patrick

Re: L.A. Caveman I thought about a telepathic angle for Neanderthals, but in the system that I'm originally writing my setting for (Savage Worlds, though I plan to write a Hero and a D20 version), the Neanderthals were plenty powerful enough, making them telepathic would have made them unbalanced with humans and chimps. I got the idea of Neanderthals "thinking" different from the Jean Auel books. I remember a few weeks ago seeing a poorly done psudo-documenty on one of the learning channels. The information was ok, the presentation was just hookey. One of the thing it talked about was that because Neanderthals had a hyoid bone they were capable of speech, but they had a shorter voice box and along with the shape of their nasal passages their voices would have had a high pitch nasal quality to them. Neanderthals sounded like Mike Tyson and Fran Drescher.

Re: Post Apoc Setting Very nice. Sound like most of the hurt is on the northern hemisphere. How does Australia fair?

Re: Post Apoc Setting But are they ill tempered mutants... I'm a less is more as post-apoc is concerned kind’a guy. Think Mad Max. I ran a post-apoc game once where the players started off as Green Berets and Romanian partisans in a Nato-Soviet WWIII. About three game sessions into it one of the characters is on watch in the middle of the night. I tell the player that as he's looking up at the stars it looks like many of them are moving, and separating into multiple stars. The player was no idiot, and realized what's going on was a nuclear exchange. He asks how many shooting stars does he see, and I tell him oh between ten and twenty. From his vantage point in the Carpathians he rightly assumed that whole world had gone to hell. From there it was all about survival. From fallout, to finding food, to fighting over food. It was very brutal. I remember one player jokingly ask "Won't the radiation make us into superheroes like in the comics?" to which I responded, "If by superheroes you mean Toothless-Hairless Man and Cancer Boy, than yes." That said I like to see your ideas Super Squirrel. Post Apoc can be great completely strait or over the top.

Re: The Future of Small Arms Found a very nice article on this stuff by some guy named Adam Getchell http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Chamber/2838/arms.html I really like the points he makes about projectile shapes evolving:bmk:

Re: The Future of Small Arms Future development also depends on the types and numbers of conflicts armies engage in. Will they be fewer or more frequent, shorter or longer, asymmetrical or conventional, here on earth or on some distant world at the end of a supply chain light-years long. This combined with what the troops and command will be happy with in the field (tradition), and the amount of bang for the buck (economics). I'm starting to realize that what started off, as just an idle thought is a very complex question dependent on more than just a few what ifs.

Re: The Future of Small Arms

Re: The Future of Small Arms Yeah, aint it great there's nothing like being there!

Re: The Future of Small Arms The more I think about it, the more I think it comes down to economics... The cheapest way to kill or disable at the needed range, and it’s really hard to argue with bullets. Plus you want to make a weapon "soldier proof", able to withstand horrible treatment and conditions in extreme environments. The AK-47 comes to mind. The simplest solutions are often the best. That said a firearm still needs to have a decent chance of penetrating any armor that might be worn in the field. Caseless ammunition needs to just as rugged as the competition, and energy and gauss weapons need to be easily charged in the field (a difficult feat while on a long range patrol). As boring as it may sound, I'm starting to think that advancements in small arms are going to be just refinements to present technology. Weapons made out of advance polymers, perhaps even bullets and casings made out of polymers designed to take the same or even more stresses that brass takes. Cleaner burning propellants and something like a spray on nanite cleaner/lubricant. The real exciting advancements on the battlefield will probably be in optics, sensors, and command and control technologies. Or like OddHat said armies will just be "non-humanoid robots with sonic, chemical and energy weapons." But what fun is that. Stupid robots taking all our fun

Just something I was idly thinking about today… 300 years ago state of the art in small arms was black powder rifled muzzleloaders. What will be the state of the art 300 years from now? Gauss weapon, lasers, microwave weapons? Or will chemical slug throwers still the only game in town? Even if other technologies exist, will firing bullets still be the most economical way of doing harm?

Re: Aliens watching our television Foiled by JSTOR yet again! My college doesn't subscribe. I'd trade our entire athletic department for JSTOR. What the hell, I'm not using it:D Thanx for the play by play Cancer

Re: L.A. Caveman My present obsession (er... setting I'm writing) involves humans from Earth (along with uplifted chimps) going out into interstellar space and encountering other humans and neanderthals, along with other flora a fauna from Earth. The background is that 50,000 to 30,000 years ago "the greys" seeded our part of the galaxy with species taken from, and then guided them along. To them the entire exercise was something like having a rose garden. Given a significant time grow with out competition, neanderthals are just as advanced as us. Although the communication of ideas between species is sometimes awkward due to the fact that neanderthals don't have a grasp of aesthetics (they value function over form), and other abstract ideas go right over them. They're also stronger, tougher, a little slower in pace, and do better in colder climes/worse in hotter ones.

Re: Aliens watching our television Thanx for the help guys, and especially for the links Nyrath. They were especially helpful. I'm always glad when real life supports a game idea and I don't have to come with a cheesy idea to explain reality away. In this case, the idea of a dramatic discovery of alien civilizations 50 ly away would've had its parade rained on if we could have been watching each other’s fifty year old re-runs. I’m glad it works out.

Background info... I've been developing a setting were Earth developed FTL travel in 2212. In 2247 we came across the first intelligent life around 50 ly away. They're at a very similar technology level (communications, medicine, weapons, ect.) in every thing but FTL travel. Both our cultures have been guided to their present state of development by an outside influence (think Roswell). Over the next few decades we come across other races/cultures that have been similarly guided, all in a kind of a 50 ly shell around Sol. Here are my questions... Would they have picked up our last 300 years (minus 50 years travel time) of radio/television broadcasts? Would we have picked up theirs? How difficult is to pick a signal from another system? Do the listeners have to have their antennas pointing directly at the source? And is there degradation in these kinds of signals (radio/TV/communication) over these kinds of distances? Lastly if they are watching our television were they as upset by Fox's cancellation of Firefly as we were? J/K

Re: Do I need the core rule book? Gracias & Danke Karmakaze-San and everyone else. Now I know what to ask Santa for XMas.

I'm new to Hero 5th (I played Champions way way back in the day) and I was wondering do I need to by the Core rule book, or does Star Hero contain all the rules for play?

Re: How do your Star Heroes get around? I call it Quantum Drive. For my setting, ships create a pocket universe around the ship that is set up to be repulsed/pulled by large masses (i.e. stars), so travel happens only between masses and there's no changing course mid-trip. To be repulsed/pulled the pocket universe needs to be set up just outside the gravity well of the mass. To close and you’ll just be pulled into the mass you’re trying to repulse from. If the pocket universe collapses mid-trip, a ship could start it back up and limp to the nearest appropriate size mass at half max Q-Factor round down (it's only being pulled at that point). The size of my setting is a 75 light year sphere around Earth so Q-factors are set up as cubic functions of light speed s(Q) = Q3c. The speed of travel is set factors called Q-factors. You can go Q5 or Q6 but not Q5.5 Q1 = 1c Q2 = 8c Q3 = 27c Q4 = 64c Q5 = 125c Q6 = 216c Q7 = 343c Q8 = 512c Q9 = 729c This part is totally ripped off from old star trek, but hey if your going to steal, steal from one of the best. A ship's max Q-Factor is based on the mass of the ship. Small ships (think Millennium Falcon or Firefly) Q3. Medium size ships (think Defiant or Voyager) Q6. And Large ships (think Galactica or Enterprise) Q9.