Vehicle - Non Combat Movement

[tcabril]

First off - thanks to all who piped in on my last question regarding "Building anytype of Vehicle" I believe I am 95% there with all your help! So thanks.

 

What is holding me up is Non-Combat movement. Is this calculated from other statistics or is it set by the designer of the vehicle (i.e. me)? I was looking at building a Grumman Goose and I know how fast they fly (about 195 mph/310 kpm roughly) but I don't know how SPD works into that or if it does and how does one figure this part out.

 

Any help? Thanks again in advance!

 

Todd

 

[bigbywolfe]

I don't use vehicles often but I thought it was double your Combat Movement just like wih characters. How SPD works in was explained in the other thread. Movement x SPD gets you movement per Turn. Turn x 5 gets you movement per Minute (5 12 second turns). Per Minute x 60 gets you movement per Hour.

[psyber624]

Vehicle movement basically works nearly identically to normal movement. IE you buy your combat move in meters and as part of that you get a "Non-combat move" that is x2 of what your combat move is. So if you buy 20m of running (for 8 pts since you start with 12 for free) you can move 40m in a phase if you go NCM, however when moving NCM you are automatically 0 OCV and 1/2 DCV (unless you use the optional Velocity based DCV rules). Note that this "zeroing" is generally the last step in the calculation so whenever you are moving NCM your OCV is 0 and you can't increase that without GM's Permission in some way.

 

The really nice part about NCM tho is that you can DOUBLE your rate for a measly +5 points, so for 5 points you get 4x your combat movement, for 10 you get 8x, for 15 you get 16x, etc. etc. As you can see this REALLY starts to add up quickly and cheaply and is therefore frequently used for vehicular movement because you can get your "top speed" ALOT cheaper this way.

 

For instance, if you want to simulate a vehicle that can go 200mph you need a whopping 1075m of movement a turn. Even with a SPD of 5 thats 215m of movement which, for combat move would cost you 203 points! If your SPD is lower it gets even worse! However if you think about it as "Combat Speed" and "Non-combat Speed" then its ALOT cheaper. You could buy 20m per phase (for 8 points), this is how fast you go if you are in a fighting situation (for SPD 5 thats just shy of 20mph) or traveling over rough ground. However if you want a "top speed" of 200 mph you can buy x16 NCM for only 15 points, making the total cost only 23 points for your movement, and now if you are going Full Out your able to reach well over 200mph with this vehicle (again assuming a SPD of 5). And at only 23 points compared to the 203 points it would cost you to move at 200mph for Combat movement

 

Now, for the question about how SPD works into this it can be a little confusing if you are new to the system. When you buy your movement that is how far you can move in a PHASE. Your SPD determines how many PHASES you get in a TURN (12 seconds). Now granted, you aren't moving the full distance on your phase, sitting still waiting for the next phase to come around, and then jerking forward a full move again but for the sake of ease of play that is how its modeled by HERO (Note there are optional rules for Segmented Movement for vehicles that you can use if you prefer, but I am just going to go over the Basic RAW). Therefore a vehicle with Running 20m with SPD 3 moves 60m a Turn (3 phases of 20m movement each). A vehicle with 20m Runnning and a SPD of 5 however moves 100m a Turn, and is therefore faster. Its a bit counter intuitive at first but shouldn't be too hard to wrap your head around once you get some practice with it.

 

And don't forget, SPD affects your Maneuverability as well (which is why it is important). You can only take an action such as change your direction of travel, accelerate, decelerate, or stop during one of your phases so a vehicle with a low SPD is less able to adapt to a changing environment than one with a high SPD (of course the Driver is the limiting factor here, if his SPD isn't as high as the vehicles SPD then he can't use all of its maneuverability).

 

To try and make it easier to understand think of SPD as response time for the vehicle. A highly tuned, well oiled machine can turn on a dime, navigating the most treacherous course you can put it in, but a slow clunker can't make all the hairpin turns and quick jukes that the high performance vehicle can. And a Professional Driver (with high SPD) can take advantage of that but Joe Blow (with Normal SPD) can't, the car could do it but he just can't get all out of the car that it has to give him.

 

Edit: While replying to your other thread I realized I forgot to add this tidbit in about movement so copying it here since its also relevant to this discussion:

 

Also note that combat movement affects how fast you accelerate and decelerate if you have a GM that deals with that. You can accelerate up to your combat movement per phase (same for deceleration) so if you have x8 NCM it will take you 8 phases (almost 3 TURNS or nearly 36 seconds) for your plane to reach top speed, and JUST as long to decelerate if you are traveling top speed. (Well, technically you can decelerate alot faster than that if you REALLY want to, but that is usually referred to as CRASHING!)