Nyrath

Re: Atmosphere In the golden age SF novels SEETEE SHIP and SEETEE SHOCK, Jack Williamson has planetary engineers using paragravity generators to give atmospheres to small asteroids. (Seetee is slang for "C.T" or "Contra-Terrene", an obsolete term for antimatter)

Re: Astrogator's Handbook I'm pretty sure that the ones I listed are the only with good starmaps. FTL:2448 is the one from the smallest publisher. If there is one I had not listed, I want to know about it so I can add it to my list. You can see swatches of the maps here: http://www.projectrho.com/smap10.html (scroll down)

Re: Astrogator's Handbook There were quite a few games with reasonably accurate starmaps. Alas, all are out of print. These include Traveller 2300 by GDW, Bug Hunters / Amazing Engine by TSR (NOT to be confused with Bug Hunter (no "s") / Sniper supplement), The Company War by Mayfair Games, Explored Space by Nightshift Games, FTL:2448 by Tri Tac Systems, StarForce Alpha Centauri by SPI, Universe by SPI, and Web And Starship by West End Games. The one in Universe is my personal favorite.

Re: Atmosphere Well, it will take some time for the pressure loss to drop to dangerous levels. whooshTime = ( gaspFactor * vol) / holeArea where gaspFactor = 1.4 for 80% pressure, 4.3 for 50% pressure, 29 for 1% pressure. whooshTime = time for cabin pressure to drop to specified fraction of initial value (seconds) vol = volume of air in the cabin (cubic yards) holeArea = area of the breech (square inches) So if a posh passenger cabin of 20 cubic yards has a one square inch hole blown in the bulkhead by a wayward meteor, the inhabitants have an entire 86 seconds (about a minute and a half) before the atmospheric pressure drops to one-half.

Re: A more realistic feel for SH http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3l.html#laserpistol

http://www.scifi-az.com/astronomy/astrogators_handbook.htm This is sort of a 3-D atlas of local space. The basic book is a free PDF download, and includes 300 stars inside a 50 light year cube centered on Earth. The expanded version cost money, but it has 3500 stars in a 150 light-year cube. The maps are fat "slices" of the cube, and include overview charts and tables listing the vital statistics of all the stars.

Re: Space Fantasy/Cyberpunk Sorta Thing . . . The Stapedon books are available as a two-in-one volume from Dover Books. The others are out of print, but copies can be found at http://www.bookfinder.com

Re: Space Fantasy/Cyberpunk Sorta Thing . . . Well, Diaspar is from the Arthur C. Clarke novels The City and the Stars and Against the Fall of Night. They are set in a remote era where from their standpoint, the invention of fire and the first nuclear explosion are equally remote. Similar novels include Macrolife by George Zebrowski, The Dying Earth by Jack Vance, Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Charles Sheffield, and of course both Last and First Men and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Any of those will have plenty of inspiration, expecially the last one. (If you do read Last and First Men, skim the first few chapters as they are a bit dull).

GP Hull RE: General Products Hulls. From "Flatlander" by Larry Niven, collected in NEUTRON STAR.

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.

Re: Discovery Channel: Alien Planet Those are "halters". They are not for balancing, they are organs for the sense of balance. http://tinyurl.com/chnjy http://tinyurl.com/cwaxz

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates

Re: Systems Diagnostics Chart It's called yEd. It free, available at http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.htm It can be used online, or downloaded if you have Java installed. Once you add the boxes and the connecting lines, select from the format menu. It can make hiearchical, circular, organic, all sorts of arrangements.

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates Absolutely. Larry Niven summed it up in a somewhat sarcastic fashion: "It was raining on Mongo that day..."

Re: Systems Diagnostics Chart WOW!! Now that's impressive! You have taken that article and used it with skill and foresight. How do the player characters use this to deal with catastrophic damage to their ship? Find ways to route around the damage? Try to establish a bare minimum chain of functional components to accomplish the critical tasks?

Re: Lensman HERO GURPS:Lensman has lots of goodies in it. Not the least is a nifty space-opera style starship combat system. Of course in said system,the hero automatically manages to find some death-defying means to escape if the ship they are in is destroyed. And as all GURPS worldbooks, it can almost be used as a textbook on the topic of the source material. I also {modest cough} contributed a couple of items to it. Chances are, you'll find quite a few things useful in it even if you never run a Lensman campaign.

Re: Space Opera resources Thank you. It's just my little way of trying to make SF writer's lives a little easier.

Re: Space Opera resources go to http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ and look up Triplanetary. I think they had a pdf file of the rules, and a Cyberboard gamebox for it. (Cyberboard is a free Windows program that uses a game file to simulate a game map with playing counters)

Re: Space Opera resources I'm glad you liked it. I worked hard on it.

Re: Getting rid of the {tech} This article may or may not be useful: http://www.schneier.com/paper-attacktrees-ddj-ft.html

Re: Pulp Reading Some of "The Thinking Machine" stories are on-line here. Everybody's favorite is "The Problem of Cell 13". He is sort of a querlous Sherlock Holmes, an irritable genius scientist who cannot understand why everybody else is so stupid.

Re: Getting rid of the {tech} I wish I could help more, but this techique is new to me as well. Each box is a situation, which can be in several states. Arrows leading into the box represent causes. When all the causes have their values determined, this determines what state the box flips to. A box has arrows leading out of it. These are causes for other boxes. Say box "A" is the state of the customs official after the free traders make their initial overture. Cause arrows leading in include whether there have been a recent rash of smuggling, honesty of the official, whether the traders offer a bribe or not and the size of the bribe, the degree that the traders hide their nervousness if they decide to depend on how well hidden the contraband is, and so forth. After all the decision are made, and any cause arrows that depend on sucessful skill rolls are rolled, the current state of the customs official is determined. Now the arrow leading out of box "A" feeds the state of box "A" as a cause into another box or two. States can include "give cargo clean bill of health", "arrest traders for bribery", "start looking for contraband", "demand a larger bribe", "demand larger bribe, pocket part of it, and arrest traders for bribery", and so on. The players have various decisions to make, based on this diagram. They might try skill rolls to figure out if there has indeed been a recent rash of smuggling, which would be a causal factor in how alert the official is. They might try skill rolls in an attempt to get the word on the street on how corruptable this particular official is. If they are going to bribe the official, how much is enough? And so on. There might be another box for triggering an anti-corruption internal affairs probe. If there has been a rash of bribed officials, the "offer a bribe of size X" arrow could go to both box "A" and to a box for "trigger a corruption probe". The official could accept the bribe, but then both the traders and the official get nabbed by the internal affairs police. And so on. I don't know if these will help or not: http://gamethink.blogspot.com/2004/06/behaviour-maps.html http://www.lumina.com/software/influencediagrams.html

Re: Getting rid of the {tech} This works for skills and talents as well as powers. What I would do is take a pragmatic approach. Look at your player's under-utilized skills and talents, the ones they complain "I don't know why I wasted points on this skill, I never use it". Then look at important actions they have tried in the past and see which ones relate to the unused skills. Make a chart for that action, with skill rolls at critical points. For example: say your players are Free Traders flying a tramp freighter starship. They will often find themselves in the situation of attempting to smuggle contraband past a planetary customs inspector. Make a "smuggling" chart, with various strategies based on different skills. The "sneeking" strategy would require skill rolls based on hiding the contraband and mis-directing the inspector. The "bribery" strategy would require bribing and confidence skill rolls. And so on.

Re: Getting rid of the {tech}

Re: Getting rid of the {tech} I've re-read the article, which reminded me that the point of all this was to enhance the player's non-combat role playing. Combat has a series of decisions (do I forfet my next phase to do a defensive maneuver or keep my next phase and take the damage?). Non-combat does not (total up all relevant modifiers, make a roll, and decide if you've cobbled together the gadget/fast-talked your way out of a speeding ticket/seduced the executive assistant of the target megacorporation/got elected in the corrupt political campaign you ran/whatever.) The example chart give was for a mechanism, but it could be used for a situation. So the idea is to look at the skills and talents of your player-characters, and construct causality diagrams for things they'd like to accomplish with said skills and talents. Make a chart for "the anatomy of a seduction", or "how to run a crooked election". The point is to give the players more non-combat decisions to make than a simple "do I roll or not roll?"