ajackson

Re: Why exponential progression doesn't work for damage Huh? No, it just indicates that the hole required to kill something is much smaller than the thing itself. You still need a bigger hole to kill an elephant than to kill a human. The typical threshold for a lethal projectile injury on a human is in the 30-40J range (about 0.5 J/kg), and a .22 short has an energy in the 120J range. That implies that the threshold for lethal force on a 4,000 kg elephant would be in the 2,000J range, and that a comfortable value would be in the 6,000J range. Typical elephant guns fire projectiles with kinetic energy in the 5-10,000J range, so you would expect them to be lethal with a well placed shot, much like a .22 is lethal with a well placed shot on a human. That's actually surprisingly close to the computed value.

Re: Why exponential progression doesn't work for damage The problem with exponential progression isn't with damage -- it's with x2 mass -> +1 Body. If anything, a realistic x2 Mass should be -1DC from all attacks (so if two people are 1000x mass and striking with 1000x the force, the +10DC from 1000x force, and the -10DC for 1000x mass, exactly balance out, and you wind up with identical results to operating at regular scale). If you want to have mechanics which are closer to standard Hero mechanics, x2 mass should be +1 Def (hardened), plus an additional +2 stun only defense. Body should not change (there are legitimate concept reasons for Body to be increased, but they're basically the excuses one uses for damage reduction -- high Body implies that you can be injured by small attacks, but it takes a really big attack to oneshot you).

Re: So yeah, about those Star Hero lasers.... I've looked into lasers as weapons a bunch for other games. Basically, any sort of laser sidearm is cinematic, so coming up with exact descriptions of how one would work is hard, but there are some physical principles you can apply if you want to. 1) In order to build an effective laser weapon in the optical or infrared frequency ranges, you have one easy choice: use adaptive optics to focus the laser to a small spot -- probably 1mm to 1cm across. For a 1mm spot, at a range of 100m, with a visible light laser, you would need a lens 50-75mm across (depending on wavelength). Beam spread is inversely proportional to lens size, so a reasonable lens for a pistol (20-30mm) would have an effective range of maybe 40 meters. Beyond that, penetration drops rapidly (there's a limit to how narrow a focus is useful, but 1mm is still usable unless the target's armor is quite thick). 2) Laser weapons, unless very high powered, need to operate at power levels low enough to not cause air to break down; atmospheric haze has significant effects on this, so plowing through atmospheric haze is hard at best. In addition, the beam is only intense enough to burn holes in things near the endpoint, so if it's passing through a cloud of smoke which lies between the projector and the target, it would almost certainly be stopped. 3) Reflective surfaces don't do a heck of a lot to lasers; lasers operate at power levels sufficient to cause mirrors to break down. White or reflective materials will be somewhat superior armor, but will not be invulnerable. 4) As noted above, laser weapons are likely to operate at power levels low enough to not cause atmospheric ionization. An optical beam will probably be visible anyway due to scattering off of dust; a near infrared beam might be visible due to burning dust, but could easily be nearly invisible, and will be most visible near the target, rather than near the projector. 5) UV laser weapons are basically not viable; the atmosphere is rather opaque to UV light, and even at the frequencies it lets through, the atmospheric breakdown limit is probably too low for a good weapon. 6) X-ray lasers would work differently. The air is opaque, but X-rays have a short enough wavelength that you could simply fire a beam that's 1mm thick for its entire length, and simply burn your way through atmosphere. This would result in plasma formation in the atmosphere, and would significantly limit range due to the power requirement of burning through that much atmosphere, but in theory it's doable.

Re: Monofilament Blade The other question is whether the GM is willing to let you have a given writeup. For example, I wouldn't normally permit AVLD does body. As others have noted, realistic physical descriptions of monomolecular blades imply them not being very useful (another problem is that, even if the blade could survive, most materials are capable of simply resealing after a molecule-sized disruption, so you might cut through things and do no damage). For genre tropes, it might actually be reasonable to have an HKA where Str doesn't add.

Re: TravellerHERO PDF in the works

Re: TravellerHERO PDF in the works The Striker armor values for armored hulls never made any sense, since it means factor-F armor on a 10 dton spherical hull (real thickness 17 cm, effective thickness 238cm steel, which is AV 62) and factor-F armor on a 500,000 dton spherical hull (thickness 13.4 meters, effective thickness 18,800 cm, which is AV 113) have the identical armor rating (of course, in any design system in which armor density matters, armor thickness is much much lower). On checking, though, it looks like that should be armor 38, not armor 34, so add 4 to all armor values. As for damage conversion -- it's one of the historical problems with Hero. If you go with a formula of x2 energy = +1DC, you tend to wind up with about x2 penetration = +2 DC. This means that, for big weapons, doubling the power pushes you from 8d to 8d+1, which seems kind of pathetic. Other than discarding x2 -> +1 DC, there's not much to be done to fix it.

Re: TravellerHERO PDF in the works Why is buffered planetoid +15 body/def, when a bonded SD hull is only +12? A buffered planetoid, in High Guard, is +6 armor rating; a maxed hull is 15. I'd probably convert Def off of the size and High Guard armor rating; I'd go with Def = 2 - (base DCV) + A, where A comes from the High Guard value (the conversion logic is based on how personal armor weight scales): 0: +0 1: +2 2: +4 3: +5 4: +6 5-6: +7 7-8: +9 9-12: +10 13-16: +11 17-24: +12 That gives a Tigress a Def of 2 - (-22) + 11 or 34.

Re: Traveller Psionics (long) Generally, the way Traveller psi works is: spend N psps for the base power (where N is usually greater than 1). Add extra psps for range; in T4 you can also spend extra PSPs for duration (on TK, you can also spend PSPs to buy up the mass). The base power, once activated, usually has a duration of around a minute (with no real savings for shorter time), though it varies by the power. Since a strong psi talent in Traveller has about 10 PSPs, and pretty much any ability of interest will cost several PSPs to activate, your entire END reserve (for simplicity, I'd go with 10 x PSPs) should be good for activating a significant power maybe 2-3 times. Something like 5-10x END to activate, and then x1 END to maintain, seems appropriate.

Re: Traveller Psionics (long) A nit about your implementation: in most versions of Traveller, it's actually very expensive to activate a power (using the END reserve method here, x10 END cost isn't absurd), but it actually isn't that hard to give it a significant duration once the power is activated. The rules you have here make it actually fairly cheap to activate many powers. Now, it may not really be necessary to emulate exactly how Traveller psychic abilities work, but if you want to be consistent, well, that's how it works.

Re: Traveller Laser and High Energy Weapons Hm. Sounds like for structural reasons, BD is required. Assuming you had strength comparable to augmented battle dress, and wired around the cutout preventing you from firing the weapon unaugmented, you'd be fine. However, under normal rules the fact that you need a specific OIF in order to use a given OAF weapon isn't a disadvantage, it's just a feature to note. In any case, my point about damage is unaffected -- PGMP-13 and PGMP-14 should have the same damage, FGMP-14 and FGMP-15 should have the same damage.

Re: Traveller Laser and High Energy Weapons An FGMP-15 has identical performance to an FGMP-14, it just has gravetic recoil compensation, which reduces the Str min and allows firing without BD. Ditto for PGMP-14 vs PGMP-13. FGMP-16 isn't given in CT so I have no comment there. I don't really think the requires battle dress disad is appropriate -- the reason an FGMP canonically requires battle dress is the huge recoil, and that's pretty well covered by the Str min on the weapon.

Re: Traveller Laser and High Energy Weapons The splash damage from fusion weapons is significantly less than the primary damage; area effect isn't particularly correct. Fusion weapons don't have any specially increased rate of fire. Why autofire? Why penetrating on fusion weapons? As far as I can tell, fusion/plasma weapons in Traveller just do damage; any nonpenetrating damage is covered by the fact that the stun damage is vastly higher than the body damage. 4d6 AP RKA is too high for a laser rifle; 4d6 with no AP or increased stun multiplier is about right. Given the general scaling of energy levels in Champions, Pen 10 (Striker) is about 10DC; every +4 Pen is about +1 DC (+8 Pen = x2 penetration). That puts a laser rifle/13 at around 2.5d6AP or 4d6 non-AP, a fusion gun at around 5d6+1.

Re: TravellerHERO PDF in the works