Are GURPS Tech Books released in wrong order / badly planned?

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

Am I alone in the feeling that Low-Tech, High-Tech and Ultra-Tech were released in the wrong order and/or not properly planned? UT lacks some of the neat weapon upgrades found in HT, and surprisingly doen't have any G-suit at all; HT & LT seem to produce strange results when combined (the armour rules seem to be not quite compatible); UT battlesuits - which are supposed to make infantry resistant to small arms - are defeated most typically by HT rifles with proper AP ammo. Overall, UT seems to suffer most from the 'unpolished' feel, though I'm not that much of a HT/LT nut, so I might be overlooking stuff.

Oh, and even Bio-Tech seems to have discrepancies with other books - notably the 1:10 drug price issue (though Pulver thinks BIO is actually right and UT is wrong) and the BIO spaceships vs. Spaceships spaceships discrepancies.

Perhaps there is / will be some grand unified PDF / article / thread that would make those books compatible? Something like the thread on using UT and BIO with THS.

Thanks in advance!

[smurf]

Considering there was some Pulver stuff left out of the UT final edit and allowed for Pyramid only users seems a bit harsh for the buyers of UT. Maybe another x dollar PDF of Pulver's World of Tomorrow :)

IMO it is nigh impossible to square everything. But the Low, High and Ultra Tech is concerned with tech over the ages.

Bio Tech is spanning the ages but also a source book for 'wet ware' as opposed to 'cyber ware'.

The issue is, is that both Low and High Tech can be proof read against real examples. Ultra Tech and extreme Bio Tech are just best guesses.

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by smurf

The issue is, is that both Low and High Tech can be proof read against real examples. Ultra Tech and extreme Bio Tech are just best guesses.

In that respect, perhaps UT would have turned out better if it had followed HT. GURPS always seems to work best when it is modeled on reality.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by smurf

The issue is, is that both Low and High Tech can be proof read against real examples. Ultra Tech and extreme Bio Tech are just best guesses.

I still feel that BIO is just better than UT.

[Joseph Paul]

Is it time for a compendium that would fix inconsistencies between the books?

[Refplace]

I wouldnt call it poor planning. There were years between several of these books so ideas change.
Also They were released in the order of sales priority and work. The numbers on E23 dont really bear this out but I bet if we added hard copy it would
E23 numbers
Low tech 843
LTC2 826
UT 720
High Tech 621
Bio tech 506

Low tech had the largest gear set in Basic and UT the lowest IMHO.
So greatest lack was covered first and you really need UT gear for a UT campaign with the others covered well enough to get by for some time.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Refplace

I wouldnt call it poor planning. There were years between several of these books so ideas change.

So, I playtested three of the four, and was LP for High Tech. Take that bias for what it is, and do recall that my memory of some of these is years old.

I remember that UT suffered a bit from either an unclear mission, or unclear execution of that mission. There were a lot of design elements in the original draft that were later excised. Some of the uber-crunch (how many kJ in a power cell, what's the power requirement for a frombotzer in kW?) were removed or not present as a design decision by those shaping the focus of the book (not the authors, as I recall). So things were a bit weird during the playtest.

High Tech had its mission clearly in line. It was to be a catalog of stuff, pure and simple. In many cases, real world price lists and performance were easily to hand, or could be based on extrapolation from items that WERE easily to hand. The authors almost never had to make stuff up and hope that there wasn't a game-breaking corner case.

Low Tech has the same kind of problem as Ultra Tech, but worse: you could't just make stuff up, because certain things were known to exist, and others had never been seen. But you didn't have hundreds of different examples of variations of a theme (such as fifty 9mm pistols or something), but rather had to take "short sword," "falchion," and "bastard sword" and play within the lines. Likewise, there were legacy system level issues such as the armor bits, that were hovering between "revise" and "rewrite." The desire to put design content in the catalog book was neatly nixed by the creation of the LT Compendia.

I own Bio Tech, but I don't think I was on the platyest. It seems to me to be of a like mind with High Tech: written by someone with professional knowledge of the field, and tightly held to concept (that's a compliment).

Seems that Bio Tech and High Tech are both very well written and executed, and lifted further by being good examples of books with a solidly understood mission statement for which much valid, mostly uncontested source material was available.

Low Tech and Ultra Tech are two sides of the same coin: less known, either because of data loss (LT) or future extrapolation to things that don't exist yet (UT). In both cases, the desire would be to provide meta-systems to help with further creation . . . but that was outside the scope. The LTC books made up for that lack, given a better understanding at the time of the e23 business model.

That's my improvised take on it.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Refplace

I wouldnt call it poor planning. There were years between several of these books so ideas change.
Also They were released in the order of sales priority and work. The numbers on E23 dont really bear this out but I bet if we added hard copy it would
E23 numbers
Low tech 843
LTC2 826
UT 720
High Tech 621
Bio tech 506
.

Using just E23 will distort things. All the tech books have had hardcover printings and UT has ahd a softcover reprint.

[Kromm]

FWIW, the order in which these works were released was the order in which they were written, and the order in which they were written was the order in which we could find willing and able writers. Central planning is nice, but in this case it would've meant GURPS Low-Tech in 2010, GURPS High-Tech in 2011 or 2012, and GURPS Ultra-Tech in 2013 or 2014. We didn't want GURPS Fourth Edition to wait 10 years to see all of its core tech catalogs published, so we went with what we had in the bullpen. The slight inconsistencies are a pain, sure, but better than the alternative.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Using just E23 will distort things. All the tech books have had hardcover printings and UT has ahd a softcover reprint.

That is why I said "The numbers on E23 dont really bear this out but I bet if we added hard copy it would"
but having researched the numbers on E23 I posted them anyhow, W23 to my knowledge has no such utility.