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The Stargate


TheNaga

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Here is my version of the Stargate.

 

45    Stargate:  Teleportation 20m, x8 Increased Mass, Usable By Other (+1/4), Area Of Effect (6m Radius; +1/2), Constant (+1/2), MegaScale (1m = 1 million lightyears; +5 3/4) (280 Active Points); Extra Time (1 Minute, -1 1/2), OAF Bulky (-1 1/2), Can Only Teleport To  Fixed Locations (Another Stargate; -1), Gate (-1/2), Requires A Roll (KS: Stargates Skill roll; -1/2), Gestures (Dialing Another Stargate Coordinates; -1/4) 28

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I would change the Usable By Other to Usable On Others as specified in the Gate Limitation.

 

Also, you could dramatically reduce the range on this. If you are working from the basis of the Movie/TV series, the Milky Way gates were able to connect to any other gate in the galaxy directly. The Milky Way galaxy is only 100,000 light years across. According to the MegaScale table (CC110) that's +5 1/2. I would buy it as Teleport 1m MegaScale 100,000 light years (+5 1/2). 

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I would change the Usable By Other to Usable On Others as specified in the Gate Limitation.

 

Also, you could dramatically reduce the range on this. If you are working from the basis of the Movie/TV series, the Milky Way gates were able to connect to any other gate in the galaxy directly. The Milky Way galaxy is only 100,000 light years across. According to the MegaScale table (CC110) that's +5 1/2. I would buy it as Teleport 1m MegaScale 100,000 light years (+5 1/2). 

How about it now ?

 

20    Stargate:  Teleportation 1m, x8 Increased Mass, Usable On Other (+1/4), Constant (+1/2), Area Of Effect (6m Radius; +1/2), MegaScale (1m = 100,000 lightyears; +5 1/2) (124 Active Points); Extra Time (1 Minute, -1 1/2), OAF Bulky (-1 1/2), Can Only Teleport To  Fixed Locations (Another Stargate; -1), Requires A Roll (KS: Stargates Skill roll; -1/2), Gate (-1/2), Gestures (Dialing Another Stargate Coordinates; -1/4) 12

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How about it now ?

 

20    Stargate:  Teleportation 1m, x8 Increased Mass, Usable On Other (+1/4), Constant (+1/2), Area Of Effect (6m Radius; +1/2), MegaScale (1m = 100,000 lightyears; +5 1/2) (124 Active Points); Extra Time (1 Minute, -1 1/2), OAF Bulky (-1 1/2), Can Only Teleport To  Fixed Locations (Another Stargate; -1), Requires A Roll (KS: Stargates Skill roll; -1/2), Gate (-1/2), Gestures (Dialing Another Stargate Coordinates; -1/4) 12

I'll take 2! :)

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Are you are trying to recreate the gates from the TV/movie canon, or are you just getting the game mechanics down for how the concept would work?

 

If the former, then you should probably up the Increased Mass significantly.  

 

The second series, Stargate Atlantis, introduced the Puddle Jumper, a small spacecraft capable of transiting a stargate.   I don't know how official it is, but the Stargate wiki says a Jumper is a 4.7m diameter x 8m long cylinder, and can carry 20 people.

 

If you go by dimensions, such a vehicle is 9-10 steps up on the Vehicle Size Table, and masses 50-100 tons.   This may seem overly heavy, but it does fit with canon. There was an episode where a Jumper ditched in the ocean, and started slowly sinking, meaning its average density is greater than seawater.   A 4.7m diameter x 8m cylinder displaces ~140 tons of water, so even 100 tons might be light, depending on how much of the overall volume of the Jumper ins't watertight and/or solid.

 

Even if we ignore the sinking issue as 'dramatic license' on the part of the writers, declare the volume of the vehicle to be cosmetic, and just go with the STR required to lift the 20 HERO system people (2000kg) to determine where on the Vehicle Size Table to place the Jumper, we still need to go 5 steps up, meaning a 3200Kg vehicle.   Any lighter, and we'd be in danger of the passengers being able to pick the Jumper up and carry it off, which seems very much not supported by the shows as a possibility.  

 

So a stargate would require either 1024x or 2048x Increased Mass to transit a Puddle Jumper and passengers, if we're going with the dimensions and buoyancy line of reasoning to establish mass, or 64x Increased Mass (at a minimum) if we're going with the much looser "ignore the tables, but it still didn't look light enough for a dozen Marines to pick up or shift much" line of reasoning.

 

Now, it is possible that Pegasus Galaxy gates have a much higher mass limit than Milky Way Galaxy gates.  They do look a lot slicker, like a more developed technology.  Also supporting this theory is how the gate bridge* was used in the show.   I don't recall them ever taking a Jumper through a Milky Way side gate, so maybe they couldn't?

 

 

*in Stargate Atlantis, they established a gate bridge between the two galaxies that forwarded travelers through a series of gates without the necessity of materializing in between, except at the midpoint station.  At midpoint, one transferred from the Pegasus gate system to the Milky Way gate system.

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Are you are trying to recreate the gates from the TV/movie canon, or are you just getting the game mechanics down for how the concept would work?

 

If the former, then you should probably up the Increased Mass significantly.  

 

The second series, Stargate Atlantis, introduced the Puddle Jumper, a small spacecraft capable of transiting a stargate.   I don't know how official it is, but the Stargate wiki says a Jumper is a 4.7m diameter x 8m long cylinder, and can carry 20 people.

 

If you go by dimensions, such a vehicle is 9-10 steps up on the Vehicle Size Table, and masses 50-100 tons.   This may seem overly heavy, but it does fit with canon. There was an episode where a Jumper ditched in the ocean, and started slowly sinking, meaning its average density is greater than seawater.   A 4.7m diameter x 8m cylinder displaces ~140 tons of water, so even 100 tons might be light, depending on how much of the overall volume of the Jumper ins't watertight and/or solid.

 

Even if we ignore the sinking issue as 'dramatic license' on the part of the writers, declare the volume of the vehicle to be cosmetic, and just go with the STR required to lift the 20 HERO system people (2000kg) to determine where on the Vehicle Size Table to place the Jumper, we still need to go 5 steps up, meaning a 3200Kg vehicle.   Any lighter, and we'd be in danger of the passengers being able to pick the Jumper up and carry it off, which seems very much not supported by the shows as a possibility.  

 

So a stargate would require either 1024x or 2048x Increased Mass to transit a Puddle Jumper and passengers, if we're going with the dimensions and buoyancy line of reasoning to establish mass, or 64x Increased Mass (at a minimum) if we're going with the much looser "ignore the tables, but it still didn't look light enough for a dozen Marines to pick up or shift much" line of reasoning.

 

Now, it is possible that Pegasus Galaxy gates have a much higher mass limit than Milky Way Galaxy gates.  They do look a lot slicker, like a more developed technology.  Also supporting this theory is how the gate bridge* was used in the show.   I don't recall them ever taking a Jumper through a Milky Way side gate, so maybe they couldn't?

 

 

*in Stargate Atlantis, they established a gate bridge between the two galaxies that forwarded travelers through a series of gates without the necessity of materializing in between, except at the midpoint station.  At midpoint, one transferred from the Pegasus gate system to the Milky Way gate system.

I was making the Milky Way Stargate.  I had forgotten about the Puddle Jumpers being able to go through a Stargate.  The Stargate can be used as time machine when the matter transmission stream passed through a solar flare.

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I was making the Milky Way Stargate.  I had forgotten about the Puddle Jumpers being able to go through a Stargate.  The Stargate can be used as time machine when the matter transmission stream passed through a solar flare.

 

 

Yeah, there were a couple of episodes that featured that.  Being a TV show, they manage to get back each time, but unless you really want to do a lot of time travel adventures, I'd leave that as a zero point Side Effect or custom Limited Power limitation to be exercised strictly at the GM's option. If you give time travel to the players, they will probably try to use it to solve every problem.

 

I just recently watched the Atlantis time travel episode at the end of season 4... it took McKay 25 years of obsessive work to figure out how to get Shepard back, so not really player accesible in the canon.

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Now, it is possible that Pegasus Galaxy gates have a much higher mass limit than Milky Way Galaxy gates.  They do look a lot slicker, like a more developed technology.  Also supporting this theory is how the gate bridge* was used in the show.   I don't recall them ever taking a Jumper through a Milky Way side gate, so maybe they couldn't?

The Pegasus gates were developed after the Milky Way gates. The Ancients left the Milky Way galaxy for the Pegasus galaxy. yada-yada-yada. 

 

As for taking a puddle jumper through, I don't remember that happening either. But the Goa'uld took gliders, etc. through. Actually, thinking about it, there was even one ship type they took through, but I don't remember which one off-hand.

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The Pegasus gates were developed after the Milky Way gates. The Ancients left the Milky Way galaxy for the Pegasus galaxy. yada-yada-yada. 

 

As for taking a puddle jumper through, I don't remember that happening either. But the Goa'uld took gliders, etc. through. Actually, thinking about it, there was even one ship type they took through, but I don't remember which one off-hand.

I think both gate systems had the same specs.

 

As you said, the Goa'uld developed a fighter that could go through the stargate.

And more then once they used milkyway gates for jumpers (like when they made the gate bridge).

 

But actually, does mass limit affect gates at all? The basic asumtion of teh gate mechanic seems to be that it "drops" the mater instantly on the other side. So even if you try to go through with a gigaton steelbar you would never have more then a few kilos in the gate at a time.

Based on some of the later episodes it works more like a star trek teleporter that totally disassembeles the object and sends it via a wormhole to a receiver, then a wormhole based transport system.

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I think both gate systems had the same specs.

 

As you said, the Goa'uld developed a fighter that could go through the stargate.

And more then once they used milkyway gates for jumpers (like when they made the gate bridge).

 

But actually, does mass limit affect gates at all? The basic asumtion of teh gate mechanic seems to be that it "drops" the mater instantly on the other side. So even if you try to go through with a gigaton steelbar you would never have more then a few kilos in the gate at a time.

Based on some of the later episodes it works more like a star trek teleporter that totally disassembeles the object and sends it via a wormhole to a receiver, then a wormhole based transport system.

I seem to recall that there were implications that the Pegasus gates were more advanced, although it was never explored. Just like they never got the chance to explore the Destiny gate's differences. 

 

Going back to the movie and early series, the gates do not work instantaneously. This was shown by the wormhole traversal sequence, and at least in the movie, tracking the travelers through the wormhole. While the time was short, it was not instant.

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I think the gates transfer things that are passing through them as a whole, rather than bit by bit as they enter the gate.   Atlantis had an episode where a jumper got lodged half way through a gate.  The forward half stayed in the buffer waiting for the rest of the jumper, rather than having been rematerialized at the destination.  So the 'mass limit' would more or less refer to the buffer size.

 

Also, from a pure game mechanics point of view, it'd be cheaper to have both galaxy's gates be the same anyway.  Doubling the how many examples of a given piece of equipment you have costs only 5 points.  Creating 2 different pieces of equipment that have nearly identical functionality would almost certainly cots a lot more.

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There was an episode of SG-1 where T'ealc was trapped in the Earth Gate's pattern Buffer since the sending gate was destroyed.

 

So more like Star Trek transporter system that sends the data packets through the wormhole.

 

IIRC, there was an episode of SG-1 where they found a puddle-jumper that had been modified into a time machine and it traveled through the gates to bring it back to Earth.

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There was an episode of SG-1 where T'ealc was trapped in the Earth Gate's pattern Buffer since the sending gate was destroyed.

 

So more like Star Trek transporter system that sends the data packets through the wormhole.

 

IIRC, there was an episode of SG-1 where they found a puddle-jumper that had been modified into a time machine and it traveled through the gates to bring it back to Earth.

 

Well, yeah. The original movie has dialogue about how the objects traveling thru the gate get dematerialized and then reintegrated at the other end. That never made much sense to me. An actual wormhole, as I understand it, would simply be a shortcut. No disinte- and reintegration. You look thru the gateway, you step thru the gateway. For that matter, the whole "using constellations as the coordinate system really, really doesn't make any sense. I always preferred to think of it as every gate has its own "IP address" and hitting the big red button was the equivalent of pressing "enter" on a keyboard.

 

I really, really loved the SG-1 series, and they did a lot of things right. Most things, really. But those were two items I had to just sigh and ignore to enjoy the rest of it.

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There is are some scenarios where it makes sense:

 

What if it cost less energy to down into energy and transferring that energy through a smaller wormhole and reassembling it on the other side than to create a wormhole big enough to move the object itself?

 

What if creating a wormhole of that size caused the wormhole to be unstable?

 

Especially when your wormhole is across such great distances.

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There is are some scenarios where it makes sense:

 

What if it cost less energy to down into energy and transferring that energy through a smaller wormhole and reassembling it on the other side than to create a wormhole big enough to move the object itself?

 

What if creating a wormhole of that size caused the wormhole to be unstable?

 

Especially when your wormhole is across such great distances.

 

Well, it's all rubber science so it's not like either of us can marshall compelling arguments. I just think that, esthetically, I prefer the idea of a stargate as a doorway you walk thru rather than as a disintegrator/reintegrator. That seems like an unnecessary step.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Not really, I suppose.   If the points are coming from GM fiat anyway, how one writes them up isn't hugely important.   Just have them work (and not work) as the setting or plot needs.

 

Yep, I was going to point out that it's a plot device. Probably not worth spending time writing up in the system.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Good idea.   I'd go with Drain (body) standard effect, instead, and give it more dice.   Each D6 killing (NND DB AoE) is what, 75 points?  Each D6 of Drain (body) AoE would only be 20.  Being only ~1/4 the price makes up for going against the point value of the Body stat instead of the stat itself, and more.   And being a Drain, it goes against Power Defense, which will effectively be NND/DB to most things anyway.

 

Still, shouldn't be worth a lot since the woosh is predictable and easily avoidable.

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