WistfulD

Yes, but it's easy enough to reproduce that by (for instance) buying both the now cheaper DEX and also high ocv and dcv. There are exceptions (olympic gymnist--high dex, likely average ocv) that show how they don't inherently go together. Taking the logic og no figured stats, why have stats at all? Why not buy inititative, stun resilience, perception, lifting ability, and everything else completely piecemeal? It's certainly a valid option.

Which book has the dogfight rules?

Well, that would reduce the size of conduits, and it would (potentially) allow for very fast acting capacitors that require a lot less energy to keep going. It probably won't change the fact that power plants are still big, usually turbine driven machines that don't just produce power when we instantaneously need the power, and in must send current somewhere when it is produced. Thus, I think your idea of using excess power production capacity to create chemical fuel will be a significant part of futurecraft design.

Has anyone had any extensive experience actually using the vehicle rules and actually running combat between/with vehicles? My group is going to be doing a space opera campaign and are wondering if the vehicle rules work very well.

Unless there is a fundamental change in the way we transport energy or make power plants, solving problems of getting lots of energy where we want it, when we want it (both quickly and only when we want it), etc. will be at least as big a hurddle as getting fusion power working.

That's really the reason we don't play Traveller. 2D6 simply isn't enough variation to provide appropriate granularity to success rolls (a +/-1 in difficulty is too big a jump), as far as we are concerned. I guess T5 has more dice to roll under depending on the difficulty of the task. That also seems like a pretty ingranular method.

A little cheesy I'll admit. Buying an extra point of speed with the "only for follow-up attack" or a trigger might also be considered that. I myself like the idea of simply more damage dice, but with a only for stun exceeding con purposes limitation. I'd say it's a - 1/2 limitation (It's only slightly less powerful than other attacks-which-can't-accindetally-kill-someone, which is what it is clearly competing with).

(paragraph numbers added to ease discourse) 1. You are correct, that is my focus (our games tend towards Dark Heroes levels of survivability and used weapons/armor), and the numbers to compare are different if you are a) using a lot blast/HA attacks or using HKA/RKAs, but Stun is still an overriding concern. A case of YMMV Based On the Game You Play, to be sure. 2. To emulate total immunity, or for the security blanket effect, sure, and maybe if you have one or two levels, sure. To accurately compare values however, I'm not convinced. Characters do not get hit with maximum damage hits. Admittedly, they do get hit with greater than average hits, and the character in a 3D6 damage cap campaign who gets their rPD/rED up to 11 and thinks it is the same as 9 levels of DN is a fool who had better spend the savings on Body, con, and stun. Still, in the long haul, compairing against the absolute maximum potential damage seems far fetched. 3. Yes, you are likely to have some of each, but then the comparison gets so complex, I'm not sure I'd want to try to draw too many conclusions without the caveate "only applies to situations almost exactly like this." Superheroic campaigns and STUN--well, you are compairing (using my comparison of averages) 5 pts per DC of DN to 3.5 pts of non-resistant PD/ED, instead of the 3DCs of DN vs. rPD/rED of 3.5, so the numbers are closer, but you are also using more dice. As the number of dice go up, the less likely max damage or other extreme values is*. Protecting towards the average or some level above begins to make more sense. An interesting balance, to be sure. *standard deviation for rolling X 6-siders is sqrt(X*2.91666...)

Is your argument strictly that in the offense-defense arms race you take the defensive Damage Negation first and then your opponents start taking Reduced Negation, while with AP and Pen., you take the offensive AP and Pen. first, and then your opponenets start taking the defenses Hardened and Inpenetrable?

Second effect with extra time (delayed phase)?

A good option. Having a mittfull of different dice and knowing in my head "okay, this is a blast and they have 3 DCs of damage negation, I'm going to ignor those three red dice" has worked fine for me, but we are usually in the 3-12 dice range

That's a pretty reasonable interpretation of its use. I thought he just wanted to do away with the damage class system --??and replace it with a roughly similar system using whole and half dice but not dice+1s?? okay, I don't exactly know what I thought he was doing, but at least that has been consistent.

Not 2 pts per dice, 2 pts per damage class. 6 pts per dice. As for no real targets where it would be better than straight damage, the same is true of the second level of AP or penetrating--you don't know if it's needed until you see your opponents having hardened or impenetrable armor. Even the first level of AP or penetrating (or piercing) is predicated on only being useful on opponents with PD/ED or rPD/rED.

5 pts per DC. Per DC. I did 15 pts for 3DCs vs. 3.5 rPD or rED. We can also do 5 pts for -1 DC vs. 1.5*3.5*1/3=1.75. Either way, you are paying 2.86 times as much per point of damage abeyance for the benefit of it working on a broader array of defenses.

Like I said, the normal work-arounds don't work. You're paying just under 3x the cost of the equivalent rPD/rED for the convenience of not having to also flesh out your other defenses for AVADs and/or figure out how many levels of armor piercing your opponents will buy so that you can have one greater level of hardened. I don't mind that the power exists, I think it is a nice simplification, but I'm definitely still waiting for a convincing argument that it is undercosted.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2015-01-11 "Your budget for this project is, and I'm quoting General Bela-Amin, 'All the Money.'"

How are they going to know to do that until it's too late? What are they, psychic?

Almost exactly, except that knowledge is drawing information or understanding from your memory, and analyze is drawing it from an evolving situation. Otherwise, yes, one is an information gathering skill and the other is a "doing" skill.

It was never stated that it did this.

Meh. It costs 15 pts to do what 3.5*1.5= 5.25 pts of rPD/rED does, with the qualifier "the normal work-arounds...don't, but there is a special work around just for this that does." It's a very expensive way of not having the headache of predicting how many levels of armor piercing and penetrating your opponent is going to throw on their attacks. If it were a +1.75 Modifier to rPD or rED, it might be overpowered, but with the fact that any modifiers you add to it also are putting + 1/4 or 1/2 or whatever to 15 pts, it's pretty hard to have enough levels of it to be abusive.

So instead of using damage classes, you've effectively replicated the damage class concept within the power?

Forcefields are sometimes built as barriers that have the limit "takes a turn (or minute) to restart after shield fails". I think it is a -1/2 limitation, but I don't remember for sure.

Hi. The force fields of large capital spaceships in my upcoming Space Opera game are going to have a limitation: fighter craft (and I suppose guys in vacc suits) can fly through them and attack the ship from inside the shields. How should that be handled? Limitation? Restainable? Consider that the equivalent to "getting into melee" and thus the shields get the Ranged Only limitation? Thanks in advance!

My understanding of the rules and my reading of the vehicle rules conflict in two small ways which I hope you can explain for me. 1) In the rules for autofire. In the rules for Autofire (6E1 327), it states, "A character must pay Endurance (or use up charges) for each shot he takes, the END cost can be enormous." However, in Star Hero (where we see many vehicles with weapons which use END instead of charges), the vehicles have Endurance Reserves which clearly do not take into account this energy cost (in the example starfighter on 6E Star Hero, page 249, a single shot from thier forward ion cannon would expend 55 END out of 126 points of Endurance Reserve REC the ship has). Are these vehicles imperfectly designed, or am I mistaken about the rules or how they apply. 2) All example Vehicles that I can find (that do not use a fuel charge) have the limitation Costs Endurance (-1/2) applied to their movement abilities. This confuses me, because I believed that modes of movement already cost endurance. I'm not clear why this gets to be taken as a limitation. Thank you for clearing up these confusions for me.

People keep using that term, "Hard Science", and I wonder what it means to them. To me, hard science means more like what it does in the GURPS tech manuals -- conforms to the laws of physics as we know them today. That means reaction thrusters, rotation as simulated gravity, yes fusion power exists but in giant megawatt-sized power plants, lasers exist but power storage constraints limit their usefulness, etc. etc. I do like the slow ftl travel, lots of travel in system, having to buy or mine fuel, etc. To me, the example of a Traveller ship isn't the Serenity, it is the ship from the movie Alien-- a cramped space where the crew usually is surrounded by lots of engineering space (which the Serenity had too little of, despite the rotating main motor that Kaley worked on). The crew ate at a raty looking plastic table that, if it got chipped or melted by acidic alien blood, would stay that way as a reminder from there on out.