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Old 09-02-2022, 03:36 AM   #41
scc
 
Join Date: Mar 2013
Default Re: Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

OK, Star Wars Blasters, we've got technical descriptions on how they work and they're plasma weapons. Someone seems to have taken the workings of a real laser weapons and modified them until they got something matches what we see on screen, so instead of the lasing gas emitting light it's thrown out the gun. Through a focusing crystal, mind you. Probably best you don't think on that too hard. Or how the gas stays together.
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Old 09-02-2022, 07:39 AM   #42
Varyon
 
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Default Re: Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

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Originally Posted by Rupert View Post
Ignoring the techobabble and the movie SFX, blasters are no easier to dodge than bullets (even though they move at about the speed of paintball rounds in the movies), and making them blasters has some useful game effects - high penetration (thus explaining why armour that stops fragments, bullets, and knives does nothing to blaster bolts), and not being fully-automatic. UT's blasters do not have a radiation effect, but do have a surge effect (which explains why they're effective on robots that, being Unliving, should have tons of hit points).

They're actually a pretty good fit for the observed actual effects for guns in Star Wars.
Even ignoring basically everything that makes a Star Wars blaster what it is (visual effects, canonical descriptions of how it operates, the way characters react to them, etc), a UT blaster wouldn't be able to be knocked back by a lightsaber (stopped, perhaps, by a UT Force Sword, seeing as the latter uses forcefields that could presumably tank the hit, but not knocked back; and lightsabers are canonically described as "frozen blasters" or similar, indicating their "blades" are made of the same stuff as blaster bolts... and neutral particle beams* aren't going to deflect each other like that). And every instance I know of where a droid gets hit by a blaster, the visual effect is indicative of simply being damaged rather than shocked, and the practical effect is the same as when a biological target is hit (they go down, unless it's dramatically-appropriate for them to stay up, in which case they do). For surge effects, yousa need usen da booma! Or an ion gun.

I was indeed misremembering the rad modifier, however - I believe that's only on antiparticle blasters.

That said, if you find the stats of UT blasters work well for you for Star Wars games (or in settings inspired by Star Wars), hey, that's great! But that doesn't mean SW blasters are the same as UT blasters - any more than someone who finds using the stats of TL 6-7 firearms for blasters works well would mean SW blasters are the same as TL 6-7 firearms.

*Blaster bolts, if they were particle beams, would have to be neutral so they don't fly apart more-or-less immediately upon exiting the "barrel." From what I understand, in atmosphere you can actually just fire a charged beam and it will effectively make itself neutral itself on contact with the air - but SW blasters clearly also work in vacuum, so they'd need to be neutral particle beams (which IIRC is +1 TL, making Star Wars a TL 12 setting for having space-capable blasters).

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Vehicles and spaceships never seem to need refuelling in normal use, except for spaceships wanting to travel interstellar distances. That's really good batteries, or something like fusion.
Or, you know, some sort of superscience energy generation. Although looking at Wookieepedia, it appears fusion is referenced at some point as an outdated method of power generation, with most technology running off khyber crystals, hypermatter generators, and other superscience tech.

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Originally Posted by Rupert View Post
High end robots in SW seem to have volitional AI and roughly human level IQ, implying a C8 computer.
Aside from droids, Star Wars computers seem more limited than what one would expect of TL11 - indeed, I believe they tend to be more limited than even modern (late TL 8) computers. They also seem to be hardware rather than software - I'm unaware of any case of a droid being restored from backup, and indeed when the Millennium Falcon's navigation droid's body was damaged beyond repair, they didn't upload her into the Falcon - they physically installed parts of her into it.

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Luke hand is at least TL9, and I'd say that the seamless nature of the 'skin' job means Living Flesh (TL10).
That's acceptable. Star Wars cybernetics seem not to need any sort of brain surgery to connect, but that may just be glazing over details rather than actually being superscience. Certainly, their performance seems to largely match TL 9-10 cybernetics.

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Originally Posted by Rupert View Post
As for Vader, I don't think 'armour with cyberlimbs built in' is really any different from 'powered armour'.
I believe Vader's cybernetic limbs and his suit are separate - indeed, the Wookiepedia entry for the armor notes his cybernetic arms are skeletal and the armor's gauntlets contains padding to flesh them out when worn. This isn't to say powered armor would be outside of the capabilities of Star Wars technology - indeed, it seems likely the same technologies used for cybernetics and/or droids would be able to produce some decent powered armor - but rather that I'm unaware of it ever showing up.

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TL10^ would be about right, IMO (though I'd still want UT's blasters). TL9 just doesn't really cut it, and robot brains appear to be TL11, though adapting the 'neural-net' option from 3e could get round that - you could have a rule that it adds +1 complexity, but only for AI programs.
Yeah, TL 10^ seems to largely fit Star Wars, although it's probably lower TL in several fields (computers come to mind, as I noted previously) and perhaps in certain locations (like the Outer Rim vs the Core Worlds).

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Originally Posted by Rupert View Post
Except that UT says:

(UT10)

And UT agrees, quite clearly.
And if everyone followed that advice from UT, I wouldn't have a pet peeve about people using the pure-superscience tech from a setting for determining its numerical TL. But a lot of people will insist Force Screens aren't available before TL 11^, Disintegrators and Teleporters require TL 12^, etc, and use that to assign too high of a TL to various fictional settings (which is what got us off on this tangent).

I don't think the UT authors were necessarily in the wrong by suggesting a progression for their pure superscience, I just kinda wish they would have simply assigned such things TL ^ and then had a note about what TL's might be appropriate for each technology.
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Old 09-02-2022, 07:46 AM   #43
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Default Re: Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

It'd also be nice to have TL10^ force screens with a specific DR, as the TL11^ ones can be stronger than desirable for the rest of the tech.
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Old 09-02-2022, 09:04 AM   #44
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Default Re: Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

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It'd also be nice to have TL10^ force screens with a specific DR, as the TL11^ ones can be stronger than desirable for the rest of the tech.
True. I could see cause to basically give every pure-superscience technology an entry for each UT TL (9-12), and have a rather explicit note that in many settings such technology won't exist prior to some given TL (say, 11 for force screens), but that the table includes earlier TL's for those settings where they show up earlier. Alternatively, maybe give the performance at the nominal TL, and include a note on how to adjust it - "While personal conformal force screens are typically TL 12^, in some settings they may appear much earlier. They have 1/3 their listed DR at TL 9^, 1/2 at TL 10^, and 2/3 at TL 11^."
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Old 09-02-2022, 09:34 AM   #45
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Default Re: Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
*t SW blasters clearly also work in vacuum, so they'd need to be neutral particle beams (which IIRC is +1 TL, making Star Wars a TL 12 setting for having space-capable blasters).

.
Nope, UT blasters do all this at TL11 (with no^).

<shrug> The purpose of UT is to act as a gear catalog and telling palyers "Buy anything you want from TLs 10 or 11 with no active nano or bioplastic and dn't bother with armor" is what you need a TL for. Assigning a "perfect" TL to Star Wars for discussion purposes is irrelevant.
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Old 09-02-2022, 10:30 AM   #46
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Default Re: Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Nope, UT blasters do all this at TL11 (with no^).
Varyon is correct. UT blasters have halved Acc and divide range by 5 in vacuum. UT Designer's Notes has the neutral particle beam option that eliminates this, and states they come one TL later, so TL12 for handheld version.
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Old 09-02-2022, 10:51 AM   #47
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Default Re: Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

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Originally Posted by FrackingBiscuit View Post
Varyon is correct. UT blasters have halved Acc and divide range by 5 in vacuum..
I don't see the problem with having "Star Wars blasters" do that. Nobody ever shoots them in a vacuum anyway.
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Old 09-02-2022, 11:08 AM   #48
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Default Re: Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

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Originally Posted by FrackingBiscuit View Post
Varyon is correct. UT blasters have halved Acc and divide range by 5 in vacuum. UT Designer's Notes has the neutral particle beam option that eliminates this, and states they come one TL later, so TL12 for handheld version.
That said, I believe "field jacketing" is an option that allows beam weapons to function as though they were in atmosphere or in vacuum, whichever is better (basically, stabilizes the beam), and could work to make UT blasters work in vacuum at TL 11^.

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Originally Posted by David Johnston2 View Post
I don't see the problem with having "Star Wars blasters" do that. Nobody ever shoots them in a vacuum anyway.
X-Wings, TIE Fighters, the Millennium Falcon, Star Destroyers, etc all use blasters in space. Of course, such vessels routinely engage each other at ranges well short of what neutral particle beams can reach (even if those are already rather short-ranged in spaceships terms), so they could probably get away with having only 1/5th the range.

Unless that was a dig about the way such vessels maneuver (which would be consistent with them being in atmosphere, even all the way out in space).
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Old 09-02-2022, 11:14 AM   #49
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Default Re: Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
That said, I believe "field jacketing" is an option that allows beam weapons to function as though they were in atmosphere or in vacuum, whichever is better (basically, stabilizes the beam), and could work to make UT blasters work in vacuum at TL 11^.
Field Jacketing is available at TL10^, even before blasters. TL11^ brings the possibility of FTL beams which do everything Field Jacketing does and halve range modifiers.
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Old 09-02-2022, 11:47 AM   #50
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Default Re: Using 3e's Tech Levels, or adding more Tech Levels beyond 12.

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Field Jacketing is available at TL10^, even before blasters. TL11^ brings the possibility of FTL beams which do everything Field Jacketing does and halve range modifiers.
Handheld Field Jacketed Particle Blasters would be TL 11^, because handheld Particle Blasters are TL 11. That said, TL 10^ may well be enough for X-Wing-scaled blasters (Particle Blasters are TL 10 for large vehicular ones, TL 11 for small handheld ones; an X-Wing's main weapons are probably smaller than the TL 10 blaster cannon in UT, but are certainly larger than the TL 11 handheld weapons, so it's hard to say exactly where they'd fit) - actually, I think Spaceships may have Neutral Particle Blasters available at TL10, at least at the SS scale, but then there are some slight differences in the tech progressions between UT and SS anyway.

But if someone wants to just call Star Wars "TL SW" (it's kinda a mishmash anyway), that will probably be more accurate than giving it an actual numerical TL... even if doing so means you can't really use UT to get an idea of what tech not covered in the canon is likely to be available.
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