It's Full of Tiny People!

[SSgt Baloo]

Years ago, I was trying to come up with a new (for me) character concept. I came up with what seemed at the time to be a pretty clever idea, but I kept "wrapping around the axles" when I started to fill in the details.

The main idea was that the character was a starship, dispatched to Earth to study the natives and determine if Earth was ready for contact. When the vessel arrived, however, it was discovered by several supervillains who just happened to be monitoring space about here the ship dropped out of hyperspace. The ship was immediately placed in stasis by one villain, (and subsequently stolen and re-stolen by various other villains). Eventually, the PCs' hero group finds it and turns off the stasis device, wherupon, after some negotiating, the ship's captain decides to remain on earth under the condition that the heroes help them in their mission to understand and analyze Earth culture without revealing that the ship is anything but a robotic device.

The ship itself is ~2m long, 1m wide, and 1/2m thick, and vaguely resembles a model of Battlestar Galactica. The crew numbers about 250 human-like beings who stand 1/4 inch tall (roughly 6.25mm). The ship is protected by force fields, armor, etc., and has a comprehensive sensor and ECM suite. Offensive capability is limited to energy weapons (think miniaturized phasors) and tractor beams.

How would you begin to construct this monster?

[L. Marcus]

Id say: Just as a normal Super-Heroic characrter, but with some . . . Interesting Limitations . . . PhysLim: Risk Of Mutiny (infreq, great).

. . . And I must say, what a neat concept. :)

[lemming]

The one I had made was what L. Marcus said. Built as a character.
Though I was a lot smaller. About 1/2 meter, much smaller crew.

[OddHat]

The ship is built as a character, with Phys Limits and Distinctive Features to mark it as a ship.

The hundreds of tiny little people, if they can't leave the ship, are just SFX. If they can leave the ship, they're easiest to handle as followers. Alternatively, I might do it as a Summon (to avoid the re-combining issues with Duplication).

Extra fun: The ship can launch little tiny Vipers, and it carries nukes.

[transmetahuman]

Extra fun: The ship can launch little tiny Vipers, and it carries nukes.Heh. There's a lower size limit for effective itty-bitty nukes (critical mass) - but not so much for itty-bitty antimatter torpedos...

[OddHat]

Heh. There's a lower size limit for effective itty-bitty nukes (critical mass) - but not so much for itty-bitty antimatter torpedos...

If 1/4 inch tall Gaius Baltar can still think on a human level despite his insect sized brain, he'll figure out that the laws of physics have just gone out the window, at which point we get little tiny nukes. ;)

[L. Marcus]

Tiny nukes, big BOOOM! :)

[Grimble]

I agree. Buy ship as character, cool disads define it as ship and crew, crew as followers. My addition. Buy teleportation. I just think that having 1/4" crewmen appearing out of no where, and disappearing just as quick would be VERY useful.

Grimble

[Armitage]

Adventurer's Club #21, Summer 1993.
The Crooks & Crusaders column, written by Bruce Tong.

Sphereship Polaris.
It was an attempt to describe the ball hovering in the Distinctive Features illustration in the 4th Edition rulebook.

It was a 1-foot diameter spherical spaceship with 200 crew and 30 civilian specialists, all 1/8 inch tall.
It was designed as a 538 point character with powers representing the ship's systems and skills representing the crew's abilities.
Flight, Hardened Armor, Energy Blast laser cannons, FTL Flight, Life Support, Mental Defense, Radar, HRRP.

[Edsel]

Adventurer's Club #21, Summer 1993.
The Crooks & Crusaders column, written by Bruce Tong.

Sphereship Polaris...
It sounds like a miniature Death Star. Let's see if the Death Star's super laser can destroy a planet that is x100 its own size... WARNING: Nerd-mode activating...

If the Sphereship is 1-foot in diameter that equals 6-inch radius x 100 = 600-inch radius which is roughly an 8.33 hex radius AE attack, we'll call it a 9 hex radius attack that can destroy a sphere of dirt that size. Dirt has 10 BODY per hex and no DEF (we'll use that for a planet). This all means that a Death Star laser on that scale would be a 10 Damage Class attack that covered at least a 9-hex radius.

Miniature Death Star Super Laser:
10d6 EB (50 points), AE radius x2 10" (+1 1/4) = 112 Active Points.

Of course it could have more dice than that (20d6 w/normal AE radius) or it could have AP or Penetrating, etc. You might want to use Explosion instead of AE radius. But I'd say the weapon above is minimum to model the miniature super laser.

Nerd-mode deactivating.

[casualplayer]

It's kinda fun to have an "Away Team" Multipower that lets you send out a shuttle full of mini-Rykers to monkeywrench with people, scout areas, retrieve data, fetch the newspaper, etc. Have it separate from your Main Weapons MP so you can do Multiple Power Attacks. Fill the MP with Indirect EBs, TK and Clairsentience and whatnot.

One of my players did a Green Lantern homage with a version of this origin.

[lemming]

Drat. Couldn't find an electronic version of Explorer.
I just remember it was more based on the old Enterprise (this was pre-Next Gen), so it had an away team function of some sort. Though this was also Champs 3rd edition rules as well.

[transmetahuman]

If 1/4 inch tall Gaius Baltar can still think on a human level despite his insect sized brain, he'll figure out that the laws of physics have just gone out the window, at which point we get little tiny nukes. ;)
D'oh! Sometimes I'm embarrassed at the randomness of which natural laws I want to enforce. Hmmm. Maybe there's some part of my brain that thinks "if it's a character, anything goes - otherwise it's physics as usual"? Definitely something I should examine and maybe re-evaluate. Anyway, thanks for pointing that out.

[SSgt Baloo]

Actually one power I thought "the ship" should have is an extremely high resistance to mental attacks, since there are about 250 minds packed into a space the size of a human body.

At one point it was planned to look like a 4' diameter model of the C-57D from Forbidden Planet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet), because it was a wicked-cool flying saucer, the first I ever saw on TV or in the movies that wasn't piloted by the bad guys. And I really liked the movie.

[freakboy6117]

i like the C57d so that one or the Andromeda would be my first choices but then i thought about it and would have to base the image on this ship (http://www.iann.net/giants/spindrift/9299_0062.htm) just to see who spotted the reference.
at the very least the away team uniforms would look like those from the show