Quote:
Originally Posted by marvin
To answer a few questions since I am still interested in making this work...
The Event occurs in local year of 1973 but the Steam Punk year is 1889 (it's primarily Space 1889 but with a few things from GURPS Mars, Dying Mars and GURPS Steampunk.)
The planets affected are...
Vulcan: use the statistics from GURPS Steampunk. Thus far no one from Space 1889 has landed on that small, boiling hot planet.
Venus: Similar to Space: 1889, but the sentient Lizard Men are from Aetheria from GURPS Steampunk. I find that version to be more interesting.
Mars: Very similar to Space: 1889 BUT with a left over beanstalk coming up from Pavonis Mars.
Lift wood works on Earth, but I really don't see that as being all that much of a game changer. Airplanes and helicopters are just as good and far cheaper to manufacture. I do think I'll have some of the Martian crystals (perhaps left over Phaeton technology) be room temp. superconductors or have other powers.
I'm not going to make 1973 another alternate TL. Too hard to keep track of and too confusing to players.
Thanks.
Ben
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What makes liftwood so valuable is that its anti-gravity properties allows things to float without the use of any fuel. That makes it valuable beyond comprehension -- not because of the liftwood, itself, but because it provides a means by which 20th Century physicists can
figure out how to generate anti-gravity.
Once Earth's scientists understand out
why liftwood does what it does, it opens the entire solar system up for inexpensive exploration, and would very likely make it possible (or maybe even pointless) to build a space elevator, on this planet.
There is just about no problem in space exploration that anti-gravity couldn't alleviate at a vastly reduced cost. In fact, if liftwood somehow creates, or acts as a depository for, anti-gravity particles, one could even (eventually) figure out how to generate (or collect) enough of them to trigger wormholes. The discovery of liftwood changes the world -- not necessarily right away, since the research and experimentation could take a lot of time, but inevitably the world changes in vast and unpredictable ways.