Tag: Technology

Sensors, Planetary Power and Comments on Smuggling: A Psi-Wars Electronics Ammendum

While not strictly necessary for the running of a good Psi-Wars game, I personally enjoy thinking through the consequences of my choices, and I find that many of my readers enjoy that as well.  Of course, a good space opera game doesn’t really care much about the details, and cares more about the “Wow!” factor.  For example, a lot of Star Wars die-hards like to complain about a particular scene in the Last Jedi, while a lot of people counter “It’s just a movie, it’s cool, stop thinking about it so much,” and that’s fair!  If you stopped and overthought most of your space opera, you could probably poke a million holes in it, and the Rule of Cool matters more.  But that said, I find that having a bit of verisimilitude can help, especially if it doesn’t hurt.  I’ve tried to arrange Psi-Wars so that it makes sense where possible.  I don’t demand that you use it this way, but I try to bake it in without really getting in your way, so that if a weird question comes up, it can be easily and logically answered.

What follows here is my musings over the consequences of the scanner rules I have created, paired with some thoughts on hyperspace, war, smuggling and pirates and the roles fighters might play in such a situation.  It’s really not necessary to understand, but like my discussions on Patreon about imperial “tactics,” or my discussions on this blog about Insurgent Tactics, I find some people enjoy this sort of musing, so if you do, well, see you after the jump!

Sensors and Space War

Counter-intuitively, Psi-Wars doesn’t see much in the way of space combat, at least not in the sense of “deep space.” It, like Star Wars, focuses more on orbitalcombat. From the battle of Naboo to the battle of Coruscant, to the battle of Scarif to the battle of Yavin IV, to the battle of Hoth and to the Battle of Endor, allStar Wars battles take place in orbit around a planet, or near enough to a planet that this does not matter. This makes sense: Hyperspace jumps let you “skip” all the intervening space, and all the interesting stuff in Psi-Wars takes place on a planet. I expect Psi-Wars to be similar, and I have, thus, based on my sensory range numbers on orbital numbers.

Defensive Considerations

It should be noted, however, that Psi-Wars ships don’t actually orbittheir worlds. Contragravity and Hyperdynamic technologies allow the ships to float essentially “for free,” so they only need to get as high as they wish, presumably to get a better vantage without losing the ability to easily access the location they are guarding. Thus most ships will have a “parking orbit” above their chosen location despite behind much lower than a geocentric orbit: they’re not actually orbiting (that is, falling towards the planet sidewise so fast that they keep missing), they’re just “floating” very high up.

No orbit grants a ship a complete view of the entire planet or all ships that may want to land on a planet. If you are the Empire, or any authority, you’ll want to monitor the comings and goings of traders to prevent contraband (this is not necessarily sinister: you’d probably want to prevent slave trade, drug trade or lightning-quick pirate raids on any world you govern). Assuming your 10,000 mile radar, you can effectively set up a “cone” of observation over, at most, one half of the planet. You would need a minimum of 2 ships to watch the entire planet at the same time, and such ships would be unable to communicate with one another and there may be blind spots. 6 ships, forming a “cube” around the planet would likely prove more effective. If my math is correct, this would require them to be about 400 miles above the planet, and put them about 5500miles apart, if they wanted maintain “sight-lines” with one another.

If a ship wanted to sneak through their perimeter, it would want to do it at a “join” of the cones, equidistant from any two or three of the ships. This would be around 2500miles away from any specific ship (if we account for all three ships and do some clever trigonometry), which gives us the actual range we need for orbital detection ranges (3000 miles or so). By comparison, the distance from NYC to London is about 3500 miles.

If a corvette traveling at 600 miles per hour (about as fast as a freighter can possibly go), and assuming a detection range of 3000 miles, if your corvette was pointed at that ideal point between all ships, and it was detected 3000 miles away from any given ship (It canbe detected farther away, but at this range it becomes a near certainty), then it would be roughly 3300 miles from the surface, and would take ~5 hours to reach the planet. Assuming a dreadnought can travel at ~200 miles per hour, it would take it about 12 hours to reach that “center point,” which means it would almost certainly arrive too late to meaningfully interfere with the arrival of the corvette. It couldsignal the planet about its arrival, but that still gives the ship plenty of time to land, disembark some passengers (say, a raiding party, or some smugglers who vanish into the underbrush) and even take off and leave orbit and shunt to hyperspace before the dreadnought arrived.

The solution is to launch interceptors. Assuming that an interceptor can travel at 600 miles per hour, it will arrive at the location ~4 hours later, and could reasonably catch up to the freighter, certainly by the time the freighter wanted to launch, or to attack freighter as its landing. An interceptor that travels at 1000 miles per hour (slightly faster than most supersonic jet fighters), it would arrive in 2 and a half hours, or roughly at the middle point of the freighter’s landing arc. In fact, if all three dreadnoughts launched when they detected the freighter, it would receive three times as many fighters as is if it charged directly at a dreadnought.

This highlights a core mission of fighters: they represent rapid-response projections of power. In Star Wars, they typically fight near capital ships, but in Psi-Wars, they are more likely to attack enemies far away from the carrier, which is true of real-world fighters and carriers since the dawn of carriers: the reason the carrier eclipsed the battleship as the primary source of firepower was its ability to project firepower over the horizon, and while we don’t have “over the horizon” needs here, a shot fired 2500 miles away might be pushing things (though we should do some math on that!). Fighters will often be far awayfrom their carriers, which means they need fuel to match. Space fighter combat looksmore like Wing Commander than Star Wars (which makes sense, actually).

This likely says some things about the sorts of fighters we might expect to see. Some of my readers have commented on the role of an “interceptor,” a craft focused on speed and endurance, to act as a “first response” for a distant and/or fast-moving target. I had mentally dismissed the need for such a role (despite calling certain fighters “interceptors” we don’t really see fighters that support this in Star Wars), but upon looking at this, its clear that we may well see such vehicles. The classic star wars fighter is more of an “air superiority” fighter, something that clears local orbit of fighters, be it in the defense of its carrier, or in preparing a space for incoming bombers. Our “bombers” are likely not dropping “dumb” ordinance like WW2 bombers or the bombers of the Last Jedi, but instead, more like “strike craft” which carry missiles and torpedos and move quickly: the Y-Wing is a better example. For ground-attack, for the classic role of “utterly destroying ground targets,” the orbital bombardment of a capital ship is likely sufficient, but we may see close-air support (the equivalent of what a gunship offers) for precision attacks at the direction of local infantry.

Offensive Considerations

Those seeking to punch through the defenses of a planet, be it for attack, for a lightning raid, or for smuggling, will need their own sets of tactics. They must either defeat a dreadnought and then make their way through before it receives reinforcements, or they must bypass those defenses altogether, ideally before the defenders can react.

The best tool for this is, by far, hyperspace. If a supremely skilled smuggler could have superliminal reactions and shunt into real-space from hyperspace in atmosphere, then that would be the ideal tactic, but I think reasonablyone should expect to shunt out of hyperspace “thousands” of miles from surface of a planet, not a handful of miles. Thus, one will shunt outsideof the defensive perimeter, not inside of it (The exact distance is worth considering, as it impacts the above calculations! If it’s 1000 miles above the surface, then a fast-traveling freighter can be down in less time than the fighters can arrive!)

So, one must choose is point of entry. He might directly attack the dreadnought, which puts him about 5000 miles from every other dreadnought; at ~200 miles per hour, this gives them a day or so to respond, at which point the battle will be long over one way or the other; to send interceptors traveling at 1000 miles per hour would take them 5 hours to intercept; depending on how far away the ship entered real-space, that might be enough. If the ship entered into real-space 3000 miles above the surface, at 200 miles per hour it would take 13 hours to arrive, at which point all of the other fighters would certainly have arrived, and corvettes moving at 600 miles per hour would also arrive.

This does raise an interesting assault tactic, however: jump in a big, well-armored dreadnought and point it straight at a single defensive ship and bear relentlessly down for it. Allow the other dreadnoughts to respond, sending reinforcements and moving closer to the beleaguered defender. Then jump in the second, a larger half of the fleet at the vulnerable points opened up by the shifting defensive lines and make your rapid planetary assault; this tactic lends itself better to lightning raids than total planetary domination, and might be the sort of thing you see pirates do to crack open well-defended worlds.

The other point of entry is that “middle point” between the overlapping zones of the defenders. This would be a preferred tactic for smugglers or raiders who want to land, and then dart into some place where they can hide and lay low for awhile, and perhaps make the rest of their trip on foot, beyond the prying sky-eyes of the orbital defenders. You either need to hit that “join” at very high speeds, faster than they can scramble interceptors, which requires something like a plasma drive or a cranked-up ion drive at the very least. A well-armed craft might pull it off. Alternatively, they can count on stealth and jamming to delay the reactions of the defenders long enough that they can swiftly insert before the interceptors can respond to them.

Hyperspace Revisited

All of this requires some design decisions, which have forced me to think about Hyperspace. The questions are these:

  • How close can you emerge from hyperspace when you approach a planet
    • For that matter, how far from a planet do you have to be to get the “frame dragging” effect?
  • What sort of bonus do people get to detect someone emerging from hyperspace?
    • Can you tell where they came from, and or where they are going when they shunt?
    • If you can, is your course automatically “set” when you’re in hyperspace or can you maneuver to “throw them off your trail?”
  • Can you just drop out of hyperspace wherever you like?

For proximity, after much thought, I’ve settled on one planetary radius, which for most worlds will be 4000 miles. This allows us our conceit of gravity’s interference with Hyperspace travel. The same limit applies to frame dragging. You can drop out of hyperspace closer by accepting a penalty to your navigation roll: -1 for every 10% closer, to a maximum of -9 for 400 miles from the planet. On average, this gives a “slow” impulse drive ship (100 mph) a 40 hour journey to the planet (2 days), a fast impulse drive ship (300 miles per hour) a 12 hour trip, a fast grav-drive ship (600 miles per hour) a 6 hour trip, and a screaming interceptor (1000 miles per hour) a 4 hour trip to the planet.

Detecting someone emerging from hyperspace in your sensory range is at a bonus equal to the emerging ships’ SM+4. You get advance warning equal to 1 minute times your margin of success. You may do an analysis roll (also Electronics Operations (Sensors) roll) to get a sense of the rough direction they came from. If someone jumps in from beyond your sensor range, you may roll to detect with a bonus equal to half their SM (in addition to the standard penalties for detecting beyond your range). When a ship shunts into hyperspace, you can make an Electronics Operation (Sensors) roll with a bonus equal to their SM to get a rough idea of what direction they’re going in. In all cases, the ship leaving can accept a -1 to his Navigation roll (and add +5% to his travel time, if it matters) per -4 he wishes to apply to rolls trying to figure out where he’s going in hyperspace; this won’t prevent people from detecting his departure or arrival, but they will prevent people from figuring out where he’s going. This represents charting a more circuitous route through hyperspace. Once you know the direction someone came from, or where they’re going, you can roll Navigation (Hyperspace), Area Knowledge (Constellation) or Intelligence Analysis to use your knowledge of range, direction and likely systems to guess from/to which specific system the ship went/came.

Travel in hyperspace is analogous to physical travel. Ships coming from the same system and going to the same system will emerge from hyperspace in approximately the same area. For a flat -2 to your navigation roll, you can arrive in some unexpected area. You cannot, however, “pass through” the planet to arrive on the far side of it, but you may, for example, overshoot the planet on the far side to come at it from a reverse angle.

The Shape of Power in Space.

For the most part, I don’t think the average player will care about any of this. Star Wars certainly doesn’t. In Star Wars, you “jump in” and the enemy fleet is already there. There’s never a case where you have to jump in and then maneuver around for awhile (except for the Empire Strikes Back, the script of which implies some maneuvering, and the unusual space-chase of the Last Jedi). But this sort of information can inform some of our abstracted choices and tell us something about how planets tend to array themselves when it comes to dealing with space traffic.

Most worlds will have a “high” and “low” orbit, though it should be noted that “orbit” is a misnomer here, as most ships will float, rather than orbit. High orbit is at the hyperspatial terminus, one planetary radius from the planet. At the point of greatest traffic, where most ships will arrive, the planet will have a nearby space dock for things like freighters to come by and drop off their goods and pick up new goods, and they can rely on swifter, grav-drive shuttles to take them down to the planet in hours rather than days.

“Low Orbit” is about 100-500 miles up, and it’s the point where defenders and patrol vessels will monitor traffic. Most defenders will space themselves apart to 4-6 points. If they can afford six points, they will achieve total planetary coverage, but if they can only afford 4 points, then they’ll skip the polar regions, as little tends to happen there; this means that most smuggler dens will be in polar areas.

Most worlds will concern themselves with a relatively small area of real-estate, about the size of a modern nation-state. This allows them to patrol a limited area for potential smugglers and to condense their defenses. This leaves wide, open areas of relatively “wild” landscape, where most of your mining occurs, and a fair amount of lawlessness, perhaps with a few spare settlers.

Psi-Wars Electronics I — Comms

I’ve been working on Electronics in general when my post spiraled out of control.  Originally, this was meant to cover sensors and sensor jamming when I noticed I hadn’t touched on Comms and Comm-Jamming.  I, at least, see the fight between ECM and ECCM as a fight between sensor systems and counter-sensor systems, but in fact, it began as comm systems and counter-comm systems. Furthermore, this makes sense: once you’ve begun an ambush (whether pirates attacking a shipping freighter or a fighter wing attacking a patrol), not only do you want to prevent yourself from being detected, but you want to prevent the target from calling for assistance, or communicating any intelligence back to an authority figure.  So this is where I want to start.

Normally I peel out the GURPS Vehicles stuff for my Patreons, but it’s too small to really make into its own document, and perhaps you’ll find it interesting, and they have the whole document, which will be updated to include this information, so see it as a preview.  I also talk about “Low, Patrolling and High Orbit,” in the document; this arises from the sensors discussion and a post that will drop later this week.  If I may briefly summarize them: low orbit is 100 miles from the surface, safely above the atmosphere but still close to the action.  Patrolling Orbit is about 500 miles up, as close to the surface as one can get while still maintaining “sight-lines” with other ships that might be guarding the planet at equidistant locations in a band around the planet, and high orbit is 4000 miles, one planetary radius away, which has to do with hyperspatial dynamics.

Comm Systems

The standard Comm Systems of Psi-Wars have been determined since Iteration 3, but given some ranges I’ve determined based on sensors, planet sizes and orbits, I’m going to make a modest change. See, Psi-Wars has been using “Radio” the whole time, as “Radio” is pretty intuitive. You know things like electrical storms or being deep in a tunnel or underground can disrupt the communication system, and this is important, because GMs will often want to isolate the PCs, and radio offers an intuitive, commonly accepted way to do that. But I thought I needed more range, but now I’m not so sure.
The primary ranges worth worrying about are 100 miles, 500 miles, and 4000 miles. 100 miles is “low orbit,” 500 miles is a “patrolling” orbit, where a belt of ships might position themselves to maintain sight-lines on one another, and maximize response time, and 4000 miles (one planetary radius) is where most ships will enter or exit hyperspace. It’s also about the distance between ships in a patrol orbit. I would imagine that characters can communicate with their ship with a wrist-mounted device (thus, tiny), that you might need a palm-sized device to talk to a ship in patrol orbit, and that ships would mount large communication systems that would communicate up to 4000 miles.
If we look at gravity-ripple, we find these values are over-kill: a tiny GR-comm will communicate to low orbit, a small GR-Comm will communicate to patrol orbit, and a Medium GR-comm will communicate to “far” orbit, or the hyperspatial terminus. However, if we look at “Communicators with Different Ranges” we see that the larger comms of spaceships and docking stations will more than make up for the small size. For example, a micro GR-comm can talk to a ship in orbit, if that ship has at least a small comm on it, and to patrol orbit if the ship has a large comm, and a small can communicate to far orbit if the station has a large comm. This is probably “too small” for what we’re going for.
If we return to standard radio, which is more intuitive, then we find that:

  • Tiny (Wrist-Comm): TL 11 can communicate up to 5 miles, to low orbit if the ship has a Large comm system, and patrolling orbit if the ship has a Very Large comm system. TL 12 can communicate to low orbit if the ship has a Medium comm, to patrolling orbit if the ship has a Large comm.
  • Small (Handheld Holo-comm): TL 11 can communicate up to 50 miles, to low orbit if the ship has a Medium comm system, and patrolling orbit if the ship has a Very Large comm system. TL 12 can communicate up to 100 miles, thus to low orbit on its own, to patrolling orbit if the target has a large comm system, and to high orbit if the station has a very large comm.
  • Large (Vehicular comm): TL 11 can communicate directly to high orbit, and can communicate between ships in patrolling orbit. It will pick up TL 11 tiny comms if in low orbit and TL 12 tiny comms if in patrolling orbit.

It seems, thus, that the simplest solution is to use Radio with TL 12 ranges, which is a step down from GR-comm, but still offers the sort of convenience that we might expect. The only remaining problem is that radio offers far lower bandwidth at 0.1 GB per second, but after some research, I found that 1080p real-time only consumes about 14 MB per minute, so radio is probably plenty for low resolution holographic communication. This might actually explain why holo images are small, full of static and have a relatively low resolution. The other problem is that the range is also lower (by 10 times) for holographic communication, but that just requires a +1 jump in size. Thus, a small hand-held need about a Very Large comm system to do a holographic conversation with someone in patrolling orbit (at TL 12), and two ships in Patrol Orbit would need Very large comm systems to have real time holographic communication with one another.

For building an arbitrary comm system, the stats are:
weight = R * 0.004
Where R = Range.
Cost is trickier to work out, as we generally work out cost by weight, and barring that, some other measure, but in or case, weight, range and power all follow the same multiplier of ten, only cost doesn’t. At its smallest, the cost per lb is $2500, and at its largest, $50 per lb. Frankly, I’d just keep the radio values as they are, since working out cost is far more hassle than its worth (you probably don’t need a 65.25 mile radio tower, and even if you did, the rules we’d create would be “stepped” so it would be cheaper pound for pound to just get a 100 mile radio, etc). Power-requirements can be determined, and are vanishingly small (it works out to 1 kilowatt for the largest radio), but I’ll simplify it and give it a small bump of 0.0001 kw per mile of range. This increases it to 10 kw for the largest radio.

FTL Comms

FTL communications needs to handle the extreme distances of Psi-Wars, but otherwise the FTL values on p 46 of Ultra-Tech are fine, just multiply the (TL 12) distances by 30 parsecs and not that nothing smaller than a Medium communicator is considered practical. 3 parsecs will talk to very nearby systems, and is close enough to hit a relay if its in or near system, a Large will communicate from one typical “Jump” to another, and a Very Large is able to transmit over multiple jumps, and is typical of relays, allowing FTL comm from rim to galactic center, assuming unbroken relay chain, instantly. The model weight is range in parsecs * 1.3333, cost is 20 times the cost of a radio comm, and power is range 33.33kw * range in parsecs (I’m treating it as a cosmic technology; even so, the power requirements are fairly slim compared to more serious hardware).

Comm Jamming and the Distortion Scrambler

What surprised me is that while Ultra-Tech has plenty of comm systems, it has no comm jammers other thanexpendable jammers! I’m not sure why this oversight exists. I don’t think the distortion jammer is meant to prevent communication. We have a “bug stomper” on page 107, but that’s clearly meant to stop audio surveillance, acting as a sort of portable privacy field. It doesn’t prevent communication systems. This surprises me, as it seems an extremely useful thing to have: it’ll stop bugs from transmitting back to their source, it’ll prevent patrols from communicating to base, etc. To find one, I went hunting through GURPS Action and there it was. A deeper investigation proved that it was found in GURPS High Tech, making it an odd omission.

Thus, we’ll have to create our own, using the High-Tech values as a base. It’s not really clear to me exactly how they’re calculated, but Vehicles divides their range by 100 and high-tech seems to more-or-less follow the same path, so the simplest approach is to simply treat a jammer as a comm system with 1% of the range. I think I would argue that it also consumes far more power. This is confirmed by the fact that a 35 lb TL 7 radio uses batteries, but a 25 lb TL 8 area jammer uses external power. So, I propose 10x power. Cost will be $100 per lb.
When I initially looked at the rules, I was skeptical, namely in that you could equip a fighter with a jammer and run it up to a capital ship and jam all of its communication. Was that feasible or even realistic? This is different from radar jamming, which only affects distorting the return signals that strike you, this is about cutting off all communications reaching or leaving a specific target. But it turns out that it is reasonable.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, comm jamming does the radio equivalent of overloading the source, or cutting up a signal. Sound-equivalents are people screaming over a conversation (very obvious), introducing white noise to slice up the sounds of your conversation (slightly less obvious), or perfectly introducing counter-waves to cancel out your waves (comes across as just silencing the target, and is not obvious at all, but also very difficult to do). While communication is generally targeted, time-boxed and can afford to be relatively low-energy (it doesn’t cost much to talk to someone), it’s more exhausting to use any of the above solutions (it costs you more energy to constantly scream than to just whisper a quick message and stop.
My concern was that a sufficiently loud broadcast should be able to overwhelm a jammer, sort of like shouting over the screamer, but my research suggests that, at least, this sort of thing isn’t common, that with sufficient power, one could jam almost any communication so, yes, a fighter could jam a dreadnought if it was close enough. I suspect there really are nuances, but not nuances I really want to get into, otherwise, we’d need to compare power-levels, and I’d need to find said power levels, and that’s both more work than I’m willing to do, and more work than you should do for a game like this.
So, the version of a jammer I have is cinematic. It jams all communications, much in the same way a distortion jammer jams all sensors. This works well for a simplistic sci-fi setting where you flip a switch and it does its thing. We’ll follow the same rules: this requires an Electronics Operation (Comms) rolls vs your opponent’s Electronics Operations (EW) roll; up to 10x the listed distance, it requires an unresisted Electronics Operations (Comms) roll. It will be called a “Distortion Scrambler”
An example Distortion Scrambler:

Distortion Scrambler: This device scrambles all forms of electronic communication within a one mile radius. Anyone attempting to receive or send a signal within one mile of the scrambler must roll a quick contest of Electronics Operation (Comms) vs the user’s Electronics Operation (EW). Those within 10 miles must roll an unopposed Electrionics Operations (Comms). $400, 0.5 lbs, 2B/1 hour; LC 2.

Psi-Wars Weaponry Revisited

Thus far in Psi-Wars, I’ve used the Ultra-Tech weapons more or less unchanged, though by Iteration 6, it was clear that we needed some changes.  The following details all weapons available in the setting and their general rules, and some additional changes and thoughts on the scale of weaponry that we might employ, especially on large scales.

Melee Weapons

The Vibro Blade

Popular among primitives, and common among assassins who want to keep their attacks unnoticed. They tend to be inferior to other weapons, given that they can be destroyed by force weapons

Neurolash Weapons

A favorite choice for stunning targets, and a poor-man’s defense against a force sword. The rules about Neurolash field push and parry remain in place, but we have additional new rules.

I keep tinkering with Neurolashes because they’re not quite right. In genre, a single hit from a stun baton isn’t enough to take them out, and we see characters like Ahsoka and Anakin enduring a pain lash around their neck for multiple seconds while still fighting, but at the same time, it wears on them. We can simulate this with our side-effect rules, and replace damage with fatigue damage. This also gives us the possibility of killing someone with pain/stun (“Stop it, you’re killing him!”) if you drive them past the point of unconsciousness and continue to afflict them.

So I propose replacing all neurolash affliction rules with a variation of side-effect: a standard neurolash weapon deals 1d6 (5) fatigue damage, and if any damage penetrates DR, the target must make an HT roll at a penalty equal to each point of fatigue lost. The target suffers -5 to their HT roll for attacks to the face or to the vitals (which represent nerve clusters). If the target fails, he suffers a minor condition (based on the type) for seconds equal to the margin of failure, and then may make HT rolls to recover. If they fail by 5 or more, they suffer an incapacitating condition for (20-HT minutes).

Stun: minor condition is stunning; major condition is Unconciousness

Pain: minor condition is Terrible Pain (-6); major condition is Agony.

Force Weapons and Psi-Blades

Force Blades are a weaponized version of a force ward, these are the more powerful of melee weapons. As an optional rule, consider changing their damage from burning to 6d (10) cutting of 4d (10) impaling. Force swords may come in a variety of sizes and quality; fine force swords deal +1 damage per 2 dice, and Very Fine Force Swords deal +1 damage per die. Cheap Force Swords deal -1 damage per die.

Psi-Swords appear in Pyramid #3-51 “Odds and Ends: Psi-Swords,” which is a masterful article. This sort of weapon makes a great deal of sense, especially for ancient civilizations of psionic masters. However, most Space Knights have between 15 and 50 points of psionics, which means they’d deal 1d(2) to 2d+5(2) on average, which is… alright, especially in a modern setting, but psi-wars isn’t modern. Anything less than 2 dice is pathetic. However, if we upgrade a psi-sword with “cool ultra-tech,” we can justify changing damage to 1 die for every 10 points worth of psionic abilities (Any psionic abilities!). Psi-Swords are built with eloi fragments, and these are attuned to a single power-type. The wielder gains a damage bonus equal to his talent with that power and gains the effects noted, except that all armor divisors rise to at least 5. These weapons cost the same as a force sword ($10,000) and draw their power from the psion themselves (assess +1 fatigue after any battle using one). Fine or Very Fine Psi-Swords also add +1 or +2 (respectively) to one specific psionic skill associated with their ability (“Terror” or “Combat Sense”); This skill is chosen when the blade is created, and cannot be changed.

Actual force swords may integrate eloi fragments in their design; such a weapon is called a resonance sword. Treat a Resonance Sword as a Force Sword with half their normal damage, plus one die per 10 points of psionics abilities from the best single power the character has. The character may add his Talent for that power to damage, and may apply the special effect appropriate for the power currently energizing the blade from page 39 of Pyramid #3/51. A Resonance Sword has an armor divisor of 5 or the armor divisor listed in his special effect whichever is better.

A Resonance Sword must be constructed with an Eloi Fragment or a Psuedo Fragment. A Resonance Sword is double the cost of a Force Sword (that is, CF +1). Fine or Very Fine Resonance Blades do not improve damage, but instead improve the character’s Talent for the power currently empowering the blade (which also effectively increases the damage of the blade); +1 for Fine Resonance Blades, +2 for Very Fine Resonance Blades.

Using any psi-sword requires attuning to it. This requires a talent of at least +1 with the psionic power associated with the weapon, an hour and a successful Meditation roll. Only one person can be attuned at a time, and if someone else is currently attuned to the weapon, he may resist this roll with his Will+4. Any attuned character can automatically sense the presence of his weapon, whether someone is touching it or trying to steal it, or where it’s currently located (as with Seekersense) with a basic Perception roll, with a bonus equal to his associated talent.

Beam Weapons

Blasters

Blasters are a mainstay of the psi-wars arsenal, though I think I’m going to move away from the “blaster shotgun” and back towards plasma as “shotgun/grenade launcher.” Blasters do not inflict “surge,” only burn, and have a recoil of 2.

A stunner is related to a blaster, and works as described in GURPS Ultra-Tech. A blaster may be given a stunner setting for +100% cost, or a weapon may be a stunner alone, for the same base cost as a blaster.

EM Disruptors

EM Disrupters send out focused, visible “pulses” of ionizing radiation that acts like a localized EM pulse, temporarily disrupting electronics and thus disabling ships or robots.

We can treat EM Disruptors as identical to blasters except that they inflict their damage normally to force screens for the purposes of eliminating points of DR; for anything electrical, every 2 points of what would be damage is instead converted to a -1 the HT check to resist being stunned; if the target fails by 5 or more, they are incapacitated (unconscious). For targets with lots of HP, use the standard rules for reducing the penalty based on HP (a 20 HP robot is at -1 for every 4 “damage,” while an HP 100 ship is at -1 for ever -18 damage, and so on). They inflict no damage on non-electrical targets.

Plasma Weapons

More destructive but less accurate or controlled than a blaster, Plasma Weapons have slightly lower accuracy (+2/+4/+6) and deal explosive burning damage. They tend to take a similar niche as shotguns and grenade launchers in the setting.

Pulsars

Pulsars tend to be limited to large cannons or to TL 12 gadgets (such as the Eldothic Pulsar Lance). They have the same accuracy as blasters and a recoil of 2.

Missiles, Explosives and Slug-Throwers

Psi-Wars uses more than just beam weapons for ranged attacks. It also makes use of projectiles, including missiles, torpedoes, gauss and chemical slugthrowers

Chemical Slugthrowers and advanced bows and arrows are limited to primitives and aliens. Chemical slugthrowers are limited to the caseless weaponry from GURPS Ultra-Tech; neither ETC nor liquid propellant are available.

Gauss mightbe used by aliens as a primary slugthrower, but throughout the Psi-Wars setting, these are primarily limited to grenade launchers and artillery shells, both of which generally fire warheads of one fo the types listed below.

Most Psi-Wars warheadsare either plasma explosives, plasma lance warheads (see UT Designer Notes) or, more rarely, Super Isomeric nuclear warheads, generally called isomeric warheads or nuclear warheads. More specialized warheads include EMP warheads (for disrupting ships or robots), expendable jammers (to disrupt communication) and decoy warheads (which transmit false distortion jammer signals to fool or distract simple ultrascanner systems, typically those found on missiles).

Grenades tend to be the only unguided explosive, but bomblets from scattershot “flak” cannons, or artillery rounds might also see use. These all use plasma explosives or, more rarely EMP rounds. Grenades are always smart grenades. Isomeric warheads are too unstable and destructive for use with grenades, but might see use in weapons like orbital cannons.

Missilescan accelerate at high speeds using a variation of plasma thrusters, allowing them to exceed the speeds of even starfighters. These tend to be tipped either with plasma warheads (for anti-personnel or anti-starfighter attacks) or plasma-lance (for anti-vehicular or anti-corvette attacks). Isomeric warheads require very careful handling to retain its metastable state: too much disruption will cause it to return to an inert state or, worse, prematurely explode. Thus, they are mounted on torpedoes, which use ion thrusters to move at relatively slow speeds (typically 600 miles per hour), which allows it to bypass force screens and carry the round to the target, but leaves the weapon vulnerable to point defense. The exception to this is a rare material called Metacoltan, found exclusively on Caliban and one of the secret weapons of House Kain; however, the extreme price of metacoltan means they rarely use it on missiles.

The most common missile sizes are 400mm for “cruise missiles” or “torpedos;” these travel at 300 yards per second (or 600 miles per hour). Fighters and corvettes use 160mm missiles for anti-ship combat. Anti-vehicular missiles tend to be 64mm or 100mm.

Exotic missiles include “micro-missiles”, 18.5mm warheads with a base damage of 10d, accuracy 3, speed 1500, max range 3000, weight per shot of 0.5 and cost per shot of $25.

Warhead
Plasma
Plasma Lance
Isomeric
18.5mm
4d burn ex
6dx3(10) burn ex
6dx5 cr ex
25mm
6d burn ex
6×5(10) burn ex +
3d burn ex
6dx8 cr ex
40mm
6dx2 burn ex
6×8(10) burn ex +
6d burn ex
6dx15 cr ex
64mm
6dx4 burn ex
6dx12(10) burn ex+
6dx2 burn ex
6dx30 cr ex
100mm
6dx10 burn ex
6dx20(10) burn ex +
6dx5 burn ex
6dx60 cr ex
160mm
6dx16 burn ex
6dx30(10) burn ex +
6dx8 burn ex
6dx120 cr ex
400mm
6dx80 burn ex
6dx80(10) burn ex +
6dx40 burn ex
6dx500 cr ex

General Comments and Changes on Weapons

Non-Lethal Weapons

Surge, Stunners and Side-Effect

I had originally dismissed the idea of using stunners in Psi-Wars, as they came up only once in all of Star Wars, but if you look at the cartoons and even other series inspired by Star Wars or generic Space Opera, then stunners come up a lot, as they’re deeply useful, so I suppose we’ll need to keep stunners as a concept.

However, while looking at Stunners, I noticed some trends and themes that I thought were interesting, mainly in how to handle things like EM Disruptors and force screens. See, Stunners inflict -1 to HT per die, but if I want a weapon like an EM Disruptor to use a similar mechanic but also to punch through force screens very effectively, then I need to know how much damage they actually do. We can work that out to about -1 for every 3-4 points of damage, or every 1/3rd of the target’s HP, which sounds a lotlike Surge.

I’ve had some complaints that Surge just isn’t that good, especially when used as a psychic power: you have a chance of maybe stunning a target if you deal “enough” damage, andyour target fails its HT roll. It seems, to said critics, to be overpriced, especially when you compare it to effects like EM Disruptors, so what can we do? Well, it reminded me of Side-Effect, so I double checked those rules, and I was shocked by what I found.

Side-Effect is a +50% enhancement that, if any damage at allpenetrates the target’s DR, then they must make an HT roll at -1 for every 2 points of damage inflicted or be stunned. If we limited that enhancement to only affect Electrical targets (say, a 80% limitation), then we’re looking at a +10% enhancement total. Even if we reduced that limitation to -50% and get a +25% enhancement, it’s close to the price of Surge, and surge only applies a single HT roll if the target loses 1/3 of their HP. Surge is definitelyover-priced. So I propose we change Surge to behave like Side-Effect, but that it only applies to Electrical beings. Problem solved.

Problem: How much Damage is Enough?

One problem I face, and often hear about, is deciding how much damage “is enough.” How big do spaceships need to be? Is 1000 damage enough for a blaster turret? 10,000? A million? This matters, because it determines how big ships shouldbe, or how big we’ll see planetary defenses. We need to understand our baseline, and it can arbitrarily be anything we want, but we need to decide what we want.

The Personal Scale

On a personal scale, this is simple enough. GURPS uses as standard 3d for pistols and 6d for rifles. This balances against the 10 HP of the human-scale standard: 3d lets you incapacitate a target, and 6d is potentially lethal in a single shot.

The high end of the “personalscale” or what you can expect humans to fight on the ground, are tanks. If we want our tanks to looklike real-world tanks, then our job becomes a little easier, because we can use real-world tank numbers. A tank cannon is about 2 tons (see the 125 mm D-81TM, HT page 140). A 2-ton blaster cannon deals about 350 damage with a shot and punches through up to 1750 DR. We expect infantry to carry a “bazooka,” which in our case is probably an IML with a 64mm Plasma Lance missile which deals about 250 damage with an armor divisor of 10. If our tank has laminate and EMA, then such a missile can only punch through about 750 DR, which means our 1750 DR is plenty. In fact, such armor would even stop a 100mm plasma lance warhead, and will seriously slow down a 160mm plasma lance warhead (they deal an average of 600 damage, and such frontal armor would soak up 525 of the 600 damage. That makes it a believable cap for most military ground vehicles outsides of “super-tanks.”

Space-Combat Scale

The most powerful weapons we expect to see will be in space, in the hands of dreadnoughts, but we should get a sense of the scale of weaponry, from fighter up to dreadnought.

A star fighter, if GURPS SS is to be believed, a fighter is between 10 and 30 tons, which actually tracks well with the real-world fighters found in Pyramid #3/53. Such fighters have between 110-160 HP. Assuming no armor, an instantly lethal shot would need to deal between 6dx12 and 6dx16 damage in a single shot, which requires something in the range of a tank cannon. If we look at real-world fighters, they deal about 60 damage per shot, which can be done with a 100 lb blaster, and is about the same mass as a real-world autocannon though, it should be noted, that those weapons have very high rates of fire. A modern fighter has roughly a ton of ordinance and firepower; if we put all of that into two single-shot blasters, we get roughly the stats of the Typhoon’s weapons, which deal 150 damage a shot, which is enough to obliterate a fighter in a single shot (which closely matches what we see on the Star Wars screen). I suspect 50-100 damage is closer to the mark, especially since they will almost certainly have more rapid fire than just 1 shot per second. Our missile of choice would be the plasma explosive, as it can “airburst” and hit the target with greater ease, and we don’t expect our fighter to have much in the way of armor. A 100mm plasma missile will deal ~150 damage, which is already enough to kill most fighters, and the 160mm plasma missile deals about 350, which will certainly destroy the target, and will seriously damage it if it misses by 1. These values seem practical at our scale.

Dreadnoughts are our “high end,” and for them, we need torpedoes. Fighter-carried torpedos would carry 160mm super isomeric warheads, which would deal 2500 damage, while a fighter-carried plasma lance warhead would deal 640 with an armor divisor of 10. Around 2000 laminated EMA DR would defeat both, though the torpedo could afford to “airburst” This means that ~2500 DR is sufficient to defeat most fighter-scale threats, and that means that most “capital-class” weapons would need to deal at least an average of 500 damage (With an armor divisor of 5) if it wanted to compete with that level of armor. Such a weapon is about 50 tons, and is about the right size to fit on an SM +7 or SM +8 ship, meaning that a capital ship at SM +9 could mount several. The main cannons of an Iowa-Class battleship clock in at around 130 tons, which is definitely heavier than our cannons here, but this is roughly our order of magnitude for frigates and smaller capital ships (corvettes might be thought of as “tanks in space.”)

The mostdamage I would expect would be from a 400mm “cruise missile” with a super isomeric warhead. Such a weapon would deal, roughly, 10,000 damage, and require about 10,000 DR to brush off. I don’t actually expect ships to “brush off” 10,000 damage, so it represents the upper-end we might expect to see ships take or dish out. A blaster that can punch through 10,000 DR needs to deal at least 2,000 damage on average; such a cannon is about 3,500 tons, and would fit on an SM +11 ship. If we wanted to actually deal10,000 damage with a shot, our best chance is a pulsar, and it would weigh roughly 60,000 tons. Such a weapon would be a spinal mount on an SM +14 ship, and begins to look like a Death-star-like “I erase one ship per turn” sort of weapon.

Some observations:

If you are a fighter then it doesn’t really matter what your DR is. You probably want at least enough force screen to fend off blaster shots, though the exact amount depends on how I handle force screens, but we’re probably looking at 50-100 here.

If you are a corvette then it wouldn’t do for you to be too vulnerable to basic fighter firepower, which means you need a minimum DR of about 300. That will also let you essentially ignore plasma missiles. Anything less than that is vulnerable to being shot to hell by basic fighters. Plasma Lance missiles become the primary danger here, so it might be worth investing in serious force screens (around 700 worth) or some high-scale armor. Obviously, you cannot tank a torpedo. Corvettes will probably look like tanks in space, especially on the heavier end.

If you are a capital ship then you need to be able to brush off all fighter fire and at least survive a 160mm torpedo. An SM +12 ship has aboutenough HP to endure a hit from such a torpedo, but only one. A DR of 800 is enough to brush off tank-scale pulsar blasts, and a DR of 2000 is enough to brush off tank-scale blasters and reduce a 160mm torpedo to “real harm” but not a lethal hit.

If you are a Dreadnought then you might want to be able to survive a hit from a cap-scale torpedo. An SM +16 ship can take 10,000 damage in a single shot, and can dish them out pretty regularly. A mile-long dreadnought could pack on beam weapons capable of inflicting super-isomeric scale as secondary batteries and brush off pretty much any attack not on its own scale, not to mention the number of fighters such a vessel could carry.

Problem: They’re too Accurate

GURPS Ultra-Tech offers absurd accuracy bonuses for their weapons. This may or may not be realistic, but it does reflect how the future would have distinctly different tactical paradigms thanks to increasingly precise weapons. What’s also definitely true is that Star Wars Stormtroopers aren’t nearly so precise, whatever Obi-Wan might have to say about them. The beam weapons in Star Wars tend to behave more like glowing bullets than like real beam weapons might, and this makes sense: Space opera “reskins” familiar content with space-like tropes. The glowing energy bolt tells you that this is “sci-fi.” Contrast this with works like the Expanse or Altered Carbon (or even Star Trek, to some extent) where they need to explain how the weapons work, in space opera, you know how they work: like real world weapons but better, “because science.”

Given this, we might expect our beam weapons to have more familiar levels of accuracy. Part of what raises this topic is my experience watching gunslingers, in particular that they tend to be fairly static. In a typical TL 8 action scenario, a gunslinger standing still gains maybe a +1 or +2 to hit, while moving, he removes a -3 penalty, which is a better deal. In TL 11^ space opera, your laster pistols are +6 if you stand still, or you remove a -2 if you move, and that really changes the math to create more static fights. On the other hand, as one gunslinger put it “I’ve never felt as epic as I did here,” so we need to make sure that we’re not nerfinggunslingers unduly. It needs to balance well, and needs to not become “worse than TL 8 weapons,” as some people point out sometimes happens (later Star Trek series have this problem, where a phaser is an ROF weapon that often seems to miss at even close ranges, and might barely wound someone).

So, if we reduce our range, what should we reduce it to? Well, it turns out there’s some method to this madness: rifles have twice the range of their pistol counterpart, and most cannons have thrice the range of their counterpart. The High-Tech examples are a little around the map, but you can see a pattern if you squint, and it looks like this:

Tier I
Tier II
Tier III
Tier IV
Tier V
Tier VI
+1/+2/+3
+2/+4/+6
+3/+6/+9
+4/+8/+12
+5/+10/+15
+6/+12/+18
TL 5 Muskets
TL 7-9 Rifles
Gauss
Plasma
Blasters
Lasers

The Gentleman who writes the esteemed GURB recommends treating Blasters as plasma weapons, and if you look at this chart, that makes sense! My initial impulse was to say: treat blasters as like guns, but give them a +2, and give plasma a +1. The result would be that Plasma would be Tier III and Blasters would be Tier IV, which is just what he recommends. But I think I’m going to need to reduce it another step: Tier III for blasters. That makes them more accurate than guns, and it means a gunslinger is as well off standing still as he is running about in most cases.

Problem: They’re too expensive

One of my readers regularly complains that Ultra-Tech overprices its beam weapons and while I initially dismissed the criticism, it turns out, shockingly, to be correct! At least, GURPS Spaceships reduces the prices of beam weapons to 10% of the costs you would get from Ultra-Tech or from the beam-weapon design system. So, why are they so expensive? I don’t know. It’s ultimately arbitrary and blasters, in particular, are very expensive, perhaps to better balance them with slugthrowers (because we wouldn’t want slugthrower to be useless at TL 11, would we?).

The easiest solution is to just slash the prices of beam weapons down to 10% of their current price, but this puts a 3 lb pistol at around $600 rather than $6000, but mind you, a slug thrower pistol of the same mass is around $800. Projectile weapons concern me because they may well come up, and I’d like to use them for more primitive groups (similar to how Tusken Raiders use projectile weapons), and I don’t want blasters to be cheaper than projectile weapons, just better. If we want it to “feel” like TL 8, can we compare TL 8 pistols to TL 11 blasters? Sure! A typical TL 8 pistol runs about $600, and given that you have a $20k budget, we find that a pistol runs about 3% of your budget. 3% of a TL 11 budget of $75,000 (I know the Psi-Wars budget is $50,000; that’s intentionally low to represent inferior economics), we come to 2,250 for a pistol, which is much less than the $6000 (so the commentator above is not wrong about it feeling expensive; it IS!), but 10% of the price is definitely too low.

Let’s make a deeper comparison. If we pull out your most common pistols, rifles and cannons from GURPS Ultra-Tech and do a price-to-mass comparison, we find that they hover between 200 and and 300. If we compare the empty, unloaded mass to the price of the weapon, we find that it’s exactly $300 per lb for many, but not all weapons. Thisi s true of the Heavy Pistol, the Holdout Pistol, the Medium Pistol, the Urban Assault Weapon, the Gatling Carbine, the Storm Carbine, and the Light Support Weapon. Those that deviate a bit high are: the Machine Pistol, and the Storm Rifle. Those that deviate a bit low are the Personal Defense Weapon, the Anti-Materiel Rifle and the Payload Rifle. There are a few so out of whack that they totally break this notion of $300 per lb, and that includes the Hunting Riffle ($120 per lb), the Magnum Pistol ($435 per lb), the Tank Cannon ($40 per lb), and the Storm Chaingun, Assault Cannon, Heavy Chaingun and Minigun (between $500 and $800 per lb). Gauss weapons follow a similar cycle, except they hit $1000 per lb very consistently, with a few odd exceptions like the Gauss Needle Rifle and the inexplicably expensive Gauss Needler. The Gauss Railgun is extremely cheap for its size (~$160 per lb, or ~4x as expensive as a normal gun), and the Gauss Mini-Needler is absurdly expensive, of course.

The prices are so precise that it suggests some sort of system like thisunder the hood. It seems to sort of follow what we know about beam weapons: $X per lb, $2*X per lb for some sort of quality bonus of some kind, and a discountfor heavy cannons! This follows closely enoughto beam weapons, which is $X per lb, $2*X per lb for high ROF, and cheaper vehicular beam weapons (or, at least, what should be cheaper vehicular weapons). I checked to see if the “Expensive/Cheap” options were being used on the weapons, and that seems not to be the case: only the Minineedler seems to come “into line” with that option and even then is about 2x as expensive as it “should be” givent he pattern. The Hunting Rifle is also closeto being in line if you remove a “cheap” option, so maybeit applies, but evidently only in extreme cases. Barring some revelation behind the scenes (ROF doesn’t seem to make a difference and Acc is the same across the board), I would guess that these variations are largely arbitrary.

So it looks like the prices are more-or-less in line with the rest of the items in Ultra-Tech:

  • TL 9 Slugthrowers = $300 per lb
  • TL 9-10 Lasers = $500 per lb
  • TL 10 Gauss Weapons = $1000 per lb
  • TL 11 X-Ray Laser = $1000 per lb
  • TL 11 Blaster = $2000 per lb
  • TL 11 Plasma = $2000 per lb
  • TL 12 Graser = $1500 per lb
  • TL 12 Pulsar = $3000 per lb

Only blasters and pulsars seem out of whack. I think we can afford to drop Blasters and Plasma to $1000 per lb and Pulsars to $1500 per lb. We definitely need to reduce the cost of larger beam weapons, but we don’t want a huge drop off. I propose at between 150 and 500 lbs, we halve the price ($500 per lb for blasters), and at larger than 300 lbs, we divide the price by 5 ($200 per lb). This means a 70 lb weapon costs $70,000, a 200 lb weapon costs $10,000 and a 1000 lb weapon costs $200,000, which doesn’t feel crazy.

Incidentally, if you look at the values for heavier beam weapon cannons, they have 1/5 the price, suggesting that the beam-weapon design article is just wrong.

Patreon Post: Let's Build a Vehicle (Starfighter Edition)

I continue my examination of my vehicles conversion by diving into starfighters.  Previously I looked at mostly civilian ground vehicles, but this time it’s exclusively militaristic aerospatial vehicles using plasma thrusters.  As a result, I learned a lot about how Vehicles handles aerodynamics, and I got a thorough working of my engines, power-plants and took a new look at weaponry.  This is an ongoing process, and each step of the way teaches me a little more about vehicles.

In this case, I’ve converted a 4e fighter craft from a Pyramid Article, and then two classic vehicles from GURPS Starships: the Typhoon and the Starhawk.  I wouldn’t take these versions as “gospel,” because I think I’d go into more detail and change quite a few things about the Spaceship design, not the least of which because the SS designs are based on SS constraints, which we don’t  have, nor need.

Still, I think it’s worthwhile to get a sense of where the design process is going, and I hope you enjoy it.  This is a patreon post available to all $1+ patrons.  If you’re a patron, check it out!  And thanks very much for your support.  If you’re not a patron, don’t worry.  Once I have this stuff worked out, I’ll be back with more sci-fi goodness.  Thanks for your patience!

Patreon Post: Let's Build a Vehicle (the Ground Edition)

Those following this new Tech Series of Psi-Wars might have caught a whiff of GURPS Vehicles and, if so, you’re exactly right.  I’m too dissatisfied with GURPS Spaceships for all of this, so I thought I would dive in with both feet to see if I could bring Vehicles into 4e.  With the conversion of propulsion, power and materials, that begins to look possible.

This patreon post contains three design diaries:

  • A generic hover-car
  • A generic hover-bike
  • A generic hover-tank
In these design diaries, I check to see if I like the results my numbers give me and look for holes or problems.  This post is available to all $1+ patrons (while it contains some preview information, it’s more about a larger project to see what it would take to get Vehicles into 4e, which I think interests more than just the Psi-Wars fans).  If you’re a patron, check it out!  And thank you for your support.

Psi-Wars Material Technology

In the far future of the Psi-Wars galaxy, industry makes use of new materials from which to construct their buildings, factories, starships and to armor their soldiers. Most of these materials resemble modern materials, but typically are far stronger and lighter, able to stand up to the firepower of a blaster and to shrug off more primitive attacks with ease. Some are the results of far superior crafting technology, but others are mined from the depths of planetary cores, or taken from exotic asteroids who passed too close to hyperspatial anomalies.

This post has two companion patreon posts:

  • For Fellow Travellers ($3+) I have a more detailed look at these materials, including using them for armor design, vehicle design, building design, and some advanced and primitive materials.
  • For Dreamers ($1+) I have some research notes on real-world sci-fi materials, as well as conversion notes for GURPS Vehicles 3e armor and GURPS Spaceships armor.

Structural Materials

The buildings of Psi-Wars make use of exotic materials for greater durability and lightness, allowing for highly durable buildings and very agile starships.

Episteel

Deep in the hearts of planets or planetoids, the intense pressure crushes iron into a new molecular configuration called hexaferrum, or “epsilon iron.” This state of iron is more dense and far tougher than normal iron: it is to iron what diamond is to carbon. The civilization of the Psi-Wars galaxy mine it from planetary cores or, more commonly, from the destroyed remnants of destroyed planetoids in the form of M-class asteroids. The resulting iron is carefully alloyed with carbon to form “episteel,” a material four times as durable as steel for the same weight. Episteel is common throughout the Psi-Wars galaxy, and forms the basis for “cheap” metal construction.

Titanium Foam

When mixed with certain nanomaterials, a titanium powder can “bubble up” into a foam that sets with structural strength as durable as iron, but exceedingly light as most of the structure is air or void. This is often used as a “filler” material where construction must be both light and durable, such as the cores of light starships or the interior of metal doors.

Ferrocrete, or Heavy Nanocrete

Concrete allowed ancient civilizations to construct “stone” structures easily, but often required steel reinfrocement. Nanocrete imbeds iron nanoparticles in the concrete mixture, so that as the concrete sets, the iron forms a natural crystalline lattice to reinforce it. This results in a dusky gray or reddish concrete structure with superior durability.

Light Nanocrete

Light Nanocrete is a more recent invention and relies on the same principle as heavy nanocrete, but replaces the iron with a tight carbon lattice, mixing the strength of diamondoid with concrete to create an astonishingly light structure with the same durability as heavy nanocrete.

Diamondoid Plate Glass

Not nearly as durable as true diamondoid armor, this mixes a transparent carbon lattice in with the silica of plate glass to create an astonishingly durable form of plate glass. This is often used where armored glass is necessary, or as a cheap material for armored visors.

Barriers and Doors

GURPS Action 2 lists the values of various items someone might try to blast their way through in great detail. This changes in Psi-Wars as the technologies involved differ substantially.

Door Controls

Most Psi-Wars doors have their mechanisms buried deep behind walls. Going after the actuators is usually harder than trashing the door itself. However, wrecking the door controls may result in a door opening or locking shut, depending on its settings. This can be accomplished through raw damage, or through a power-outage (Electrician). You can set the control settings with Mechanic (Any), Lockpicking or Electronics Operation (Security), or via a local computer interface if you have access. Once destroyed, the door will trigger its safeguard: in most cases, this will open the doors, but in highly secure areas (especially prisons), it will prevent the door from opening until repaired.

Controls tend to be a simple electronic panel; how robust they are varies.

Delicate: DR 7, HP 3

Standard: DR 15, HP 5

Tough: DR 35, HP 10

Extra-Tough: DR 75, HP 20

Door DR and HP

Most doors are sliding doors, thus one cannot attack the hinges. Bringing a door to 0 HP allows one to force it back into the wall, or push through a gap between the two doors.

Plastic-faced door: DR 4, 10 HP

Episteel-faced door: DR 30, 15 HP

Episteel Door: DR 45, 15 HP

Carbide Armored Door: DR 250, 25 HP

Blast Door: DR 1000, 50 HP

Force Wards

An intensely strong force field projected on a 2d plane, typically used for prison doors, or to lock away certain passages on command. They provide hardened DR 100. The projector is typically on the far side of the ward, and generally has a DR of 30 and 12 HP. Cutting power to the area will instantly shut-off the ward (though high security wards have their own back-up power supply that will last 12 hours). It can be manually disengaged with an Electronics Operation (Security orForce Screen), or deactivated via a computer interface.

Bars and grills

Cell bars or barred windows rarely appear outside of more primitive alien worlds; they feature strongly in the Dark Arm of the galaxy, however. They’re usually constructed of Episteel

Makeshift bars: DR 30, HP 5

Standard bars:DR 50, HP 10

Rugged bars: DR 100, HP 20

Walls and Barriers

4” Light Nanocrete Wall: DR 100, 50 HP

12” Heavy Nanocrete Wall: DR 300, 90 HP

3’ Heavy Nanocrete Bunker Wall: DR 1000, 135 HP

1/2” Diamondoid Glass: DR 50, 20 HP; Brittle

1/8” Mild Episteel Wall: DR 20, HP 25

Defensive Materials

As weapon technology advanced, armor technologies needed to advance with them. Thefollowing materials are typically used in armor, whether on vehicles or as personal armor. Some primitive civilizations use Episteel for armor, but this is not noted below.

Carbide

Carbide is a crystalline alloybetween grapheneand some other material, typically titanium and hexaferrum, which creates an extremely durable material. It has a flat, matte grey cast, though it can be polished to a chrome shine. This is the preferred armor of the setting, often used as for plates or armor, or to cover vehicles, and may be made into a laminate (but may not be made transparent).

Diamondoid

Diamondoid armor is crystalline carbon armor of the Maradonian aristocracy. It offers nigh unparalleled protection, though it is more fragile than carbine armor and offers less protection against crushing attacks as it has a tendency to fracture under extreme pressure. Extremely difficult to manufacture and thus very expensive, this is retained almost exclusively as a personal armor for space knights. It typically has a highly polished sheen, or may appear as a glittering, greyish-blue armor, or it may be transparent or semi-transparent.

Cerablate Plating

An advanced form of ceramic armor, cerablate plating evaporates quickly under energy attacks, including blaster fire or plasma attacks. This grants it considerable, but temporary and specific, protection. Fortunately, it is cheap enough to be disposable, and some soldiers use it to augment their armor. Cerablate is white, similar to polished ceramics, and may gain fine “spider-web” fractures on it, like broken glass, after an extended battle.

Nanopolymer

Nanopolymer is a nano-particle reinforced plastic, and an outdated, but cheap, armor technology. It appears as a dull, matte grey or brown composite metal, similar in appearance to ancient tank armor.

New Armor Rules

Psi-Wars sports seriously advanced technology, but depicts a cinematic reality where a brawler can punch out a man in full armor or an assassin with a knife can expertly kill a soldier in full plate armor. Thus the following new rules:

Cinematic Rule: Armor Blowthrough

All armor counts as flexible against crushing attacks. Crushing attacks that deal knockback cause one point of damage per yard if the target fails his knockdown roll or he is knocked into a hard surface.

Harsh Realism for Armor: Armor Gaps

Plate Armor is at -6 to target armor chinks on the torso and -8 to target armor chinks elsewhere; all other forms of armor have the standard rules for chinks (-8 for targeting the chinks on the torso, -10 to target chinks elsewhere). All armor except for flexible or solid armor have gapswhich can be targeted at -8. Attacks to gaps bypass DR entirely while attacks to chinks halve DR as normal.

Force Screens and Wards

Psi-Wars uses Force Screen technology both as a form of active support structure and a form of defense. The former shows up in certain environmental domes in hostile environments, or as the crackling “force wall” of a prison door. These suffer the drawback of disappearing when they power down, but most such systems have redundant power supplies that last for about 12 hours after power is shut off.

Force screens tend to be used on corvettes and capital ships, as well as some well-protected fighters, to divert blaster fire and missiles. The most extreme example of such a force screen is a planetary shield, meant to prevent space bombardment They may be “angled” to better defend the ship from attack from a particular direction. No force screen can prevent “slow” (that is, slower than a bullet) craft or people from entering its space. A force screen cannot be made small enough to protect a single person, though rumors persist that Denjuku or the Empire have both perfected personal force screen prototypes.

Force Shields and Force Wards

But what about Force Bucklers? The closest I can find to them in GURPS Vehicles is a Deflector screen, which has no DR and only provides PD. We mightcorrelate these with Force Shields and work out their power/mass requirements by surface area onlyand assume that they alwayshave a DR of 100, but then we need to struggle to figure out why smaller vehicles don’t cover themselves with force buckler-like constructions, or how we make force buckler masses and power requirements mesh with those of the force ward and balance everything with force screens!

I have a better idea, however! How about we just leave them as writtenin Ultra-Tech? We don’t need to use them as vehicular design options (or, at least, we can treat them like we would any gadget and allow someone to purchase them straight out of GURPS Ultra-Tech). This also minimizes the fuss, as GMs can use these straight out of the books as well. It’s simpler and side-steps messier issues. If this turns out to be a problem in the future, I can always revisit it.

Psi-Wars Propulsion Technology

Psi-Wars features vehicles of all sorts, from hover cars for high speed chases to starfighters zipping around great and mighty capital ships in battles that look surprisingly reminiscent of WW2 battles.  This post takes a look at what technologies the Psi-Wars setting uses to traverse its planets and the galaxy, including:

  • Hyperspace drives
  • Hyperdynamic technology and aerospace engines including plasma thrusters, impulse drives and the grav drive
  • Ground-based propulsion technology including repulsorlift technology, legged vehicles and tracks.
  • Aquatic propulsion technology and why it is slowly becoming obsolete.
For those who want additional details about the design process, including the specifications (compatible with the design process of GURPS Vehicles 3e, and with the previous power post!), $3+ patrons can find the design notes here.

Aerospace Propulsion

For the Psi-Wars galaxy, the discovery and mastery of hyperspace, and its hyperdynamic nature, meant that air and space travel merged into the same technologies. While occasionally one can find primitive aliens making uses of gasbag technologies or turbofans or space rockets, the rest of the galaxy uses hyperdynamic engines to drive both its spacecraft and aircraft.

Hyperdrive

The Hyperdrive “shunts” a ship from “normal” space to four-dimensional “hyperspace,” which allows the ship to travel at far greater speeds. A typical hyperdrive engine reaches speeds of 30 light years (10 parsecs) per hour, through more powerful drives can reach speeds two or three times as fast! While in hyperspace, a ship cannot see or interact with “real space” matter, though strong gravity fields, like those found on planets or around stars, or for light years around black holes, can distort the medium of hyperspace, making travel difficult, throwing the ship off course, or even pulling the ship out of hyperspace entirely. Thus, the spacefarer must carefully choose his course before activating his hyperdrive. Generally, a hyperdrive is activated once a ship has left a planet’s orbit, and the ship travels a course that takes it to just outside the orbit of their target world.

The act of shunting a ship into hyperspace takes farmore energy than the act of traveling through space. This energy can be through the use of energy banks, which generally take 24 hours to recharge on an inactive ship, or by actively burning hyperium fuel. The latter requires a hyperium fusion reactor, but the amount of hyperium required is a fraction of the mass of an energy bank, and has become the preferred means of paying the high costs of hypershunting. In principle, once a ship is inhyperspace, it can remain there for as long as the traveler wishes (and “exit” for free, like “falling” into real space), but in practice, the farther one must travel without interacting with real-space, the more likely one is to go wildly off-course. In practice, most hyperspatial journeys are “hops” of 100-200 light years at most.

The medium of hyperspace is not a perfect vacuum, but a sort of hyperfluid through which the ship can travel and, with a hyperdynamic field, can “push” off of. This medium distorts and changes over time, and can interact with the ship, making passage more difficult, disrupting the ships travel, or driving it off course. Some regions have placid, easily traversable hyperspace between their systems. The most well-known of such regions is the galactic center, where travel between worlds is relatively easy. The easiest and most well-charted courses tend to become major trade routes and avenues along which major empires project their power. These tend to be called “hyperlanes” or “hyperstraits.” Other regions have much “denser” or more “difficult” hyperspatial medium: most travelers avoid these, but especially daring navigators might give them a shot, and may well know a “pass” through such a dense region. The space between the galactic arms or between galaxies tend to be notoriously tricky to traverse. Finally, the hyperspace medium has “weather,” and hyperstorms can kick up, throwing ships out of hyperspace or making travel difficult. The death of the homeworld of Styx when its star suddenly collapsed into black hole threw their entire region of the galaxy into a chaotic storm that raged for centuries and makes travel in that region treacherous to this day.

Charting a hyperspace route takes 30 minutes and requires a Navigation (Hyperspace) skill roll. A successful roll means the jump will occur without incident. A failure means the ship is “off course,” typically ten parsecs times the margin of failure, while a critical failure can put the ship nearly anywhere, ruin the hyperdrive or crash the ship into a star or planet (though not a recommended choice for pcs!).

Modifiers: The GM may assign a difficulty between -0 and -10 to a particular route, depending on how “dense” or “easy” the region is to traverse. A well-charted hyperlane adds +4. Every 30 light years (or 10 parsecs) after the first 100 light years (or 30 parsecs) applies a –2to your navigation rolls; and, of course, if your route takes you over multiple “regions” of hyperspace with different difficulties, the GM should apply the penalty for the roughest region of hyperspace. Finally, “hyperspace weather” can apply between -1 to -10, with a typical hyperstorm applying a -4 to the roll, and typical “bad weather” applying a -2.

Shunting into hyperspace requires the drive charging for 5 minutes, though it can be charged faster with a Mechanic (Hyperdrive) roll with a time modifier applied.

Hyperdynamic Drives

Hyperspace contains a “medium” through which a ship must travel, and off of which a ship may push. Ships equipped with hyperdynamic fields may this medium to accelerate and to maneuver. Depending on what drive has been equipped, this may allow a ship to maneuver through space as though it were a jet aircraft, or it may grant it contragravity-like properties, or allow it to float serenely through the sky like an airship. Ships with hyperdynamic fields maneuver through atmosphere exactly as they do through space.

Outside of a gravity field, hyperdynamic drives allow a hyperdynamic ship’s relativistic frame of referenceto accelerate to light speed. This happens naturally: once a ship exits the orbit of a planet, its frame simply accelerates without additional cost to the ship. As the frameaccelerates, this is a form of psuedovelocity: if the ship collides with another ship, the collision occurs at the ship’s “real” speed (typically measured in miles per hour, rather than thousands of miles per second!). Furthermore, when ships enter another ships frame of reference, while an outsider will see both traveling in the same direction at the speed of light, in their own reference, they seem to be traveling at their own, natural speeds. In practice, this “frame dragging” simply means that ships that wish to travel to other worlds may do so very quickly (typically in minutes or hours) while still engaging one another at their own “normal” speeds.

Hyperdynamic Plasma Thrusters

A plasma thruster is a form of “fast” reactionless drive that produces extremely fast thrust, and interacts with hyperspatial medium as though it was as diffuse as air. This gives the plasma thruster performance similar to a jet engine. Ships equipped with plasma thrusters travel at supersonic speeds and might have “afterburners” to allow them to reach even higher speeds, but must maintain high speeds in both atmosphere or space or risk “losing grip” on the hyperspatial medium and losing control. They maneuver similar to aircraft with wings. Unlike other hyperdynamic drives, plasma thrusters require no direct power input, but do consume hyperium fuel.

A plasma thruster has a bright, highly visible and hot signature that resembles rightly focused blue or red “flame.” They require extensive hyperdynamic structures, and often have a great deal of surface area dedicated to either aerodynamics like wings, or hyperdynamic control structures (which may or may not resemble wings, but still take up a considerable volume of the craft’s volume).

Plasma thrusters tend to be used on starfighters and starbombers; occassionally, it sees use on craft intended only for aerial travel. It can also operate as a jetpack, though such engines need decent heat dissipation.

Hyperdynamic Grav Drives

A grav drive was the first of the three hyperdynamic propulsion systems and was believed, at first, to interact with gravity itself; only later was it discovered that it interacts with the hyperspatial medium, but the name stuck.

A grav drive provides both a motive thrust and “lift,” allowing it to move at very high speeds (up to 600 miles per hour), or to float perfectly in place, granting it high maneuverability. Such a drive must at a minimum, provide enough lift to counteract the vehicle’s mass, but requires no “minimum” speed like a plasma thruster, and is less efficient at extreme masses than the impulse drive, which tends to limit it to medium-class starships, such as corvettes, or smaller craft like gunships where the ability to hover is more important than the ability to maximize speed. It consumes only energy to produce both thrust and lift.

A hyperdynamic grav drive produces an intense blue or red glow from its engines, but no visible flames.

Hyperdynamic Impulse Drive

A hyperdynamic impulse drive is a large, heavy thing engine that interacts with the hyperspatial medium as though it was “dense,” similar to water. This greatly slows its speed, which cannot exceed 300 miles per hour and is typically below 100 miles per hour, but “pins” it against the hyperspatial medium, so that it does not interact with gravity at all. Even at perfect rest and consuming no energy at all, an impulse drive allows a ship to float perfectly above a planet or even above the ground.

An impulse drive is very heavy, requiring at least 5 tons of mass, but is more efficient at large scales than the grav drive, and is by far the cheapest of hyperdynamic drives. This makes it the preferred choice for extremely large vessels, such as interstellar capital ships and transport vessels. It sees much use on planets, often replacing sea travel with slow-moving-but-cheap aerial transport.

An impulse drive produces a faint and streaky blue, white or red glow, often appearing like diffuse, escaping gas; it resembles the ancient “ion drive” in appearance, and is sometimes (mistakenly) referred to as an ion drive.

Ground Propulsion

Repulsorlift Drivetrains

A repulsorlift utilizes the opposite of a tractor beam, a pressor beam, to both lift a vehicle off the ground and to provide directional thrust by pushing off the ground. The result resemblesa low-flying grav-drive, but works with a completely different technology. Vehicles equipped with a repulsorlift seems to hover or skim across the ground with about a foot of clearance. It moves swiftly, slightly faster than a wheeled vehicle under ideal conditions, but does not require a road.

Repulsorlifts tend to see use most often on the equivalent of cars or motorcycles, but also sees use in high-speed military vehicles. Because it must expend energy to both lift and push the vehicle, it tends to be less efficient for very heavy vehicles, unless built around a rail that interacts with efficiently with the repulsorlift: hover-trains tend to be common on highly industrialized worlds, or on worlds with intense mining.

While repulsorlifts don’t require roads, they do (marginally) benefit from them and, of course, a hover vehicles can still crash into a tree or a spike of rock, so many municipalities that can afford to do so still pave their roads, as it provides a convenient path for pedestrians, makes life a little easier for hover-cars, and provides clear routes for traffic.

Legged Drivetrains

Legs provide vehicles with greater mobility, but less speed and higher costs than a hover-vehicle. Thus, legged drivetrains tend to be used only for highly specialized vehicles, though the Cybernetic Union makes extensive use of them. They don’t require a “lifting energy” when resting, and which makes them slightly more useful for heavier vehicles such as tanks, but their high cost limits such vehicles unless the vehicle needs to be highly agile (such as scuttling side to side to dodge shots, or stepping over broken and rugged terrain). Most legged drivetrains have four or more legs, as this provides more stability than two-legged designs.

Tracked Drivetrains

Vehicles with tank-style treads do exist in the Psi-Wars setting. These tend to be limited to older vehicles and has largely been superceded by the repulsorlift, except where the vehicle is exceptionally heavy. Giant, industrial crawlers use tracks, as do super-tanks. Older vehicles may as well, like the Gristian track-cycle. Vehicles with tracks tend to be the slowest of the three sorts of ground vehicles and the least agile, but they’re cheaper and more rugged than their counterparts.

Animal Propulsion

On remote or primitive worlds that lack a major industrial base, locals often use indigenous species as transportation. One might see an alien raider riding a multi-legged, feral-looking creature into battle, or see aliens who have hooked up wagons to great behemoths to draw their vehicles through great salt deserts. This tends to be rare in the “civilized” galactic center, however.

Aquatic Propulsion

Aquatic propulsion has largely been overtaken by the Hyperdynamic Impulse Drive, as it provides similar performance but can travel to space. So one is more likely to see serenely floating skyships over the oceans of a world than to see ships plying the seas. That said, starships make poor submersibles, and a Magneto-Hydrodynamic Turbine is slightly more efficient than an Impulse Drive if one onlywants to travel by sea, or beneaththe sea.

On more primitive or poor worlds, aliens still make use of sails, paddle wheels and animal transportation when traveling on water.

Designing an Ultra-Tech Framework

Given my blog’s focus on GURPS sci-fi, I often find myself fielding a lot of questions, especially about Ultra-Tech. I often see criticisms leveled against it that it is the most flawed GURPS book, apart from (perhaps) Magic. While I do not wish to argue for or against this point, I do understand where and how people can find it frustrating. So what I want to do with this post is get to the heart of what I think Ultra-Tech is and what it isn’t. I want to discuss how I use it, and how I recommend you use it too, if you want to get the most out of it, and if you want to understand how GURPS really works, especially when it comes to sci-fi.

I think the biggest problem with GURPS Ultra-Tech stems from the fact that people try to treat it as a catalogwhen it is better understood as a world-building tool. I see many people try to use Ultra-Tech in a similar manner to how they might use GURPS High-Tech; For example, if you can dig through High-Tech to find that one highly specific gun you want, y ou should be able to do the same in Ultra-Tech, right? Only what they find in Ultra-Tech is, at best, very generic (“Blaster Rifle”), and at worst, potentially profoundly unbalanced. However, GURPS Ultra-Tech dedicates a considerable volume of its pages not to gear that characters could carry around, but to concepts and megastructures, like terraforming projects, cryptography and even playable robots. These certainly impact characters, but they can often be better understood as things that exist in the world with them better than things they carry in their pocket (Incidentally, this is true of High Tech and Low-Tech too, especially when you combine the latter with its companions). Ultra-Tech itself takes this stance, as you can see from the introduction where it discusses how to use the book, including different technological frameworks, different development cycles and gadget control.

My approach with Ultra-Tech has always to take it as a guidebook of inspiration and ideas. Consider, for a moment, if you were to throw up your hands over GURPS, and step over to another system of your choice for your sci-fi epic, such as Fate, World of Darkness or D20. In what sort of book would you look for ideas about your sci-fi game? You might dig through Atomic Rockets or a wiki on a setting you wished to convert, but personally, I’d just pick up Ultra-Tech again, not because I intended to directly use its mechanics, but because those mechanics act like benchmarks, and the discussions in the book offer inspiration. The point of Ultra-Tech, then, is to inform your sci-fi game. The rest, alas, must be done by you.

Just how much work this actually requires can vary from “Just create a list of appropriate technologies” to “How good are you with algebra?”
This will be a short-running series over the next couple of weeks.  Patrons ($1+) gain immediate access to, and in two weeks from this posting date, the full document will be publicly available to everyone.  You can find it (patron and patient reader a like) here.

Building a Technological Framework

What we’re actually trying to do here is to build a technological framework, which combines both the narrative “fluff” of our setting with the available gameplay mechanics of our campaign. The fact that both combine is where campaigns often go very awry. On the one hand, you want a tightly balanced set of technological gear to choose from (but GURPS Ultra-Tech only offers generic material, for the most part), and on the other hand and on a completely unrelated note, you want the game to take place in a sci-fi setting, but these two things interact. If you include cheap robots in your space-flavored dungeon crawler for flavor (“The local bartender is a robot; there’s a robot junker down the street”) then players might start to do something like purchasing robots as minions. Alternatively, if you include cheap quickheal salves meant to get your space dungeon crawlers back on their feet, but you want to depict a world full of suffering, it’s hard to line these two up, because the heroes can just hand out buckets of quickheal salve to get all those poor orphans and ragamuffins healthy again. The point here is that the fluff you include can negatively impact the gameplay you’re trying to create, or vice versa, if you don’t consider all the implications. To do this, I see most people combing through the whole book, asking lots of questions on forums, struggling with the book and often giving up.

Let’s see if we can make this easier for you. To do this, let’s break this down into steps, as follows:

  1. Determine the technological “concept” for your setting, including a core activity and general themes and moods.

  2. Choose a default tech level as a starting point

  3. Built a technological catalog in layers, starting with the least consequential technologies first and work your way up to the most consequential technologies (“Conservation of Miracles”) (Part 1 and Part 2)

  4. Elaborate your technological catalog with additional gadgets or customized gadgets to provide additional detail that supports your core activities only.

  5. Make the material available to your players

Iteration 7 Part 1 – Technology

“GURPS Vehicles is more than about just vehicles; it’s a technological infrastructure book” -David Pulver

Why start with technology? Because technology is the foundation of all sci-fi settings. While Psi-Wars endeavors to maintain a “feel” of familiar technology, both by extrapolating modern technology and by making use of familiar Star Wars technology, as well as the sort of “standard tropes” that we tend to see in space opera, rather than diving into a deep exploration of an alternate technological concepts. But even with all of that, the technological differences between the real world and Psi-Wars really need to be carefully outlined and discussed.

Psi-Wars is not a book or a filmor a tightly bound computer- or board-game, it is an RPG, and in an RPG, players can and will try to do anything, which is often the source of many an amusing story. Players need to know what they can do and what they can’t, as does the GM, which means we need a reallygood idea of how technology works, and we need to explain it well, so that the players can see how everything works.

Furthermore, Psi-Wars deliberately draws on exotic ideas. While it doesn’t have crazy technologies like domination nano or consciousness uploading, I do make an effort to find some unusual and fascinating imagery. While Star Wars does trade in fairly familiar tropes, it goes out of its way to embrace the exotic on occassion (the salt plains of Crait, the court of Jaba, the ocean cities of the Gungans, the entire world of Geonosis), and I draw regularly from sci-fi that embraces weirdness, like Dune, the Metabarons and Barsoom. For me, the pointof space opera is to go to weird placesand have familiar adventures there. If you wanted to save the princess, you’d be playing D&D; you’re here because you want to save the space princess. What, exactly, is a space princessand how is she different?

One of the ways we can show that the setting is exotic is through unusual technology. We don’t have cars, we have repulsor cars. We don’t have guns, we have blasters. We don’t have fighters, we have starfighters, and so on. But, again, these need to be explained and, indeed, players will likely wantto read about them! After all, the X-Wing and the Star Destroyer are nearly as discussed as the Jedi and the Force!

We spent iteration 6 exploring our setting, which means we already know a lot of technological concepts and we have a picture of how the setting works. All we really need to do is sit down and define things carefully and, more importantly, make them our own a little. I don’t think Psi-Wars players will ever get away from GURPS Ultra-Tech and I’m okay with that (though I think if we can get away from GURPS Spaceships, I’ll be happy with that!). All we really need to do now is put pen to paper and clearly define these.

The Technological Roadmap

So, we know what we want to do. Where do we start?

First, we tackle technological concepts. We need to discuss the technologies that serve as the foundation of Psi-Wars: where energy comes from, how factories work, how one builds cities or space stations, etc. We looked at this once, back in iteration 3, and we’ve not looked at it since, but it should be a simple matter of going through Ultra-Tech and answering some essential questions. The point here is to establish the setting in generalities.

Then, we’ll look at more specific, gamer-facing technologies. The first will be spaceships because I am disatisfied with how spaceships work thus far. I don’t like that they function entirely separately from other vehicles, I don’t like that we have no good rules for vehicles or vehicle design, and I don’t like that spaceships reduces the good complexities at the cost of adding bad complexities. It works fine for certain sorts of games, but not for Psi-Wars, where we’re really just trying to imitate WW2 sea battles, but in space. Part of this will be a look at vehicles in general, because despite the fact that physicsdisagrees, Star Wars doesn’t really treat tanks and speeders differently than it treats dreadnoughts and starfighters.

Then we’ll move on to personal gear: weapons, armor, the shopping catalog in the back of GURPS Action, but for spaaace. Most of this is already worked out, but a lot of it is scattered over some patreon previews that we can consolidate into a single spot, to avoid confusion. Part of this will involve talking about our gameplay framework, which will serve nicely when revising our Action rules.

Finally, we’ll revisit the technological infrastructure of specific factions. While the Empire is largely complete, we can revise it; the Alliance needs it space ships and vehicles, and I’d like to look at the Knights of Communion; while modern templars might not have major military hardware, the original Knights of Communion did and some templars might.

A Technological Context

An important concept to understand when you build a sci-fi setting is that you are building a technolgical gameplay context. Every game you play in has one: what tools are available shape how you play, and the extensive gear catalogs of GURPS make this a vital element of gameplay. For most games, these are assumed. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy assumes a base DR of 4-6 with gear-based armor (but allows enchantment and superior to hit much higher levels; I understand DR 10 isn’t unusual) and your primariy ranged weapons are bows or crossbows, which means most people fire once every few seconds or, if they are very specialized, once a second or perhaps up to 3 times per second, but melee weapons tend to be a preferred choice. In GURPS Action, DR of 12+ is not unusual, but most ranged weapons can fire many times per second (allowing things like suppression fire and sprayed fire) and can easily punch through any but the hardiest of armor, and you have to handle things like tanks.

This context and how it plays shapes how characters will fight. I discussed this pretty extensively in Iteration 4 when I talked about how I expected military hardware to compare to, for example, a force sword, and we’ll talk about it again.

But I want to draw your attention to other contexts. Not everything is about combat! Action, in particular, turns on infiltration tactics and spy-gadgets. How do you bug a phone line, or get past a lock, or find that record you’re looking for? I’ve touched on this a bit, but I want to look at it more extensively and completely. I want to know we have all of ducks in a row, as it were.

Part of this will involve looking at how factions usetechnology. My Insurgent Tactics article proved very popular, and while I’m not sure such documents need to make it into the final product (though please, if you disagree, leave a comment!), they certainly help give an idea of how this technology might be used. Tactics are to technology what signature moves are to martial arts: a way of highlighting what we need and how we use what we have. In Star Wars, the Empire’s troops look different from the rebel troopers; this is because they fightdifferently, and we want to define that. We also want a sense of what sort of things players can expect when dealing with a faction.

GURPS Vehicles

I’ve been trying to “fix” these things for awhile, in the midst of Iteration 6 (which is one of the reasons we’re having this iteration: these problems are too big for me to fix on the side). One thing I’ve noticed is how extremely valuable GURPS Vehicles 3ereally is. The Companions, which I just picked up for a song on e23, contain almost everything from GURPS Spaceships, plus new content (like the repulsor technology that I tried to create from scratch, not realizing that it already existed).

I remain extremely disappointed that after ten years of development hell, we still don’t have GURPS Vehicles for 4e; this is a topic I could rant about for an entire post, I’ms ure, but the truth is that we don’t have it, and likely never will. But by this point, I’ve become adept enough and understanding the logic behind how the GURPS Ultra-Tech vehicles are build that I feel confident in doing it myself.

(One of the reasons I dove into Psi-Wars as opposed to other sci-fi games is that I expected I could get away without extensive vehicles. Ha!)

So, by the end of this, while I won’t have a complete conversion of GURPS Vehicles 4e, I hope to have a workable vehicular design system that suits Psi-Wars. If so, this will be a Patreon special.

Necro-Psionic Technology: The Legacy of the Dead Art

Necro-Psionic Technology

The Ranathim mastered the Dead Art and used it and its synthetic flesh to craft unliving biological machines that fed off of psionic energy to empower their uses. This technology gave them the edge they needed to forge their empire, but also had drawbacks, both in slowly twisting and corrupting their users, and in the intense specialization and skill needed to train necrocrafters. Thus, after the Ranathim Empire fell, most of its Necro-Psionic technology fell with it. Even so, some practitioners of the Dead Art still exist in the Galaxy, and many Ranathim relics still use this technology, or the living warmachines created by the Ranathim Empire still roam the decaying remnants of their great empire.

In essence, Necro-Psionic technology is bio-tech with a highly specific focus (synthetic flesh or dead flesh), and shaped with a specific technique (Necrokinesis). In a sense, it’s similar to “Variant Biotech” from BT 30, except that we use psionics instead of magic, and the Dead Art has a very distinc thematic flavor. Anything, from plague engineering to human engineering to bio-tech gadgets and bio-mods can be made using synthetic flesh or dead flesh and necrokinesis. The following represents a catalog of “common” technology as inspiration.

Necro-Psi Gadgets and Implants

Necro-Psi gadgets can function like Biogadgets (BT 95). The most common “pwer-sources” are Bio-Convertor, Nutrient Bath (either by keeping it stored in a flesh vat, or soaking it in blood), or it is “vampiric,” typically demanding HP or FP per use, per hour or per day. Vampiric devices are x1 cost.

Flesh Armor (Ferthe Dapolor)

One of the more complex Necro-Psionic creations, this uses carefully manipulated synthetic flesh that’s been hardened into sturdy, organic armor (as strong as nanocomposite, though more brittle), and powered by internal sinews that draw their strength from the life force of the wearer, allowing him to be stronger and faster. The result appears to be an imposing suite crafted of bony, organic armor covered in tarry, black or bony, white plates.

Statistics. This armor provides the wearer with Super-Jump 1, +2 Basic Move, +10 striking and lifting ST, 100 Semi-Ablative DR on the torso and head, and 75 Semi-Ablative DR elsewhere; it heals its semi-ablative armor naturally, at 1/10th of its armor once per day provided it has access to life force or a nutrient bath. It must be bathed once a week in a mixture of synthetic flesh or it starts to suffer (treat this as maintenance), and it draws upon the life force of its wearer, draining on HP per day of use. It weighs 50 lbs and costs $50,000.

Variants of Flesh Armor exist. Some have helmets that offer a visual depiction of the Detect Life, and others have claws, equivalent to long talons with armor divisor 3, or a large, heavy set of horns (that usually exaggerate the wearer’s horns) that act as strikers and offer additional skull DR.

Dead Arm (Radin Tarvasis)

Synthetic flesh can be used to replace living flesh, and thus rather than use cybernetics, one could replace his limbs with necro-tech limbs. For additional ideas to those below, see Pyramid #3/1 “Necromantic Tools” starting on page 13. All such arms have the Psionic disadvantage and are subject to anti-psi powers or to anti-psi devices. Anything that suppresses a power can be used to switch off a necro-tech limb. This applies as a -10% Psionic limitation rather than a -20% cybernetic limitation, and applies a -70% mitigator, rather than a -80% mitigator. They can still apply corruption, in this case from grafting unholy, unliving, psionically-empowered flesh to your body, rather than “cyberpsychosis.” If using the Cybernetics and Corruption rules, apply the corruption of one procedural level higher (With radical inflicting 6dx10 corruption!). Additional ideas include Dead Legs, Dead Eyes (typically with infravision and glowing red) or a dead jaw (extensible, with savage, black fangs with an armor divisor of 3).

Synthetic flesh replacements have largely fallen out of favor in the modern galaxy, thanks to the scarcity of those with the Dead Art (most people don’t even know they exist), but in the heart of the Dark Arm of the galaxy, one can still find people who use them.

A classic Radin Tarvasis is pallid and leathery, with grotesque black veings and savage, tarry black claws jutting from the fingers. The arm is exceedingly obvious and unnatural to those who see it.

Statistics: Arm ST +2 (One Arm, Psionic -10%) [6]; Claws (Talons; Armor Divisor 3) [13]; DR 10 (One Arm, Tough Skin -80%) [2], Injury Tolerance (Unliving, One Arm -40%) [12], One Arm (Mitigator, Psionic -70%) [-6], Pestilent Arm [1], Unnatural Features 2 [-2]. 26 points. $12,000.

Availability: Minor Procedure; $12,000.

A classic Radin Tarvasis is pallid and leathery, with grotesque black veings and savage, tarry black claws jutting from the fingers. The arm is exceedingly obvious and unnatural to those who see it.

Dead Heart (Gitra Tarvasis)

The Dead Art holds at its heart one of the great secrets of immortality in the old Ranathim Empire, though its price was steep indeed. A heart crafted of synthetic flesh and then permanently animated with necro-kinesis could potentially “beat” forever. Moreover, it spread its influence through the bearers body, giving him distinct black veins and black blood. While the bearer wasn’t unliving, he became nigh immortal, no longer aging and very difficult to kill. However, instead of aging, the dead heart would slowly corrupt the user, or rapidly if it preserved the bearers life after a serious beating. Every point of damage the character takes past -1xHP afflicts an equal amount of corruption. The character also gains 1d6 corruption every year he ages, though this is noted only for narrative effect (player characters should never take this latter form of corruption), to note that ancient beings with dead hearts are likely monstrous and insane.

If the heart is destroyed, however, it can no longer preserve the character. Attacks to the heart will rapidly kill the target (inflicting x4 damage) and his psionic immortality will not last.

Statistics: Terminally Ill (Up to One Month, Mitigator, Psionic -70%) [-30], Unkillable 1 (Corrupt -20%, Achilles Heel: Attacks to the Heart -10%) [35]; Unnatural Features (Black blood, black veins) 2 [-2], Vulnerable (Heart, x4) [-20]. –7 points.

Availability: Minor Procedure; $20,000.

Black Blood (Dehan Tarvasis)

Synthetic flesh can be engineered to act as a sort of bio-drug, healing or augmenting some aspect of a character’s performance. The easiest application is healing the target. A dark, tarry substance, called “Black Blood” because of its similar appearance to the blood of the Gaunts or those who bear a Dead Heart can seek out wounded points and “step in,” acting as replacement cells and stitching a wound together. A single injection gives the character Regeneration (Fast) for the next hour, but each point of injury healed this way inflicts 1 point of Corruption. $1000 per dose; LC 2.

Necro-Psi Monsters

The Dead Art can be used to bioengineer corpses with specific properties, either working from existing corpses or creating something wholecloth from synthetic flesh, and then bringing it to life. Many such monstrosities simply rampage in a blind frenzy, but the greatest are docile for their masters, and ruthless in disposing of their enemies.

The limits of a Necro-Psi’s ability to create one of these monsters comes from how much Necrocraft they have mastered. The smallest creations, little larger than insects, can be crafted by apprentices, but the greatest monstrosities, weighing tons, require masters of the craft, or prodigious use of Extra Effort, exhausting the Necro-Psion.

Styxian Scarab

Alternate Name: Viktus Vasulor

Among the simplest creatures to return to life are small insects, or palm-sized pieces of synthetic flesh. The so-called Styxian Scarab is one such Necro-Psionic creation. It appears as a white beetle with bony,thick plates and particularly menacing mandibles. They have the ability to transmit what they see directly to their master using their Sense Senses skill; they use long-range modifiers (B241) and suffer a -1 if they cannot see their master; they automatically succeed and do not need to roll, provided they have a modified skill of at least 3. They may also receive their masters commands in the same way, making them an extension of their master’s will.

Their real horror is when deployed en masse. A single yard-sized swarm can strip the flesh from the bones of a man in less than 10 seconds. Their powerful jaws can even shred metal, albeit slowly, so even fully sealed armor only holds them at bay for a time. Their tough carapaces and their unliving nature make them extraordinary difficult to deal with. The stats below represent a swarm.

Styxian Scarabs aren’t “for sale,” but a necro-psionic character may “purchase” a Styxian scarab swarm as signature gear for 1 point ($25,000).

ST: 4
HP: 20
Speed: 5
DX: 10
Will: 10
Move: 2
IQ: 4
Per: 11

HT: 10
FP: NA
SM: +0
Dodge: NA
Parry: NA
DR: 0
Skills: Telespeak 5, Send Senses-8

Traits: Frightens Animals; Mindlink (Master), Pestilent; Reprogrammable Duty, Psi-Susceptibility -5, Telerecieve (Shallow) 1, Telesend 5; Swarm

Fright Check: -0

Bite (NA): 1d(3) corr; only sealed armor protects

Ranathim Bale Hound

Alternate Name: Gerluk Vaika

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The pointy-eared, broad-shouldered Gerluk is a common companion to many Ranathim; with their innate psionic powers, they bond well with their masters, and prove to be exceptional hunters. Unsurprisingly, the Ranathim who practice to Dead Art feel the same way about the capabilities of the Gerluk as a hunter and often steal the corpses of these large, tiger-sized hounds to forge the Gerluk Vaika, the Bale Hound.

A Bale Hound appears as a native Gerluk, but with a pale, hairless hide and with spikes and plates of tarry, black “bone” jutting from its white flesh. The plates fail to cover it completely, and they only protect the hound on a 4+ (-2 to any attack to avoid the plates outright). It has long, black fangs and a mouth that drips with black bile, and similarly tainted claws. Its teeth and claws can both infect a target with whatever disease the unliving hound carries, and all Ranathim Bale Hounds have the uncanny psionic ability to detect disease and to track by disease. If someone is infected, they can detect it, and where they are, and then narrow in on finding them. Thus, a bale hound’s master usually commands a pack to attack enough to scratch or bite their prey, and then calls them off. If he ever wishes to find his target again, he can usually do so, if whatever disease the hounds carry hasn’t killed them off by then.

ST: 20
HP: 40
Speed: 8
DX: 12
Will: 10
Move: 12
IQ: 5
Per: 13

HT: 12
FP: NA
SM: +1
Dodge: 11
Parry: 9
DR: 40 (on roll of 4+)
Skills: Detect Disease-12

Traits: Born Biter (+1 SM); Bright (Glowing Eyes; -2 to Stealth if eyes visible); Carrier; Combat Reflexes; Detect Disease; DR 40 (Bone plates; partial, 4+, or -2 to avoid); Discriminatory Smell; Frightens Animals; Hard to Kill +3; High Pain Threshold; Infravision; Injury Tolerance (Unliving); Penetrating Voice; Pestilent; Psi-Susceptibility -5; Quadruped; Reduced Consumption 1 (Cast-Iron Stomach -50%); Reprogrammable Duty; Resistant to Metabolic Hazards +8; Sharp Claws; Sharp Teeth (Fangs); Silent 1; Spines (Long); Unfazeable; Wild Animal.

Fright Check: -1

Bite (12): 2d(3) imp; Reach C; -3 to resist disease/infection.

Claw (12): 2d(3) cut; Reach 1; -3 to resist disease/infection.

Spines (8): 1d imp; Reach C; -3 to resist disease/infection. Free attack in close combat!

Styxian Death Wurm

Alternate Name: Devourer, Tarvatemkor

The Death Wurm is slightly misnamed and is better termed a “Devourer,” though even that doesn’t quite capture it’s true horror. The Necrocrafters of the Ranathim Empire crafted these not during the great war with the Monolith, but after. The purpose of the Styxian Death Wurm is not to slay the enemy, but to terrorize others into submission and to capture prisoners.

The Styxian Death Worm appears as a giant, thick, pallid worm with its “face” ringed with great “tusks” and burning red “eyes.” It has a long, tendril-like tongue, and four tendrils ringing its body. In battle, it either lies in wait, or it erupts out of the ground beneath its prey’s feet. It uses its tendrils to rapidly grapple its prey and then slowly draws it, still struggling and alive, into its waiting maw and then down into its body where it keeps it. The Death Wurm eats only dead flesh, but once its prey has been devoured (it is large enough to contain a single human, or two if it crushes them close together), it can squeeze them to death, or it can use its psychic vampirism to slowly drain the life from them. More commonly, though, it tunnels away once more and brings the still-living prey back to its master. The most common use of the Death Wurm was to capture fleeing prisoners or, more commonly, to recapture escaped slaves.

After the fall of the Ranathim Empire, the Death Wurm should have fallen away, but its construction facilities was one of the few to remain active, and they proliferated across the dead world of Styx, hence their name. The slaver empire also found them particularly useful, and so keeps some around to terrorize slaves, or for “gladiatorial matches.”

ST: 20
HP: 40
Speed: 5
DX: 12
Will: 9
Move: 6
IQ: 2
Per: 9

HT: 12
FP: NA
SM: +2
Dodge: 5
Parry: NA
DR: 40/20
Skills: Steal Life-12, Stealth-12, Tracking-12

Traits: 360 Degree Vision; Bright (Glowing Eyes; -2 to Stealth if eyes visible); Constriction Attack (Engulfing); Damage Resistance (Tough Skin) 20, Damage Resistance (Crushing Only) 20, Discriminatory Smell, Extra Arms (5 total, Long, Flexible); Frightens Animals; High Pain Threshold, Infravision, Injury Tolerance (Unliving), Payload 20, Penetrating Voice, Psi-Susceptibility -5, Reduced Consumption 1 (Cast-Iron Stomach -50%), Reprogrammable Duty, Resistant to Metabolic Hazards +8, Sensitive Touch, Silent 1, Striker (Limited Arc, Forward), Steal Life 1, Tunneling (Move 6), Unfazeable, Vermiform, Wild Animal

Fright Check: -2

Tusk Strike (12): 2d(3), Reach 1

Grapple (15): Each tentacle after the first adds +2 to hit and control. Reach 2.

Devour (20): After successful grapple, attempt to pin target (+3 if more tendrils free than target has hands, +3 per SM difference). Success means target is devoured. Death Wurm may target is pinned and the Death Wurm may, as a free action, roll ST (20) vs ST or HT to inflict 1 crushing damage per margin of victory.

The Styxian Dragon

Alternate Name: Belwale Nuthija, Lafthe Makte

The original dragons of Styxia are no more. With the death of the Ranathim homeworld, the great and majestic beasts of that world are no more. All that remains are their pale shadow, the tattered plague serpents enslaved by the flesh crafting of the Dead Art.
The Styxian Dragon resemble their once majestic counterparts, but thinner, with a starved look. They have the white underbelly of a worm, and their scales have bleached like bones in the sun, while their mouths and claws drip with black, tarry bile, and their eyes burn a fierce red. A Styxian Dragon is the size of a tank and phenomenally lethal with its claws and fangs, even its tail, able to crush a man to dust with a smash of its tail, or bissect a man with a lash of its claws: even the heavy armor of an Imperial soldier will fail before the talons of a Styxian dragon. They can make two attacks per turn, using different body parts.
But a Styxian Dragon’s true terror is not its brute power; indeed, an actual tank is typically more dangerous. Instead, a Styxian Dragon relies on its innate psychic vampirism and its miasma of disease. Those who get too near it find themselves afflicted with an illness; the precise nature of the disease varies from dragon to dragon, but they tend to be minor, with mild symptoms other than obvious physical changes such as the skin growing clammy and the eyes red and irritated. The real danger posed by the Styxian Dragon is not the disease it carries with it, but what it can do with the disease. All Styxian Dragons can sensedisease, which lets them track anyone who has caught any plague, but especially their own. They can further use plague as a conduit for their natural psychic vampirism, allowing them to drain targets they can’t even see of life, even though behind cover or buried under the armor of a tank.

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Finally, the Styxian Dragon is nigh unkillable. They can take a staggering amount of punishment, and only complete bodily destruction will actually destroy them. They will not die unless they are reduced down to -10xHP; given their DR, their 30 HP and their injury tolerance, this can require a prodigious amount of damage.

ST: 150
HP: 30
Speed: 5
DX: 9
Will: 12
Move: 10
IQ: 9
Per: 12

HT: 12
FP: NA
SM: +5
Dodge: 8
Parry: 10
DR: 100/60
Skills: Detect Disease-12, Steal Life-15, No Contact-15

Traits: Born Biter (+1 SM); Bright (Glowing Eyes; -2 to Stealth if eyes visible); Carrier; Claws (Talons), Combat Reflexes; Detect Disease (Lock-On); Disease Miasma; DR 40 (Bone plates; partial, 4+, or -2 to avoid), DR 60 (Tough Skin); Extra Attack; Frightens Animals; High Pain Threshold; Infravision; Injury Tolerance (Unliving); Penetrating Voice; Pestilent; Plague Vampire; Psi-Susceptibility -5; Quadruped; Reduced Consumption 1 (Cast-Iron Stomach -50%); Reprogrammable Duty; Resistant to Metabolic Hazards +8; Steal Life 4, Striker (Tail, Crushing), Teeth (Fangs); Unfazeable; Unkillable 1; Wild Animal.

Fright Check: -3

Bite (12): 5dx2 (3) imp; -3 to resist disease/infection.

Claw (12): 5dx3 (3) cut; -3 to resist disease/infection.

Tail Smash (12): 5dx4 cr.

Miasma (NA): Anyone who gets within 10 yards of a Styxian dragon must roll HT-2 or catch “Styxian Plague.” Characters need to only roll to resist the miasma once per day (this limitation only applies to the miasma itself, not to those struck by fang or claw or who choose to eat the flesh of a Styxian dragon). The miasma acts like a gas, and so the dimensions of the miasma change based on the wind, and the dragon can “breath” his miasma upon the targets. It typically has a very bad smell.

Notes: Plague Vampire applies a -2 to anyone attempting to resist the character’s Psyshic Vampirism powers if they’re afflicted with a specific sickness (in this case, the disease that the Styxian Dragon carries). The disease inflicted by their claws and bite is identical to their miasma, but apply the additional -3 to resist. “Styxian Plague” has a 7 daily cycles; at each cycle, the target must roll HT-2 or suffer 1 point of fatigue damage, 1d6 corruption, and minor irritations (itchy eyes, sniffles, etc) for the remainder of the day (The GM can apply an additional -1 to all rolls for one scene in a day to represent an “attack of the Styxian plague.”). Styxian plague is mildly contagious. Anyone exposed to the Styxian Dragon’s miasma or blood, or who eats its flesh or are struck by their claws or fangs must roll HT-2 to resist (-5 if eating its flesh or wounded by its claws or fangs).