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Old 12-06-2020, 08:38 PM   #11
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcr

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Originally Posted by Rolando View Post

you just have to look for it
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/CM...ed_Combat_Suit

There you get all the specs you need for a conversion, the rest is handwave and game design choice (put as much armor to stop the weapons you want it to stop, etc).
Most of those aren't very advanced b Gurps standards. There were improbable missing items and features added in later models should have been too simple to be left out of the earlier ones.

There was little information I could use to establish stats. I'd use stats from UT wholesale.
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Old 12-06-2020, 09:03 PM   #12
Rolando
 
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Default Re: closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcr

I think it is more important if the stats go along with your defined campaign.

If you want your average marine to survive the basic zerg attack the armor must stop most or all of it. So basic zerg must swarm the marine and attack chinks in armor or slowly degrade the armor somehow.

If the marine armor should survive civilian weapons the armor should have enough DR to simulate that reality.

ST, HT, Hp are also campaign related...

using Ultratech as a base is a good choice, as those armors are already designed to compare to the weapons in the same book, so you can have some parameters. With that you make the zergs (if you want to make a starcraft conversion) comply to the Ultratech armors and weapons.
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Old 12-06-2020, 09:35 PM   #13
AlexanderHowl
 
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Default Re: closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcr

If you want a Zerg Rush that actually threatens UT powered armor, I would suggest a 3d corrosive dual weapon melee attack. Each attack would reduce DR by an average of 1, which matters when a few dozen are attacking each space marine. If each space marine is suffering twelve attacks per turn because they are surrounded by six Zerg, they are losing an average of 12 DR per turn. Even if they kill two Zerg per turn, it will not matter if there are thirty waiting to take the place of every one that falls.
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Old 12-07-2020, 08:47 AM   #14
Gold & Appel Inc
 
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Default Re: closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcr

Our own CousinX generated reams of material for his GURPS Starcraft campaign years ago that you may find handy. You can find it here.
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Old 12-07-2020, 10:25 AM   #15
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Default Re: closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcr

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Originally Posted by Rolando View Post
you just have to look for it
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/CM...ed_Combat_Suit

There you get all the specs you need for a conversion, the rest is handwave and game design choice (put as much armor to stop the weapons you want it to stop, etc).

With weight you can get hit points too.
There is exactly one statement of weigh on that page that I could find: firebat armor is 140kg, and its considered heavy.

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Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc View Post
Our own CousinX generated reams of material for his GURPS Starcraft campaign years ago that you may find handy. You can find it here.
The Suit there seems to be based on the TL9 powered combat armor from ultra-tech. Its not an exact match, but its pretty close. Its probably a decent starting point.
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Old 12-07-2020, 10:30 AM   #16
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Default Re: closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcr

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Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
The Suit there seems to be based on the TL9 powered combat armor from ultra-tech. Its not an exact match, but its pretty close. Its probably a decent starting point.
It's totally based on that, yep. I was more thinking of the Zerg and Protoss stats, which were designed to line up with that. The campaign we used all that for went great.
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Old 12-07-2020, 10:44 AM   #17
Anthony
 
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Default Re: closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcr

If you've done the original Starcraft missions, there are a bunch that have either civilians or random animals, and they aren't that much less durable than combat units, so starcraft armor really isn't terribly good.
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Old 12-07-2020, 11:15 AM   #18
ericthered
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Default Re: closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcr

Of course, if you'd rather have marines in giant combat walkers, that's awesome, and a few weeks ago I was actually trying to use spaceships (with some tweaks and glances at 3e mecha and vehicles) to come up with a range of suit sizes for a space culture inspired by starcraft (They're essentially creep farmers. Its a terraforming agent that extracts minerals and produces a biosphere. The big monsters only show up if the stuff gets infected or feels stressed. The "farmers" are nomadic, so they don't stress out one area too much)

Power armor in gurps mecha has a huge weight range, from about 200 lbs to 10,000 lbs.
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Old 12-07-2020, 11:49 AM   #19
Plane
 
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Default Re: closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcr

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
The problem with hulking battle suits is that the articulation really doesn't work; try to bend the arms/legs of one of those hulking suits and you dislocate or break your limbs. Either it has to be basically the same size as the wearer, or it has to be big enough that the wearer fits entirely within the torso.
If you kept elbows/knees locked and most of your limb occupies the proximal half of limbs (thighs/upper arms) it seems like you could use your ankle/wrist to articulate the armor's knee/elbow?

This makes me wonder how you'd create the distinction between "extremities in limb joints" giant armors vs "extremities in extremities" normal armors, when distinguishing overpenetrating damage for wearable allies.

Basically if you wear a smaller SM ally (your SM, or maybe 1 or 2 higher) then if it loses a shin/forearm you're going to lose one too. There might be some small extensions (it can lose a hand/foot without you losing one) to protect your extremities from damage to theirs, but because f a "elbows in elbows and knees inside knees" design, damage you take will more greatly resemble the damage your wearable ally takes in terms of hit location.

If you wear a much bigger SM ally then we get stuff like "it can get blown off at the knee/elbow and my extremity takes damage instead of a limb" or even "I don't take any damage at all because the thigh/upperarm is slightly longer than my full limb length" by the hand/foot controlling pistons above the knee/elbow to operate the knee/elbow.

You'd still be taking damage to some part of your lower body from damage just to the thigh though (maybe 2/1/2/1 odds of it being thigh/knee/shin/foot ?) when you have a "hip inside hip" and "shoulder inside shoulder" design.

To have both hip=hip and shoulder=shoulder would require bots whose torso height matches your own, of course, which would look very odd with long legs/arms but not impossible...

I could be thinking too one-dimensionally (vertical distance) though. Another factor is to have hip/hip and shoulder/shoulder would be that the width between these joints has to roughly match your own, or else you would need to be a LOT more flexible to make the armor do certain things.

Example: if a human has shoulder joints spaced 3ft (1y) apart (sounds above average but doable for a roided marine) then the armor would need that too, giving it a narrow torso which would also look odd if you had long arms.

Marine's power armor seems to resemble human proportions between torso height/width to limb length though so it doesn't fit my theory...

I wonder if this might be even more extreme like "elbows and knees operate the shoulders" ?

This would give an even smaller proportion of your limbs inside the limbs of the armor. Only the proximal halves of the proximal halves (first 50% of thigh, first 50% of upper arm) would be occupied by the distal halves (forearm+hand and shin+foot) of the pilot's limbs. This would have the benefit of protecting them even more from overpenetrating damage to the limbs of their armor. You would definitely be protected from elbow/knee hits and maybe even attacks to the upper arm / thigh might occasionally miss your limb, or at worst lop off an extremity instead.

With that kind of size contrast there's probably also room for a pilot to do a last-minute "yankback" to pull their limb entirely inside the torso if they see it's about to be lost, like if a Zergling is gnawing on it and you can't pull it free, worry-through being unavoidable in the next couples seconds.

You're better off in that cast to free your limb (your PA limb is immobile anyway) to avoid blood loss, and maybe you could even use it to operate something inside the torso?

With a HUGE contrast (as we see in the CMC donned by Shivani Singh ... being a short female I think she might wear a different design than huge guys like Tychus Findlay though? dunno) maybe you'd even have room to store a small weapon like a pistol inside your armor, and even use it to fire wildly outside the "shoulder hole" created when a Zergling rips off your arm?

Probably pointless though because small pistols probably aren't enough to harm a Zergling. The lowest threshold of damage in SC seems to be 5 for SCVs but these are still 12ft tall mining robots who use the power drills (for mining) and plasma torches (for welding repairs) for attacks, which in gurps terms I'm guessing could still be more than 5x more powerful than a low-caliber pistol.

SC has a weird mechanic where all attacks do at least 1 damage regardless of how much armor you have, which I guess in GURPS terms means that to account for such mandatory incrementing any DR you buy should at least be Semi-Ablative so it can be whittled down over time.

Or at least any DR you get that's not Ablative should not be high enough to make 0 damage possible for the lowest caliber of weapon (SCVs I assume... Zerg Drone and Protoss Probe do identical 5 dmg and are probably also giant things 2x the size of a human: seem slightly bigger than marines and def bigger than zerglings which I think are meant to be horse-sized) but you could make it high enough to prevent damage from attacks/sources not actually accounted for in the RTS like say shrapnel from small explosions, walking on sharp rocks, the heat of being adjacent to a firebat's flame w/o getting hit directly, or the burning damage of hot shells ejected from a marine's weapon.

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Originally Posted by RedMattis View Post
Given that the marines are probably genetically modified giants and they inject themselves with almost lethal drugs (stimpack) I'd guess that their power armor requires exceptional strength to properly use.
The use of a stimpack in-game has to be researched and gives you extra speed, but that just might be "10x as much stim as I usually use" (it damages them) so you could definitely assume that the long-term use of stim-packs work like roids and make them stronger/faster at baseline than a Terran Scientist / Terran Dropship Pilot / Terran SCV pilot NPC would have.

That would aid in the explanation (aside from the actual skills to use specific suits or weaponry) why you can't reassign certain people to new careers. Part of that also seems to be the crazy-long suit-up process seen in the Wings of Liberty OP.

Marines are bolted into their armors that makes makes the slow suitup Tony Stark did in the Iron Man OP or first live film (as oppose to faster suitup in 3rd film) seem quick by comparison...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZd9n373vf4&t=1m

Actually I guess 1m50s isn't that long (unless they FF'd some parts) I'm sure there are power armors which take longer than that to get into. I imagine by SC2 due to tech advances the process was faster than in SC1. Here you see a bunch of robots helping him put on the armor but maybe they had fewer robots (or slower robots) doing it with earlier Marine production.

I'm betting that's what the "training time" and "mineral cost" of Marines is supposed to be, the Barracks going through that automated process of putting armor on, since it could cause problems to be wearing that kind of thing for long periods of time you would assume that marines would in their leisure time not be wearing it.

Tychus Findlay could be an exception because he seems to keep his armor on even when not fighting, like when hanging out in a bar. I think that's because of the whole "armor is your prison" thing. I'm only a couple missions into the campaign so I want to avoid spoilers but it sounds from opening narration that Mengsk (you memorize his voice if you played SC1) sent him to mess with Raynor's plans.

Raynor by compairson hangs out w/o his marine armor on in the 1st/2nd pre-mission RP fluff, even though he wears it when you can control him in-game as a hero unit.
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Old 12-07-2020, 11:51 AM   #20
Plane
 
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Default Re: closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcr

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Originally Posted by Rolando View Post
Starcraft ripoffed Starship Trooper, not WH40k. I think it deserve some respect :)
Just so long as we are clear that the March 1998 game did not rip off armor from the Nov 1997 live film.

The game would clearly be in development longer than that (it was planned since 1995) and there was 1996 demo at E3.

Any inspiration from Heinlein's creation would come from the 1959 novel itself, or the 6-episode anime OVA series released in 1988 which more faithfully adapted the power armor from the novel than the live films.

we never saw the SST armor done faithful to novels until the 1999 "Roughnecks" 3d-animated show, whose 36/40 episodes were GLORIOUS and I really wish they'd done more of that.

I wish we could blame that on budgeting restrictions, but I bet a lot of it has to do with the actors wanting face time which you don't get as much of when they're wearing suits instead of open-face helmets. IE why Robert Downy Junior just seems to have his helmet off so often in the movies, or why Grant Gustin as Barry Allen just happens to have a bunch of buddies who know his secret ID so he can "talk shop" as Flash unmasked on the CW's TV show.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rolando View Post
This animation, on the other hand, makes them a lot smaller.
The only way I can puzzle out the clear "proportions difference" between Findlay's animated suitup and Singh's comic suitup is they must be different CMC models.

I haven't been able to find specifics on what model number CMC either of them use (though I'm not looking too hard, wary of spoilers) but I think that while the end result is probably similar (probably around 10-12ft tall) there's proportional differences in the design between what a 5ft woman and some 8ft roidmonster wear to get to that point.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
There is exactly one statement of weigh on that page that I could find: firebat armor is 140kg, and its considered heavy.
Nice find, also seeing height of 1.98m mentioned. Appropriate find for you too since Firebat CMC660 is red!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc View Post
I was more thinking of the Zerg and Protoss stats, which were designed to line up with that.
ie bugs/skinnies, but Blizzard certainly took things in unique directions with the Xel'Naga connection between them, and even though bugs were messing around with human psychics to some degree, Blizz also had a unique take w/ Infested Terrans and the fate of Sarah Kerrigan too I think.

Then again I haven't delved into WH40/Warhammer so I might be overlooking some similarities to non-SST stuff too.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
If you've done the original Starcraft missions, there are a bunch that have either civilians or random animals, and they aren't that much less durable than combat units, so starcraft armor really isn't terribly good.
the lowest human unit I can recall had 20 HP which was half that of a starting marine: https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Scientist_(Deception)

there were even some who had the same HP as marines (40):
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Genetic_engineer
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/UED_scientist
and an advanced one who had 60, which is more than the 50 than even a firebat starts with: https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/UED_genetic_engineer

They weren't exactly naked though, so we might handwave this as these scientists all having super-durable armor because they deal with volatile chemicals / high heat / etc.

They definitely seem slimmer and less bulky than a marine, but a lot of the marine armor probably goes toward stuff like having the strength to carry their guns, handle the recoil of the guns, etc.

That could even apply to Deception's scientists wh owere less protected than the UED ones and gene engineers, while being a UED into genetic engineer seems to give the +20 bonus twice because theirs is presumably the most dangerous field needing the most protection.

Of course: all of this "the HP is the armor" is a problematic assumption with Medics being able to heal the whole kaboodle of these "organic" units. I could handwaive these as medics having repair skills too (like SCVs but for small armor instead of vehicles/buildings) but a key diff is they use energy alone while SCVs use resources, so that implies you need resources to repair machines and energy to repair organics.

It's a weird assumption because I'd think you'd need resources to repair organics too...
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