Subj:	TRAVELLER digest 317
Date:	95-06-14 21:57:43 EDT
From:	traveller@mpgn.com
To:	traveller@mpgn.com

From:	traveller@mpgn.com
Sender:	traveller@mpgn.com
Reply-to:	traveller@mpgn.com
To:	traveller@mpgn.com (Multiple recipients of list)
			    TRAVELLER Digest 317

Topics covered in this issue include:

  1) Vampire Ships/Robotics
	by Wesley.Esser@hd62.haledorr.com
  2) Re: Full Cyborgs
	by "Brendan O'Donovan" <Brendan@odonovan.demon.co.uk>
  3) Big guns question...
	by merrick@Rt66.com (Merrick Burkhardt)
  4) Cyborgs
	by Christopher_Griffen@dmcwave.com (Christopher Griffen)
  5) GDW: Help with Robot rules
	by "David A. Nelson" <34TYHPE@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 01:58:04 -0400
From: Wesley.Esser@hd62.haledorr.com
To: Rob Miracle <traveller@MPGN.COM>
Subject: Vampire Ships/Robotics
Message-ID: <"542*/G=Wesley/S=Esser/OU=hd62/O=hale and
dorr/PRMD=haledorr/ADMD=mci/C=US/"@MHS>







David Nelson writes:
>   " The strength of the arm is the total volume in liters devoted to power.
>When determining the STR attribute of the robot, round this value to the
>nearest whole number (but never less than 1)."
>     I may answer my own question here, but let's say your robot has an arm
>whose total volume is 0.25 kiloliters or 250 liters. 40% of the arm is
>devoted to articulation (or 100 liters). This leaves 150 devoted to STR.
>Is this the robot's STR, 150? Or is this supposed to be dvided by 10, thus
>giving our robot a STR of 15? Or is it based on the percentage devoted to
>STR, giving our robot a STR of 6? I beleive the STR would be 15. Thus, I
>think something has been left out.

You have it exactly right.  Of you look at Book 8: Robots, you will find that
100 kl=a standard humanoform robot.  Arms are 10 kl each, which would give
general stats of say, agility 5 (50% devoted to agility) and strength 5 (5 kl
remaining).  The one thing that the Vampire Ship Robot rules do is create 
**HUGE** robots - and it is not unbelievable that huge robots would be
very strong.  

Also: with regards to humanoid robots that look like a human - I would follow
the pattern in the cypebernetics section of FF&S, where "slick" versions
of the main body components are available by TL12.  Take the 1 TL advantage
that all of the Cybernetics components have when applied to robots, and I
would
say you could build a human-looking robot at TL11.  The components would all 
cost the full FF&S price (no discount for higher TL than introduction level)
and would only be moderately capable of fooling another human - that would
depend
on the final TL of the robot, and the sophistocation of the brain.  If you
think
this is not enough of a cost penalty, you could assign a blanket price mod
for all robotic (non-slick) components, such as the chassis and the
arms/legs,
anywhere from x2 to x10 might be appropriate.

I have to say, I think that the Vampire Ship design rules are about the 
clearest rules that GDW has come up with in a while - the only major
departure
from FF&S is the robot brain, and that is the easiest part to understand
(unlike
book 8).  The only challenge is producing the small robots that (IMHO) would
be the most common.

My one major question though is about the Pattern Recognition and Voice
Recognition Skills.  Does a robot have to have these to see and hear, 
respectively?  It seems like these would be part of the basic eye/ear 
hardware, but it's not clear.  Also..why would a neural(data) jack be 
so expensive for a robot?  I would think that it would be about as costly 
and rare and add on for a robot as a serial port is on a pc.

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 05:51:20 GMT
From: "Brendan O'Donovan" <Brendan@odonovan.demon.co.uk>
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Re: Full Cyborgs
Message-ID: <36@odonovan.demon.co.uk>

I haven't seen Vampire fleets, but:
>  But I think full cyborgs would be very popular. av50 walking tank 
> carrying a Crunch Gun and he would cost a fraction of what a comparable 

Very popular with army generals, probably less fun for the guy trying to have
a 
normal social life with an anti armour rifle built into his shoulder. Perhaps

you could use an interchangeable brain case, so that when the cyborg was off 
duty he could 'wear' a more anthropomorphic body.

> humans(in the long run only), and he could eat food instead of 
> electricity(small fusion reactor or fuel cell) simplifing supply.

Food could supply the small amount of nutrients needed, but maybe you could 
extract enough hydrogen from the food as well, to power a fusion plant (sorry
if 
thats what you meant). Cyborg troops might need deuterium enriched food, in 
which case it would be easier to fuel them normally, but if they had some 
inbuilt fuel purification, then they could live off the land in longer
military 
campaigns.

> woulden't have to pay for the robot brain. Wich is _expensive_ and 
> _extremeley_ hard to produce. Hence it would be better at lower tech
levels.

Is this in the Vampire Fleets rules? Brain transplants and full neural 
interfacing sounds fairly difficult and expensive. There could be some 
interesting moral issues with this. If a soldier gets shot up badly, do you 
even try to regenerate his body, or just put the brain in a new body, 
incidentally providing a much better soldier for your army. Some cyborg 
characters could have quite chip on their shoulder, if this happened to them 
withou their permission.
 
> just a thought.... I would like one.... Maybe Loren could 
> contribute(always wanted to work for GDW ;) )
me too ;)
> --
> bri
> 

-- 
Brendan O'Donovan


------------------------------

Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 08:39:51 -0600 (MDT)
From: merrick@Rt66.com (Merrick Burkhardt)
To: traveller@MPGN.COM (traveller)
Subject: Big guns question...
Message-ID: <9506141439.AA15436@Rt66.com>


Just a quick question...

I was looking at spinal and parallel MG and PAW mounts in FFS, and it got me 
thinking.  How many targets can a ship deal with with its spinal and parallel
(or radial in a spherical hull) mounts since they would have only a limited
pointing ability (outside of moving the whole ship)?

I always assumed that bays were just *big* turrets (as they were in AHL), but
they don't include enough room for pointing bay sized PAWs/MGs, and even if
they did, the surface area should be more like length*dia. than Pi*r^2.  If
bays
made a little more sense, and you could only point fixed mounts at so many 
targets, you'd have a reason to make bay weapons---which aside from missiles
and super lasers have no usefulness (bogan-bays as well, vs. smaller ships).

The easiest thing would be to standardize the socket size for each bay (dia.
+
some depth) that doesn't use the whole volume, and allow the weapon to sit
"above decks" as a naval turret would these days.  As for number of targets
to be engaged, I was thinking of something like this:

1.A ship can engage a number of targets with spinal and parallel mounts equal
to
the number of gturns *not* spent (out of its max g) on maneuver or evasion
with
the following modifiers.

	a. -1 target for each rate of fire DiffMod above -1 (high ROFs would
	require the *ship* to point at a given target for a longer period of
	time).

	b. +1 target for each gturn spent on "tracking" targets (the ship uses
	gturns to rapidly move the ship from target to target (if the targets
	are through more than 1 hexside, then all passive detection attempts get
	a -1 DM (it's spinning around a lot)).

2.Bay weapons have no such restrictions if they are trainable (for simplicity
I
would just say "bays are trainable", but why not say "my 100m PAW parallel
mount
is really a big bay"?).

Maybe a weapon can't be trainable unless it is less than some arbitrary % of
ship displacement (1% of displacement, or 100 tons whichever is higher?).

Any ideas out there?  (it'd be cool, because it will require ships to
sacrifice
weapon range/performance to be able to deal with multiple targets--making
tactics more important than range 10 big guns if there are enough targets).

-merrick


------------------------------

Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 08:04:02 -0700
From: Christopher_Griffen@dmcwave.com (Christopher Griffen)
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: Cyborgs
Message-ID: <fdefa7a0@MailXFER.DMCWAVE.COM>

     bri wrote:
     
     >>But I think full cyborgs would be very popular. av50 walking tank 
     carrying a Crunch Gun and he would cost a fraction of what a 
     comparable 
     combat abilitie would cost from Robots, Vehicles, Or highley trained 
     humans(in the long run only), and he could eat food instead of 
     electricity(small fusion reactor or fuel cell) simplifing supply.
      The bonus would be you'd be getting a _much_ smarter combat unit, 
     with 
     the abilitie to adapt(if you don't wanna use a virus robot) and you 
     woulden't have to pay for the robot brain. Wich is _expensive_ and 
     _extreemley_ hard to produce.<<
     
     In my current merc campaign, I think my plan is to slowly transform 
     their PCs into cyborgs.  I've already managed to blind the CO and make 
     him purchase TL-13 soft cybereyes on Deneb.
     
     By the time they've completed a dozen tickets or so, I'm sure they'll 
     all be setting off metal detectors.
     
     --Chris

------------------------------

Date:         Wed, 14 Jun 95 14:34:35 EDT
From: "David A. Nelson" <34TYHPE@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>
To: traveller@MPGN.COM
Subject: GDW: Help with Robot rules
Message-ID:   <950614.144310.EDT.34TYHPE@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>

To GDW:
   Did you build the robots given in VAMPIRE SHIPS with the system given?
If so, what is the cubic meter volume of the PR-317? In trying to build this
robot, I assumed a volume of 0.25 kl (larger than a human being, who would be
about 0.1 kl). In trying to design a power plant for this robot using FF&S,
I and others here come up with a robot requiring 23 kl of TL 12 storage
batteries, which obviously will not fit. Is it just me (entirely possible) or
are robots in the Traveller universe MUCH larger than humans? Is it as tough
as it looks to build a human-sized robot? I noticed a complete lack of rules
for building robots that can impersonate humans-maybe because it can't be
done. Can we see a summary of the design of the LSP PR-317? I would find this
tremendously useful in figuring out how to use these rules. Thank you.

------------------------------

End of TRAVELLER Digest 317
***************************


----------------------- Headers --------------------------------
From traveller@mpgn.com Wed Jun 14 21:57:03 1995
Received: from Ambassador.MPGN.COM by emin05.mail.aol.com with ESMTP
	(1.37.109.11/16.2) id AA094721423; Wed, 14 Jun 1995 21:57:03 -0400
Return-Path: <traveller@mpgn.com>
Received: from  (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by Ambassador.MPGN.COM (8.6.9/8.6.9)
with SMTP id VAA23503; Wed, 14 Jun 1995 21:45:46 -0400
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 21:45:46 -0400
Message-Id: <199506150145.VAA23503@Ambassador.MPGN.COM>
Errors-To: traveller-request@mpgn.com
Reply-To: traveller@mpgn.com
Originator: traveller@mpgn.com
Sender: traveller@mpgn.com
Precedence: bulk
From: traveller@mpgn.com
To: Multiple recipients of list <traveller@mpgn.com>
Subject: TRAVELLER digest 317
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
X-Comment: Traveller Mailing List

