Murphy's Rules

[Pmandrekar]

I submitted two which were included in the cartoon Murphy's Rules series back in the day. Both of them, computer game tricks:

1) In Command and Conquer, the computer always sent its air raid against your northernmost cluster of troops. So, one trick to keep the air raid away from the mass of your troops is to send one pathetic soldier up to the top of the board after the computer has wiped out your last one with an air raid.
(Kovalic had a great image of a single soldier standing there with an icicle off of his nose).

2) In Age of Empires II, you control Sheep that you could send to your city center for slaughter and meat... Or, you could take your sheep and send them out to the furthest edges of the map where they could operate as non-combatant 'scouts' who will map out the terrain and if you're lucky, could encounter one of the enemy units before they switched allegiance. You could use sheep on the field to map out the enemy's position.

-P

[lexington]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Show your work! ;)

What modifiers are you using for the Sense check here?

SM, naturally. Some vast Range penalty. +10 for 'in plain sight'. Darkness penalty does not apply given that it is light that we are trying to see, so instead, the light gives a bonus depending on brightness. I'd call it +3 for the full moon, myself, but I can't be arsed to look it up. Could even be much higher than that.

I recall someone in the GURPS forum working it out before and finding that the moon's SM + 10 - range penalties exactly canceled. Maybe I remembered wrong.

+38 (2150 mi across) + 2 (blob shaped) + 10 (in plain sight) - 50 (25000 mi away) = 0

That's as far as much as you can get from Basic Set. LT's addition of rules for seeing bright objects in the dark probably fixed the problem.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

I'm going to use the +6SM = x10 size extensively below.



B550 is fairly clear here. The Moon is roughly 3.8 million yards across, which rounds up to 5 million yards and is thus two orders of magnitude or 12 SMs more than SM+26, or SM+38. B550 also reminds us that "Box-, sphere-, or blob-shaped characters add +2 to SM". So SM+40.



It's always going to fall between 300 and 500 million yards. (Even if we add in the 1,117 yards/s for its speed.) A factor of 1,000 is 18 SMs, so -18+ -14 = -32 range penalty. That leaves a net +8 to spot a Moon that's taking advantage of natural cover and trying to blend in...

Eeek. That's not right. The Moon's range penalty is greater than it's SM. You've messed up your decimal point somehow in extrapolating. The range penalty should be around -50.

[teviet]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

B550 is fairly clear here. The Moon is roughly 3.8 million yards across, which rounds up to 5 million yards and is thus two orders of magnitude or 12 SMs more than SM+26, or SM+38. B550 also reminds us that "Box-, sphere-, or blob-shaped characters add +2 to SM". So SM+40.

It's always going to fall between 300 and 500 million yards. (Even if we add in the 1,117 yards/s for its speed.) A factor of 1,000 is 18 SMs, so -18+ -14 = -32 range penalty. That leaves a net +8 to spot a Moon that's taking advantage of natural cover and trying to blend in...

???

SM is correct. Range is under 500 million yards, or range modifier of -50. So net size-range modifier is -10. +10 for "in plain sight" gives a net 0 modifier. To get it positive, you need the extra modifiers for being bright on a dark background.

TeV

Oooh, double ninja'd

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

Thread moved to Roleplaying In General (no clue why it was in Geek Culture).

Because Cute Knight is a computer game not a roleplaying game.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

B550 is fairly clear here. The Moon is roughly 3.8 million yards across, which rounds up to 5 million yards and is thus two orders of magnitude or 12 SMs more than SM+26, or SM+38. B550 also reminds us that "Box-, sphere-, or blob-shaped characters add +2 to SM". So SM+40.



It's always going to fall between 300 and 500 million yards. (Even if we add in the 1,117 yards/s for its speed.) A factor of 1,000 is 18 SMs, so -18+ -14 = -32 range penalty. That leaves a net +8 to spot a Moon that's taking advantage of natural cover and trying to blend in...

...Wait a minute, that doesn't seem right. Range penalties and SM scale off the same value, so how could a longer range have a smaller penalty than a much smaller object would have in SM?

It looks like you scaled the range off 500 yards, which is the -14 penalty, but then only multiplied range by 1,000, not 1 million. So the range penalty would actually be -50.

So -10 before modifiers. Illumination would probably be as much as +10 for a full moon at night, or as little as +0 during the day. Then another +10 for "in plain sight" unless there is more than some sparse cloud-cover. So ranging from -10 for a modestly cloudy day, to +10 (And a "don't even bother rolling") for a full moon on a clear night.

Of course, the worst result is that you don't see it right that second, which is completely believable even for a clear-day sky. Just keep looking around a few seconds.

(Edit: Grrrr, right, preview -before- posting, to see if the post is completely and thoroughly redundant. Doh)

[Evil Roy Slade]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

You've messed up your decimal point somehow in extrapolating.

I haven't bothered to look up the exact ranges (no books with me) and this may or may not be a typo on Lexington's part, but the post above yours mentions the moon as being 25000 miles away, when the actual figure is closer to 250,000.

I wonder, given that the sun and the moon present almost exactly equal-sized discs from the surface of the earth, what the penalty to spot the sun in the sky is.

[teviet]

Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade

I wonder, given that the sun and the moon present almost exactly equal-sized discs from the surface of the earth, what the penalty to spot the sun in the sky is.

The net range-size modifier would be the same; the brightness modifier would be larger but there are no RAW for that (I thing Anthony had a set of houserules?).

TeV

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by teviet

The net range-size modifier would be the same; the brightness modifier would be larger but there are no RAW for that (I thing Anthony had a set of houserules?).

Well, the Spaceships rules come close. The sun is essentially an omnidirectional fusion drive.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade

I wonder, given that the sun and the moon present almost exactly equal-sized discs from the surface of the earth, what the penalty to spot the sun in the sky is.

The Sun is 864,000 miles in diameter and the distance is in the 93-95 million mile range.

Even without looking up the exact numbers from the speed range table I can tell you that the second figure is approx. 100x larger than the first (remember you always round up). Since every factor of 10 is a -6 on the Speed/Range table the range - the SM ought to be about -12.

If you did crunch the exact numbers in yards you might get another 1 either way if you were almost exactly on a breakpoint but in many ways that's a false precision in an approximate system.