ajackson

Re: Space Warfare II - Stealth Reconsidered

Yes' date=' I'm familiar. But then you're claiming that the Second is a mathematical proof?[/quote']

Actually, it is. The second law is dependent on the information content of the system being finite, but it works for a wide variety of systems with little resemblance to our universe.

Re: Space Warfare II - Stealth Reconsidered

On reflection, gas moving from high to low pressure will also drop in temperature -- you can in general produce energy from a pressure differential in much the same way you can produce energy from a temperature differential. There are also some categories of chemical reaction that are endothermic but have positive entropy.

Re: Teleport redirection

Something else?

Vs con, probably. I generally assume mind control vs con also goes vs power defense, because it's essentially useless otherwise, but as written it would be pd/ed and con.

Re: Space Warfare II - Stealth Reconsidered

Right' date=' the input of electrical power prevents violation of the second law. If there was no power input, there would be a violation.[/quote']

Actually, you're missing his point, though it's an artifact of clumsy wording. If you let a liquid move from a high pressure area to a low pressure area, and it transforms into a gas when doing so, its temperature goes down without external energy input, which looks like a second law violation. It's not -- modest pressure gas is higher entropy than a liquid, even if the gas is cooler than the liquid -- but using a careless definition of entropy it looks like one.

Re: 6E, 1st non backwards compatible Hero?

Really? Maybe I was just using basic stuff' date=' but my 2E supers characters played just fine in the 5E world.[/quote']

They'll probably play fine in 6e. They just won't be legal writeups.

Re: Population Growth for a colony

GURPS Space uses a 2.3% growth per year model until the planet starts to get a bit crowded.

Aka x10 per century, or x2 per 30 years.

Re: 6E, 1st non backwards compatible Hero?

4e wasn't really backwards compatible either, you pretty much had to rebuild characters and a number of abilities either ceased to exist or changed how they worked.

Re: Space Warfare II - Stealth Reconsidered

How about we actually find out what's possible?

People do work out the math on examples like that, actually. It's just time consuming and annoying, and so far hasn't produced any examples that differ from what we'd expect from the second law of thermodynamics, so unless you're specifically searching for second law violations it's generally legitimate to just assume the second law holds.

Re: Teleport redirection

1) Dispel plus teleport as attack, probably triggered.

2) Transform

3) Mind Control

None of them are great builds.

Re: Population Growth for a colony

Hi guys,

 

I'm looking for any information, ideas, websites, programs, etc... that might help calculate the growth of a population over time.

Depends on a lot of factors, but it's typically an exponential growth curve. You might get a factor of ten increase in fifty years, a hundred years is more likely, and of course it's possible that the colony will remain static, shrink, or die out entirely. So, after three hundred years, I would expect 3-6 factor of 10 increases, or a population between 1 million and 1 billion.

Re: Space Warfare II - Stealth Reconsidered

All Scientific Laws are Working Theories just waiting to be proven wrong. Not to say that laws like the Conservation of Energy and such *will* be proven wrong or inadequate' date=' but to say they [b']cannot[/b] be wrong or inadequate is folly.

The case for the second law is stronger than most (it comes from mathematics), but when you're talking about hard SF, you pretty much have to discard convenient mistakes, because, while there's a high chance of errors in current theory, there's a low chance of those errors producing any particular outcome, and the errors, such as they are, will almost always be in places that are currently inconvenient to impossible to observe.

Re: 6e Characteristics

How would you do a Magical Awareness power in 6e?

Presumably the same way as 5e -- detect with the Sense modifier.

Re: 6e Characteristics

As the REST of my post goes on to state - once you escalate over 20 Points/1D6 (on average greater than a +2 Advantage' date=' pushing towards +4) the Utility Drops.[/quote']

Okay, 2d6 EB, NND (+1) autofire 20 shots (+1), zero END (+1), area effect: radius (+1), x16 radius (+1) (strangely enough, 64 hex radius): 30 points per die, with a reasonable OCV I can hit my own hex five times and the remaining fifteen shots won't scatter outside of the area of effect so I can pretty reliably do 40d6 NND to everyone on the map who isn't immune to my particular NND.

 

What drops to useless is powers where people reliably have a non-zero defense against the power.

Re: 6e Characteristics

What's mispriced is that the more Advantages you add to a Power the further drop you see in Utility to Cost ratio.

Actually, if they're the right sort of advantages, the utility to cost ratio improves. 6d6 NND vs 12d6 EB is probably a push; 4d6 NND AoE is way better than 6d6 AoE normal. The problem is that a number of advantages have effects that really fall outside of the normal power calculation. For example, area effect (1 hex) is really the equivalent of an OCV bonus -- but AE counts against active point limits, and OCV doesn't.

Re: 6e Characteristics

You do not need Indirect on a build simulating Ego Attack.

Actually, you still do, because there's no other way to buy 'line of sight'.

Re: 6e Characteristics

Are there a lot of non-opaque “walls” in your games?

Force wall. Also, enhanced senses can make any wall effectively non-opaque.

“If you assume that walls stop AVLDs and NNDs' date=' for consistency they would stop ego attacks as well.” Um, isn’t that why “Indirect” is listed as one of the unbalancing Advantages in the “build” to make Ego Attack?[/quote']

Yeah, but I'm not convinced that Ego Attack has the indirect advantage; if a vehicle or base provides mental defense, it generally protects its contents as well, and an indirect attack bypasses such defenses.

Come to think of it though' date=' does the Energy Blast modeled to show that Ego Attack is unbalancing even need “Indirect”? Isn’t the whole being able to attack what you can see, despite physical barriers, part of the “Line of Site” Advantage?[/quote']

No. Line of sight just means it has no maximum range or range penalty.

Re: Space Warfare II - Stealth Reconsidered

But the original waste heat is still there.

Well, sort of. If you were able to apply some device to it and generate useful power, it wasn't waste heat.

Re: 6e Characteristics

There is no aspect of Ego Attack alone' date=' by itself, that let's you attack a target through a wall.[/quote']

Ego attack lets you attack through a non-opaque wall, though it's not clear that this is any different from any other AVLD or NND -- while this doesn't always make sense, there's no particular evidence that a wall stops any attack it doesn't provide defense against. If you assume that walls stop AVLDs and NNDs, for consistency they would stop ego attacks as well.

Re: 6e Characteristics

There's as much reason for supporting an unobservant genius as a clumsy combat master' date=' and while both could be done just with limitations, the clumsy combat master is apparently important enough to make things streamlined for. So personally, I'm for separating PER as well.[/quote']

Main difficulty is that Int, without Per, is often of very marginal utility, and the entire stat might not be worth x1 at that point.

Re: 6e Characteristics

A more interesting example' date=' where I think that the 'non-reversibility' of Hero works, is Force Field v Armour. Force Field gives better protection for the points but is visible and costs END. Building Armour 'down' to Force Field is messy and building Force Field 'up' to Armour is expensive, but it works.[/quote']

Not really. Force Field is essentially always worse than armor, because even if IPE were free, the fact that armor is Persistent is enough to make it better.

Force Field (END TO ACTIVATE*) and Armour (visible) cost the same (real) and do almost the same job.

No they don't. The force field goes down if you're stunned, the armor doesn't.

Re: What effects would you see on a terrestial planet in a binary system?

It depends on the details of the binary. For example, looking at the Alpha Centauri system, a planet orbiting A at 1.22 AU (roughly equivalent to 1 AU for earth) would have a distance from B ranging from about 7.25 AU to about 27.9 AU, and would have apparent magnitude ranging from around -19 to -22. From B to A is similar, but A would be somewhat brighter. This might have discernible climate effects, though the other star is still no more than few percent the brightness of the planet's primary.

Re: 6e Characteristics

Ego Attack.

Ego Attack can be seen as evidence for a problem with the costing of AVLD.

Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

Actually, a likely done thickness is one where the weight compensates for air pressure, which results in a mass density of up to about 28 tons/square meter on Mars and 60+ on the Moon.

Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

In my campaign' date=' some of the Martian and lunar colonies will have biodomes that have radiation shielding and allow for an earthlike atmosphere to exist inside. I'm making the assumption that these domes are built to withstand meteorites, so a bullet fired from a gun shouldn't even make a dent. A railgun salvo from a spacecraft would still damage it, however. Does that seem reasonable?[/quote']

Well, effective cosmic ray shielding on the moon would be 2-3 meters of lunar soil (probably turned into a concrete-type material), so yeah, small arms won't do much of interest, but heavy weapons will.

Re: 6e Characteristics

Again' date=' the problem isn’t on the PER end, if anything it’s with how the system models “night”[/quote']

Mostly a matter of magnitude. On average (based on theoretical modeling with noise and photon counts), inadequate light will reduce spotting range as the 1/4 power of light intensity, so -4 perception (1/4 spotting range) should be about 1/256 of a 'zero penalty' light level, which is probably about right for the difference between bright indoor light and bright moonlight. A moonless light would be more like -10.