manu

Only one NPC i designed ever had one - since he had oversized arms, he needed the adtional pair to have a normal set of hands - he also packed an heavy exotic mod, bug-like and a scorpion-style combat tail.

Yes he had lots of mental therapy to be soemwhat stable. Worked as bouncer, only called to trash problems when they got out of hand. I never had to actually have it to show up, but it was fun to think out that guy.

I'd sugest you to get a look at GURPS for defaulting skills.

He could, but the benefits would be slim : if the visor has any kind of ilmage tratment on, all you'll see with your cyberyes will be limited to what the visor can display...

Only things useful would be anti-dazzle and HUD-like displays.

Better fit your optics with an I/O port (1 option) to link the to all kind of image treatment gears, put overlay from extral IR/UV/whatever cameras and whatever you can think of.

Quote (Dog Soldier @ Dec. 18 2003,03:45)

I recall  long ago playing some Battletech tabletop campaigns.  My buddy and me decided to field tanks with air support instead of Mechs.  We slaughtered the opposition.  I know thats purely anecdotal but the fact was that the other side deployed and operated on "standard" Mech principles.  Even the use of the most basic military tactical principles got the Mechs wiped out.  There was a lot of bitching about it and then some house rules were written to cripple the combat capability of conventional equipment.  It was justified byt saying "Well,  this is Battletech,  Mechs should have the advantage."  We pointed out that perhaps they should consider other tactics.  That really made 'em mad.  fter that I lost interest in the whole "Giant Robot" genre.  Though I have to admit to having some enthusiasm for Heavy Gear

I never had the opportunity to do it, but I always thought that in Battletech, fielding tanks, infantry and artillery enables one to fieldd far more tons of guns and armor than with Mechs for the same budget.

But for a given weight allocation (what counts when dropping troops from space), well, the mechs gain the upper hand as they pack more armor, gun and mobility. At least in the game, in real life the laws of physic would give them a hard time.

Such a compact system would be good only for a very limited range of operations - machining parts and nothing more - foget about tempering, surface coating and such.

But it will let you produce homogenous machined parts, basic glued or welded assemblies at most.

You won't be able to get things likes springs or ball bearings, unless you provide them first.

About assembling :

A basic drone with a plastic-threaded base and two stripped-down cyberarms should rune in the 5000 Ed range, 3000 if fixed. Tack on it a good caemra (no need for miniaturisation) and software, and for less than 10 000 Ed you can get your perfect assembly guy. Tack a few of those drones and you can assemble almost anything.

The sheer bulk of an autolathe/factory will make it quite difficult to steal - except maybe the smallest ones (just think about today's numerized machine tools - those things are quite bulky). They would rather be bought by (front( companies and resold or leased as the needs arise.

A few remarks :

* with thousands of dismantled nuclear warheads available, plutonium will not be in short supply in 2020. Better switch to some esoteric combinations of rares elements, (just think of the colombanite rush in western Africa - coltan is a source of tantale used in cellphones)

* the heavy documentation involved (maps, vehicles stats and so on) don't mix well the a play-by-forum game.

A 10 millions budgets will mean a light force only - a single SOTA tank (the M-11 from max Metal) will explode it at 16 millions. This means ACPAS, infantry and maybe some older stuff like Leo-2, MA-A1, refurbisheds oldies like T-72, T-80s, M-60, Leo-1 and ANX-30s. Some choppers/AVs too.

That's how I consider the capabilities of an autolathe :

* produce almost any kind of machined part, provided it's not too big (about the size of an engine block) and the dsired matrial is avalaible

* print the circuitry and implantthe chips, connecotrs and other components of an electronic card, provided the parts are available

* do some thermal/surface treatments (basic stuff like quenching, tempering, nitruration, chroming, plastic coating - nothing fnacier)

* do some basic mounting, set ball bearings an such parts (here again, if the right type and size are available)

* weld, bolt or glue part together

Of course you ned to feed the proper datas to get what you want. And complex stuff will require some manual intervention to finish the assembly.

In an urban setting, unless you're sitting on rooftops, the range won't be of much use and the bulk will be a problem.

On social situation a pistol is fine.

In a 'brown stuff flying low' situation, I'd go for a compact bullpup assault riffle with underbarrel shotgun or grenade lancher as a weapon of choice. Not too bulky, powerful and versatile, far better than any SMG. Of course this means you're not concerned with overpenetration and such.

This spinner round is a totally silly stuff - isn't the thing supossed to be a drill-like head that uses the quarrel's momemntum to spin, allegedly hollowing aout anything in it's path

The only time I played a character without some kind of ramor was while evading from some kind of prison camp (happened twice). Tough the armor could be light and almost nevers goes beyond armorjacket and pants (oh, well, when I know the heavy stuff will be flying, common sense says 'wear heavy stuff or run').

I tend toward light grade skinweave and some light armor atop of it, enough to handle pistol rounds without much concern  and survive a hit or two by rifle rounds.

In my opinion, you must distinguish two ratins, Shadowrun style :

Availability, which rates the ease wit hwich you can get the item.

Legality, which measures the troubles you're going to have for possesing/using the item.

They tend to be related, but something totally legal (say a cuting edge techscanner) can probably be hard to get, while something very illegal (say a Ronin assault riffle) could be quite easy to get your hands on.

I wonder how a 'borg could have 7 in empathy, even with massive amounts of therapy - or are you meaning a shomewhat cybered guy rather than a full borg ?

The overall intelligence and education of he guy will influence the result - with above average INT and a good education level, you can expect derogatory coments rather than flat out insults.

Things like "You're equiped for thermal sighting are you ?", "They're only packing SMG's, nobody seriously armored will be hurt", "You're supposed to be a professional, I thought you could handle this" and the like.

A semi-literate idiot, on the other hand, is likely to uqickly delve into basic insults like "nah, you fleshie can't handle that kind of hit"

Some thoughts :

+ valuable antiques have an huge drawback : these things have a nasty tendancy to be recorded (for insurance and such), so they're quite traceable.

* 150 Ed a bottle, wholesale rate means 1 000 Ed a bottle for the consumer. Not the kind of things you find in many bars, especially in the hundreds.  A more common champagne at 150 Ed a botle, bar tab rate, will only sell for something like 15-30 Ed a bottle, bulk sales rate. Fine pay if you're a drunkard, bulky, heavy and fragile otherwise.

* stocks and bonds are nice, there won't usually be enough of them to motivate the corresponding firm to look around who'se having them. But stock market in 2020 is quite a rocky terrain, ups and downs are quick and many. Better convert them to cash quickly.

Several ways I used :

* good ol' cash - works fine for small deals

* electronic cash, namely pre-loaded credit cards

* electronic transfer

Gold is damn heavy, dimaonds takes some knowledge to prevent geting cheated, and stuff like drugs and chips are quick to change price to be reliable.

Electronic money requires some processing fee to launder it and make it as untraceable as possible.

A relatively simple trick would be to ferry cases of banknotes between several caribean banks who happen no to note the banknote's serial number (and keep a few thousands on you just to mess the possible sum of movements).

I am interested - what kind of characters would you need for the second one (fixer, solo, techie, something lese) - no need to be precise, only the general lines will do

The proposed design is an articulated mount, not a full turret, which is lighter and there's no proble with sideway firing. With a modern, lower-recoil and lightweight gun, and with a complete redesign of the spurestructure, something like a rollcage, I think the design gets workable. The service life will probably be relatively short, but as the vehicle is likely to be trashed if anything heavier than machinegun is involved, that should not be a major concern.

Some personnal rules variation I uses :

- all armour are reduced about 1/3 (average skinweave SP 8 instead of 12 and so on). Hard armors reduced less (metalgear dowgraded to sp 20)

- heavy weapons (anything using d10 for damage) halve all indiivdual armor except hard ones (those are milsêc stuff, bulky and obvious)

I also thought about a quick and dirty change to armor layering rules :

thougest armor is at full SP, next one 1/2, third is 1/3, fourth is 1/4 and so on.

So SP 14/10 jacket, SP 12/8 skinweave and SP 18/12 subdermal armor give SP 29/20 instead of 44/30 (first number with canon armors, second the 1/3 reduction)

Note that with my armor reduction a 12.7 sniper averaging 33 damages would inflict 11/18 points to guy. Two hits and he's likely to be down for sure.

Combine with layering and that's 18/23 Ouch, big guns hurt big.

They'd rather use knockout gas renades than flashbangs, who are almos as effective as frag for ruining an office, and a re easier for the security staff to get protected from.

Of course they can go flashbang if the intruders appears to be gas-proofed.

Note : 2020's chemistry can probably design some kind of skin-action knockout gaz. Very nasty stuff to get dosed upon, only envirosealed gear or taking the antidote first will protect. Could be a very nasty surprise for the PCs "I've an internal air storage and don't breath, why do I fall like my comrades..."

From this, Street Samouraï might have evolved two ways :

* the best and more reliable ronins (often corelated, if you betray your employers, odds are you won't live enough to become good)

* a way for the ronins  to downplay the samourai's image 'they're no less dogs than us, they simply eat from one master's hand where we have several'

The problem will be the size of the design : a shotgun slug is quite small, something like 1/100 the volume of grenade. I think a large capacitor to generate a taser effect could be more effective.

There's no direct relation between the blast and the EMP wave - both simply happen to travel the same path since the vase-shaped reflector will coerce the explosion in the same direction as the wave.

But something seems odd : collapsing the powered wire will result in the creation of a magnetic field - which is a thougher beast to direct than microwaves or such.

The EMP bomb uses the explosion to move a magnet into the wire array, creating a very short lived but very powerfull generator to power the emiter part of the design. This two stages system don't appear there.

An example of waveguide would be the reflector of your average maglite, or the reflector of carlights. Of course, the tigther the intended beam, the deeeper the curve will be, until it looks more like a tube than anything else. Another example would be a radar dish, or your average satellite antenna - the antenna proper is the small bit in front of the parabola (reflector, to concentrate the signal)

All you need is a material that is highly reflective of the involved wavelengths - in that case alomst any highly polished metal is likely to performthe trick, maybe even metalized plastic. Fit a microwave-transparent glass in front, fill it up with inert gas to prevent corrosion (you'd better choose a mix that don't catch much enrgy from the beam), and mybe pack some kind of diode to get light out of the stuff so you can get a good idea of what you're aiming at.

note : as long as your diode's face is reflective of microwaves and transparent to visible light, you won't risk burning it.

My personnal feeling is that pregen characters are fine for one-shots or short campaigns (out of experience with game conventions scenarios), but I doubt it wil keep interest in the long run.

I experienced playing with a GM that turned each and every scenario into a show for his über-NPC, and that turned out to be quickly boring : no matter what we did, things always happened the way he wanted them to happen - and even without those peskys NPCs it would quickly have been boring.

This makes me sceptical about the interest of performing hoop-jumping like and obedient dog in the GM's perfect story. I prefer games where the way I'm playing the character can actually make a difference about what's going to happen and the end result. If everything is written down in advance, well, what's the point of playing it ? I'd rather sit down and simply listen to a good story.

About Transhuman Space :

near-future SF (2100), with lots of biotech stuff floating around. You also have the things GURPS sourcebooks ar famed for, with plenty of funny details.

I liked the 'top tens' sections, some small tables displaying the 'top ten' ranking items/epoples in various categories.

I really liked the 'food' entry, especially the smartbeef (meat altered to crawl down your throt so you can't get it in the wrong way - George w. would like it)