[UT] Built-in digital camera

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Anthony

55 grain hasn't been the standard military load for quite some time, it's been SS109/M855 at 62 grains since the 80s.

Well, 3.6 grams, 4 grams, it's about the same in game terms. In any event, I think we all agree that the 4mm "gauss rifle" weapons, whether they fire a 2.7 gram or 4 gram bullet, are more or less firing projectiles that are within the general bounds of "small caliber bullet" and not really ballistically just about the same as a 1.6mm flechette with a 25-1 length to diameter ratio!

[David L Pulver]

I do know some folks would prefer if Ultra-Tech 4e had done things differently.

Ignoring minor items of errata (I believe the most important, the ammunition weight errors, were corrected years ago) I would be happy to know what people would change, remove, fix, or add to make Ultra-Tech better?

I don't guarantee I can do anything, but it's always useful to know just in case the opportunity arises!

(Excluding full-fledged gear design systems or compatibility with same.)

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Varyon

]I think a lot of UT's bad reputation is largely-undeserved, although there are some issues off the top of my head. First off is that some of the gear is... underwhelming. Notably, I believe there are many personal firearms in UT that are outperformed by TL 8 (and even TL 7) firearms in HT,

Looking at the firearms tables, I'm not seeing it. The TL 8 firearms are performing pretty much exactly the same as the TL 9 conventional firearms. Basically they seem to be the same guns allowing for the fact that the TL table only has one model for each category while the TL 8 table has multiple entries.

and the UT tanks are laughably underarmored.

Only if you're comparing them to the front armour of a modern main battle tank when clearly none of them are, despite the description for grav tanks. The tanks are built for stealth, speed and missile avoidance despite that misleading description. The author's assumption appears to be that true MBTs are obsolete in their design philosophy

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

I do know some folks would prefer if Ultra-Tech 4e had done things differently.

Ignoring minor items of errata (I believe the most important, the ammunition weight errors, were corrected years ago) I would be happy to know what people would change, remove, fix, or add to make Ultra-Tech better?

I don't guarantee I can do anything, but it's always useful to know just in case the opportunity arises!

(Excluding full-fledged gear design systems or compatibility with same.)

An idea that has occurred to me is to make the projectile weapons a little more generically spread out to cover more bases and account for late TL8 things like higher ISP weapons. Then make Electrothermal 1.2x conventional and Electromagnetic a more realistic 1.5x.

1.5x is closer to the savings in recoil you'd get by removing the propellant gasses which you could then apply to more velocity. This would leave EM guns with recoil (RW concept not Gurps stat) similar to modern conventional guns.

[DemiBenson]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

I do know some folks would prefer if Ultra-Tech 4e had done things differently.

Ignoring minor items of errata (I believe the most important, the ammunition weight errors, were corrected years ago) I would be happy to know what people would change, remove, fix, or add to make Ultra-Tech better?

I don't guarantee I can do anything, but it's always useful to know just in case the opportunity arises!

(Excluding full-fledged gear design systems or compatibility with same.)

I always thought UT was pretty good considering the many genres it had to cover (and had to cover them generically) and the fact that predicting the future is notoriously hard.

What I always wanted was

1. More adventuring gear, so I worked up my version of that for myself, and then turned it into a Pyramid article.
2. Genre-specific gear/rule/advice books, so GMs and players could grab the right book for the type of campaign they’re playing without being distracted/confused by gear/rules/advice for different campaign types. E.g. the cyberpunk game will have very different gear/rules/advice from the Star Trek game.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

Most UT devices that use power get better (long range, more damage, or whatever) at higher TLs, but that also uses up more power, so durations stay the same. If a lower-TL device is jury-rigged to use higher TL cells (or was specifically built to perform as per a lower-TL device) I'd probably opt to use a conversion of this sort:

TL10 power cell = 2x energy of TL9
TL11 power cell = 5x energy of TL10 or 5x of TL9.
TL12 power cell = 10x energy of TL9, 5x of TL10, or 2x of TL11.

Do not draw too many conclusions from this. A design directive in the book was to make power cell details somewhat vague, as there was a perception that the precision 3e's GURPS Robots or GURPS Vehicles was excessive.

Ah, thank you for that. I'm assuming the TL11 power cell is meant to be 2x energy of TL 10 and 5x energy of TL 9, rather than 5x each.

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

I do know some folks would prefer if Ultra-Tech 4e had done things differently.

Ignoring minor items of errata (I believe the most important, the ammunition weight errors, were corrected years ago) I would be happy to know what people would change, remove, fix, or add to make Ultra-Tech better?

I don't guarantee I can do anything, but it's always useful to know just in case the opportunity arises!

(Excluding full-fledged gear design systems or compatibility with same.)

I'd need to read back through it, although as I said I think my "issues" with it were more flavor than substance. Some ideas off the top of my head:

The information from your above post about energy would have been nice to have had in the book, even with a note of "This is only a suggestion; in some settings, a faster or slower progression for energy storage is in play, such as x3/x10/x30 or x1.5/x2/x3."

Include a bona fide, heavily-armored MBT. If you're working under the assumption that such would likely be liabilities on a UT battlefield, and thus the lighter-armored, more nimble versions in UT would be more feasible, make note of that in the prose description - "Realistically, such heavy armor would be insufficient to stop most serious anti-vehicle munitions. This tank is more appropriate for a retro sci-fi setting, where things like top-attack drones and the like are absent; in a setting with such, one of the lighter tanks on p.000 would be a better option" or similar.

This veers into design territory, but perhaps some options to tweak battlesuits - so much weight and cost added (or reduced) per point of ST added (or reduced), jump jets as an optional accessory rather than being built into some suits (as Super Jump), etc. Oh, and dedicated programs to give a bonus to Battlesuit skill (so you can have Battlesuit a few levels below your other DX skills, with the program making up the difference so you can still use them at full skill).

Perhaps some generic guidelines on how to upgrade the stats of TL 7-8 firearms to TL 9+ (aside from just incorporating smartgun technology), and possibly even some general per-TL improvements for firearms in general. Having caseless vs cased be an option could have been interesting, although I'm not certain what the stat differences would have been (perhaps cased would simply be a bit cheaper but have lower magazine capacity?).

This arguably gets into errata-ish territory, but going from gyroc to guided/homing micromissile seems like it shouldn't have a higher effective price multiplier than going from bullet to guided/homing bullet. Also, a note about how the projectile's 1/2D and Max are handled when you upgrade to guided/homing would be welcome (I've seen plenty of forum posts using the 1/2D of such as their velocity).

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

I would be happy to know what people would change, remove, fix, or add to make Ultra-Tech better?

I think the only thing I've noticed so far that I really wish there was more of was guidance for buying modified robots. The AI software has specific rules for determining price based on character traits, but for robot bodies it just says the GM should just look at other equipment as a guide.

Hey, while you're here and I'm on the topic, I've got a question about some text in Ultra-Tech that is unclear to me. Page 29, "Purchasing Machines," in "AI Software," says that "each additional character point adds 5% to the cost of the robot," but soon after it says "If the cost [in character points] is negative, don't reduce the software cost below 20% of the base cost."

Where it says "adds 5% to the cost of the robot," should that read "adds 5% to the cost of the AI software"? The cost of the robot body shouldn't be impacted by the capabilities of the AI software, right? (Assuming no Complexity change that would require a bigger computer.)

[DemiBenson]

Originally Posted by Varyon

This veers into design territory, but perhaps some options to tweak battlesuits - so much weight and cost added (or reduced) per point of ST added (or reduced), jump jets as an optional accessory rather than being built into some suits (as Super Jump), etc.

I’ve been working on a system for that, although I was going to make it a small excel sheet like the spaceships worksheet, or a static client-side JavaScript page (or similar).

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by DemiBenson

I’ve been working on a system for that, although I was going to make it a small excel sheet like the spaceships worksheet.

I mean, I've made my own Battlesuit Design System (albeit lacking accessories beyond what's already in UT), and it even has decent agreement with UT (if we derive the performance of whatever wonder material the TL9 Combat Hardsuit's armor is made of and use that, anyway), but that's a little complex; a simple "+x% to cost and +y% to weight per +1 ST, to a limit of n*ST" could have potentially been an option in the book. But I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by Varyon

Perhaps some generic guidelines on how to upgrade the stats of TL 7-8 firearms to TL 9+ (aside from just incorporating smartgun technology), and possibly even some general per-TL improvements for firearms in general.

Decided to put some of my thoughts on this subject into its own thread here, if anyone is interested in discussing it.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

Ignoring minor items of errata (I believe the most important, the ammunition weight errors, were corrected years ago) I would be happy to know what people would change, remove, fix, or add to make Ultra-Tech better?

I dunno if this qualifies as minor errata, but do plasma flamers have some kind of area of effect that makes them do regular burn damage? I'm left wondering why the description says they're better against swarms, when swarms are weak specifically to area of effect attacks.