature is high enough for radiation transmission to be primary, in which case it varies as the fourth power of absolute temperature).

[kdtipa]

Do you have the 3rd Ed Vehicles book? It's immensely complicated and always took me hours to make a single vehicle... but it had rules for everything, including weight and power usage per affected volume/mass/whatever. It might give you something to use for consistency.

I like that book a lot. But I seem to take pleasure in spending hours on that sort of thing.

[Seneschal]

Originally Posted by Dark Knight Renee

I'm bit baffled by the Ultra-Tech armor in general, doubly so since I've been trying to cobble together a custom armor design that's not just tailored Ballistic armor. My current question, however, relates to just the very beginning of the Armor section (p. 171) where it describes various forms of threat protection. As far as I can tell, these features ONLY exist in the pre-designed armors, the modification of which is difficult and inflexible at best. I've been struggling to reverse-engineer a rough set of values for them, but so far it hasn't been working.

My questions: How much do these things cost, how much do they weigh, how much battery power do they use? In particular, I'm looking at climate control, but everything listed under threat protection has the same lack of info.

Regarding the inflexibility, I tried very recently to make a Low-Tech-like armour table for a sci-fi campaign using (roughly) Ultra Tech values. However, it's only vaguely consistent with the pre-made armours found in Ultra-Tech.

For example, a light fabric armour would have DR 6*, Cost $100, Weight 3, Don 10 seconds. Nanoweave or the like would have higher DR with a +5 CF or something (like "Leather of Quality" or "Hardened Plate" in Low-Tech). For thicker versions, every +50% increase in DR results in a +100% increase in Weight and Cost - this is a VERY awkward way to implement the "Heavy Plate" rule from Low-Tech, but its +1 DR per +50% Cost & Weight is just too weak for Ultra-Tech armour.

After the "suit" was assembled, additional systems could be added to it: climate control, trauma plates, vacuum support, radiation shielding, waste disposal, air tanks, electronics, etc.

It's a clunky system, but it's for a silly Space Opera, so it doesn't clash much.

EDIT: Ooops, this is a bit necro. I mistook April for May because I'm special that way. Derp.