Thorium Reactor as a purification plant

[Blue Ghost]

kilemall; that's interesting, because I never played T4. I just bought a few of the books from the old Imperiumgames website. I had no idea.

It adds flavor to the operations of a ship, but I wonder if gamers "got into it", so to speak.

 

[kilemall]

kilemall; that's interesting, because I never played T4. I just bought a few of the books from the old Imperiumgames website. I had no idea.

It adds flavor to the operations of a ship, but I wonder if gamers "got into it", so to speak.

My guys are quirky, sometimes they will, often they won't.

I look at a lot of this chrome as an aid to me to visualize and render snap decisions/descriptions when they come up.

Only the T4 stuff I labelled is T4 related, the rest is my exposition adding descriptive chrome to a simplified old school chassis.

Like many here I had 'grav tank trauma' designing vehicles from Striker back in the day, and went through a bit of it designing a survey robot a couple years ago.

I only have 'Brilliant Lances' as suggested by many here for state of the art Traveller ship combat, and the T4 Central Supply Catalog, the daddy version of the MgT editions. The CSC has charts for most every sensor and power plant.

So between those two I can infer that T4 is sort of Striker on steroids re: equipment/ship design.

The crunchy gearhead stuff is also useful in thinking through the setting and making informed logical changes to it.

For instance the Striker improvement per TL for jet engines is laughable, you put in the right numbers and there are going to be jet engines even slapped onto grav vehicles until upper TLs render greater grav power.

But then you put in atmosphere restraints, i.e. every jet engine has to be designed for a particular world's atmosphere number and gas mix, and the grav vehicles win out for expeditionary flexibility.

Those rules don't exist to my knowledge (they may be in design sequences I haven't seen), and I have them more as a fuzzy conceptual, but they make for setting flavor you won't get out of the box and a reason to have those COACC flyboys.

All these vehicles have antennae this and that, which has long seemed deeply silly to me as no fighting tank let alone a ship designer is going to let their multimillion credit creation be blinded with one hit to a fiddly bit on the hull, nor miss out on VLA effects, another nice change I make without using stuff straight out of the box.

So in summation I think it's worth working out a lot of this to the extent that your group needs it. Technology and equipment are after all critical extensions of characters and in the case of robots and ships often characters themselves.

But ref time should always be focused on the story and adventure with equipment being part NPCs, enabling quest items and/or McGuffins.

 

[Blue Ghost]

*gotta love waiting for paint to dry ... I should have finished this a long time ago, but...*

I've heard mixed things about T4 on this very board, mostly negative. I have to admit that I did try to read it several times, but some of the gear just seemed like it had been technologically "dumbed down" (not the rules mind you, just the actual technology it's supposedly based upon) or needlessly tweaked. The fact that I didn't have a gaming group at the time was par for the course, so I really didn't have anyone to game with even had I wanted to try the interesting T4 endeavor.

But, back on topic; it strikes me that when I played a great deal a lot of my fellow players were more Star Wars-ish "fire up the engines and let's go" types as opposed to gearheads who wanted to know what version of navigational software the ship was running, and so forth. One of my guys was a ... er, not a rules' lawyer, but a player who wanted to know the pertinent operational rules for whatever game it was. So, he didn't need to know if there was a thorium reactor or what OS was running the ship's computer, but he wanted to know what was needed rules-wise to get the ship going.

And that's something that I think a lot of scifi RPGs , Star Wars RPG included, tend to eschew. It's part of the reason I brought up the thorium reactor, because it seemed like a grey area that needed hammering out.

Interesting post.

 

[Carlobrand]

Regarding the "dark start" problem:

I am away from home and have no access to my supplements, but I recall the early game talked about the ships having batteries that were used to start the power plants, and those batteries could be used to power life support for short periods if the plant was taken out during combat. Over in MegaTrav land, the Starship Operator's Manual talked about a warship jumping (the jump drive utilizing its own plant) while the crew relied on batteries for minimal life support.

I use that as the basis for the "ship vaporized" result, though I am of course liberal in my interpretation of the word, "vaporized". I figure something capable of packing that much power in a small space might be volatile if subjected to a destructive force, blowing the way batteries blow on subs when things go really sour. Wouldn't actually vaporize the ship, but it would be pretty close.