It comes back to haunt you

[Agemegos]

G'day

 

It just occurred to me that setting up tech for an SF RPG campaign is more like doing the same for a successful sci-fi TV franchise than for a more limited thing like a SF novel.

 

The example in point is the 'variable sword' in Larry Niven's 'Known Space' books: a monomolecular filament stiffened by a stasis field, and which will cut through anything except GP hull material, which is monomolecular. You can thow away a thing like that in a novel (especially as an item of small significance), and people won't realise the implications until they have finished. But you have your royalty by then, so who cares.

 

Let that sort of nonsense get past the continuity editor in a TV series, though, and you end up in the hell Star Trek made for itself when it suggested that dying crew members could be restored from backup in the transporter buffers, or witht he ridiculous things it established the holodeck as being able to do. (I would have had holographic marines in a flash. What would you have done with holodeck technology?) The thing is that any feature of teh world and its technology that you establish for a successful TV series is with you for a long time, and you may have to deal with it.

 

In an SF RPG campaign you have that problem, except worse, because you have an ongoing dialogue with a bunch of imaginative people for whom the features you establish represent problems and resources, and who are looking for opportunities. They will not conveniently act dumb as characters in scripts will do.

 

If I put a variable-sword in my SF campaign, and let it chew its way through armour and what have you, it would not be long before my PCs took out the patent on monomolecular (eg. synthetic diamond) plates for armour inserts, and monofilament-cored fibre for weave armours. And everyone would have to wonder why those things had not existed originally.

[Tim]

Re: It comes back to haunt you

 

One way around it is to make them incredibly expensive. Or the weight is a bit much. So yeah, no one uses the tech that way, who wants to spent 70,000 credits on armor that is heavy and cumbersome?

[Agemegos]

Re: It comes back to haunt you

 

One way around it is to make them incredibly expensive. Or the weight is a bit much. So yeah' date=' no one uses the tech that way, who wants to spent 70,000 credits on armor that is heavy and cumbersome?[/quote']

 

That sort of approach isn't always reasonable. If, for example, you have established that GP hulls (monomolecular spaceship hulls) are available for a reasonable cost, how do you justify ruling that monomolecular thread should be expensive? And how can you possibly justify a supposition that armour cloth woven out of a thread far finer and much, much stronger than kevlar should be unreasonably bulky? If you have already accepted the variable sword as light, cheap, and useful, how can you rationalise the force-field buckler, heltmet, breastplate, and vambraces being ludicruously expensive and heavy?

 

If you establishing in a off-hand moment that the transporters work by quantum scale reassembly, and that the same technology is used (with recorded templates) in the food replicator, you may find it hard to explain why Start Fleet isn't replicating its best crews--at least to restore them from backup when they are killed. You can hardly rule that transporters are prohibitively expensive and bulky if your characters have been using them with gay abandon for a series and a half. Star Trek went one worse, in which the solution to the problem in one episode consisted of disassembling the afflicted crew into their component atoms with the transporters and restoring them to their staus quo ante using records in the transporter information buffer. If you establish that sort of thing for one purpose it will definitely come back to bite you.

 

And given that STNG has established that holographic weapons from the holodeck can kill you stone cold dead if the safeties are turned off, and that a holographic Moriarty can get out of the holodeck (and scheme to take over the ship), it is rather hard to turn on a PC captin who has decided to set holographic marines to repel boarders and tell him that a holodeck with such capabilities would be too heavy and expensive to put on a starship. It is also hard to tell any player that human-level or better AI is not practical, or is prohibitively expensive.

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: It comes back to haunt you

 

Well, as far as "super swords" of almost any ilk go, the general counter-arguement is: "guns". Why bother with making mono-proof armor when I can just shoot the SOB from 10 yards away?

[Nyrath]

Re: It comes back to haunt you

 

In one of his essays, Larry Niven mentioned that this problem was one of the reasons he stopped writing about the Known Worlds. It became clogged with miracle gadgets. The one that really became a problem was the stasis field. It was so incredibly useful that it was difficult to create a plot problem that could not be solved by an appropriate application of a stasis field.

 

The gadgets narrowed the scope of possible stories to the point that writing the stories was not fun any more.

[Agemegos]

Re: It comes back to haunt you

 

Well' date=' as far as "super swords" of almost any ilk go, the general counter-arguement is: "guns". Why bother with making mono-proof armor when I can just shoot the SOB from 10 yards away? [/quote']

 

Kevlar.

[Agemegos]

Re: It comes back to haunt you

 

In one of his essays' date=' Larry Niven mentioned that this problem was one of the reasons he stopped writing about the Known Worlds. It becamed [sic'] clogged with miracle gadgets.

 

 

The gadgets narrowed the scope of possible stories to the point that writing the stories was not fun any more.

 

So it is series that suffer from this problem. Series of written stories as much as series of TV episodes, series of movies, or series of adventures.

[Outsider]

Re: It comes back to haunt you

 

I was under the impression that the monomolecular strand used in the variable knife wasnt what did the cutting, but was instead just provided the medium onto which the stassis field could be formed. The stassis field formed at the thickness of the strand is what did the cutting.

 

As to why a variable knife will not cut GP hull material, it may not necessarily have anything to do with the GP hull being a monomolecule itself, but could be for some other reason entirely. GP hull construction is not a human technology, or even one understood by them.

 

So using monomolecular fiber weaves as armor may not provide a gread deal of protection against a variable knife.

 

Materials that could be used as super armor would be GP hull material itself, or specially formed stassis fields. Both of these have their problems, though.

 

GP hull materidal is, as has been said, not a human understood technology. IIRC GP hulls come only in 4 or 5 predetermined forms, not in any shape the buyer could desire. So armor made of it is unavailable, unless, perhaps it is provided directly by the puppeteers as equipment to humans acting as their agents on some insanely dangerous mission. It isnt like the puppeteers are driven to maximize profit in their dealings with humans anyway. They just need enough to support their delegation and buy an occasional mercenary adventurer.

 

Armor constructed out of stassis field plates has two possible drawbacks that I can see.

 

First, again IIRC, human made stassis fields are limited in their form to being convex on any and all external angles. So, while an impenetrable plate could be formed, it will be at best a flat impenetrable plate, not a molded one. A molded effect could be produced by using multiple plates, but then the joints become a problem.

 

Second, it could well be that stassis field generators of human manufacture, at least, require a certain minimum volume for the generator itself. The handle of a variable knife is large enough to accomodate a generator sufficient to contain a volume a few molecules across and 30 meters long. A generator sufficiently powerful to contain itself may be much larger though. This would mean that stassis field plate armor might well need to be very bulky, as each individual plate/field would require a flashlight sized generator.

[Nyrath]

GP Hull

 

RE: General Products Hulls.

From "Flatlander" by Larry Niven, collected in NEUTRON STAR.

 

"A General Products hull is an artificially generated molecule with interatomic bonds artificially strengthened by a small power plant. The strengthened molecular bonds are proof against any kind of impact and heat into the hundreds of thousands of degrees. But when enough of the atoms had been obliterated by antimatter explosions, the molecule naturally fell apart."