Phasers in GURPS

[Tyneras]

Before I got my hands on GURPS Prime Directive, we made our Phasers have several settings.

Stun 1: HT [1 charge]
Stun 2: HT-2 [2 charges]
Stun 3: HT-4 [3 charges]

Kill 1: 6d (0.1) burn [2 charges]
Kill 2: 6d*2 (0.1) burn [4 charges]
Kill 3: 6d*3 (0.1) burn [6 charges]
Kill 4: 6d*4 (0.1) burn [8 charges]
Kill 5: 6d*5 (0.1) burn [10 charges]

Disintegrate: 6d*10 (0.1) burn [20 charges]

Holdout phasers could only do up to Kill 3 and had 30 charges, the bigger hand and rifle Phasers did everything and had 100 and 200 charges each .

They had horrible accuracy and range, acc 0 for holdout, 1 for hand, and 3 for rifle. The rifle had the built in tricorder. The (0.1) armor divisor represents just how terrible their damage is to metals, so almost any armor at all could stop a phaser cold. Beware the all mighty packing crate!

[Tyneras]

Originally Posted by TheScribe

In the later series, they have a scale of damage that they do. I assume heating rocks is down with one of the lower settings and disintegrate is the highest setting.

The have at least 16 levels per on screen canon. I should see if I can find an episode where its stated how much damage a level 16 setting does.

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/...&Submit=Submit

Lots of good quotes for ground combat tactics and phaser effects.

[LoneWolf23k]

Originally Posted by Qoltar

Couldn't someone just look in the 4th edition version of PRIME DIRECTIVE???


- Ed Charlton

I have seen the stats for the Prime Directive phaser, and while the gaming stats are ok, there's not much explanation on what a phaser actually is, or how it compares to more conventional sci-fi weapons like lasers.

I actually looked up Phasers on Wikipedia, and this is what I got:

Phasers are common directed-energy weapons first seen in the original Star Trek and later seen or referenced in almost all subsequent films and TV spin-offs except for the phase cannons of Enterprise.

Originally (from the production notes to TOS), the Phaser was a PHoton mASER, or LASER, since at the time of writing the Laser was a relative unknown, and powers were not expected to be very great. Masers, on the otherhand, were very already powerful machines which produce very destructive radiation pulses. The term "phaser" is has since been revised as a backronym for PHASed Energy Rectification.

Phasers appear as both personal hand-held weapons and as starship-mounted weapons. Hand-held phasers are depicted to have a variety of settings, able to "stun", "heat", "disrupt", "disintegrate", and "vaporize". Capable of being used as welding torches or cutting tools, they can be set to "overload", whereby they build up a force-chamber explosion internally; the resulting blast will destroy most natural objects within a 50-yard radius. Hand phasers can also be set to fire in "Wide Beam" mode, to defeat multiple targets at once. The phasers mounted on the USS Enterprise also can fire a stun blast capable of incapacitating groups of people on a planet's surface. Similar to the hand phaser, ship phasers can also be fired to evenly disintegrate a target object such as meteors and asteroids.

The hand-held phasers include a larger rifle which has similar settings to the smaller phasers. The rifle is more powerful than the smaller phasers; there have been a number of different types of phaser rifles, most notably the phase compression rifle which has appeared in a number of Voyager episodes and in all the recent films from First Contact to Nemesis.

Phasers make a beam of a fictional type of subatomic particles called nadions.

Unfortunetly, the on-screen version of the Phaser relies on a lot of Applied Phlebotinum (thank you TVTropes.org!), and suffers from having a lot of incredibly varied feats by different writers, to the point where it's hard to pinpoint what Phasers can actually do.

[Extrarius]

Originally Posted by LoneWolf23k

[...]Unfortunetly, the on-screen version of the Phaser relies on a lot of Applied Phlebotinum (thank you TVTropes.org!), and suffers from having a lot of incredibly varied feats by different writers, to the point where it's hard to pinpoint what Phasers can actually do.

The game already has mechanics for that - phasers grant a limited form of the serendipity advantage with the special effect of "the phaser can do that"

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by LoneWolf23k

I've been puzzling... How would you recreate Phasers using GURPS Ultra-Tech? Would they be a variant on Lasers, a type of Omniblaster, or something else entirely?

This is really simple.

1. Use the TL12^ Disintegrator. That's what's it's there for.

2. Use the Omniblaster rules to add a Stun setting. This will make Phaser Stun very effective but that's good. How often did you see anyone just ignore a Phaser set on Stun?

3. Allow users to dial down the power for extra charges. That's the Disintegrators main limit, lack of charges.

4. You're there.Stop. No need to complicate things. :)

If it's technobabble you're looking for ("What's a Phaser beam made out of?") that's tough.

Fred Brackin

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

"What's a Phaser beam made out of?"

Weapons-grade handwavium.

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by umbros

I think they are definately a Space Opera Omni-Weapon, including:

a laser-like effect,
an electrolaser-like stuning effect,
variable output,
lots O' shots,
maybe wide-beam or cone fire,
and pretty much what ever else the plot requires.

Don't forget FTL capable.

[Apache]

I used to care about the details of phaser damage, but if I ran a Star Trek game again, I'd model phasers as follows....

Ammo.....ignore it, supposedly you could fire a phaser at combat power-levels for DAYS (continously) before you ran out of power. And that was in TOS.....

Damage.....on 'stun', it knocks you out for an hour. 'Heavy stun', 2 hours.

On 'kill', you die. On 'vaporize', you go POOF.

Wide-angle setting lets you make area effect attacks......

Nasty? You betcha. Makes 'em think before they start jumping into that Blazing Phaser Action.......

[SCHIFTY]

Originally Posted by Tyneras

The (0.1) armor divisor represents just how terrible their damage is to metals, so almost any armor at all could stop a phaser cold. Beware the all mighty packing crate!

Then how could they be used in vehicle/starship combat?

[Apache]

Apparently the ship phasers have an AP setting...;)