Planetbusters

[AmadanNaBriona]

I just picked up Bestiary, and haven't gotten a copy of the new Star Hero yet, as funds are tight, and Fantasy got first pick. But as I was flipping through the Bestiary, I noticed the Engine of Destruction, and was wondering whats up with the incredibly weak main gun?

In my old SH campaign, I had crew served weapons that did more damage. 10D6 AP, even x4 AP, still deosn't pack much wallop by my book. if a hex of dirt has 0 DEF and 10 BOD and Stone has 5 DEF, 19 BOD, then it'd punch what...3-4 hexes of dirt or maybe 2 hexes of rock per shot. Even if you let the guns use " Casual" Damage to puch through dirt to bedrock, It'd still take about a bazillion years to burn a planet.

unless, of course, you use the "body by weight" tables....

in which case....

lets see, the Earth weighs 5,976,000,000 Teratons metric... that comes out, unliving body, by weight, to about 83 body.

OK...that makes it really easy to blow up

Seriously, for the EOD, you really should add some sort of megascale AOE, to at least allow it to scorch the planet , wipe out cities, and cut large patches of landscape apart....maybe another slot in the multipower.

Anyone have anything interesting to say on the topic of planet killers? I've always enjoyed the threat of them.... Berserkers, Tyrannids, Mechanoids, Wave Motion guns, the Death Star... they have a fine pedigree.

[CrosshairCollie]

If and when I start my Star Hero game, if I have a Planetbuster show up, I'm not going to bother statting out its big gun. It's gonna be 100 percent pure plot device. If you're in front of it, your ship disintigrates, your planet explodes, the sun supernovas, and you are dead with a capital corpse.

[megaplayboy]

60d6 RKA, AE-radius(90"), mega-area(1"=1000 km), mega-range(1"=1000 km), 3600 active points

(this will vaporize anything up to a jupiter-sized planet instantly)

 

appropriate limitations:

bulky OIF(-1)

extra time: 5 minutes(-2)

 

probably others, but that gets the cost down to 900 points.

 

For something which will merely crack a planet into fragments, lower the RKA to 30d6--the cost goes down to 450 points.

[CrosshairCollie]

Heh ... now I'm half tempted to use that, just so I can dump my little 36d6 into a frisbee then look around shouting "More dice! MORE DICE!" and watching my players turn pale.

[Snarf]

83 body? Doesn't that mean a superhero with a 60 AP killing attack can destroy the earth in 8 shots or so? That doesn't sound right.

[Southern Cross]

No it doesn't.I'd only allow the super to use the 'body by weight" tables if the attack was bought as a Megascale Area Effect attack large enough to cover the entire planet,and I'd also require such an attack to be bought with Megascaled range at the same level.

That's a total of + 3 1/2 in Power Advantages (assuming a standard Area Effect).

[AmadanNaBriona]

further thoughts

 

Even as a plot device, I like pointing out things, and my Planetbuster would probably be similar to the above write up....maybe a few shifts in the megascales, and I'd probably throw in some AP & Penetrating, just to add insult to injury, but in a campaign I'd tend to prefer the ID4 style blasts...something that'll level a city or so per shot, punch holes in the crust, and with repeated pummelling eventually crack the crust and do bad things...it's a little more "heroic" in that you do have a chance at stopping it even after it starts firing...

the Body by weight, +1 body for X2 weight has always been a HERO convention that I've had issues with. The earth having only 83 body is just the extreme example of that wierdness. There are others. A motorcycle has only 5 less Body than a railroad car. My games have ALWAYS used damage by the hex...including our old startship combat system (we had to cook something up may years ago, way back when pre-1st ed. SH). It required mapping out the ships, but as old Traveller players, we did that kind of by habit anyway. it gave us the luxury of using device malfunctions and the like... It was nice knowing exactly what parts of the ship were damaged, what sections decompressed, which NPC's were reduced to vapor...etc. Wasn't even that hard to do... basically after mapping the ship, just break down each floor into a 6 by 6 grid. If there are multiple levels, randomize the floor, roll a die for where on the appropriate facing, or an X die and a Y die from the top or bottom. the only trick then is figuring out what angle the shot comes at to figure how it penetrates. easier than it sounds, and very up close and personal. it could be a lot more refined (and was at the time....I'm recalling things from a campaign over 15 years ago)

[Kzinbane]

I don't think I would worry too much about the exact statistics of the planet buster UNLESS it was somthing I was going to be using frequently - and it had strengths and weaknesses, etc. For example if the target had no magnetic field the thing wouldn't work or some other disadvantages.

 

As for the planet buster doing anything to a star that's a totally other story. Remember Earth is so small compared to the sun that it would look like just another sunspot. And the sun is a pretty small star. Top that off with the fact that stars work differently than planets and you could in theory have a weapon that destroys stars but does nothing to planets! More likely the planet weapon - such as Star Wars' death star would have no noticeable effect on star

[Snarf]

I guess BODY by weight is one of those extremely cinematic rules, like the generous amounts of jumping you get with strength.

 

AmadanNaBriona, have you tried calculating the BODY of the earth by hex yet? I'd like to see that figure. If not, I have a physics book with volume of the earth in it somewhere around here...

[Ben Seeman]

If we use the mean diameter of the earth in making our calculation, the total volume of the earth is 259,923,241,563 cubic miles.

 

I'll leave you all to do the conversion to hexes.

[Metaphysician]

You wouldn't need to calc the total Body by Hex. Merely the Body per Hex, and compare with the damage per Hex of an AoE Megascale attack. OTOH, this means you couldn't have point-target planetbusters, like the DS superlaser.

[Snarf]

According to google:

 

259 923 241 563 cubic miles = 4.18305909 × 10^14 cubic meters

 

(4.18305909 * (10^14)) / 3 = 1.39435303 × 10^14 cubic hexes

 

So if the earth is as tough as dirt (10 BODY per hex) on average:

 

1.39435303 × 10^15 BODY or ...

 

1,394,353,030,000,000 BODY to utterly pulverize it.

[AmadanNaBriona]

quite a difference

 

bit of a shift from 83 body eh?

 

just to note tho...the Earth isn't a big dirtball... once you hit bedrock its stone, or its molten form, which I assume would have the same body per hex (19) but less DEF.

and how the hell do we figure out the DEF and Body of all that pesky water covering 70% of the surface?

 

I'd assume that the Death Stars main gun is in fact a megascale attack... look at the size of the focusing dish. its just a really WIDE beam...maybe a megascale AOE Line attack? I kinda figure that if you burn a kilometer (or 10 kilometer, or a 100 kilometer) size hole straight through the core of a planet, it'd go boom.

I may be wrong tho

And Dammit...I forgot a planetbuster in my original post...

The LEXX

[AmadanNaBriona]

remembered another planetbuster

 

and how about Dr Device from Enders Game?

That should be fun to write up, but if I do it now my girlfriend will disown me

Basically a uncontrolled continous sticky explosion... probably need an adjustment power (Body Transfer to Explosion?) in there somewhere to represent the replicating waveform.

*shudders* not something I'd want in a game I was running.... I suspect given a bit of rules lawering, it could be the cheapest planet killer of all, in point terms.

[Metaphysician]

Yeah, those things are nasty. Megascale radius for the AoE, too ( not explosion, IMHO, since the effect doesn't really vary ).

[Kzinbane]

One way to destroy the Earth is with a big gravity control weapon. Fire at planet, turns Gravety to a repelling force and boom. The larger the target the more power you'd get. Shudder - hit a galaxy center black hole with it...

Anyway this would allow you to destroy a planet like Earth without having to have an EB that does a zillion body.

[AmadanNaBriona]

LOL

 

Yeah... all you'd need is a Major transform that does a zillion body

Unless there's another way to do it that I can't currently think of...

[AmadanNaBriona]

Dr Device

 

re-read enders game and you'll find that the MD Device works similar to the weapon Kzintibane suggested. The energybeam is focused on a solid mass, which goes critical and explodes. the greater the mass of the target, the further the secondary effect carries, but IIRC, it decreases as it expands...unless it conects with another mass...in which case the new mass goes critical and create yet another blastwave. Sounds like an explosion to me.

Definitly mega scale tho...even fighters in tight formation would be dispersed fairly widely, I suspect, at the speeds involved for space combat

[Foxiekins]

Actually...

 

Originally posted by Snarf

83 body? Doesn't that mean a superhero with a 60 AP killing attack can destroy the earth in 8 shots or so? That doesn't sound right.

 

I don't see how you figure this... Doing 83 body in 8 shots or so implies an average of 10.375 body per shot or more, and a 60 AP killing attack can do up to 24 body with one shot...

 

Anyway, I interpret the mass/body effect as applying to one, SINGLE attack, not the combined effects of multiple shots... So, using Standard Effect rules, a 60 AP killing attack would inflict 12 body per shot... Earth's air and water are actually a thin film over the surface, while the iron core is rather small in volume compared to the planet as a whole... (volume is proportional to the CUBE of the radius, remember... Half radius implies one-eighth volume, and one-third radius implies 1/27 volume, for example...)

 

This gives Earth a DEF of 5, I'd say, so that 12 body attack only does 7 body to the planet on average... At that rate, it has to make up the other 76 body by piling shots on, which is x2 shots for each +1 body... That's 64,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 shots required to obliterate the Earth completely...

[Zoroaster]

I never bothered to "point up" the stats, but there was a planet-buster that turned up in the last SF game that I ran ...

 

Planet busting was a secondary effect, though. The gadget was a giant nuclear damper, pointed at the system's sun. It was powered in much the same way that current X-Ray lasers are, by focusing the energy from a very large explosion. In the case of an X-Ray laser, it's a nuke; in this case, it's a 10-ton sphere of antimatter contained in a stasis field. Drop the stasis field, and you get an instant explosion of immense power, which pumps the nuclear damper long enough for it to do its job, right before the blast wave obliterates it. Ten tons' worth of total conversion yields enough raw energy to vaporize an Earth-sized mass.

 

Why the nuclear damper? Well, that suppresses the fusion reactions in the core of the target star. This triggers a premature nova. (At least, I was able to convince my players that it was plausible...)

[CrosshairCollie]

Ah, the cardinal rule of science fiction. Trot out enough Treknobabble and everything's feasible.

[Zoroaster]

You say that like it's a BAD thing.

[freakboy6117]

you know i think 10 tonnes of antimatter would do a fair job of destroying a planet all on its own its aprroximatly 160, 714 mega tonnes of explosive force. or around 900 exa joules.(and thats just wimpy metric tonnes)

[Foxiekins]

Hmmmmm...

 

Metric Tons are actually more massive than English Tonnes, by the way... But I agree...

 

I once figured the yield for the detonation of 100 pounds of Antimatter, and I estimated the crater would be roughly the size of the state of Texas... And that's a little less than a pidley 50 kilos or so... 10 Metric Tons would be around 220 times as much, which would easily blow a hole around the size of the North American Continent, which I really can't see the planet surviving... Intact, that is...

[Snarf]

Anyway, I interpret the mass/body effect as applying to one, SINGLE attack, not the combined effects of multiple shots...

Where did you find that? I think I'm totally not understanding the destroying objects rules or something.

 

I don't see how you figure this... Doing 83 body in 8 shots or so implies an average of 10.375 body per shot or more,

Keep in mind I'm just arbitrarily pulling numbers out of my ass here.