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Technology
by Aaron 30th April 2019, 17:18
Despite the strong belief that humans matter more than machines, the Solar League knows that it is tools that permit them to travel the deadly void and confront whatever they might find there. Care and respect for one’s equipment is drilled into the heads of every Patrol cadet. Those who dwell on Luna or the Belt are borderline fetishistic about maintaining and updating their gear. A single failed tool can mean a quick and painful death. The powerful industrial machine of the 21st century produces an immense variety of luxury goods and useful tools. This section lists a few items that found in the setting of Tales of the Solar Patrol, those that are most of use to adventuring characters or that are most likely to be encountered in daily life.
SPace Suits:
No one who travels the black emptiness between worlds would do so without a space suit close at hand. Because space travel is so common, space-suit training occurs from a young age as part of regular schooling. Any Solar League citizen knows the basics of how to put on a suit. By Solar League law, all ships must have suits for all passengers, plus 10% – to account for damaged suits, unexpected visitors, and other contingencies.
Space Suit Descriptions:
Space Suit: Dozens of marginally different space suits are available in the System, and more than a few barroom brawls have erupted over the merits of the AstroTuff versus the Starglider brands. The reality is that all are identical for game purposes. Twenty-first century suits are light, flexible, and tough, with a minimum of complicated equipment to get in the way. They are loose fitting and composed of thin, silvery cloth, but seal completely with minimal effort. They come in a variety of standard sizes, though individuals who are Very Fat might need to squeeze a bit to get in one. (Commercial ships tend to carry extra-large suits just in case.) The helmet is a clear plastic bubble that contains a speaker grill, with controls for the radio located on the outside, just about where the ear would be. The back of the suit has two oxygen tanks, each good for 4 hours, which can be swapped out by a single user in 6 sec-onds or by a partner in 2 seconds with a successful. Environment Suit/Vacc Suit skill check.
Boarding Suit: The Solar Patrol and others who expect rough-and-tumble combat use a boarding suit. Such suits pro-vide only minimal protection from atomic guns, but they are quite effective against knives and old-fashioned gunpowder weapons. They share the functionality of the space suit.
Commando Suit: This is a heavy suit, with hard plastic implants to provide additional reinforcement. It is still considered flexible armor for purposes of blunt trauma, though.
*All Solar Patrol suits include an arclight searchlight w/IR filter and a camera that is connected to the radio. The helmet contains a drop down night vision visor.
Weapons:
Mark I Lasers were standard issue from around 1975 to 1995. The pistol forms are unusually long barreled. The general design is that of gunpowder weapons, with a few high-lights of chrome and crystal.
Mark II Lasers were the dominant personal weapons from 1995 until the early 2040s, and they are still commonly found, though few new ones are being manufactured. These weapons follow the same design aesthetic as the Mark Is, but with more accouterments, such as power readouts and intensity settings.
Atomic guns became available for personal use in 2041 and quickly dominated the military and authorized civilian markets. Atomic guns, in either pistol or rifle form, are distinctly different from older laser and gunpowder weapons. They tend to be molded entirely in smooth, chromed metal, with an ovoid acceleration chamber and a thin barrel. The grip has a variety of controls placed on it, all easily manipulated when holding the gun in a standard combat stance.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]
Glue Guns fire a chemical that becomes a sticky, entangling mass of threads on contact with air. This is a Binding-12 attack, so the grapple effect is ST 12 and the DR of the binding is 4. This is the preferred sidearm for all non-military personnel who are unlikely to face heavily armed opponents. A glue gun has a similar design to a revolver, except that the material is an ultra-hard greenish plastic, and the “bullets” are chemical cartridges two inches long and an inch thick.
Tesla Coils: Tesla coils, based on the work of 19th- and early 20th-century super-genius Nikola Tesla, can suck the latent energy out of space itself and use it to power the mighty electron drives. The only weakness to the coils is that as the ether grows weaker, space becomes so turbulent and warped that the coils lose phase and begin to overheat. This limits space travel to roughly the orbit of Jupiter, at least until a reliable means of passing the so-called Tesla Line can be found.
Electron Drive: The electron drive is half of the secret of space travel. Producing tremendous thrust via accelerated hyper-electrons, it can propel a spacecraft at nearly unimaginable speeds, up to a respectable fraction of the speed of light itself. However, the power required is enormous, so much so that the drive would be a merely theoretical device, were it not for the Tesla coils.the standard spacecraft drive. Capable of acceleration of up to 3G with the standard variety. Solar Patrol ships typically mount a 5G unit.
Atomic Guns: Accelerating atomic particles and containing them in fields of stressed etheric energy can produce devastating beams of energy. Atomic guns can shred the strongest alloys as if they were metal foil, or slash a city apart from the safety of high orbit.
Atomic Barrier: Thanks to other properties of the Tesla coils, a shield of powerful repulsive energy can be formed, protecting the star-ships of the Solar Patrol from the awesome energies of atomic guns.
Infomat: Truly the miracles of the 21st century, infomats exist through the System. Always implacable and sometimes terrifying even to the scientists who run and maintain their data stores, the large machines can process and integrate all manner of data, and some can aid mathematicians by per-forming as many as 10,000 calculations in a mere second!
*note that our computers count as electromechanical for GURPS purposes
SPace Suits:
No one who travels the black emptiness between worlds would do so without a space suit close at hand. Because space travel is so common, space-suit training occurs from a young age as part of regular schooling. Any Solar League citizen knows the basics of how to put on a suit. By Solar League law, all ships must have suits for all passengers, plus 10% – to account for damaged suits, unexpected visitors, and other contingencies.
Space Suit Descriptions:
Space Suit: Dozens of marginally different space suits are available in the System, and more than a few barroom brawls have erupted over the merits of the AstroTuff versus the Starglider brands. The reality is that all are identical for game purposes. Twenty-first century suits are light, flexible, and tough, with a minimum of complicated equipment to get in the way. They are loose fitting and composed of thin, silvery cloth, but seal completely with minimal effort. They come in a variety of standard sizes, though individuals who are Very Fat might need to squeeze a bit to get in one. (Commercial ships tend to carry extra-large suits just in case.) The helmet is a clear plastic bubble that contains a speaker grill, with controls for the radio located on the outside, just about where the ear would be. The back of the suit has two oxygen tanks, each good for 4 hours, which can be swapped out by a single user in 6 sec-onds or by a partner in 2 seconds with a successful. Environment Suit/Vacc Suit skill check.
Boarding Suit: The Solar Patrol and others who expect rough-and-tumble combat use a boarding suit. Such suits pro-vide only minimal protection from atomic guns, but they are quite effective against knives and old-fashioned gunpowder weapons. They share the functionality of the space suit.
Commando Suit: This is a heavy suit, with hard plastic implants to provide additional reinforcement. It is still considered flexible armor for purposes of blunt trauma, though.
*All Solar Patrol suits include an arclight searchlight w/IR filter and a camera that is connected to the radio. The helmet contains a drop down night vision visor.
Weapons:
Mark I Lasers were standard issue from around 1975 to 1995. The pistol forms are unusually long barreled. The general design is that of gunpowder weapons, with a few high-lights of chrome and crystal.
Mark II Lasers were the dominant personal weapons from 1995 until the early 2040s, and they are still commonly found, though few new ones are being manufactured. These weapons follow the same design aesthetic as the Mark Is, but with more accouterments, such as power readouts and intensity settings.
Atomic guns became available for personal use in 2041 and quickly dominated the military and authorized civilian markets. Atomic guns, in either pistol or rifle form, are distinctly different from older laser and gunpowder weapons. They tend to be molded entirely in smooth, chromed metal, with an ovoid acceleration chamber and a thin barrel. The grip has a variety of controls placed on it, all easily manipulated when holding the gun in a standard combat stance.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]
Glue Guns fire a chemical that becomes a sticky, entangling mass of threads on contact with air. This is a Binding-12 attack, so the grapple effect is ST 12 and the DR of the binding is 4. This is the preferred sidearm for all non-military personnel who are unlikely to face heavily armed opponents. A glue gun has a similar design to a revolver, except that the material is an ultra-hard greenish plastic, and the “bullets” are chemical cartridges two inches long and an inch thick.
Tesla Coils: Tesla coils, based on the work of 19th- and early 20th-century super-genius Nikola Tesla, can suck the latent energy out of space itself and use it to power the mighty electron drives. The only weakness to the coils is that as the ether grows weaker, space becomes so turbulent and warped that the coils lose phase and begin to overheat. This limits space travel to roughly the orbit of Jupiter, at least until a reliable means of passing the so-called Tesla Line can be found.
Electron Drive: The electron drive is half of the secret of space travel. Producing tremendous thrust via accelerated hyper-electrons, it can propel a spacecraft at nearly unimaginable speeds, up to a respectable fraction of the speed of light itself. However, the power required is enormous, so much so that the drive would be a merely theoretical device, were it not for the Tesla coils.the standard spacecraft drive. Capable of acceleration of up to 3G with the standard variety. Solar Patrol ships typically mount a 5G unit.
Atomic Guns: Accelerating atomic particles and containing them in fields of stressed etheric energy can produce devastating beams of energy. Atomic guns can shred the strongest alloys as if they were metal foil, or slash a city apart from the safety of high orbit.
Atomic Barrier: Thanks to other properties of the Tesla coils, a shield of powerful repulsive energy can be formed, protecting the star-ships of the Solar Patrol from the awesome energies of atomic guns.
Infomat: Truly the miracles of the 21st century, infomats exist through the System. Always implacable and sometimes terrifying even to the scientists who run and maintain their data stores, the large machines can process and integrate all manner of data, and some can aid mathematicians by per-forming as many as 10,000 calculations in a mere second!
*note that our computers count as electromechanical for GURPS purposes
Last edited by Aaron on 3rd May 2019, 07:26; edited 2 times in total
Aaron- Admin
- Posts : 24
Join date : 2016-09-04 -
Re: Technology
by Aaron 30th April 2019, 18:03
Key Technologies in Detail
Atomic Guns: In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, lasers were used as personal and shipboard weapons, as the discovery of the Tesla coil enabled the construction of the compact power sources that made such weapons feasible. By the end of the Jovian war, though, researchers had discovered new applications of the etheric field: It could contain hyperaccelerated particles and then decay the field in a controlled manner, releasing them monodirectionally. In short, it created a beam weapon of unimaginable power.
The first atomic guns, much like the first cannons, were massive weapons that required full crews to operate them and that were notoriously unstable. The etheric fields could break down, either slowly (releasing deadly, invisible radiation) or instantly (causing a terrible explosion). “The Ballad of the Richenbacher” tells the true tale of a crew that stayed at their guns and kept them firing even as the radiation leaks tore their bodies apart from the inside.
Over time, the technology evolved and stabilized. It’s been boasted that the engineers of the current atomic guns would happily sleep on top of them during the heat of battle, so secure are they that there will be neither leaks nor explosions. Indeed, the technology has advanced so far that atomic pistols and rifles have become avail-able (as of 2041), finally banishing the old laser beam to the realm of collectors and criminals.
Use of shipboard atomic guns requires the Gunnery skill. Normal combat application is straightforward – aim and shoot. A skilled gunner can get some “tricks” out of the guns, however.
Pinpoint Beam
Average
Default: Electronics Operation/TL (Atomic Guns)-4
Prerequisites: Electronics Operation/TL (Atomic Guns); cannot exceed prerequisite skill.
By adjusting the focusing elements of the gun and carefully regulating the power flow, a talented operator can cause the gun to generate an exceptionally tight beam of energy. This beam can punch through even a supercharged nega-barrier. If the skill check is successful, the Armor Divisor of the gun increases by 1. If the skill check fails, the gun beam is dispersed or unfocused, resulting in an Armor Divisor of 0. If the skill check critically fails, the gun burns out, rendering it use-less until repaired.
The Atomic Barrier: sometimes called the nega-screen or the force field, is the most powerful defensive technology ever invented. It uses an offshoot technology of the Tesla coil to “harden” space, providing a powerful defense against most forms of attack. Only atomic guns have the power to pierce the nega-barrier.
The skill Electronics Operation (Force Shields) is used to manipulate and control the nega-barrier in combat. Simply turning on the barrier and hoping for the best is a standard skill check, but talented operators know how to squeeze every ounce of performance from their screens.
Focus Atomic-Barrier
Average
Default: Electronics Operation/TL (Force Shields)-4
Prerequisites: Electronics Operation/TL (Force Shields); cannot exceed prerequisite skill.
This technique allows the operator to deliberately weaken part of the nega-barrier in order to enhance another part, ideally the part currently being shot at. With a successful skill roll, the operator can borrow up to three-fourths the DR from one facing of the ship and add half of the amount “borrowed” to another facing. With an additional -4 to the roll, he can do this to an additional facing (i.e., “borrow” from two and enhance two). Aside from the obvious risks (a ship firing on the weakened facing), this action unbalances the nega-field and can cause the field generators to short out. If this is done more than two rounds in succession, any failure on the roll causes the nega-barrier generators to fry, resulting in the shields drop-ping until they can be repaired.
Nega-Barrier Overload
The nega-barrier cannot keep reflecting energy all day. Even if nothing leaks past the barrier, the constant pounding slowly weakens the etheric matrix. Every hit lowers the total DR by 1/10 of the damage done; so long as the barrier remains up, this “heals” back at 1/20 of the DR of the screen per second.
Example: The corsair Black Jack’s Lady finds itself in battle with the Patrol ship Resolution. The Resolution has screens with a DR of 650. The corsair has weak lasers, doing a mere 8d¥5(2) damage, but it does have four of them and skilled gunners. Four bursts hit, doing average damage – 140 points each. These beams fail to penetrate the nega-barrier at all, but they do 560 points of total damage, dropping the DR by 56 points, to 604. A few more such volleys, and the beams will indeed break through. Of course, the Resolution’s atomic guns will destroy the corsair long before this happens, but if a large enough pirate fleet attacks.
INFOMATS
The infomat is one of the marvels that has become so commonplace it’s barely noticed. Dozens of them dot the cities of the Solar System. Anyone with a question need only place a quarter-sol in the infomat, key his question on a punch card, and presto! The amazing machine searches through hundreds of volumes of encyclopedia, dictionaries, and other references to produce a clear and concise answer in mere minutes. Onboard ships, infomats serve to provide access to the stored knowledge of mankind and to analyze and interpret sensor data.
Resorting to an infomat for general research of basic, easily defined facts (“What is the average rainfall in North Dakota for the past 20 years?” “What is the text of the Treaty of 2010?”) is commonplace to any citizen of the Earth League over the age of 10 or so. It is a part of the cultural background, much akin to dialing a phone or changing the channel on the tri-vid.
Using an infomat requires a Computer Use (TL6+3) check, as the question must still be “carded in” in the correct format, and the possibility of error always exists. Basic requests should get a bonus of +1 to +4 on the check. Extremely complex requests that require the infomat to search multiple databases and cross-correlate information might have a penalty of -1 to -4, to simulate the increased chance of formatting the punch cards incorrectly. The infomat has poor “error checking” features, and it treats a malformed request in an indeterminate fashion, either spitting out an error message or a stream of useless data.
Data on the infomats comes from public sources and qualified reference works – general citizens do not contribute it. There are no Web pages, Usenet groups, wikis, or anything remotely akin to them, other than mailed newsletters and local clubs where people gather to talk of common interests.
The infomats contain vast quantities of knowledge. Public infomats hold all the data found in the reference section of a good-sized public library, including indexes of periodicals (though not the periodicals themselves), encyclopedias, and dictionaries. They can consolidate, edit, and filter information to meet user requests. Non-public infomats contain data relevant to their users’ needs – for example, the Solar Patrol has every Patrolman’s records and history, the flight logs of every ship, all regulations and guidelines, and so on.
Hacking Infomats
Infomats consist of a user interface (resembling a phone booth with a keyboard and punch-card slot) plus a data store (which is a massive collection of coded information and systems to scan and process it). Several infomat booths could be hooked up to any given data store. It is possible, though difficult, to alter the connection, to “hack” a public infomat to, say, read from the data store of a bank or military base. This is a Computer Hacking (6+3) skill check, with penalties ranging from -1 to access non-public, but non-secure, data stores (such as the academic records of a university) to -6 to access highly secure data stores (such as the Solar Patrol records base). This requires physically altering the connections and rewiring parts of the booth, so accomplishing this necessitates total access to the booth and 1d hours of time.
Atomic Guns: In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, lasers were used as personal and shipboard weapons, as the discovery of the Tesla coil enabled the construction of the compact power sources that made such weapons feasible. By the end of the Jovian war, though, researchers had discovered new applications of the etheric field: It could contain hyperaccelerated particles and then decay the field in a controlled manner, releasing them monodirectionally. In short, it created a beam weapon of unimaginable power.
The first atomic guns, much like the first cannons, were massive weapons that required full crews to operate them and that were notoriously unstable. The etheric fields could break down, either slowly (releasing deadly, invisible radiation) or instantly (causing a terrible explosion). “The Ballad of the Richenbacher” tells the true tale of a crew that stayed at their guns and kept them firing even as the radiation leaks tore their bodies apart from the inside.
Over time, the technology evolved and stabilized. It’s been boasted that the engineers of the current atomic guns would happily sleep on top of them during the heat of battle, so secure are they that there will be neither leaks nor explosions. Indeed, the technology has advanced so far that atomic pistols and rifles have become avail-able (as of 2041), finally banishing the old laser beam to the realm of collectors and criminals.
Use of shipboard atomic guns requires the Gunnery skill. Normal combat application is straightforward – aim and shoot. A skilled gunner can get some “tricks” out of the guns, however.
Pinpoint Beam
Average
Default: Electronics Operation/TL (Atomic Guns)-4
Prerequisites: Electronics Operation/TL (Atomic Guns); cannot exceed prerequisite skill.
By adjusting the focusing elements of the gun and carefully regulating the power flow, a talented operator can cause the gun to generate an exceptionally tight beam of energy. This beam can punch through even a supercharged nega-barrier. If the skill check is successful, the Armor Divisor of the gun increases by 1. If the skill check fails, the gun beam is dispersed or unfocused, resulting in an Armor Divisor of 0. If the skill check critically fails, the gun burns out, rendering it use-less until repaired.
The Atomic Barrier: sometimes called the nega-screen or the force field, is the most powerful defensive technology ever invented. It uses an offshoot technology of the Tesla coil to “harden” space, providing a powerful defense against most forms of attack. Only atomic guns have the power to pierce the nega-barrier.
The skill Electronics Operation (Force Shields) is used to manipulate and control the nega-barrier in combat. Simply turning on the barrier and hoping for the best is a standard skill check, but talented operators know how to squeeze every ounce of performance from their screens.
Focus Atomic-Barrier
Average
Default: Electronics Operation/TL (Force Shields)-4
Prerequisites: Electronics Operation/TL (Force Shields); cannot exceed prerequisite skill.
This technique allows the operator to deliberately weaken part of the nega-barrier in order to enhance another part, ideally the part currently being shot at. With a successful skill roll, the operator can borrow up to three-fourths the DR from one facing of the ship and add half of the amount “borrowed” to another facing. With an additional -4 to the roll, he can do this to an additional facing (i.e., “borrow” from two and enhance two). Aside from the obvious risks (a ship firing on the weakened facing), this action unbalances the nega-field and can cause the field generators to short out. If this is done more than two rounds in succession, any failure on the roll causes the nega-barrier generators to fry, resulting in the shields drop-ping until they can be repaired.
Nega-Barrier Overload
The nega-barrier cannot keep reflecting energy all day. Even if nothing leaks past the barrier, the constant pounding slowly weakens the etheric matrix. Every hit lowers the total DR by 1/10 of the damage done; so long as the barrier remains up, this “heals” back at 1/20 of the DR of the screen per second.
Example: The corsair Black Jack’s Lady finds itself in battle with the Patrol ship Resolution. The Resolution has screens with a DR of 650. The corsair has weak lasers, doing a mere 8d¥5(2) damage, but it does have four of them and skilled gunners. Four bursts hit, doing average damage – 140 points each. These beams fail to penetrate the nega-barrier at all, but they do 560 points of total damage, dropping the DR by 56 points, to 604. A few more such volleys, and the beams will indeed break through. Of course, the Resolution’s atomic guns will destroy the corsair long before this happens, but if a large enough pirate fleet attacks.
INFOMATS
The infomat is one of the marvels that has become so commonplace it’s barely noticed. Dozens of them dot the cities of the Solar System. Anyone with a question need only place a quarter-sol in the infomat, key his question on a punch card, and presto! The amazing machine searches through hundreds of volumes of encyclopedia, dictionaries, and other references to produce a clear and concise answer in mere minutes. Onboard ships, infomats serve to provide access to the stored knowledge of mankind and to analyze and interpret sensor data.
Resorting to an infomat for general research of basic, easily defined facts (“What is the average rainfall in North Dakota for the past 20 years?” “What is the text of the Treaty of 2010?”) is commonplace to any citizen of the Earth League over the age of 10 or so. It is a part of the cultural background, much akin to dialing a phone or changing the channel on the tri-vid.
Using an infomat requires a Computer Use (TL6+3) check, as the question must still be “carded in” in the correct format, and the possibility of error always exists. Basic requests should get a bonus of +1 to +4 on the check. Extremely complex requests that require the infomat to search multiple databases and cross-correlate information might have a penalty of -1 to -4, to simulate the increased chance of formatting the punch cards incorrectly. The infomat has poor “error checking” features, and it treats a malformed request in an indeterminate fashion, either spitting out an error message or a stream of useless data.
Data on the infomats comes from public sources and qualified reference works – general citizens do not contribute it. There are no Web pages, Usenet groups, wikis, or anything remotely akin to them, other than mailed newsletters and local clubs where people gather to talk of common interests.
The infomats contain vast quantities of knowledge. Public infomats hold all the data found in the reference section of a good-sized public library, including indexes of periodicals (though not the periodicals themselves), encyclopedias, and dictionaries. They can consolidate, edit, and filter information to meet user requests. Non-public infomats contain data relevant to their users’ needs – for example, the Solar Patrol has every Patrolman’s records and history, the flight logs of every ship, all regulations and guidelines, and so on.
Hacking Infomats
Infomats consist of a user interface (resembling a phone booth with a keyboard and punch-card slot) plus a data store (which is a massive collection of coded information and systems to scan and process it). Several infomat booths could be hooked up to any given data store. It is possible, though difficult, to alter the connection, to “hack” a public infomat to, say, read from the data store of a bank or military base. This is a Computer Hacking (6+3) skill check, with penalties ranging from -1 to access non-public, but non-secure, data stores (such as the academic records of a university) to -6 to access highly secure data stores (such as the Solar Patrol records base). This requires physically altering the connections and rewiring parts of the booth, so accomplishing this necessitates total access to the booth and 1d hours of time.
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Join date : 2016-09-04 -
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