wilphe

Style is what builds you a rep.

Substance is what keeps you alive to enjoy it.

Hmm,

      this one percent power out of batteries thing. Has that been a pretty much constant in the history of battery design? Given 30 years of development (given time lines diverged 12 years ago) how much possible improvment could there be.

     I can see what people have to say about the power densitities of ETE weapons and cutting down the shots per battery would seem to resolve this - except that you run up against the 1% thing. As you can see I view ETE as something you use when you need a few BIG hits (holdouts/sniping) so cutting down on shots per battery would not make much odds. Making the battery the size of a car would (wear it as a backpack). Also of course, on a vehicle, power is not a problem.

     I think I have the following tasks:

           a) See if any other 2020 tech requires a power dump of such speed and quantity.

            Compare the energy inputs of various weapons and try and work out what their power requirements would be.

           c) I know water requires a lot of energy to heat up and has a very high latent heat value. There may well be better working fluids availible, but this would do away with the advantages of working with water (its inertness, availibilty and innoccousness(sp)).

        Hmm, this might take a while. Fortunatly I've got some days off coming up.

Damn right. I could not have put it better.

Ok, whilst the Good v Evil debate continues. I will now preach the one, the true, gospel as laid down in R.Tal CP cannon insofar as it relates to religion.

  If you are looking anything that covers it in one place, you are screwed - they've got the stuff all over the place, and some of it disagrees (such as about how dangerous it is to visit Mecca). Largish chunks can be found in:

  "Home of the Brave"'s section on religion covers pages 33-5 with a paragraph or two on most major religions and some new ones. The Elvii can be found on 97-98 (basicaly they worship him as the Messiah).

  "Wildside" 89-91 covers Islam, Voodoo, Buddhism, Satanism, Digital Divinity (The Net is proof of humanities godhood), Realists (The world is one huge VR) and Malists (The world is EVIL).

   "Night City" (62-67) covers an area which has an established Catholic church with mentions of the sort of work they do and the people who man it.

   "When Gravity Fails" is supposed to have a good coverage on Islam, as my e-bay copy has not arrived yet I can't comment.

    As for the Catholics: They have updated after the Vatican III reforms of 2014, I imagine this as being something like the councils of Trent after the Reformation. Conservative liturgy and relatively liberal social views - birth control & married priests. They do have some Swiss solos who protect the churches land and personnel.

PS: For what it is worth I am a Stoic/Cynic cross with Gnostic tendancies.

Ok, for what it's worth and considering that a lot of blood has been spilt over this (the original discussion I found on this topic appears to be missing chunks, maybe it's me.) there now follows an extremly long post.

     Disclaimer: I am not a position to play test any of this.

    Ok back to the basics. How does this actually work?

Essentially you are passing an electric current through a liquid, causing it to ignite and turn into plasma. Not being a physicist I'll take the word of people who choke on thier kibble when reading that. So instead we will just put that down to hype and instead it gets really hot (as in reallllllllllllllllllllly hot). This allows it to work essentially as a souped up steam engine which accelerates the bullet down the barrell gradually (in comparitive terms) - it is that that gives it the reduced recoil.

    As written ETE is something you retrofit onto an existing weapon. It can only use cased ammo, to hold the liquid. It "is only useable with with semi-auto and manual repeater actions (bolt-, lever, pump-action)." Why would this be? Well the actual reason is to avoid making the thing more munchkin than it actually is. However for non-metagame reasons then there are two that I can think of:

        Heat: This thing chucks out a hell of a lot, at ROF 30 the barrell would probably go soft very quickly, this is probably the major problem. If this is true, then one round at ROF 2 or 3 from an ETE weapon would be the same as ROF 30 from a normal one (hence you apply the heating rules from SOF2 - reliabilty drops by one each turn, erp).

         The other problem is that automatic and semi-auto weapons are complex things; depending on the system used you have a lot of springs, buffers and/or gas parts to deal with. These are all finely balanced and tuned for use with a chemical proplellent used at a comparitively low temperature and giving up all its energy fairly quickly. If you  instead use something that's hotter and gives up its energy at a slower rate but over a longer period that is going to have some interesting effects. The gun might not work, the cyclic rate might change, bits might break and bits will almost certainly wear out quicker. You might not get the immediate problems you would get with heat, but even a semi-auto ETE will have problems.

      ETE manual actions should be fairly easy to retro-fit, although your tech may need to strengthen the barrell, bolt etc. (Or they may not, depending on their competence (this is nu-tech after all), or if your enemies have got to them, or they just do not like you.) If you are using a revolver you will have the problem that most revolvers are not made as gas seals and so there are always leaks between the barrell and cylinder. This is why IRL most revolvers cannot be silenced. Having superheated steam/plasma seep out the side varies between disconcerting and dangerous, especially as the gap will erode faster. In a rifle thats not a problem, but the rifling will degrade much faster.

    To get reliable and safe semi-auto ETE would cost a lot more, if it could be done to the gun at all. Remember what I mentioned earlier about barrell heating and also the probable degrading of parts under stresses they were never designed to take.

     What this means is that on existing weapons ETE would appear to best employed on weapons you don't plan on firing a lot. Holdout pistols, sniping weapons where you only have one or two shots at one target, that sort of thing. Now if you build and design something from scratch...

Speculative point A:

       Would it not be possible to combine Liquid Propellent and ETE? You would therefore get the punch of one and the ammo capacity of the later.

Speculative point B:

        A gun that runs on water and electricity would a terrorists dream (chemsniffers will not pick it out). Guerillas/infiltrators would be intersted in a gun that all you needed to supply was bullets - if you could make it reliable. As a last resort, set up solar panel/still combo and you do it in the bush. Ok you might not get a lot of charge, but its better than nothing.

Speculative point C:

        If you could vary the current you could vary the energy output and get something like the Enfield LPA1.

Speculative point D:

        Although you could use any lquid (they say), you would need to vary the current (as above) as they would have different thermal characteristics.

Speculative point E:

        If you want an autofire equivalent a Gatling is probably the way to go, 6 barrells at ROF 4 = 24 (rotation would help cooling)

Speculative point F:

         If you are using water. Would you need to clean the barrell so much? You might get a little bit of a rust problem, but there are no corrosive combustion by-products to deal with.

     That said, here are a couple of speculative designs:

Tsunami Mini-Helix.

      Based on the 10 ga Helix borg gun this is a quad-barell gatling fireing an ETE version of the ammo for the S&W .410 "Tristar", firing a combination of slugs (4d6+3), Triplex 3d6 (each shot is three round burst) and shot 3d6/2d6+1/1d6+2. This already incorporates a heat resistant barrell. Size is similar to the Militech Hi-Power 15.

SHG  0    R   var    90  12  VR   60m    BOD Min: 6 (Unbraced)

Cost: ??

Royal-Enfield LPA-X2 HBAR

        Designed to fire the same bullet as the LPA1, this design incorporates a heavy SAW type barrell so it can fire at its full ROF without penalty, as well as combining ETE and variable liquid propellent tech. Dam is: 2d6+1/4d6/9d6 as standard but can be varied anywhere between 2d6 and 9d6 by varying the voltage. Its tactical role is somewhere between Battle Rifle/Sniping Rifle/Light Cannon. It has a Bipod.

RIF  +1   N   R   var    2x45   1/3    VR   750m   BOD: 3 (braced)

                                          Cost: Your immortal soul.

          Of course, with BIG guns you have more possibilities:

SIT A4 Universal Gun.

   This a high-quality 105mm weapon designed for common use on ships, tanks and as artillery. The savings by having a universal weapon are designed to partially offset its expense. By varying the voltage you can either get high velocity and impact for anti-tank & long range support work, or drop the muzzle velocity to reach over intervening terrain. It can fire just about any 105mm shell, or you use the full energy setting to fire heavier explosive shells a relatively shorter distance. Rumors persist of a rocket assist for post muzzle boost and obscene range.

Direct fire stats for anti-tank:

HVY  +2   15d10ap (Pen 15)  1  2   1500m

Indirect fire Support:

HVY  +2    11d10   1        2   25.5km

It takes up 12 spaces and costs 1Meb.

Arh, my soul is clensed.

I have a phenomenally long list of things to say about ETE, but I will stick it under Armament as a new topic.

Re the "Looking Cool in Shades" thing, is it me or does Colonel Ghadaffi look a lot like Micheal Jackson?

Reminds me of the old Cold War Joke...

    "a tactical nuclear weapon is one that lands on Germany."

   Seriously although the US has considered using  A bombs since Nagaski, they never actually have. Indeed Truman sacked MacAurthur (sp?) for wanting to do so. There were other reasons as well, such as he was behaving like a total a**hole. "If I can't invade China I'll sulk", but it was contributory factor. They also told the French to get lost when they begged for some in Indochina during the Dien Bein Phu fiasco.

 Where was I going with this?

 Oh yeah, stick along you might get some game material.

   Evil dictators do not care how many of their own people die, that is why they are evil dictators, hence the nukes or any other WMD are not particularly deterring. They are too busy growing facial hair (Saddamm), enagaging in ego gratification (that Kim Kim Kim guy) or maxing  out their "Look Cool in Shades" skill (Ghaddaffi) to give a rats a** about their people. North Korea would be starving without the food aid it gets and Saddamm would rather spend his oil money on anything rather than the medicine for his own people, "Dying children? Cool. I can blame the West."

   I did have an idea for a script/campaign background in which this was realized and instead deterrence worked by having plans for the assassination of the elite military and political figures of an enemy nation. The agents would mostly be deep sleepers activated by coded messages or the Net. The hook would come when this communication system was compromized and the agents started offing people left, right and centre and because they were so deep under cover it was practically impossible to stop them.

And they would care because?

They don't need us.

Admittedly if 9/11 had happened in London, Tokyo or Frankfurt the US would not have reacted half as much as they did (I can see myself being flamed for that). No, they would just be sitting complacently & contentedly on their arses, say "God how horrible" and carry on.

    And I would not blame them, it is not as if the British have never done it.

    Enoch Powell once said that British foreign policy consisted of doing what the Americans wanted before they knew they needed it done. Now we may not like this, but it is better than being the French - who can't seem to bring themselves to the realization that they are a second rate power and thus play spoiler.

         This does also mean that I can emphathize with that faction of Arab opinion which is upset that the successor states to the greatest empire of its time should be minor clients of an overseas power.

Thjs is probably a dead thread now, but:

      There is an alternate Drugs system in "Dark Metropolis" one of the licensed Alternate Reality Universe sourcebooks from Ianus Games. Never having seen drugs used much in campaign terms - the only occassion was when I deliberatly went out of my way to build a PC who was designed to be practically unkillable and who had an autoinjector with those medical drugs from Chrome 3.

     Anyway I digress, the Ultimate Weapon system STR 3 Drug of Inifinity Side Effects works out under that system as Diff 30 to make and .5eb mass produced.

     Even the most expensive drugs are 100 eb (or 50 eb in bulk) and are pretty damn good, and the most difficult to make are Diff 35.

      Your chances of getting a copy are remote to slim however as it is out of print.

I haven't forgotten about them, I just happen to think that they are c*k, that's all.

       It seems counterintuitive that my SP10 T-shirt will give me 3 extra SP is I put it under and SP14 armour jack, but only one if I wear it under metal gear. What the frack is that all about? Does it have any basis in reality whatsoever? All it is is a quick and dirty R-Tal fix.

       I'm prepared to admit that two 1mm thick sheets of Kevlar might not exactly the same as one 2mm thick sheet, but I doubt the difference will amount to much. In some situations you might gain - I believe some tanks employ spaced armour for better protection from certain rounds (I think HESH and HEAT) and yes there are small arms that work that way in CP. In other situations you might lose out, whether the difference means squat in game terms.

       If anybody (Hanns maybe?) has any experience of armour layering I'd be interested to hear their take on it.

There's something wrong with being prepared? And isn't this the same information Congress gets every year? And do you think Tony Blair is going to tell the world where his Trident SLBMs are planned to strike? Or Chirac? Try asking Putin what he's planning to do with his (if he knows where they all are.)

     It is not uncommon for nations even to plan for war even with unlikely opponents (eg: US Navy plan Red of the 30's for war with the British Empire.)

      Americans come across as arrogant @;@;***, they do however have a lot to be arrogant about and I'm not particuly suprised if they haven't got a lot of time for Europeans who:

        a) Have been freeriding on defence for years.

        Are incapable of making a decision, and when they do its on the basis of "Well its a Frenchman's turn to have the job, because we had a German guy last time."

       I am not the US's greatest fan, particularly the "We are in favour of democracy and free elections, unless you freely and democratically elect a communist or Islamicist in which case you are obviously not ready for democracy and the CIA will back a coup." (Chile anybody?). However, we (British) do not run the world any more and I'd rather the US was in charge than the Russians or the Chinese.

26 going on 62.

Hmmh, Ok.

       halving soft armour SP is not so much a realism thing (as I hope the math demonstrated it will stop normal pistol rounds but not AP), I'm also trying to get away from the:

     15mm BMG bounces off PCs chest without them even noticing, 6mm to head kills instantly (Ok I'm exaggerating but not much) which is emotionally disatisfying and combat turns into a "who gets a head shot first" contest.

Apologies for my punctuation.

I've been looking for an excuse to bounce this off some people so here it goes...

    I think people may be approaching the armour/guns situtation from the wrong direction, arguably it would be better to make armour weaker rather than guns better (or bigger - which is what people really seem to like to do).

    As an idea halve the SP of any soft armour, including skinweave. I will now numbercrunch and look at the implications of that under the rules in Chrome 4, using torso/arm armour.

   The maximum you can get under straight rules before getting EV penalties is:

      Skinweave:        SP10 (without risk of ATT loss)

      One light layer:   SP12

      One heavy layer: SP18

 Total: SP 40 (sure you may look armoured, but you ain't suffering any EV - frack MetalGear comes in at on SP25 (35 w/skinweave) and thats EV2!). Take a booster with an FN-RAL with AP, average damage will be 23 points, 3 will get through, half that and subtract BTM - 1 point on an average roll. If he gets lucky ands gets six fives or better (or equivalent), he will do 32-20 = 12. 12 halved is 6, subtract a BTM of 3. 3 points of damage.

    If you half the SP, that armour becomes SP20. No ordinary pistol round below 12mm stands a chance of penetrating - which should probably pass a reality check. 9x19 parabellum will not penetrate NATO combat body armour (2.5kg of Kevalr) at any range.

        However if you pack AP then 11mm will penetrate exactly half the time (average roll 10.5) and 9mm 1/6 of the time. Damage halving and BTM will still bring it down to one point though, but a medium SMG is no longer something to be discounted.

      Your booster friend with the FN-RAL doesn't need to shell out the dinero for AP any more as on an average roll of 23 he will get three points through, if he gets his 6 fives equivalent then 12 points get through - BTM íthatí chooba.

    There are probably better ways to do this and my apologies if someone else has already suggested it but this way you do not have to re-write everything and any idiot can divide by 2.

  As for the SMGs doing more damage than pistols thing, I have finally found a use for those arcane tables in Edge of the Sword:

                               Barrell length: (cm) Muzzle energy: (J)

Pistols:  FN - Hi Power           11.8                    500

           Glock 17                  11.4                    500

SMGS:   H&K MP5                  22.5                    637

           Sterling L2A3            19.8                    606

           Colt 9mm                  26.7                   625

           AUG                         42                      445

           UZI                         26                       637

           Micro UZI                 11.4                    488

and for .45s

Pistols:   M1911A                   12.8                    502

            S&W 645                  12.7                   500

SMGs:    Ingram M10              14.6                    533

            M3AI                      20.3                    583

         You may well have a point, although the situation is not clear cut (look at the AUG) and is it worth it? Also bear in mind that it's not the bullet's energy thats important, its how much it dumps in the target.

Oh yeah, I've got some pictures of those but no scanner, so its a bit pointless mentioning the fact, ummh, sorry.

You know, there I was, looking through some of my old books and I happen to go past L, and there after Lewis and before Lignose I pass by the Liberator; and looking at it a new light I think, "You know, that's kind of like a very early polymer one shot."

   In case anybody is not up on obscure WWII weapons here is its resume:

 It was intended to be dropped over enemy controlled areas in the hope of discomfiting Axis occupiers. You got the pistol, ten rounds and a set of comic strip instructions. It was a single shot .45 calibre pistol stamped out of metal. To reload it you first had to poke the spent case out with a twig (not included).

  There was a 9mm varient called the Deer Gun intended for Vietnam, but it was never isuued.

  Now with a generally more armed populace why anyone would want to make something like this for distribution, let alone for profit I'm not sure. Perhaps even at 35eb a Kang TaoType 97 or Fashion Gun 9 is too much for some people, or perhaps some anarchist group wants to cause trouble and makes up a load, or some corporate group wants to do the same. It might even be the maximum firepower civilians can own (nowhere in 2020 cannon I can think of) - One shot is enough to deter, but it is hard to go on a killing spree with one.

   Here's it stats for the traditional version, new ones would be in whatever calibres you like - probably the ones most used in the areas it's distibuted, but not necessarily (its designed to be used to get something better).

   P   0   P  E   2d6+2*  1  1 VR   20M

        *Or whatever Ortillery damages .45s do in your game.

    Availibiity is E, if the things exist at all you can always find somone eager to sell it - next to no one carries this if they can afford it.

    Reliability is VR - there is nothing on it to go wrong. If however anything does, assume it is broken permently. (Like you would pay someone to fix one of these?)

    Cost is variable. If people pay money for them, 10-20 eb sounds right, most of the time though you just find them.

  As I say next to no one would carry one out of choice. The polymer one shots proper look cooler and have better marketing.

(pause while I hump out my old Car Wars supplements)

Ok,

   amongst the more interesting/wierd stuff:

 Ice Droppers

 Flaming Oil Jets

 Incendiary Tyre Spikes

 Amoured Beer Fridge (Brought to you be Second Chance

                        Damage Sinks Inc - great for Beer, Smash, Body Parts etc)

 Kamibombs.

 No Paint Windshield (No idea how that worked but a cool idea)

 Rocket Boosters.

Any of those sound worthwhile?

In a world where the world and his wife are wearing Kevlar, the standard infantryman is armoured to SP14 at least and with full borgs and ACPA are around, who thought it was a good idea to arm the US Infantryman with something that does 4d6? There are SMGs that do better than that.

        I am curious to know if anybody's character carrys one of these or has it on their wish list.

Hi,

  having been away too long I'm looking for a game, I'm Reading based, do not mind travelling too much (West London, Oxford, Swindon, Basingstoke would be about my limits) but can only make Tuesday or Wednesday nights.

THNX

Part II of the ASCII molecular models response on the thread which while not actually pertaining to the topic in hand still seems to have a few people interested.

  Having I hope established that getting obtaining ethanol out of CHOOH2 is  not a simple task, how then would you go about it?   Well, if it takes bio-engineered yeasts to make it, that would suggest that you would a tailored enzyme or bacteria to break it down. Probably not too difficult (by 2020 standards), but not the sort of tech you can buy off the shelf.

    Another problem is what you might get as by-products. An alcohol consists of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.CHOOH2, as a complex one almost certainly contains many more Carbon and Hydrogen atoms than oxygen. You will almost certainly be left with Carbon and Hydrogen left over, these will be in the form of gases such as methane CH4, ethane C2H6, ethene C2H4 and propane C3H8, all of these are flamable so if you don't vent them properly....KABOOM.

        So it is theoretically possible, the question is why anyone would bother something the difficult, dangerous and expensive way when people have been doing it the easy way for centuries, nay millenia, the chemistry is well understood and you don't have to deal with any by-product more toxic than carbon dioxide. A bathtub of kibble based moonshine is amusing (would you get a different flavour if you used beef rather than chicken?), a bathtub full of CHOOH2 is, well, dangerous.

          You might have some Night City University post-grads doing it out of perverse ingenuity, the average bunch of boosters would end up posioning or immolating themselves.

In conclusion:

  I BURN CHOOH2, CHOOH2 IS GOD'S FUEL.

Ok, we are at least at the point where no one is proposing drinking it sraight from the pump. (I HATE emoticons). I am now going to argue organic chemistry with people.

   There is alcohol and then there is ethanol. In everyday useage they are synonomus as ethanol is the only alcohol most people come into contact with. Ethanol is one that alcohlic drinks contain...

              H     O=H                    C- Carbon

              |      |                        O-Oxygen

           H-C----C-H                    H- Hydrogen

              |       |

              H       H.

It is the O=H that makes it an alcohol, replace that OH with an H and you get ethane ( a gas.) Similary if you take methane (which is what you get in natural gas and cow farts)

         H

         |       and stick an OH on you get methanol...

      H-C-H

         |                                       O=H

         H                                       |

                                               H-C-H

                                                  |

                                                  H

      CHOOH2 is descibed in the base CP2020 book as a "meta-alcohol" and "complex grain alcohol" (CHOOH2 is a trade name and not a chemical formula).

       As such it probably consists is long carbon chain,

          |  |  |  |  |  |  |

        -C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-

          |  |  |  |  |  | |  |      or maybe a hex

                                                   |  |

                                                   C=C

                                                  /      \

                                                -C      C-

                                                   \\   //

                                                     C-C .

    ASCII is not a moleuclar modellar, you can stick your own choice of H and OH groups on that as you wish, I'm not doing it.

     What all this means is that you cannot "run CHOOH2 through a still to get the alcohol off", CHOOH2 is an alcohol, and all you will get condensed out is CHOOH2 (if you are lucky, if you are unlucky you get to discover first hand that heating up a petrol analogue until it vaporizes is a seriously bad idea. (That is the politest thing I can bring myslef to say about it)).

     To get ethanol you have to break the CHOOH" down chemically, which I will cover when I return from riding...

I haven't seen my copy of CorpBook 3 in about 5 years but I believe it quite explicity states that CHOOH2 is toxic. This is not unreasonable given that it is not a naturally occuring alcohol. It might not even get you drunk. Methalyated spirits is practically neat ethanol with just enough methanol to make drinking it a bad idea and enough colour to warn you off. It will still do very unpleasent things to you.

    This is the sort of thing a group of boosters finds out the hard way every so often. Hmm. If you could persuade some that it was a corporate lie that it was toxic it would be an excellent way to get rid of a gang you didn't like.

Favorite moments? Almost any occasion my character died through my own stupidity. My first character in about the third or second session set the tone for the rest.

      My solo and the groups fixer were scoping out the base of a Civil War poser gang. We hear something behind us, turn around and a load of Unionist troops are pointing rifles at us.

      Me: (adopting Southern accent) You gotta problem boy?

      Other PC: The minute he says that I am running away as fast as possible.

       Round One: I draw my UZI and hose the group. One of them goes down. They shoot and hit, they are using bolt action rilfes with hollow points and hit armour. I stand unhurt. Think. YES I AM INVINCIBLE.

        Round Two: Empty rest of clip. Hollow point rifle round hits me in the head. I can't remeber how much damage I took but it was more than enough.

        Round three: Begin new character concept.

        Funniest thing that ever happened to anybody else was someone who had read SOF2 and the section about carrying a Dai Lung modified to be VR. Decided to be cool and buy two. Only problem was was that EVERY time he tried to use them he got 1s so the things still jammed anyway.