DrTemp

Re: Alien Wars: Before hyperdrive, there was... Another option might be giving Earth an actual Antimatter infrastructure and letting starships use antimatter photon drives. Those would have an exhaust speed of near c (light speed), and that'd significantly reduce the amount of propellant needed. That kind of fuel would not be "easy to obtain", though.

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. That idea is not a chemical rocket. BTW, you run into energy density problems there. The amount of energy required to produce thrust in space is enormous, the density of "free energy" of that kind is not. We actually know quite a bit about the universe- any thechnology that provides things that we cannot do today at least theoretically requires assuming new, today unknown pieces, such as reactionless thrusters, for example.

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. But we still know a horse can only pull so much. That has not changed, and it won't change for chemical rockets either.

Re: Enterprise vs. Enterprise Isn't there this fine fan project for a Star Trek Hero? So why doesn't anyone take both ships' stats from there and simply plays it out using Hero System? I mean, if so many people are interested in the matter as it seems from this thread...

Re: Alien Wars: Before hyperdrive, there was... There is, indeed, a tendency among some people to see it that way, but I personally find this... uhm, silly. I can have that kind of "I don't care how that works" attitude in any regular fantasy campaign. SF is, by definition, different. Especially military SF, which usually wants to be hard SF as well.

Re: Alien Wars: Before hyperdrive, there was... Well, give them some kind of Russard ramjet, the'd have some 10% of lightspeed. Colonizing a new system would thus come down to a matter of decades. I'd really love to read that, too. I know that Star Hero is currently not as profitable as it needs to be, but still, the settings are cool (minor difficulties aside) and I'd love to learn more about them.

Re: Average Seperation I believe there is. First, the galactic habitable zone is an approximation that does not take into account the destructive effects of nearby supernovae, which can happen just anywhere in the galaxy. If a supernoa strikes, a few centuries later the surrounding life-bearing planets will have lost much of their higher life forms. Thus, it is quite probable that only in regions that haven't had supernovae for a long time there cann be an civilizations. Second, of course, the average separation is just that, an average. It is quite possible that simply by chance, several intelligent species are closer to each other in the galaxy. There could still be those farther away- but nobody would know them. Third, there is always the option of the "progenitor race", which sed life on a few clusters in the galxy. The progenitors were the first race (or a federation of races), and only on their planets did intelligent life evolve naturally. A variant of this might be an extinct genocidal race that was successful in some regions of space, but failed to exterminate intelligent life in others.

Re: Alien Wars: Before hyperdrive, there was...

Re: Average Seperation That's because you, as the universe-builder, are to determine by sheer force of will what the "average separation" shall be. ;-)

Re: Alien Wars: Before hyperdrive, there was... If I remember correctly, the class Alpha was the first mass-produced hyperdrive, but prototypes were certainly available much earlier. As much as you cannot buy an ion drive for your personal space probe today at "Old Neil's used spaceship parts", the early hyperdrives were purely gouvernmental experimening drives not available to the public in a way that a "class" of drives could be called existing. I also vaguely remember reading about slower-than-light-hyperdrives as being the first uses of that technology. If they did some 0.5 c, they were still usefull for exploration.

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. Correct. With chemical rockets, UES spaceships would merely remain in orbit, jumping from one system to another orbit-to-orbit and not maneuvering much at all. Using, for example, fusion rockets, would allow at least for some "free-fall" deep space operations, with short bursts at the begin and end of a projected interplanetary course. But design mistakes like this one are just examples for the necessity of a well-grounded design system for the SF environment and genre. I restate: A vehicle design system for the Hero universe, maybe much like GURPS Vehicles (even though a bit simpler, I suggest...) is required- at least for the higher-tech Hero Universe timeperiods like Solar Hero, Alien Wars, Terran Empire and Galactic Federation.

Re: Veteran of a 1000 Psychic Wars Doesn't that depend on your campaign setting? Can you give a few clues about what is supposed to be possible?

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. Well, this is rather a problem of the GM involved, but I see what you mean- one can argue that the time consumption per usable campaign material output of such design systems is too high to be usefull. This can easily be avoided by making a design system not too detailed. Skip things like the mass of the computer and sencsors system (being 50 or 100 kg) influencing the mass and performance of the 20 ton space superiority fighter- simply assume that all designed craft have a fair equipment aboard, all bought with the "2 to 3 tons for the cockpit". Modular design, so to speak. If designing a ship consists of only a few steps and takes no more than ten minutes, the output of usable campaign material increases rapidly... But the value of such a design system is not only to give the GM a tool with which to provide background information for his or her campaign- it is also some kind of solitary play, which is simply fun for some people. (Many of those people also prefer rather rules-heavy game systems, such as you-know-which-one ). "Find out more about the setting by exploring its technological conditions". Providing such a systems deepens the fan's involvement with the game universe.

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. No. Alien Wars, for example, wants to be rather hard SF on the sublight propulsion system question. The efficiency of a chemical or fusion rocket is not subject to arbitrary decision by the worldbuilder, but to known physics. If one wants to do Hard SF, one needs actual numbers. (There is only so much energy to be gained from converting Deuterium to Helium, so that is the maximum one can get out of a fusion rocket. It simply cannot be more, whatever the tech level is. For higher acceleration and burn endurance than the best imaginable (antimatter rockets) can provide, one needs rubber science. {Warning. Numberchrunching example follows. If you are not interested in such things, move on to the next curly brackets} For example, there is _no_ chemical rocket with an acceleration in the range of 0.1 g or above that can burn for a month. That is due to the exhaust velocities inolved, which are a function of the energy provided by fuel and oxidant. The best available chemical rockets use almost all of the energy provided, which allows for an exhaust velocity of perhaps 4500 meters/second. To compute how much reaction mass we need for a given ship for a one-seconds-burn, we can use the simple formula: shipsmass * velocitychangepersecond= reactionmassconsumptionpersecond * exhaustvelocity For said Centauri class battleship, that is 100 000 tons * 5 m/s = reactionmassconsumptionpersecond * 4500 m/s So reactionmassconsumptionpersecond = 500 000/4500 tons which is close to a hundred tons. For one second. A month has a _lot_ of seconds. (And one cannot simply multiply since the reaction mass for the last seconds has to be accelerated all the way until it is used, increasing the ship's initial mass and requiring a logarithmic equation for the actual computation.) Even if one assumes that the exhaust velocity of Alien Wars rockets is much higher (which is actually not possible for a chemical rocket, simply because there is not more energy in that kind of propulsion system), there is no way a 100 000 tons ship can be in that range with its propulsion data if it uses chemical rockets. {End of numberchrunching example} In addition to physics being somewhat of genre relevance in SF, there is still the point that even with completely arbitrary rubber science systems, the numbers provide background information for the setting. If the best available FTL drive requires one ton of mass per ton moved with it, it is useless, since it can't even transport its own power source, and certainly not any payload. If interstellar empire A can build ships that carry one ton per kilogram of FTL drive and empire B only 500 kg, then empire A will dominate empire B (either economically or outright militarily). In Alien Wars, the only real advantage the Xenovores seem to have, propulsion-wise, is that their dreadoughts are able to enter atmospheres- human ships are just as durable and just as agile as their Xenovore counterparts, even though the setting assumes that "the Xenovores are technologically superior", of which we'd see nothing in a space battle, given the stats of the available ships. Don't misunderstand me- in the reality of play, these things are probably rather minor, and can be easily corrected if necessary. I really love the result of the author's work, it is a great SF setting. But it certainly lacks a design system.

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. But those charts are, again, only lists of Hero System powers and their associated point costs. No engineering involved.

Re: Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't. Well, this is a funny thing about, for example, Alien Wars: While otherwise a remarkable work (and Terran Empire being even better), it turns out that if you reverse-engineer a Centauri-class battleship that way, you find out that using basic physics, it is simply impossible to build it- not because of the necessary rubber science involved, but because it has chemical rockets that can burn for a month and accelerate the ship at about 0.5 g... making that 100,000-tons-ship carrying about 250 *million* tons of reaction mass... a mistake that would have been easily avoided with a design system at hand. I know that the Star Hero line does not sell too well, so it probably won't make sense for DoJ to add such a system to Star Hero, but I wonder if the lack of such a system is part of the reason for the relatively low sales.

Ever since Traveller, SF roleplayers like to do one thing: "Build Starships". (Of course, it's not only starships, but any kind of vehicle, but for ease of discussion, I'll simply call them all "ships"). Thing is, you cannot do that with Star Hero. Oh, yes, you can write down the desired attributes of a ship you have in mind, and then assign a point cost according to the Hero system rules. But that is not what "building ships for your game" is about. Especially in SF gaming, the engineering limitations of the technology available is a rather important aspect of the background. You want to know whether it is possible to build a Terran Empire dreadnought with 20 g of accelleration, ot what the maximum level is, engineering-wise. What are the limiting factors? Engine mass, pilot acc tolerance, available fuel? Some players take solitary fun in simply exploring what the "ultimate vessel" would be like- just what kind of ship is possible in the game universe? Many SF games, from the old Traveller on, had "systems" to map these engineering limits: A given drive weighs X tons per ton of thrust, consumes Y tons of fuel per second for that and so on. Star Hero and its two settings, Alien Wars and Terran Empire have no such thing. Why?

Re: Need Star Hero Reference

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice Well, if the "hard data" of the literature/movie source is arbitrary, then any conclusions from those are just as arbitrary. GIGO. But there _are_ SF universes where this is not the case, as far as the technical data of ships is concerned. Of course, those are most common among RPG universes... but some TV shows qualify too. (We have hard technical data for the Star Trek Galaxy class, for example.) Thing is- I've seen this kind of discussion on a local Battletech Mailing List, concerning several 'Mech types. From the same universe, with existing stats. But even under these circumstances, people preferred to do some blabla about why this or that was superior. They didn't even consider trying it out... Could have been so easy. BTW can anybody tell which one is superior- a Xenovore Dreadnought from Alien Wars or a Tigress class dreadnought from Traveller?

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice Now that is easy- you use Occam's Razor. If no author mentions anything in either source material that indicates this makes sense, there is no reason to assume that it did. You use the model of said vessel which requires the least assumptions for explaining every fact available. Of course, in a written scenario, writers are free to introduce any such a thing for the sake fo the plot. But the problem with the "writer's choice" answer is that it does simply not answer the question at hand. Nobody wants to know how the _writers_ would resolve the issue within a storyline because to _that_ the answer is just arbitrary. What people who ask for "X vs Y, who would win" really want to know is: "From all the available established source material, how do those units compare, combat-wise, all 'divine' interventions aside?"

Re: Who would win? Writer's choice What I do not understand in all these X vs X threads is: WHY THE HELL DOES NO ONE USE THE HERO COMBAT SYSTEM TO SOLVE THE ISSUE? *Aehem* Really, one can argue several thousand times "X will, no Y will, because...". Or one can simply have one fight, using your facvorite RPG system, and the issue is closed. Why all the pointless blabla? Step 1. Create the stats. Step 2. Define the combat situation. Step 3. Resolve the combat according to the rules. And then you know. :-)

Re: Perry Rhodan Hero Probably not. However, I cannot agree that I find anything based in Midgard "cool". Midgard is something like the opposite of Hero System or GURPS: It's a bad D&D clone from the early 80's, and it shows. While I also believe there'd be interest in the game you have in mind, a want to nitpick that the Solar Imperium did not exist in the first cycle of the series...

Re: Enterprise NC1701A vs. Imperial Star Destroyer Normally these dicsussions are pointless, but not here. Hey, this is an RPG system forum. Why hasn't anyone just created the stats and used the combat system to find it out? Two of three, and you know which ship is better in a one-on-one. Of course, this would still require some consensus on the actual capabilities of the two ships... but at least the whole discussion would be not as arbitrary as it normally needs to be.

Re: Perry Rhodan Hero Uhm... if one does not want Pucky (I assume that's the Ilt Gucky's name in the english translations of the stories?) or a character of similar power level in the group.. well, what about giving fewer Character points to start with? Well, in a story, there is no such thing as "game balance", naturally. I would not conclude from that that in a different medium that has game balance this would not work in the Perryverse. That should be easy. You need free CP for learning skills- just the amount of time required is reduced dramatically by hypnoteaching.