Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Greetings, all!

Am I alone in the feeling that Low-Tech, High-Tech and Ultra-Tech were released in the wrong order and/or not properly planned? UT lacks some of the neat weapon upgrades found in HT, and surprisingly doen't have any G-suit at all; HT & LT seem to produce strange results when combined (the armour rules seem to be not quite compatible); UT battlesuits - which are supposed to make infantry resistant to small arms - are defeated most typically by HT rifles with proper AP ammo. Overall, UT seems to suffer most from the 'unpolished' feel, though I'm not that much of a HT/LT nut, so I might be overlooking stuff.

Oh, and even Bio-Tech seems to have discrepancies with other books - notably the 1:10 drug price issue (though Pulver thinks BIO is actually right and UT is wrong) and the BIO spaceships vs. Spaceships spaceships discrepancies.

Perhaps there is / will be some grand unified PDF / article / thread that would make those books compatible? Something like the thread on using UT and BIO with THS.

Thanks in advance!

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Considering there was some Pulver stuff left out of the UT final edit and allowed for Pyramid only users seems a bit harsh for the buyers of UT. Maybe another x dollar PDF of Pulver's World of Tomorrow :)

IMO it is nigh impossible to square everything. But the Low, High and Ultra Tech is concerned with tech over the ages.

Bio Tech is spanning the ages but also a source book for 'wet ware' as opposed to 'cyber ware'.

The issue is, is that both Low and High Tech can be proof read against real examples. Ultra Tech and extreme Bio Tech are just best guesses.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

In that respect, perhaps UT would have turned out better if it had followed HT. GURPS always seems to work best when it is modeled on reality.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I still feel that BIO is just better than UT.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Is it time for a compendium that would fix inconsistencies between the books?

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I wouldnt call it poor planning. There were years between several of these books so ideas change.
Also They were released in the order of sales priority and work. The numbers on E23 dont really bear this out but I bet if we added hard copy it would
E23 numbers
Low tech 843
LTC2 826
UT 720
High Tech 621
Bio tech 506

Low tech had the largest gear set in Basic and UT the lowest IMHO.
So greatest lack was covered first and you really need UT gear for a UT campaign with the others covered well enough to get by for some time.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

So, I playtested three of the four, and was LP for High Tech. Take that bias for what it is, and do recall that my memory of some of these is years old.

I remember that UT suffered a bit from either an unclear mission, or unclear execution of that mission. There were a lot of design elements in the original draft that were later excised. Some of the uber-crunch (how many kJ in a power cell, what's the power requirement for a frombotzer in kW?) were removed or not present as a design decision by those shaping the focus of the book (not the authors, as I recall). So things were a bit weird during the playtest.

High Tech had its mission clearly in line. It was to be a catalog of stuff, pure and simple. In many cases, real world price lists and performance were easily to hand, or could be based on extrapolation from items that WERE easily to hand. The authors almost never had to make stuff up and hope that there wasn't a game-breaking corner case.

Low Tech has the same kind of problem as Ultra Tech, but worse: you could't just make stuff up, because certain things were known to exist, and others had never been seen. But you didn't have hundreds of different examples of variations of a theme (such as fifty 9mm pistols or something), but rather had to take "short sword," "falchion," and "bastard sword" and play within the lines. Likewise, there were legacy system level issues such as the armor bits, that were hovering between "revise" and "rewrite." The desire to put design content in the catalog book was neatly nixed by the creation of the LT Compendia.

I own Bio Tech, but I don't think I was on the platyest. It seems to me to be of a like mind with High Tech: written by someone with professional knowledge of the field, and tightly held to concept (that's a compliment).

Seems that Bio Tech and High Tech are both very well written and executed, and lifted further by being good examples of books with a solidly understood mission statement for which much valid, mostly uncontested source material was available.

Low Tech and Ultra Tech are two sides of the same coin: less known, either because of data loss (LT) or future extrapolation to things that don't exist yet (UT). In both cases, the desire would be to provide meta-systems to help with further creation . . . but that was outside the scope. The LTC books made up for that lack, given a better understanding at the time of the e23 business model.

That's my improvised take on it.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Using just E23 will distort things. All the tech books have had hardcover printings and UT has ahd a softcover reprint.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

FWIW, the order in which these works were released was the order in which they were written, and the order in which they were written was the order in which we could find willing and able writers. Central planning is nice, but in this case it would've meant GURPS Low-Tech in 2010, GURPS High-Tech in 2011 or 2012, and GURPS Ultra-Tech in 2013 or 2014. We didn't want GURPS Fourth Edition to wait 10 years to see all of its core tech catalogs published, so we went with what we had in the bullpen. The slight inconsistencies are a pain, sure, but better than the alternative.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

That is why I said "The numbers on E23 dont really bear this out but I bet if we added hard copy it would"
but having researched the numbers on E23 I posted them anyhow, W23 to my knowledge has no such utility.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Since so many of the original authors are both active on the forum and accept there are changes that need to be made, as well as former playtesters and simply knowledgeable folk, why work out an "unofficial eratta" document as time allows?

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

This is an insult to the people who planned and wrote these books. I'm not saying that any or all of them are perfect, but on hindsight everything can be done better. I still feel the books represent the best that could be done under the respective circumstances at the time they were written.

What kind of answer do you expect to your "question" anyway? "Yes, you are right, we are morons, please humbly accept our apologies and allow us to rewrite the books." Seriously, WTF?

Cheers

HANS

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

This was never intended as an insult. Especially given that on their own, HT and LT and BIO are absolutely brilliant. UT doesn't seem to have the benefit of techbook hindsight that LT and HT enjoyed, though*. But the point is, they are not quite compatible when taken together.

Kromm gave a good answer which pretty much explain all the reasons behind the books interacting (or not) in the way they are. Also, as I mentioned, it would be interesting to hear the authors' opinions as to how to best reconcile the three/four techbooks. It's not like I'm demanding anything - just asking if maybe there are already some ideas in that direction (based on the fact that there is such a series of reconciling UT/BIO with THS).

* == I don't remember what came first - UT or BIO, so not sure whether BIO enjoyed the benefits or was simply that good.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I actually like the "salad bar" approach to LT (take what you want, leave the rest). Maybe it'd be a good idea for someone to work up a UT Compendium X series, which would be a good venue to clear up any discrepancies, and put back in some of the crunch that missed the cut.

At this point, I think I would go with a TL-based approach, rather like the original run of 3e UT (which, rather than a raw equipment list, was broken up into sections based on TL)—FREX, UT Compendium 1 - TL9 (seems best to start closest), which could be used to fold in a lot of TS/HT concepts. Seems like TL9 & 10 would be the most needed.

Just spitballin'

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Personally I would not have been involved with Low-Tech if it was separated into Tech Levels like the first edition. The separation into broad "technologies" is more sensible: easier to lay out and reference, and is far easier to use when trying to design a world.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I agree with Dan. An UT Companion series should go the same way as the LT Companions.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Actually, 3e LT was laid out by "era" as well. YMMV—I happen to like having stuff that doesn't apply to what I'm working on filtered out. Not that I dis-like the catalog approach. It's a shame it'd be too much work vs profit to lay it out both ways and let us decide which we want.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

The "divided by TL" approach of earlier editions had a lot of conceptual problems.

Historical TLs (TL0-8) are averages. For any real culture, you must look at what they actually used on a case-by-case basis. Calling a particular culture "TL4," say, is in a way like summing TLs for some very large number of specific items – let's call it n – and then dividing by n, rounding to two places, and getting a result between 3.51 and 4.50. There may well be some 0s, 1s, 2s, 3s, 5s, and even 6s in there! If n/2 examples are TL2 and the other n/2 are TL6, you could get TL4 without a single TL4 item. That is, putting everything under a TL sends the message that all of that stuff is contemporary, which is rubbish. Sorting tech by type rather than TL removes that deceptive bias by association.

Future TLs (TL9-12) are even worse for this! Really, everything about the future is a guess, and once you start tacking on "^" for superscience, it doesn't even have to be a particularly educated guess. Why should star travel accompany blasters? Who says that this flavor of nanotech will accompany that flavor of fusion power – or indeed, that either will ever be invented? In a generic RPG, that stuff should be left up to the setting creator, not shanghaied by some game designer. Again, there are false associations.

Whereas grouping by category shows a clear evolution in terms of durability, deadliness, efficiency, added functionality, or whatever. The TL numbers are still there to show where the big steps are, but they're only meaningful relative to one another in that one category. There's the weak promise that, on average, most TLn innovations will be somewhat appropriate for a TLn society, but not a prescription that you must have TLn there. And speaking as the guy who answers questions: Many gamers used to think that we were saying, "You have to use all the TLn stuff together." That's why we changed tack.

I think it's a stronger approach when your highest-level divisions – your chapters – are defined by major categories that people can agree have real-life meaning (e.g., weapons, transportation, and medical technology) than when they rely on a mutable, subjective game convenience such as TL. Plenty of customers buy GURPS books for other games or just to read. For them, TL is a quirky and ignorable game stat, nothing more. Really, that's how I feel about it as well. After working for years on GURPS, I've seen no evidence that any real historical culture or well-known fictional one fits TLn perfectly . . .

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Given the obviously jagged lines that separate cultures/TLs, I wonder if "TL" is really the best mechanism to represent advancement—or better yet, a different way of thinking about the existing rules, maybe as individual tiers of development, to the exclusion of a single, overall score. But that's a separate discussion…

I think the thing I liked about the "era-based" approach was that, at the time, I was worldbuilding, and what it provided was a snapshot of TLn that I could use. Really, either approach can be just as useful to a GM that knows what to ignore or not.

But more to the OP—if we were in agreement regarding the need for some UT Compendiums, what make the best use of the (figurative) paper it's printed on? What might be the easiest to write? A focus on (FREX) personal weapon development, or a snapshot of TLn? Would there even be enough material to justify its own book, or would it make more sense to continue to dole it out, piecemeal, as it has been, in various Pyramid articles?

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

-- Ultra-Tech would look a bit different if we had the other tech books to look back on. The original UT proposal and draft was significantly different because the format you now see as "standard" in the tech books didn't exist when the book was first being written. And some high-level design decisions were made during the development process that caused radical revisions to the text.

-- Even with all the bumps and issues, I still think Ultra-Tech came out looking signficantly better than the old Ultra-Tech 1 and 2, or 4e Magic for that matter.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

-- It's not in an Ultra-Tech Companion line, but Psi-Tech and Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100 both have elements of this. Reign of Steel: Will to Live also can serve as an compendium of additional robot designs.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I should also note that the sales of Psi-Tech and Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100 have both not been so spectacular (so far) that I'm super-convinced there's a huge demand for similar supplements . . . especially given how expensive tech supplements are to get right.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Both of those are much more niche products than a general UT Companion (similar to the Low Tech Companions) would be, though.

If the UT companions were as applicable and general as the LT companions, you'd probably see sales on the same order as the LT companions (modified for the difference in popularity between UT and LT, of course).

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Well I just got Martial Arts 2100...It was on my list...I just had to wait till pay day.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Yeah I got the martial arts supplement was cheap enough and hoping for some new stuff I could use even though I haven't picked up TS.
Psi tech is on my list but money been real tight lately so it will have to wait.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I got the 4th ed. update booklets for THS and Reign of Steel. I seem to recall one of them had a bit of blurb that said something along the lines of "these stats will differ slightly from the UT stats".

I'm okay with that, but I think it's indicative that UT seems speculative enough that each campaign setting will likely have to make their own determinations of canon - to an extent that's larger than non-UT settings.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I do not own BIO, UT, or LT. I do own HT and think it is just great.

Browsing through this thread, taking note of the comments about UT, I wonder:

What if UT companions were written where a page or two is given over to making an assumption on a specific facet of a future society. Then the rest of the pages are goodies that support that assumption's cultivation.

You could have tons of "companions" that way and if they are based on properly defined and diverse ideas you could essentially mix and match companions to create a "future." With enough ideas fleshed out you could create a lot of combinations. Still should work with the main UT book as well since a lot of definitions and what not will/should be referenced.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Yeah that's becasue a lot of UT is Super science so very much a setting switch.
Even if you do allow something you might tweak it so it does not have the same results for the setting to make other things work out the way the setting designer wanted.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Interesting idea.
Sort of like a PowerUps or Thaumatology book. Or Psi tech and Biotech is a more wide focus along the same concept.
GURPS UT Companion ContraGrav! with not only gear and such for societies that have it but notes on the effect it can have on Society if it is commonplace.

I could think of a lot of options and ideas along this line.
Cloning (covers autoduel and Roger Zealazny "Gods of Light and Darkness" for example). Some gear but also a lot on what society might look like.
Holoprojectors and Matter Transmutation might have been a good one for Hollywood to have read......
Reactionless drives, Teleporters, go over various ways they might work and some of the ramifications of each.

Many of these could even be smaller PDFs few would merit the size of PsiTech or Biotech.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

If there was a 5th edition GURPS I think you'd want to release the Tech Books in a different order, but I don't feel like the way it was done was actively harmful. There aren't enough things wrong with GURPS to really need a 5e though, so it's a moot point right now.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Apparently you phrased this badly LOL Sticking to that theme - you are not alone.

It would be nice if all the tech books were rewritten to smoothly flow into one-another. But that'd take a lot of work, work frequently needs to be paid for, therefore the rewrites would cost money. I'd presume less work to reformat than to create and less work = less cost.

Would the power behind the throne care to posit a price for, eg UT mkII? See how many "I'd buy it"s it garners and, if it's a popular concept, add it to The Wishlist...

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Speaking as someone who works in big projects... you either do the best you can, admitting it won't be perfect. Or you don't do it at all. I just saw a 3-year project sink beacause the person responsible took so much time trying to make it perfect, that costs exceeded reason. And it became so abstract and idealistic, that no one was willing to keep shoving money into it.
A less "perfectly planned" project would have seen benefits in the first year, flaws and all. And would have kept going, being perfected gradually.

Had GURPS waited for the stars to align, it might not have had enough profit to keep going. Also, experience gained helped more recent projects.

On a personal note, the order was just right for me... because I game more, the lower the tech-level gets. If the order had been chronological, I'd get the short straw. Its a matter of perspective, I guess.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I'd eat up a UTC series. The LTC series is great reading, but it mostly just that, to me, leisure reading material. UTC I would actually use. I'd love to see a companion about weapon design, ala this thread, with a design sequence and worked examples. I would certainly be fascinated to read a series that discussed social implications of various UT fields, too. There is room for crunch as well as fluff, although advice on integrating technology into a sci fi campaign doesn't seem so fluffy (in the pejorative sense) to me.

The way to look at this isn't "we had to do something under constraints, so now we live with what we have," it should be, "given the base we have built, what do we add onto it to make campaign creation a smoother process with more options.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Seems like Pyramid is the right venue here. Enough small stuff that lots of qualified people can contribute. Every take - even on the same thing - is likely to have validity to a subset of gamers.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I understand what you mean, but I think its an effect of discovering what works as you go along. Would they, for example, use the CF system throughout High and Ultra if they could do it all over again. Probably. But would you want to wait for that to be discovered before getting the books? I wouldn't. There are limits to planning, and we call them hindsight.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I think you're right: UT looks so bad because the follow-up books are SO good. I think UT also suffers from being a bit specialized, in that LT and HT are still quite effective as sourcebooks up to that point, and depending on what you're going for with a UT campaign... well, you might not need UT.

UT also, in my opinion, suffers from the fact that sci-fi future settings can be so danged varied. A blaster from Star Wars, a Laser Rifle from fall out and a Las Gun from 40k are very different weapons! While a sword is a sword, no matter what it looks like.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Well I already buy Pyramid. I am thinking this is a way for SJG to get a little more of my money!

Seriously, though, you may be right. A design sequence for UT weapons might be only long enough for a Pyramid article.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Might. On the other hand, design for ONE class of weapons (bows) took me 11,000 words to get right. Original predicted budget? 2,500. :-)

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Eh, as far as 4e books go, I put UT just ahead of Magic and behind everything else. UT is not AS bad as Magic, but I can't use the guns section in anything where modern day weapons might still be around, the drugs in Biotech are just plain better, and even in campaigns where drugs or guns aren't a big deal there's still all kinds of typos.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Fair enough, but it's still got a much broader area to handle than any other tech book, and with more scope for dramatic differences between different UT settings. This really does limit the thngs that could be done with it's page count.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Yes, it ended up consuming 11,000 words . . . along with my soul.

:-)

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Sawwy. And yet you agreed to look at Technical Grappling.

At least the Armor Revisited article was less twitch inducing.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

*Shrug* None of my complaints have anything to do with the scope of the book.

I understand why UT is the way it is, but it comes down to this:

If I run a fantasy, modern, or sci-fi game, the one in which I will have to do the most work, gear-wise, is the sci-fi one. And it isn't because I have to narrow down what has been invented or not, but I have to figure out which things are nonsensical, contradictory, or simply have different values within the same book.

Low Tech and High Tech are both pretty good on the "pick up and play" side of things. UT isn't, in much the same way Magic isn't. I have to look at each stat and say "does this make sense" instead of simply being able to hand the book to a player and say "TL 10, LC 3 or better, anything requiring electricity requires one size larger energy cell."

I understand that it was the first of the gear books that they could get a writer for, and that it underwent some design changes midway through, and all the other hard real-world reasons that it turned out the way it did. But that doesn't make it as useful to me as HT or LT.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

It occurs to me that UT might call for a different approach from that used in HT and LT. Science fiction campaign might be better served by a series of design systems.

Say you want laser guns. The publication (article or UTC or whatever) discusses the implications of different spectra, how they perform in different media, the sort of focusing apparatus called for, and the power draw. The user decides to apply switches like power cell vs chemical reservoirs, realistic cooling requirements vs ignoring cooling considerations, and so on. They plug their assumptions into a sequence that provides a statted out weapon. It should be less complex than world and system design from Space 4e, and maybe less complex than The Deadly Spring. Actually, I feel like The Deadly Spring is a pretty good model for what I'd like, but maybe it is beyond the level of crunch most other people would like. You conclude with a set of worked weapons, so that someone who doesn't want to brew up their own arsenal right away can have a starting set that will be consistent with later variants they produce.

Something similar could be used for anti- and artificial gravity technologies, force fields, and all manner of hard science and superscience constructs.

The difference between The Deadly Spring and the laser gun or a-grav handbooks would be that there is a call for some "fluff." What kind of noise does a laser gun make? What does a-grav do to the shipping industry, or mass transportation? Does it allow storage of antimatter? How does a single technology change how people actually live? This stuff would be pretty speculative, and individuals might want to ignore some implications, but having a more sophisticated appreciation of how beamed power changes the battleground or how ubiquitous terrariums would need to be on a space ship to make a total life support system without replication technology might also inform GMs.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

And the neat thing is that I can see this for GURPS.
I can not think of another system where I would be able to say that.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I mean, there was a design sequence in place for Mr. Pulver, or he developed one, or whatever. Framing that, along with some adjustment perimeters to individualize weapon designs for different build priorities, would put the tools in the GMs' hands. GURPS GMs seem to like tools.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Yeah, but realistically, there's not much in HT or LT that can change the game like AI, Microbot swarms or fusion. And I think a big part of that is the lack of focus a UT supplement has. It has to include psuedo-science "magic" technologies that have vast world shapping effects(teleportation, shields, fusion, swarms, AI), and it has to be generic enough for a wide spectrum of possible games. And there's a lot of space waste on some stuff, imho.

For example, I play hard science Sci-Fi. I might allow FTL travel devices for a story aid, but otherwise, if it's TL^, it's not allowed. So there's about HALF of UT unavailable to me. But some people will want to have ultra scanners, or contragrav, or whatever. And it's hard to really peg future sci-fi campaigns. There's so many possible permutations available that a book UTs size can't cover the subject.

Yes, i do want a new UT book. Want it bad. Want it to be as good as LT r HT. But i also realzie that it may or may not work for everyone who wants to run a TL9+ game. And that's a hard genre to pin down.

Perhaps smaller, more defined books would be better. "Ultra-Tech: Gritty Realism", "Ultrra-Tech: space Opera", etc.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

... and as a guy who runs a space opera campaign, I would buy both (since I want some ^ and some actual relationship with reality).

Really, UT is useful to me, but not as useful as I'd like. I want to be able to customize technologies to my liking (my a-grav probably operates under different constraints than the a-grav someone else uses). I want some idea how technology might work (if some big hurdles that stop it from being HT were overcome).

Catalogs are good for historic period (or modern day) campaigns. Everything there is defined. I mean, for sci fi, I can work something out, but GURPS is strong at providing an approach to generating content.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I think there is much wisdom in what you say.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Having run a sci fi campaign, I can tell you what my setting things were quite easily

1. TL 10, everything primitive (TL 8 or less) is 1/3 price as 'public domain'
and TL 9 things which have superior TL 10 counterpartments count as cheap for 40% off
2. 'Military' type TL 9-10 things are restricted without good excuse
3. Magic items use TL 3 prices, mages get paid more, but industrial enchanting has picked up also so it evens out
4. Cyberware just costs money. 'Vow: No Cyberware' is -15%, and can be used as a Pact

I can't think of anything else I needed to do to make the game work, was really MUCH simpler than my current Steampunk game where had to deal with A - trying to convert 3e items, and B - the fact TL 5 guns are a VERY messy mix of Revolutionary War and Old West type stuff

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

3e Robots is an Awesome book, it is absolutely great . . . . I would love to see something simple like that released for making 4e robots, battlesuits and cyborgs oh my

Spaceships baffles me no end, I guess that is because spaceships are just much more complex than robots maybe, but it makes me sad

So I guess that in some ways UT is trickier if you want to have spaceships, since I don't get those at all

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Again, spaceships are fine as a product line. Cool, even. But they break down if combined with UT in some ways - notably, UT Commando Battlesuits are almost good enough to pit them 1-on-1 against SM+4 to SM+6 spaceships (assuming the commando gets a thruster pack and a missile launcher of some sort).

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I'll admit I find Spaceships to be extremely hard to follow and use, to the point of my sci fi games having no space combat or spaceships being used as anything more than taxis

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Spaceships can be overwhelming if taken all at once. But they're very good. Basically, you divide your ship into 20 chunks, and decide what those chunks should be (3 armour units and a control room, some guns, some engines, some cargo holds etc.). If you're running Space Op(e)rah, you can skip the dV calculations and just use superscience drives with a fixed top speed and a single FTL drive type (BSG-style jump drive is probably the simplest, non-narrated hyperspace is a close second).

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I would strongly dispute that it's very good for combat. The basic idea of system-based shipbuilding is nice, but a lot of the Spaceships rules are seriously problematic.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Yet I haven't seen a better one that wouldn't be too cumbersome. Rogue Trader spaceships rules come close, and are better for their specific setting, but as I said, they're limited to emulating one specific setting.

G:SS has their share of murphies, but they're better thought-through than, say, Magic/Grimoire or even UT.

Oh, basic spaceship combat is very meh, but once you figure out tactical, it's quite OK.

P.S.: If you're in the mood, I'd be quite curious to see the list of problematic rules and possible quick fixes for spaceships. I know I made a few threads on the topic in days past, but I wonder what others would list.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

That'd get long. I suggest spinning a new thread if you want to. I'll certainly participate in it.

I rate it as so badly broken that I'm not sure how to fix it, so we're in somewhat different places on this.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I really liked Grimoire, and it followed the same format as Magic and all, I had no problems dropping it into my games at all. Ultra Tech I will definitely give has some major complexities to me in building robots for instance though I think need help

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Personally, I find basic spaceship combat quite OK, but tactical combat has some gigantic, and fairly fundamental, problems (the biggest one being that 2D tactical space combat -- especially with missiles or more than two ships -- is fundamentally a broken idea [it makes about as much sense as having a 1D "tactical" combat system for ground combat], and the relationship of turn ability to time scale is broken pretty badly.)

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Basic Space Combat is actually worse, as ships and missiles move at speeds not attainable given their accelerations, delta-V's, and turn durations. 2D combat is just an abstraction, like chess. I suppose one could make a 3D conversion, but then few people without some sort of 3D maptool would play it, and few with one would either. Speaking of which, I think by now my Unity-fu is strong enough that I could make such a 3D tool if given enough incentive. But answer to me honestly: would you really want to play such a thing?

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

The problem with any 3D program is that the interface is generally 2D. Even most FPS are only 3D in a limited sense.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

...well, it's generally projected onto the 2d plane of the display, yes, and operated with 0-2 dimensional input devices. It's possible to work reasonably well within those constraints.

These days if one really wants it is possible to get a 3d monitor (via 120 hz screen and shutter-glasses, for instance). Dunno about 3d input devices.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Actually, writing a rotating or even roaming camera that will help visualize the ships in 3D is trivial - been there, done that. Explaining a point in space to the 3D-aid will be somewhat trickier, but if we look at SS rules strictly, you shouldn't be doing that in the first place: the ship captain designates bearing (a rotation, which, strictly speaking, can be expressed as two axes, with the third optional), and the desired dV (a linear value). Making the software calculate (instead of the player) such things as an intercept course with another given object is only slightly more complex (strictly speaking, not harder - just more operations). Really, this is certainly better 3D-visualization than, say, WWI pilots had. :)

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

(Have you guys played Attack Vector and/or Squadron Strike and/or Saganami Island Tactical Simulator? If you want 3D... *and* playable... *and* interesting tactical options... this is probably the way to go.)

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

3D input = joystick. I happen to have the a SpaceNavigator (the most basic version of 3dconnexion line) which gives me a solid 9 axis of control with a normal mouse very intuitively. I use it for CAD. While it would work for games, most people (including myself, unfortunately) do not have strong enough three dimension capacity to enjoy such a thing as a hobby. Like the people that can solve n-dimensional rubik's cubes blow my mind.

Granted, this is a self fulfilling loop, and I'd love to support and would use such a 3d maptool, but the market is slim to none right now.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Boy, this thread started wandering off topic. Computer aids for 3d ship combat? Heh...

Most of what I would say in this thread has already been said. I might have offered that the tech books were products of their time and development order, and people much more in the loop than me have already confirmed this.

It would be nice to see some kind of grand reconciliation between LT, HT, BT, and UT, where all the systems for statting types and qualities of clothing and armor, or weapon mods, drugs, whatever, were unified - or, if there's some physical reason why those systems should NOT be uniform across TLs, explained. And while we're at it, I'd like to see design systems for weapons, armor, power, computers, and the like, showing the underlying formulas, assumptions, and switches (e.g. between "realistic hard sci-fi lasers" and "space opera lasers"). And while we're at that, I'd like a pony.

Wait, I'm a grownup. I could probably buy a pony, if I really wanted one. Fine - make it a dire uplifted cyberdinosaur. That's safely out of reach.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Typically, the problem with space combat (2d or 3d) is that either you spend a lot of time fighting with the interface (acceleration, 3d movement, etc, etc), or you fix that (for example, by computerization) and it winds up about as interesting as watching paint dry.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Been there, done that. One of the annoying examples from the recent playtest discussion/explanation:

'This arrow shows the recommended direction of acceleration/thrust you should maintain in order to dock with the destination starbase.'
'Ah, so it points to the starbase.'
'No, it points the direction where you should thrust.'
'So it points to the destination starbase?'
'No, it points to where your ship should be facing and accelerating towards.'
'So where else could it point? To the starbase?'

At least I'm trying to do my part to help children un-learn Aristotelian Mechanics.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

(Thread necromancy, of a sort)


I am quite keen on the idea of a series of Ultra-Tech Companion books. I think I've mentioned that elsewhere.

I started writing what was to be a Pyramid article for the Future Exploration article many moons ago, but it was headed for "too long for a magazine article" territory. It included setting design switches like "If contragrav exists, here's how that affects societies and tech. If it only works for big vehicles, then X; if it only works for small vehicles, then Y." And the same for reactionless thrusters and FTL. Plus notes for gritty hard science and space opera (and everything in between) and how the Tech Paths affects settings.

I'm also quite interested in writing the UTC Cyberware book, and considering the positive feedback on the Pyramid 51 Tech and Toys 3, I should talk to whomever to see about actually making that happen.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Heh. I've always wanted to figure out how to do an orbital mechanics sim that would show current and future position of all objects (some sort of curve or line of dots), so you get an intercept course by arranging for your ship's dot in some future turn to correspond to the right target dot, but not sure how you make something like that into a readable display.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Hmm. Maybe allow the user to view their total maneuvering envelope for any given future turn? Though if you're dealing with non-uniform gravitation or some such calculating what that envelope is might be tricky.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Check out Kerbal Space Program (a video game about a space program, from rocket design to launch to orbital intercepts and docking/creation of space stations and more). It's got a pretty decent method for showing current and future positions of all objects - exactly a curve, including position indicators for when objects will be close to each other/etc.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

You mean it isn't just about blowing up three little hapless cartoons? There must have been some developments since I last took a peek.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Everything has a little arrow sprouting from it, pointing to its ballistic position in +n time units. n can be adjustable with a thumbwheel perhaps, and you can dress up the arrows by graduating them in color, so you can make sure that you don't intercept some object while touching your arrow tip to the subject's. This works for projectile weapons as well, per its use in John Varley's story, "Equinoctial".

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I think the problem UT has (if it has an overall problem) is that the scope and scale of the subject matter is far larger than HT & LT. So yes maybe it fails to achieve its goals as successfully as the other two, but then it's goals were a lot harder.

I like the idea of UTC's especially as it would seem to fit in with taking certain aspects of technology and drawing them through TL9-12 (and corresponding super science lens as well).

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

Yeah, it made LT and HT considerably more straightforward that they were restricted to one possible reality, and that (as Ken Hite put it) the best-researched and best play-tested of all. The brief for UT and BT notionally covered a very wide range of different and incompatible projections of future technology, that were not only built of unobtainium and nonsensium to different extents but of different kinds.

Another way of organising it might be to take different flavours of SF, sci-fi, and science fantasy and give a treatment of all technology in each one.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I suppose drawing actual trajectories instead of arrows is reasonable, particularly since you're calculating them anyway. You can probably indicate the n of a point by colour, though that will of course interfere with being able to use colour to differentiate various objects.

Re: Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?
 

I think this approach is bloody fantastic. I'm much more interested in a reference plumbing the implications of specific technologies, or sets of specific related technologies, then in a general all-encompassing speculation about Magic or The Future (which work out to be pretty much the same thing...).