Engineer skill nonsenses

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I don't doubt it. I'll even add further examples if you like, s.

These appear to be more about the effects of the Optional Specialization of Politics(Internal) being used in place of Adminstration rather than Gurps' organisation of mandatory Engineer Specializations.

I mean that if it is one of a bureaucracy's purposes is to hire engineers a successful roll v. Adminstration would do the research to hire the right engineers. Politics(Internal just gets the user his position in the bureaucracy and doesn't help to run it.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Yes, and that is a needless semantic argument.

Not at all. It is a pragmatic argument that sweeps aside the semantic trickery.

I consider tech skill penalties a perfectly adequate way to reflect "this equipment is based on older/more advanced technology than you're used to, so here's a penalty,"

Interesting. How often have you actually used it?

It seems to me that the /TL system only sees extensive use in Traveller=like campaigns (where the party visit technologically advance and backward planets), Infinite Worlds-like campaigns (where they visit backward timelines), and time travel campaigns or adventures, situations where its practical effect is “here’s a penalty” so harsh and sweeping that several character types are just hosed. That made an amusing hard-SF point in Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early”, but it doesn’t seem to me to have extensive adventuring potential. When I tried to use GURPS 4th ed for a Traveller=like campaign players took one look and avoided generating technical characters in droves.

I don't see any reason to make it more complicated than that.

Fine. I want to make it simpler and less rigid.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Interesting. How often have you actually used it?

Reasonably often. I like time travel games, so I've run the Time Corps and In the Cube. Never had a problem with TL skills.

[Tymathee]

GURPS, being a generic universal system, is bound to have these highly niche-case mechanics for these sorts of things. Someone might look at them and think "Wow, that's useless, who'd use it?", and inevitably someone else will chime in to say "I have, and it is useful!". I've certainly talked smack before about certain GURPS mechanics only to be surprised that at least someone found them useful.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Emerikol

The only way to break this impasse is to write that supplement and sell it in great numbers in which case I will concede the point.

There are actually several ways to test market such a product.

For folks who have their own blogs and who have written official GURPS material, there is the possibility of doing a small sample of a larger work, posting it, and judging the number of page views, and number and type of comments.

Second, a limited amount of such material could be folded into a less specialized product, possibly based around High Tech and/or Social Engineering which expands on the Invention rules and gets into things like factory and product design, improving local TL, and so forth. Based on sales and fan reactions future products could just expand on skill specializations. If there's ever another run of Pyramid, these specializations could form an article.

There's also the possibility of mining all the GURPS 3E and 4E supplements for specializations and optional specializations for skills and then expanding on this information.

[whswhs]

For the most part, GURPS divides specialties of Engineer up as Agemegos would prefer, with electrical and chemical and civil and so on. The one big exception is that there is no specialty of Engineer (Mechanical). By analogy there ought to be: Electronics Repair goes with Engineer (Electronic), so Mechanics ought to ge with Engineer (Mechanical). But instead every optional specialty of Mechanics has a required specialty of Engineer to correspond to it.

I think the simple fix would be to institute Engineer (Mechanical), and have vehicle engineers and power plant engineers and the like take an optional specialty within it: Engineer (Mechanical, Hovercraft) or Engineer (Mechanical, Steam Engines).

It might seem that Armoury ought similarly to correspond to Engineer (Weapons) or the like. But the specialties of Armoury are rather too disparate: unpowered armor wouldn't fall under Mechanical (it might fall under Materials), firearms could be Mechanical, beam weapons would be Electronics, and so on.

Things like millwork, or clockwork, or steam engines, or motors, or nuclear power plants probably don't need special branches of Engineer, though; they're already covered by TL differences—a TL3 engineer designs millwork, a TL6 one designs steam engines, and a TL9 one might design compact nuclear reactors or something.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

The trouble is with the English word "Engineer." It is a very mixed-up word. For example, the man who runs a train is called the "Engineer."

In most old SF stories (EE Doc Smith, for example), the person who operates and runs the engines (ship's drives and sometimes the power plant) is an engineer.

On the other hand, when I went to University of Delaware in the late 70's to study electrical engineering, it was as design skill.

When I went to the University of New South Wales in the early Eighties to study electrical engineering it was a design skill too. But many of my classmates and the students in other years were RAN engineering-officer cadets, and there were other naval engineering-officer cadets in the school of mechanical engineering. The bods who go to sea as engineering officers are fully-trained professional engineers who have graduated from the same degree courses as civilian engineers. But the Royal Australian Navy certainly doesn't design its own engines, radars, radios, etc., and wouldn't do so at sea if it did. It's almost as though teaching design was being done as a means to some other end.

During my brief stint as an engineering student, my teachers (particularly Dr. Churches, my lecturer in Engineering Design) were often keen to emphasise that real engineering is not the design of a product in isolation, but in conjunction with a more profound complement: the design of the process by which the product will be made. Arnolfo di Ambio's genius was not that he invented a huge dome for the Duomo in Florence, but that he invented a practical process for building a dome without a centring. John Roebling's genius was not to suspend suspension bridges from wire-rope cables instead of chains, but the process of spinning those cables in place on an easily-installed pilot cable. The miracle of the cantilever bridge is the process of building them without falsework. Later, when I came to work with civil engineers on road projects, I found that the great bulk of their work was not designing highways, but managing the complex processes of building the monstrous things, and particularly adapting or revising the process to deal with the unexpected as it emerged.

I think that perhaps most of the people that English calls "engineers" manage complex systems, such as industrial production processes or marine engines and drive trains, and they are taught to design those processes as a way of thoroughly understanding them.