How to build: becoming Inertialess in the Lensmen sense

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

QQ, and the title says it: how do you build the ability to become Inertialess, as with the space drives in the Lensmen setting?

Thanks in advance to all who answer!

[Blood Legend]

Lensemen? Describe please?

[Fnord-Fnairlane]

The Lensman series by E. E. Smith was turned into a GURPS 3e sourcebook.

Starkly outrageous space opera, where doomsday weapons start at using a solar system as a vacuum tube (sun as emitter) and end with dropping anti-matter planets on people at several times the speed of light in real space, plus galaxy spanning psionic powers.

FTL travel is enabled by turning off inertial mass, which reduces space travel to newtonian mechanics: top space speed is derived from air resistance vs rocket thrust... well, interstellar gas resistance.

If you want in-game rules, go read the books, they're very good and packed with enough detail to correctly model a great variety of ships / situations, or try and pick up the 3e sourcebook.

However, the genre is grossly cinematic - sample NPCs in 3e were on the order of 4,000 points, and while some of the reasons for that are fixed (ally costs of 2,500+ point allies) in 4e, others issues are now worse (Psi powers that can crack planets).

If you really want to write up a gadget for some reason, it's just a form of FTL space travel with a high top speed. Note that you can't be an AI/mechanical character in the background, the masters of the universe prevent non-biological intelligence and the development of transistors - so anything with an inertialess drive is by definitition just gear.

[Fnord-Fnairlane]

Good factoid from the wikipedia page on a battleship:

By the time of Galactic Patrol and the later novels of the series, no further developments of power technology have been described, but the power systems' capacities are clearly based on refinements of total-conversion technology; early in Gray Lensman, the Dauntless is described as using "30 pounds per hour" of power while inertialess and running at full thrust. Using E = mc2, this works out to 400 trillion (4×10^14) watts of power (or, in terms of its destructive potential, 100 kilotons TNT equivalent per second). With the advent of Medonian electrical systems following the penetration into the Second Galaxy, by the end of the series usable power on-board had been increased by another factor of 1000.

IE: Battleships towards the end of the series have powerplants in the order of 10^17 Watts - later on, they get substantially more powerful.

[Kirby]

Originally Posted by Molokh

Greetings, all!

QQ, and the title says it: how do you build the ability to become Inertialess, as with the space drives in the Lensmen setting?

Thanks in advance to all who answer!

To my mind, in the Lensman setting, inertialess ships go really really fast and are immune to collision damage. A limited version of Insubstantiality (which includes masslessness and thus inertialessness) would do the trick for collision-proofing and simulating the physics of inertialessness, if you want to put the ability onto a character or a spaceship built with the character creation rules. For the other game aspect of the special effect, Space Flight with lots and lots of Enhanced Move would be what you want. One might put the Cosmic: Inertialess Turns enhancement on the Flight and Enhanced Move, but it seems if one is insubstantial this modification is redundant.

Both of these suggestions assume you're building an inertialess ship with character points; you might not like doing things this way. If you don't, then until the spaceship design rules come out, you might be best off just making up numbers to match your sense of the performance of ships in the setting.

Hoping these suggestions are useful,

--K

[Blood Legend]

Originally Posted by Fnord-Fnairlane

dropping anti-matter planets on people at several times the speed of light in real space.

Holy sweet mother of God.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Kirby

To my mind, in the Lensman setting, inertialess ships go really really fast and are immune to collision damage. A limited version of Insubstantiality (which includes masslessness and thus inertialessness) would do the trick for collision-proofing and simulating the physics of inertialessness, if you want to put the ability onto a character or a spaceship built with the character creation rules. For the other game aspect of the special effect, Space Flight with lots and lots of Enhanced Move would be what you want. One might put the Cosmic: Inertialess Turns enhancement on the Flight and Enhanced Move, but it seems if one is insubstantial this modification is redundant.

Both of these suggestions assume you're building an inertialess ship with character points; you might not like doing things this way. If you don't, then until the spaceship design rules come out, you might be best off just making up numbers to match your sense of the performance of ships in the setting.

Hoping these suggestions are useful,

--K

Doesn't seem quite right. Becoming inertialess makes an object behave differently from a physical PoV. The inertialess 'drive' is not a propulsion system (it doesn't confer movement, merely changes the way an object moves). Modifying Flight and Enhanced Move is wrong.

OTOH, the Insubstantiality path seems promising, except that it requires some more enhancements/limitatons.

Oh, and a funny thing: it becomes dangerous to use Innate Attacks with Rcl>0 while inertialess...

[David Johnston]

Originally Posted by Molokh

Oh, and a funny thing: it becomes dangerous to use Innate Attacks with Rcl>0 while inertialess...

Not necessarily. You'll just fly away. And it wouldn't just be Innate attacks with Rcl>0. It would be all of them except possibly things like Maledictions.

[Kirby]

Originally Posted by Molokh

Doesn't seem quite right. Becoming inertialess makes an object behave differently from a physical PoV. The inertialess 'drive' is not a propulsion system (it doesn't confer movement, merely changes the way an object moves). Modifying Flight and Enhanced Move is wrong.

OTOH, the Insubstantiality path seems promising, except that it requires some more enhancements/limitatons.

Oh, and a funny thing: it becomes dangerous to use Innate Attacks with Rcl>0 while inertialess...

My mistake; I assumed you wanted the whole drive, not just the ability to become inertialess. Simply mentally delete the third and fourth sentences of my earlier post. In any case, though, Insubstantiality seems like what you want; any ability in the RAW will require enhancements or limitations, so it's no worse than anything else in that respect. If you're interested in the specific values of the enhancements and/or limitations, I'd probably just call it -80%, but I'm certainly not married to that value and could be convinced otherwise by argument.

That said, if this is a character, you'll need to pay full points for the Flight and Enhanced Move, whether the special effect is inertialessness or something else. One might desire to substitute Warp for these abilities, to simulate FTL flight, but that may be a bit baroque for your taste.

--K

[Fnord-Fnairlane]

Originally Posted by Blood Legend

Holy sweet mother of God.

If the "Lord of the Rings" is the seminal work that launched an entire genre of fiction and fantasy roleplaying, Lensman is the equivalent series for Sci-Fi and Space Opera. It is (IMO) equally influential in it's own genre.

You want over-the-top? Read the Lensman series. Considering it was written in the '30s and '40s, it has aged extraordinarily well. Wherever possible, he stuck to "physics as understood at the time" - other than psionics it's a moderately hard-science background (more so than Star-Trek or Star Wars, for example). Maths ans physics used in the series are internally consistent, though there's a fair bit of "Super Science" (TL^) in GURPS terms.

Spaceship speed? 90 to 100,000 Parsecs per hour. Note that the Milky Way is only about 30,000 parsecs across... Gamma quadrant? That's a day or so away.

Power-plant ratings? Starts at pounds per hour (IE: E=MC^2, where M is macroscopic....) increases 12 orders of magnitude during the series.

Psi powers? Every main protaganist (Lensman) has a few hundred to a few thousand points of Psi. Jedi are utterly laughable by comparison. Training and forthright determination are starkly more powerful than hokey religions.

Lack of escalation control? People start using full sized planets as battle-stations, coz they're tough enough to more or less cope with battleship guns. So then people start tossing planets as kinetic energy weapons. So a defence is arranged for important systems: Use the entire output of the systems sun as the emmitter for a plasma cannon (cooks planets real good). Thus, planets have to be tossed at substantially higher velocities (preferably more than light speed) to be effective weapons.

Starship Weaponry? Back in the "pounds per hour" era of power-plants, the good guys switch to nuclear-bomb-powered lasers (one bomb = 1 shot) to get through star-ship shields. All I can say is that the breech of those "primaries" must be pretty strong, because they're not one-shot weapons. This escalates along with power plants...

The second most powerful weapon used in the series (crushing a fortress planet between a few supra-light anti-matter planets) caused an explosion (well, more like a local destruction of the space-time continuum) around a dozen parsecs across. There was a worry it might cause the total destruction of space-time, but apparently "something" would step in to prevent this (God?).

The most powerful attack used in the series was a psionic gestalt of a few billion Lensman controlled by "The Unit". Note that your baseline Lensman (1st stage) are around about a 1,000 points, the few (4?) most powerful ones (2nd Stage) are around 4,0000 pts, the five members of "The Unit" are 3rd stage Lensman, with no sensible points total, and "The Unit" is effectively "Stage 4". They then did a galaxy wide (yes, the whole galaxy, millions of inhabited planets, thousands of Lensman per planet) psionic mind meld, and mind-blasted the bad guys.

Note: "Most powerful" attack was the result of two billion years of planning and preparation. Oh, and second most powerful attack would not have worked on final bad guys.

Seriously, no other setting even comes close. One end-game Lensman universe dreadnought could take on the entire combined might of the Star Trek and Star Wars universes (maybe excluding Q and the like) and treat the battle as a minor skirmish on the way to the main event. And there are millions of said dreadnoughts available.

It's somewhat hard to work out the exact numbers, but a Mauler class battleship has a power plant with an output on the order of at least several thousand tons of total conversion per second, and if I'm doing the math right, more like "millions of tons per second". IE: roughly one solar output. Per battleship. First you start with a total conversion power-plant rated in "pounds of matter converted per hour", then you increase it's power output 1,000-fold via the discovery of super-conductors that can handle the required power output (this allows the FTL capable planets, BTW). Note that one of the biggest issues in Lensman battleship design is your thigh-thick copper bus-bars turning into plasma due to battle damage induced power surges, thus the super-conductor thing being so useful. Finally, you use super-conducting total-conversion power-plant to run your "cosmic" powerplant, where energy out = one million times energy in. Lucky they have those infinite energy density superconductors, eh?