[UT/SS] 4e Star Trek Weapons and Effective TL?

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

The farther you go in the series, the less they use it, though. I mean, there are outright war-scenes in DS9 where you have the enemy crouched behind rocks on a planet, and the heroes have a phaser rifle, which surely has more than enough power in it to disintegrate a rock and remove your opponent's cover, but they never do it. There are also murder scenes that Odo investigates that are rarely piles of dust. Instead, you have targets with "phaser burns." You can definitely make the case that the phaser has devolved, or at least our expectations of it have changed.

Though you could still make the case for TL 12. They could be neutral particle beams, or grasers (we see them using fan patterns and such)

I get the feeling phasers with a disintegration setting are LC0 by the time of TNG, and the only things the rifles seem to be good at are the fan blasts and rapid-fire. Either that, or, somebody figured out a way to make phasons cause massive organ failure, without wasting so much energy on the flesh.

[borithan]

I think the idea is that the non-disintegrating "kill setting" of TNG era onwards is essentially a turned up stun setting. It deals some kind of shock to the system that at low levels temporarily incapacitates people and/or renders them unconscious, while at higher settings it damages or shuts down a person's body entirely (overloads the CNS somehow?).

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

. Which means I still need to figure out what the hell phasers and disruptors actually are in GURPS terms....

Setting specific energy weapons with setting specific quirks. I'd personally make up numbers (with the tech and toys blaster design system, preferably). The easy route would be to make a phaser do damage as the TL11^ weapon or the TL 12^ weapon at 80% damage (choose via mode), and the disruptors perform a little better but don't have near as many settings.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

malloyd, Mailanka: For the record, what I'm looking for is not 100% accuracy to the series, but a "playable approximation to capture the feel" for it.

After looking through a few things, I'd probably say it's effectively TL10 with emergent superscience, .

Why? The Federation certainly has the wealth of a TL 12 society. And the medical capability.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Why? The Federation certainly has the wealth of a TL 12 society. And the medical capability.

Do they? people still die of old age. Wealth they have in spades. It can be argued that's one of the most important aspects of TL, but I have a hard time envisioning TL12 that isn't post singularity.

Now TL8+4^, you can sell me on.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Do they?

Yes.

people still die of old age.

At ages in excess of 140.

Wealth they have in spades. It can be argued that's one of the most important aspects of TL, but I have a hard time envisioning TL12 that isn't post singularity.

It has a "post-scarcity" economy and government that is incomprehensible to us. It is post-singularity. It just isn't transhumanist, because it's safetech for the most part.

Now TL8+4^, you can sell me on.

What does that even mean?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Why? The Federation certainly has the wealth of a TL 12 society. And the medical capability.

Yep. TOS might have had a theme of "Exploring an incredibly dangerous unknown" but TNG had a theme of "Don't accidentally drop the Universe and break it.". Something like the way both Wesley and Geordi unintentionally created AI in the first season.

Wesley even created an entire race of nano AI. They let him use antimatter and dilithium crystals for his science homework too.

I could go through UT and come up with a huge list of TL12^ tech that the Federation could use but chooses not to. Not just cloaking devices but exophase generators and the list would keep going. Their replicators appear to be more capable than the ones in UT.

About weapons, in TOS on Organia you saw disruptor rifles and they had disintegrate settings. A Klingon disruptor pistol with a disintegrate setting was seen in The Search for Spock as well.

Both disruptors and phasers are basically UT disintegrators with variable power settings and the phasers have a stun setting. Note that the stun setting is extremely effective which is one reason it's used as default. The -3 you see with UT's Neural Disruptor pistol won't do at all. In any version of Trek if you saw some humanoid resist stun it was proof that they weren't human.

Also note that in SS terms UT disintegrators are Cosmic. You can arm other powers with non-phaser/disntegrator weapons but make both personal and ship weapons Cosmic as well. Force screens will be Cosmic as well with at least one and probably 2 levels of Hardening.

[The_Ryujin]

Ok, while I don't got the time (or energy) to throw all this together right now here's a few things to help you stat out a Phaser.

First off to stat out a disintegrator to handle the disintegrate setting. Here is a post I did a little while back that tries make a workable kludge that let's you stat out one using the Laser and Blaster Design rules (oh course it'll only get you "good enough", it seems it was one of the weapons that were pulled from a hat).

The normal kill setting is just a generic blaster.

For the stun setting, I've started to deconstruct how neural disruptors are stated though I haven't yet converted it yet into a Laser and Blaster Design friendly format yet but here's the guts of it:

First figure out how big of a HT penalty the disruptor is going to give with a base of HT-1.

Range: Half damage range is 2.5 yards times the penalty squared. Max is three times half damage range.

Weight: ~0.38 times the penalty cubed.

ROF: Always seems to be 1.

Number of shots: 0.8kJ times the penalty cubed per shot (Assuming these were stated without super science cells). A TL11 C cell has 1,440kJ.

Of course the trick is going to be combining these different modes into one weapon (or if you want to be lazy I guess you could just threat them as three different weapons and use the combination rules from Ultra-Tech).

Once I get back from work, assuming it doesn't kick me ass to hard (Mondays are hell were I work, like 90% of new hires quite after their first Monday level hell) I'll try to cobble this all together into something more coherent.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Yes....At ages in excess of 140.

I wouldn't call that TL 12. 10? sure. 11? maybe. 12? no.

It has a "post-scarcity" economy and government that is incomprehensible to us. It is post-singularity. It just isn't transhumanist, because it's safetech for the most part.

hmm....

What does that even mean?

It means star trek. It means that in terms of wealth, military power, and so forth, its as good as TL12 -- but its not the TL12 found in the books. They can do things that are beyond any TL12 hard science, but not what TL 12 can do. Base the TL off of TL8, then add superscience as the setting requires until you hit the economic and military equivalent of 12.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

At ages in excess of 140.

Which can certainly be justified by having TL 10 medical science.

It has a "post-scarcity" economy and government that is incomprehensible to us. It is post-singularity. It just isn't transhumanist, because it's safetech for the most part.

And yet people run around buying stuff with gold-press latinum. It's not that post-scarcity. Furthermore, why isn't it transhumanist?

What does that even mean?

[/QUOTE]
B513 should explain it well enough. In principle, he means "It's like TL 12, but not the way the standard rules describe it," which is fair enough.

Look, perhaps you're just challenging people to get them to think, in which case that's nice, but it's hard to get that across on the internet, especially on a forum. Moreover, it sounds like you're sold on TL 12, but not everyone wants to model Star Trek the same way, or are modelling the same parts of the same show the same way (TOS is certainly not post-scarcity, TNG looks much more post-scarcity, DS9 is less post-scarcity but more transhuman, and VGR certainly seems post-scarcity, though it could just be badly written). The same arguments that could be applied to the phaser can be applied to just about everything else in Star Trek (what, exactly is the medical tech level? And how does the economy work? Are there transhuman technologies or not?) Thus, just as you can shoot down any argument of a person who disagrees with you, they have just as much ammunition to shoot down your arguments.

So you'll get nowhere with that approach. There's no profit in telling people that they're doing Star Trek wrong, there's only profit in suggesting routes to model it. Positive discussion not negative discussion, and I don't mean that in the sense of "nice, not mean" but in the sense of adding ideas rather than shooting them down

For example, I think you're better off with TL 12 as well. TL 12 seems designed to have all of the ridiculous tech-magic that Star Trek brims with, including regeneration rays, omni-tools, disintegrators, teleportation booths and so on. But Star Trek is also about advancing technology, so where do you go after TL 12? And how to you have interesting fights when you have disintegrators on the table?

My solution was to expand the tech levels out to 13+, usually by taking some of the more ridiculous tech and pushing it forward. Mental Translators (Which are not the translators you see, as standard Universal Translators are not psionic in nature), neural interfaces, psi-crystals, disintegrators, tachyon shotguns, tau shields, stasis fields, etc, get pushed up to higher TLs, while graser beams and pulsars become the weapons of choice, plus I added in personal force fields.... I'm not Star Trek at that point, but I believe in shedding ties to specific settings.

That's on solution, one vision.

On the other hand, you really just need some kind of beam weapon and basically any beam weapon will do. You need multiscanners, but those are TL 10^. You don't have the regen ray anymore, but you rarely see that sort of tech in later Star Trek as they become more attached to medical room drama and characters use more and more drugs, so we can use advanced TL 10 drugs, and the teleportation device is super-science and can be introduced at any point. With TL 10 technology, you have two whole TLs full of transhuman crazy left to explore/invent, the technology largely stays under control and remains more understandable/gameable out of the box than much of the TL 12^ tech, and it feels more-or-less right.

I critiqued Malloyd for suggesting that you just need to roll-and-shout, but in a sense, he's absolutely right. Star Trek is definitely about a technological playgroun and an exploration of science, but the exact nature of that technology isn't so important, just as long as it's there.