Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 040 – Feb 9th

FINALLY! I sell all but five side arms for 2,000 secs. I also get lucky and sell the skimmers for another 1,200.

I have 16 CU of space in the Bay. Time to move on.

Before I move on, I'm going to make a principal only payment, since I already paid the interest this week. 1,000 secs.

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe 116,000 secs. in principle.
1 TL-1 Ship’s Guns.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.
2 CU Status unit in Cockpit and Engineering, 8 1 CU Status units in Crew Quarters and 1 1 CU unit in Gunnery.
10 Fuel Units in the Ship’s Boat.
12 Repair units,
5 Life Support Units in the Ship’s boat.
7 PS-bots, 1 per character,
6 Heavy Hand Weapons for sale, 4 for characters use,
5 Side Arms
13 U-suits, 7 for the crew, 5 for sale and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.

I have 3,631 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.

Starship Deck Plans for Hopper Alternates (Star Smuggler)

I came up with three alternates for Ship's Boats. One is a completely new product, an Orbiter, which takes up 50 CU inside a 60 CU cargo bay. It really not a good choice for the Antelope, but it can be done.

The Orbiter is roughly 25% bigger than a Hopper Ship's Boat. It is able to carry a skimmer. This ship is big enough to provide it's own Life Support just like a Starship. Even though it has enough cargo space for guns, there is no way to mount them due to the wing configuration. It is always unarmed.

The second ship is a regular sized Hopper, but reconfigured for longer trips. It does not provide Life Support, so some cargo will have to be used for that.

The third ship is called an Interceptor, because... well, it's an interceptor. It has integrated guns. They can be upgraded or downgraded, but never removed. It has a dedicated space for Fuel and Life Support Units. These spaces can't be used for other things, just like the gun space.

Each and every one of these ships have the ability to break out of gravity wells. See r214b. The Orbiter must use it's cargo for fuel to escape, while the other two ships can do it with just their fuel tanks. The Orbiter has a max power of 15, the Fast Boat has a rating or 16 and the Interceptor has a rating of 20.

In order to boost to a speed of 20, the Interceptor must purchase external fuel tanks on the planet is is leaving. Each tank holds just enough fuel to break orbit from that planet and are jettisoned on take-off. These tanks can be purchased for standard price 500 each and are available from ground based areas which offer offer Hypercharges (eg. e025). These tanks are extraordinarily dangerous and can only be stored on a planet or on a military vessel, like a carrier. They are never available at space stations.

All three of these items can be purchased or sold from e034 or e035. They can never be found in the Ruins.

Prices are:

Orbiter, e034. 1800 secs. base price. e035 is 2400 secs.
Fast Boat, e034. 1000 secs. base price. e035 is 1500 secs.
Interceptor, e034. 2500 secs. base price. e035 is 5000 secs.

Armor in the Movies and in Games

This week, I had two ideas collide. I finally finished The Mandalorian on Disney+ and received my order of the book, What is Dungeons and Dragons?. The book takes you through the process of how to create for not just Dungeons and Dragons, but many game systems, while the TV show follows the adventures of Baby Yoda and his newly minted father figure, The Mandalorian.

One thing that stands out in the TV show is how armor should work. Mando gets blasted and knocked around, losing bits and pieces all over the place. Like the real world.

Apparently, Mandalorians are the only Star Wars characters with fully functioning armor. I'd like to bring that into my D&D campaign.

In the original Unearthed Arcana book, there are a couple of options for this. First, there is field plate, which acts like hit points and a matching Magic Armor spell which does the same. I use a fusion of B/X and AD&D so this isn't too outside the box.

What I would like to do is create a system where all armor works to reduce damage. AD&D's armor class is nicely suited for this as 10 is a person's street clothes armor class, which is not protective. It stands to reason that I could simply create a table where dividing each minus to AC by 4 reduces damage by one.

AC
10 0/4 is nothing, so No Damage Reduction
9 is -1/4=.25 No Damage Reduction
8 is -2/4=.50 for 1 Point of  Damage Reduction
7 is -3/4=.75 for 1 Point of  Damage Reduction
6 is -4/4=1.00 for 1 Point of Damage Reduction
5 is -5/4=1.25 for 1 Point of Damage Reduction
4 is -6/4=1.50 for 2 Points of Damage Reduction
3 is -7/4=1.75 for 2 Points of Damage Reduction
2 is -8/4=2.00 for 2 Points of Damage Reduction
1 is -9/4=2.25 for 2 Points of Damage Reduction
0 is -10/4=2.50 for 3 Points of Damage Reduction

This table is nice because it naturally places armor in groups: none, minimal, medium and heavy, which is kind of what the game books do anyway. The table requires division and rounding, which is easy enough on the brain to do on the fly or I could simply make an index sized card for quick reference.

What do you think?