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Old 05-12-2021, 08:57 AM   #3
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Force Sword (and Blaster) Design - Assistance Requested

Nothing?

Having actually written things down, and then giving it further thought, I think I may have a clearer idea of how I want to handle things. First off, I think I will go ahead and set the WM using the second entry, for both thr and sw (and blasters), giving them a similar range to firearms - purple is comparable to pi-, green to pi, yellow to pi+, and red to pi++ (blue is between pi- and pi - or is comparable to pi- with a common houserule, while purple is instead comparable to pi-2).

On the topic of firearms, I'm not entirely comfortable with the way blaster damage scales with weight. With the firearm design rules from GURPS Classic: Vehicles, damage for firearms often scales linearly with weight - both weight and damage scale linearly with length and power; however, weight scales with the square of caliber, while damage scales linearly with caliber. Blasters are meant to function like firearms, so it may be appropriate to have them scale the same way. This is problematic for spacecraft and the like, however, considering armor DR scales with the cube root of weight. Of course, the ammunition - both in the form of energy and KN plasma (although considering KN is used in superconductor loops as energy storage, I'm thinking blasters would just have a modified power cell, which serves as a supply of both power and KN) - would still follow Spaceships progression - a 6d blaster may only be twice as heavy as a 3d one, but it uses 10x as much ammunition. This would likely result in a similar effect to what we see in Star Wars, where vehicles typically use relatively-small blaster cannons instead of full-sized ones. For example, I've already decided KN supercapacitors store 50 GJ per ton, or 25 MJ per lb. If we go with, say, a 1 lb RoF 1 blaster doing 3d, that's 3 kJ per shot - a 1 lb supercapacitor could power a bit over 8000 shots (assuming 100% efficiency, which probably won't be the case). Scaling this up, an RoF 1 Major Battery on an SM+12 capital ship would weigh 10,000,000 lb, for an amazing 30,000,000d. Of course, such a shot would require 30 YJ, which in turn would require a supercapacitor weighing 600 teratons for a single shot. For reference, back at the end of 2020, it was estimated the total weight of man made objects was somewhere around 1 teraton. This means what SS calls a Major Battery for a SM+12 vessel - 30 GJ, for 600d - would only weigh 200 lb.

It's something I'll need to play around with. I'm thinking it might work out a bit better to have damage scale with the square root of weight - if a +1d force sword is 1 lb, having a +2d one be 4 lb seems like it would work out better than having it be only 2lb or a full 10 lb. And above, that 30 GJ cannon would weigh 20 tons, rather than only 0.1 tons or a full 5,000 tons.


As for parrying, I think the whole HP idea would be overly cumbersome in play. Instead, I'm thinking Green force swords are the standard when it comes to Parrying blaster bolts, using the character's normal Parry (skill/2+3). Reds are at -2 to Parry bolts, Yellows are at -1, Blues are at +1, and Purples are at +2. The fluff explanation for this is that the more stable, higher-spectrum beams have a wider repulsing effect, but because it's spread out further it's not as strong (and thus doesn't enhance wounding as much as the more concentrated fields do). This conveniently also explains why faster-moving bolts aren't any harder to Parry - their repulsing field is also wider, meaning you don't need to get as close to deflect it enough for a miss (the fields work both ways). The weapons don't benefit from this against other force swords due to the control exerted by the other user (blaster bolts are nearly weightless, making them easy to deflect, but a user can keep a force sword on-point); they don't benefit against other projectiles because only one repulsing field in play is insufficient (also, even a Kolibri bullet is massive compared to a typical blaster bolt). Incidentally, visually I've decided Reds look like Kylo Ren's lightsaber (thick, unstable, crackling with energy), while Purples look more like the ones seen in Rebels (or at least in the Asoka vs Vader duel, the only part of that series I've seen - foil-thin and stable); other colors are somewhere in-between (Greens look something like what we see in most of the movies - moderately thick and fairly stable, with a bit of flickering). In all cases, the actual beam is incredibly thin - what people see is where the repulsing field is strong enough to distort the beam's light.

I do still like the idea that, in a duel, the combatant using a lower-spectrum force sword (red vs purple would be the extreme case) is better off fighting aggressively to end the fight quickly, while the opponent is better off dragging things out. With the HP idea, each clash of weapons would deplete the lower-spectrum force sword more than the higher-spectrum one (as the latter had a higher pool of HP to draw from), making this occur as a natural consequence of those rules (the lower-spectrum force sword runs out and shuts down first). I intend to adapt the rules from "The Broken Blade," possibly setting higher-spectrum force swords as having a higher threshold, to risk "breakage" (actually a forced-shutdown, with effects like those previously described) if striking too hard, deflecting too powerful of a strike (including one from a blaster bolt), etc, but I don't think those lend themselves to this effect (unless I set it so there's a risk of shutdown on nearly every exchange, but I think having your weapon roll HT constantly would detract from the game). I may just have to let that particular idea die, but I'm open to alternatives.


Finally (for now), I'm debating the inclusion of in-between colors, like orange and teal. If I have these be possible, I'm not sure if I should have the player pick which color's effect it has (so an orange beam could function like red or yellow, depending on the player's choice when the weapon is made/purchased/whatever), round to the nearest wavelength, or throw simplicity out the airlock and have the effects be somewhere in-between. It might also be possible to "dye" a beam a different color, so you could have a visually-green beam with the stats (and instability) of a red one.
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Last edited by Varyon; 05-12-2021 at 09:04 AM.
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