Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wyvern" data-source="post: 1546311" data-attributes="member: 2374">Good questions.  Here are my initial thoughts on the topic.  I can think of three basic possibilities:1) The vessel automatically overrides the pilot.  (Not much fun for the pilot, especially if you've got an Evil GM.)2) The pilot automatically overrides the vessel.  (Maybe the best solution if you're talking about a computer AI or other intelligent construct, but it doesn't seem realistic in other cases.)3) The pilot must succeed at a contested Will save to override the vessel.  (I don't like this one much myself, but it is an option.)4) The pilot must meet certain conditions in order to pilot the vessel at all, but if he does his control is absolute.  In the case of undead or construct vessels, you might say that only the vessel's "creator" can control it, or that you need a special magic item (like a rod of dragon control).  You could use the latter option with aberrations too.  Perhaps there's a device that allows the pilot to "become one" with a living vessel.  (This is the best option IMO because it allows so many different possibilities.)I don't know what you thought I meant, but when I mentioned percentage adjustments, I was talking about a modifier to the base price of the vessel, not the HD.  It also wouldn't have to be anything complicated like 33%; 10% is easy enough to calculate.  What I had in mind was adding X% to the base price of a vehicle if it needs a fuel supply, and another X% if it needs life support.  A vehicle that doesn't need fuel (because it uses sails instead of engines) or life support (because it's only used in atmosphere) wouldn't bother with these costs.  However, since making that suggestion I've had a better idea about how to handle fuel, which I'll explain in a bit.Good point.  So, any thoughts about how this could be reflected in the rules?I think you may have misunderstood what I meant.  I'm not suggesting that we need a list of different types of engines for different tech levels.  What I meant was that the number of "movement points" you get for one level in the Engines "class" could be determined by the baseline tech level.  At its simplest, you could just say that you get (TL+1) movement points per level of Engines.  (The "+1" is because the scale starts at TL 0: Stone Age.)  The base cost of one level of Engines is a constant regardless of Tech Level, but you could upgrade your engines to a higher TL by paying more, or get a discount by downgrading them to a lower TL.Using this system, you can then calculate a vehicle's speed without needing a table.  First, add up the number of movement points allocated to forward motion ("speed points" hereafter).  For each multiple of the vehicle's total hit dice, it moves 1 square (30 ft).  Therefore, a 40-HD ship with up to 40 speed points would have a maximum speed of 30 ft; with 41-80 speed points, its speed would be 60 ft, and so on.For maneuverability points, each multiple of the vehicle's hit dice above the first improves its manueverability by one class.  So a 40-HD ship would have clumsy manueverability with 40 or fewer mp's; poor maneuverability with 41-80 mp's, etc..On reflection, I don't think there's any need to bother with "lift points" and minumum speed.  It may be more realisitic, but it's not any more fun.  Just say that a vehicle must have Good or better manueverability or a dirigible in order to hover.  (As a side note, I think a dirigible should double the vessel's effective hit dice for the purpose of determining maneuverability.)Incidentally, a side effect of these rules is that you could never exceed the minumum speed of 30 ft using Stone Age engines.  To go faster, you'd need magic (which would use a different formula to calculate speed points) or sails (which I'm presuming are treated as a separate type of component from engines).The same type of rule could be applied to fuel and power as well (you might want to consider making these separate "classes").  For every level of Fuel you add, you gain (TL+1) units of fuel.  The total fuel divided by the hit dice gives the vehicle's range in, say, hundreds of miles.  As with engines, you could pay more to get high-grade fuel with an increased TL.  Power would work on the same principle; the higher the TL, the more units of power you get per level.  In this case, the size of the vessel doesn't matter; the power needs are determined by adding up the power consumption of individual components.  (You could also have special components that allow you to convert fuel to power or vice versa.)Wyvern</blockquote>

Verification