[UT/Spaceships] A Mech-Based Combat Setting

Langy · 06-06-2008, 11:57 PM

I'm in the middle of the planning stages for a game based around mech-type combat, which I'm hoping to play using GURPS 4E. I've got a decent amount of information on the setting written up, but have been running into a few issues - primarily in the area of vehicle and weapon design and mech-based combat. First, I'm going to post a bit of information about the actual setting so I don't need to define terms and such every time I use them.

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In the summer of 2008, a great shockwave of blue light flashed out from a point in space just at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere. As the light dissipated, what appeared to be a great meteor materialized in its place and began falling to the ground, the fiery light created by the meteor's entry into the atmosphere showing up in the night skies of over a dozen countries. By the time the meteor had crashed upon the edge of Antarctica, a number of radar stations had already confirmed that this meteor was an artificial construct - a space ship falling to its death upon the Earth's crust. Within days of its arrival, several nations and even some corporations sent military and scientific teams to find out more about this visitor from the stars.

---------

This is a homebrew Ultra-Tech setting that spans TL8 (Earth at the start of the campaign) through TL9-10 (Jiganti, Scorpio Federation GIs) all the way to early TL12 (SF High-Guard). The basic premise is that a major interstellar war lands right on top of an unprepared Earth’s doorstep, with Humanity caught in the cross-fire. The main weapon in this war is termed by the US military the Bipedal Infantry Fighting Vehicle, or BIFV (pronounced BYE-ef-vee), but is more familiar to most as simply the ‘Mech. These twelve-foot-tall, 6-ton humanoid vehicles carry a single pilot – and as much firepower as a light tank. Inspired heavily by a friend’s homebrew game that was itself inspired heavily by Dream Pod 9’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Gear, this is a setting that I’ve been working on in one form or another for several months, and I’m going to be posting a good bit of detail on it in this thread for a while, both as a sort of soundboard and to see if I can get some help on getting things to work in 4E.

First, a quick overview of the setting and its terminology:

EDO: Earth Defense Organization, also called just ED. ED is the result of the SF/Jiganti war spreading onto Earth soil – a fully-unified military organization currently operating through the United Nation’s Security Council, the EDO operates fully 50% of Earth’s military might. The other half is made up of the myriad individual militaries of the Earth nations, which have yet to solidify into a one-world Government.

SF (Scorpio Federation): A technologically advanced empire of slave-states. Originally named a ‘Federation’ after the Federation of Planets from science-fiction’s Star Trek due to the vast number of species found in their ships, it eventually became apparent that the known species in the SF were all slaves, ruled through military force by another race. The SF uses no ‘strong’ artificial intelligences and very, very few ‘weak’ AIs, though Humanity isn’t entirely sure why.

Jiganti: A race of short, lizard-like aliens with light exoskeletons. The Jiganti are roughly TL9, but also have access to TL10 computers and construction technology. Though the Jiganti have a lower technology base than the SF, so far they have been able to put up a very strong fight against the encroaching SF forces through the use of their very impressive automated construction facilities. An important note about the Jiganti is their high resistance to radioactivity – Jiganti fission reactors are able to outperform Human fission reactors of twice the same mass due to the lower amount of radiation shielding required.

BIFV (Bipedal Infantry Fighting Vehicle): The Military’s name for a human-built, humanoid war machine.

Frame: A general term for a BIFV, regardless of origin. Can also be used for a non-military bipedal vehicle.

Omniframe: The term used for SF-made BIFVs. They are called ‘Omni’ frames for their extensive use of modular components, allowing one Omniframe to perform many different tasks, including maintenance, cargo lifting, and combat.

Battleframe: The term used for Jiganti-made BIFVs, these Frames are extremely specialized and do not use modular components, unlike both human BIFVs and Omniframes. Another major difference is that Battleframes are unmanned – the Jiganti control their Battleframes through sophisticated AIs and telepresence. Ground-based Battleframes tend to use air-breathing nuclear reactors which pump large doses of radiation into the atmosphere but have extremely high performance.

Frame Classes: Light (Less than 3 tons, SM+2), Regular (Up to 6 tons, SM+3), Medium (Up to 10 tons, SM+4), Heavy (Up to 16 tons, SM+4), Ultra (Up to 30 tons, SM+5)

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Now that the fluff's out of the way, the crunch. For the past while, I've been trying to design Frames using GURPS 3E's vehicle design system - I really like the 'real world' figures you get out of it, like kilowatts of motive power or however many pounds of armor, but the system is very clunky and doesn't translate very well into GURPS 4E, especially when you compare the DR of, say, UT Battlesuits and what you get out of the vehicle design system. I've been considering switching over to a system inspired by Spaceships, to make sure it's compatible with 4E's rules, but I'm not convinced Spaceships would work that well for sub-10 ton Frames. Similarly, I'm not sure that Spaceships will scale very well for regular-scale combat: even tertiary VRF weapons in Spaceships do extremely high damage, and missiles are many times worse. Luckily, the weapons appear to be my only real problem with Spaceships, though I think the DR ratings may be a little too low.

That brings me to the other major stumbling block. I've been working on trying to derive the calculations used for weapons in Ultra-Tech, but have so far kept hitting problems. Laser weapons were rather easy to figure out - I've got calculations down that match up perfectly with the ones in Ultra-Tech (or at least the ones I'm sure are right - there are a few things in Ultra-Tech's laser weapon tables that look like they need to be errata'd). Slugthrowers, on the other hand, are giving me fits - making weapons that are consistent with those in UT but are big enough for 12-foot-tall 'mechs to use is getting frustrating. For straight Conventional guns, I've almost got it correct - gun damage is roughly right, but maximum range and weight are nowhere near the same ballpark most of the time.

Langy · 06-06-2008, 11:57 PM

Finally, here's a human BIFV carrier I designed using Spaceships, with some things modified so that the weapons work similarly to real-world guns:

Late TL8 + TL11^ Thermopylae-class BIFV Carrier

The Thermopylae is a late TL8, 10,000 ton flying Bipedal Infantry Fighting Vehicle Carrier, built and designed around technology salvaged from a TL11^ spaceship which crashed onto Earth’s southern pole. The BIFV Carrier has tank-level armor utilizing advanced materials taken from the crash, an experimental fusion reactor modeled upon the alien’s power plant, and the remnants of the alien’s reactionless drive – which humanity has not yet been able to understand, much less replicate.

The Thermopylae only carries 48 BIFVs, as it was decided that armor and defensive weapons were more important than having twice the ground element – due to its alien components and extremely high cost, the Thermopylae is as well-protected as possible.

Current TL8 Defensive Electronic Counter Measures have proven to be completely useless against the aliens – as such, they were not added to the design. Also, it is worth noting that this is not a spacecraft, though it is capable of operating in space: even with nearly half of its mass devoted entirely to armor, the ship is incapable of taking even a single hit from a similarly-sized ship’s main gun. Instead, this ship sticks relatively close to the ground, letting its armor soak the damage from the relatively small ground-side weaponry.

The Thermopylae includes scientific laboratories that are used to study the alien technology left after a battle and has a fabricator capable of constructing and repairing most of the BIFVs and weaponry. With a half-year’s food supply and enough fuel for the fusion reactor for over a decade, the Thermopylae is a long-endurance carrier capable of operating inside enemy territory for weeks at a time. Its primary mission is as a forward base, but can also be used as heavy fire support.

Front
[1-3] TL9 Armor, Advanced Metallic Laminate, dDR 90, Hardened, $120M
[4] Habitat, $10M
[5] Tactical Array, Level 9, $100M
[6] Weapons, Secondary Battery, $60M +$1M for Nuclear Warheads
[Core] Control Room, Complexity 5, $20M

Middle
[1-3] TL9 Armor, Advanced Metallic Laminate, dDR 90, Hardened, $120M
[4] Habitat, $10M
[5] Hangar Bay, 300/100 Tons, $1M
[6] Weapons, Tertiary Battery, 65 Tons Cargo, $26.4M

Rear
[1-3] TL9 Armor, Advanced Metallic Laminate, dDR 90, Hardened, $120M
[4!] TL11^ Hot Reactionless Drive, 2G, $30M
[5!] Fabricator, $500M
[6] Cargo Bay, 500 Tons, 60 Tons Refrigerated, $30K
[Core] TL9 Fusion Reactor, 2PP, $100M

Features
Stealth Hull, $10M

Habitats
36 Bunkrooms
14 Cabins
10 Sickbays
6 Briefing Rooms
10 Labs (Physics)
1 Establishment (Gym)
6 Offices
35 Steerage Cargo

Weapons
Secondary Battery: 50 Vertical Launch System tubes, each carrying 4 320mm Missiles based on the RIM-66 Standard Missile. 10 of these missiles carry 100KT Nuclear Warheads. This battery can fire up to 10 missiles at one time.

Tertiary Battery: 15 Very Rapid Fire 35mm Cannons with 600 shots each (35mm Bushmaster III Cannon)
15 Very Rapid Fire 20mm Cannons with 2,600 shots each (Phalanx CIWS)
15 16cm Missile Launchers with 21 shots each (RIM-116 RAM Launchers)

Cargo
6 Tons 20mm Ammo
24 Tons 160mm Missiles
60 Tons Food
35 Tons Miscellaneous Steerage, including Crew Armory
475 Tons Weapons/Replacement Parts for BIFVs

Hangar Bay
48 Bipedal Infantry Fighting Vehicles, Average Mass: 6.25 Tons, Average Cost: $5M

Crew
44 BIFV Pilots
4 BIFV Squad Commanders
5 Reactor Engineers
5 Drive Engineers
12 Gunners
28 General Engineering
10 Medical
10 Scientists
10 Vehicle Maintenance/Factory Technicians
30 Command

Total: 110 Ship's Complement
48 Ground Element

ST/HP 1500
HT: 14
Hnd/SR: -2/5
Space Move: 2G/c
Air Move: 10/125
SM: +10
LWt: 10,000 t
DR: 900
Occ: 158 People/180 Days
Load: 915.8 t
Cost: $2,115.29 Million

Notes: The CIWS and RAM launchers are both smaller than Tertiary weapons and were calculated as each massing 7 Tons rather than the 0.5 Tons listed for their respective size. This size discrepancy is due to the CIWS and RAM launchers having their own dedicated fire-control RADARs and being fully automated - even if the Thermopylae's Control Room and Tactical Array are both fully destroyed, these two point-defense weapons will still be able to independently target and attack incoming missiles and aircraft.

06-06-2008, 11:57 PM	#1
Langy Join Date: May 2008 Location: CA	[UT/Spaceships] A Mech-Based Combat Setting I'm in the middle of the planning stages for a game based around mech-type combat, which I'm hoping to play using GURPS 4E. I've got a decent amount of information on the setting written up, but have been running into a few issues - primarily in the area of vehicle and weapon design and mech-based combat. First, I'm going to post a bit of information about the actual setting so I don't need to define terms and such every time I use them. --------- In the summer of 2008, a great shockwave of blue light flashed out from a point in space just at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere. As the light dissipated, what appeared to be a great meteor materialized in its place and began falling to the ground, the fiery light created by the meteor's entry into the atmosphere showing up in the night skies of over a dozen countries. By the time the meteor had crashed upon the edge of Antarctica, a number of radar stations had already confirmed that this meteor was an artificial construct - a space ship falling to its death upon the Earth's crust. Within days of its arrival, several nations and even some corporations sent military and scientific teams to find out more about this visitor from the stars. --------- This is a homebrew Ultra-Tech setting that spans TL8 (Earth at the start of the campaign) through TL9-10 (Jiganti, Scorpio Federation GIs) all the way to early TL12 (SF High-Guard). The basic premise is that a major interstellar war lands right on top of an unprepared Earth’s doorstep, with Humanity caught in the cross-fire. The main weapon in this war is termed by the US military the Bipedal Infantry Fighting Vehicle, or BIFV (pronounced BYE-ef-vee), but is more familiar to most as simply the ‘Mech. These twelve-foot-tall, 6-ton humanoid vehicles carry a single pilot – and as much firepower as a light tank. Inspired heavily by a friend’s homebrew game that was itself inspired heavily by Dream Pod 9’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Gear, this is a setting that I’ve been working on in one form or another for several months, and I’m going to be posting a good bit of detail on it in this thread for a while, both as a sort of soundboard and to see if I can get some help on getting things to work in 4E. First, a quick overview of the setting and its terminology: EDO: Earth Defense Organization, also called just ED. ED is the result of the SF/Jiganti war spreading onto Earth soil – a fully-unified military organization currently operating through the United Nation’s Security Council, the EDO operates fully 50% of Earth’s military might. The other half is made up of the myriad individual militaries of the Earth nations, which have yet to solidify into a one-world Government. SF (Scorpio Federation): A technologically advanced empire of slave-states. Originally named a ‘Federation’ after the Federation of Planets from science-fiction’s Star Trek due to the vast number of species found in their ships, it eventually became apparent that the known species in the SF were all slaves, ruled through military force by another race. The SF uses no ‘strong’ artificial intelligences and very, very few ‘weak’ AIs, though Humanity isn’t entirely sure why. Jiganti: A race of short, lizard-like aliens with light exoskeletons. The Jiganti are roughly TL9, but also have access to TL10 computers and construction technology. Though the Jiganti have a lower technology base than the SF, so far they have been able to put up a very strong fight against the encroaching SF forces through the use of their very impressive automated construction facilities. An important note about the Jiganti is their high resistance to radioactivity – Jiganti fission reactors are able to outperform Human fission reactors of twice the same mass due to the lower amount of radiation shielding required. BIFV (Bipedal Infantry Fighting Vehicle): The Military’s name for a human-built, humanoid war machine. Frame: A general term for a BIFV, regardless of origin. Can also be used for a non-military bipedal vehicle. Omniframe: The term used for SF-made BIFVs. They are called ‘Omni’ frames for their extensive use of modular components, allowing one Omniframe to perform many different tasks, including maintenance, cargo lifting, and combat. Battleframe: The term used for Jiganti-made BIFVs, these Frames are extremely specialized and do not use modular components, unlike both human BIFVs and Omniframes. Another major difference is that Battleframes are unmanned – the Jiganti control their Battleframes through sophisticated AIs and telepresence. Ground-based Battleframes tend to use air-breathing nuclear reactors which pump large doses of radiation into the atmosphere but have extremely high performance. Frame Classes: Light (Less than 3 tons, SM+2), Regular (Up to 6 tons, SM+3), Medium (Up to 10 tons, SM+4), Heavy (Up to 16 tons, SM+4), Ultra (Up to 30 tons, SM+5) ---------- Now that the fluff's out of the way, the crunch. For the past while, I've been trying to design Frames using GURPS 3E's vehicle design system - I really like the 'real world' figures you get out of it, like kilowatts of motive power or however many pounds of armor, but the system is very clunky and doesn't translate very well into GURPS 4E, especially when you compare the DR of, say, UT Battlesuits and what you get out of the vehicle design system. I've been considering switching over to a system inspired by Spaceships, to make sure it's compatible with 4E's rules, but I'm not convinced Spaceships would work that well for sub-10 ton Frames. Similarly, I'm not sure that Spaceships will scale very well for regular-scale combat: even tertiary VRF weapons in Spaceships do extremely high damage, and missiles are many times worse. Luckily, the weapons appear to be my only real problem with Spaceships, though I think the DR ratings may be a little too low. That brings me to the other major stumbling block. I've been working on trying to derive the calculations used for weapons in Ultra-Tech, but have so far kept hitting problems. Laser weapons were rather easy to figure out - I've got calculations down that match up perfectly with the ones in Ultra-Tech (or at least the ones I'm sure are right - there are a few things in Ultra-Tech's laser weapon tables that look like they need to be errata'd). Slugthrowers, on the other hand, are giving me fits - making weapons that are consistent with those in UT but are big enough for 12-foot-tall 'mechs to use is getting frustrating. For straight Conventional guns, I've almost got it correct - gun damage is roughly right, but maximum range and weight are nowhere near the same ballpark most of the time.

06-06-2008, 11:57 PM	#2
Langy Join Date: May 2008 Location: CA	Re: [UT/Spaceships] A Mech-Based Combat Setting Finally, here's a human BIFV carrier I designed using Spaceships, with some things modified so that the weapons work similarly to real-world guns: Late TL8 + TL11^ Thermopylae-class BIFV Carrier The Thermopylae is a late TL8, 10,000 ton flying Bipedal Infantry Fighting Vehicle Carrier, built and designed around technology salvaged from a TL11^ spaceship which crashed onto Earth’s southern pole. The BIFV Carrier has tank-level armor utilizing advanced materials taken from the crash, an experimental fusion reactor modeled upon the alien’s power plant, and the remnants of the alien’s reactionless drive – which humanity has not yet been able to understand, much less replicate. The Thermopylae only carries 48 BIFVs, as it was decided that armor and defensive weapons were more important than having twice the ground element – due to its alien components and extremely high cost, the Thermopylae is as well-protected as possible. Current TL8 Defensive Electronic Counter Measures have proven to be completely useless against the aliens – as such, they were not added to the design. Also, it is worth noting that this is not a spacecraft, though it is capable of operating in space: even with nearly half of its mass devoted entirely to armor, the ship is incapable of taking even a single hit from a similarly-sized ship’s main gun. Instead, this ship sticks relatively close to the ground, letting its armor soak the damage from the relatively small ground-side weaponry. The Thermopylae includes scientific laboratories that are used to study the alien technology left after a battle and has a fabricator capable of constructing and repairing most of the BIFVs and weaponry. With a half-year’s food supply and enough fuel for the fusion reactor for over a decade, the Thermopylae is a long-endurance carrier capable of operating inside enemy territory for weeks at a time. Its primary mission is as a forward base, but can also be used as heavy fire support. Front [1-3] TL9 Armor, Advanced Metallic Laminate, dDR 90, Hardened, $120M [4] Habitat, $10M [5] Tactical Array, Level 9, $100M [6] Weapons, Secondary Battery, $60M +$1M for Nuclear Warheads [Core] Control Room, Complexity 5, $20M Middle [1-3] TL9 Armor, Advanced Metallic Laminate, dDR 90, Hardened, $120M [4] Habitat, $10M [5] Hangar Bay, 300/100 Tons, $1M [6] Weapons, Tertiary Battery, 65 Tons Cargo, $26.4M Rear [1-3] TL9 Armor, Advanced Metallic Laminate, dDR 90, Hardened, $120M [4!] TL11^ Hot Reactionless Drive, 2G, $30M [5!] Fabricator, $500M [6] Cargo Bay, 500 Tons, 60 Tons Refrigerated, $30K [Core] TL9 Fusion Reactor, 2PP, $100M Features Stealth Hull, $10M Habitats 36 Bunkrooms 14 Cabins 10 Sickbays 6 Briefing Rooms 10 Labs (Physics) 1 Establishment (Gym) 6 Offices 35 Steerage Cargo Weapons Secondary Battery: 50 Vertical Launch System tubes, each carrying 4 320mm Missiles based on the RIM-66 Standard Missile. 10 of these missiles carry 100KT Nuclear Warheads. This battery can fire up to 10 missiles at one time. Tertiary Battery: 15 Very Rapid Fire 35mm Cannons with 600 shots each (35mm Bushmaster III Cannon) 15 Very Rapid Fire 20mm Cannons with 2,600 shots each (Phalanx CIWS) 15 16cm Missile Launchers with 21 shots each (RIM-116 RAM Launchers) Cargo 6 Tons 20mm Ammo 24 Tons 160mm Missiles 60 Tons Food 35 Tons Miscellaneous Steerage, including Crew Armory 475 Tons Weapons/Replacement Parts for BIFVs Hangar Bay 48 Bipedal Infantry Fighting Vehicles, Average Mass: 6.25 Tons, Average Cost: $5M Crew 44 BIFV Pilots 4 BIFV Squad Commanders 5 Reactor Engineers 5 Drive Engineers 12 Gunners 28 General Engineering 10 Medical 10 Scientists 10 Vehicle Maintenance/Factory Technicians 30 Command Total: 110 Ship's Complement 48 Ground Element ST/HP 1500 HT: 14 Hnd/SR: -2/5 Space Move: 2G/c Air Move: 10/125 SM: +10 LWt: 10,000 t DR: 900 Occ: 158 People/180 Days Load: 915.8 t Cost: $2,115.29 Million Notes: The CIWS and RAM launchers are both smaller than Tertiary weapons and were calculated as each massing 7 Tons rather than the 0.5 Tons listed for their respective size. This size discrepancy is due to the CIWS and RAM launchers having their own dedicated fire-control RADARs and being fully automated - even if the Thermopylae's Control Room and Tactical Array are both fully destroyed, these two point-defense weapons will still be able to independently target and attack incoming missiles and aircraft.