And now for my third "Quickie" in row, though to be fair this is kinda the first one that actually follows the concept of being a small post (the last two started out as small posts but kinda... ballooned out and I was too lazy to come up with new titles for them heh).
In this post I break down each of the communicator types from chapter 3 of Ultra-Tech so you can stat up your custom version of any size and any range. And since you can now have communicators of any size that no longer fit the neat size category progression from the book I also updated the Communicators with Different Ranges rules so they can be used between communicators of arbitrary size.
So open all hailing frequency and follow me after the jump.
This was actually a pretty easy post to do as most things had a nice an neat scaling progression to them (especially compered to logarithmic operations nestled in exponent hell that was figuring out how active sensors worked heh).
At lest it was... until I noticed that the cost for a communicator didn't increase with linearly with their weight. It wasn't even a straight repeating pattern like the SS/R Tables 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10! Well after much banging of my dome against my table when it dawned on me. He worked out the cost of a Tiny communicator first then for the other types he then took the difference in weight between a given communicator and a Tiny one and then rose it by some factor and finally multiplied it by that based cost. This factored turned out to be around 0.7 (the square root of 0.5) and it seems that David just rounded things off heavily to get the nice and neat numbers you see in Ultra-Tech though to help you get closer numbers I tweaked this factor slightly for some communicators. And here I thought that the dice of damage cubed timed $19 he used for Flamers was as odd at it got (sometimes I wonder if he does this stuff on purpose to troll people like me who try to reverse engineer his stuff). Oh and one last thing, I think the prices for the Gravity-Ripple Comm might be off in the book. It kinds messes up the normal progression a bit so they numbers my formula give aren't going to line up but there was no way to match that progression without changing formulas mid way through the progression line and... well yeah. I think it's best to just chalk it up to being a typo.
Ok, enough about that. Now that you can make communicators of any size the rules under Communicators with Different Range on pg. 43 of Ultra-Tech need to be tweaked a bit to work now.
To figure out how far away the a larger communicator an pick up the single of a smaller one use the below formula.
Rs×the square root of (Ul/Us).
Rs is the normal range of the smaller communicator.
Ul is the weight of the larger communicator.
Us is the weight of the smaller communicator.
Example: The crew of a command and control ATV with a 20lbs, 500 mile range TL9 radio communicator is trying to pick the single of a recon unit equipped with 1.5lbs, 37.5 mile range TL9 walkie talkies that is about 150 miles away. The max range the recon unit can be and still be picked up is the 37.5× the square root of (20/1.5) or 137 miles, a 3.7× increase in range. The recon squad is going to have to make a Electronic Operations (Comms) roll to see if they can boost their radios range or they're gonna have to hump a few more miles.
See Ultra-Tech pg. 42-46 for the full rules and details for the different kinds of communicators covered in this article. Also see High-Tech pg 38-39 for additional options.
Also while this is article is geared towards Ultra-Tech communicators, if you need TL8 radios half the range of a TL9 one and replace A cells with XS batteries and B cells with small batteries and C cells with medium batteries and so on.
IR Communicator
Weight: 0.0008×Ur×TL
Ur is the units range in yards.
TL is 1 at TL9, 0.5 at TL10, 0.2 at TL11, and 0.1 at TL12.
Cost: (Uw/0.04)0.69×$20.
Uw is the units weight in pounds
Duration (in hours): (Cs/Ur)×TL
Cs is 0.5 if a AA cell, 5 if a A cell, 50 if a B cell, 500 if a C cell, 5,000 if a D cell, 50,000 if a E cell, and 500,000 if a F cell.
Ur is the units range in yards.
TL is 1 at TL9, 2 at TL10, 5 at TL11, and 10 at TL12.
Laser Communicator
Weight: 0.008×Ur×TL
Ur is the units range in miles.
TL is 1 at TL9, 0.5 at TL10, 0.2 at TL11, and 0.1 at TL12.
Cost: (Uw/0.04)0.65×$100.
Uw is the units weight in pounds
Duration (in hours): (Cs/Ur)×TL.
Cs is 0.5 if a AA cell, 5 if a A cell, 50 if a B cell, 500 if a C cell, 5,000 if a D cell, 50,000 if a E cell, and 500,000 if a F cell.
Ur is the units range in miles.
TL is 1 at TL9, 2 at TL10, 5 at TL11, and 10 at TL12.
Radio Communicator
Weight: 0.04×Ur×TL
Ur is the units range in miles.
TL is 1 at TL9, 0.5 at TL10, 0.2 at TL11, and 0.1 at TL12.
Cost: (Uw/0.04)0.65×$50.
Uw is the units weight in pounds
Duration (in hours): (Cs/Ur)×TL.
Cs is 0.5 if a AA cell, 5 if a A cell, 50 if a B cell, 500 if a C cell, 5,000 if a D cell, 50,000 if a E cell, and 500,000 if a F cell.
Ur is the units range in miles.
TL is 1 at TL9, 2 at TL10, 5 at TL11, and 10 at TL12.
Sonar Communicator
Weight: 0.00007×Ur×TL
Ur is the units range in yards.
TL is 1 at TL9, 2/3rds at TL10, 0.5 at TL11, and 1/3rd at TL12.
Cost: (Uw/0.04)0.7×$40.
Uw is the units weight in pounds
Duration (in hours): (Cs/Ur)×TL.
Cs is 0.5 if a AA cell, 5 if a A cell, 50 if a B cell, 500 if a C cell, 5,000 if a D cell, 50,000 if a E cell, and 500,000 if a F cell.
Ur is the units range in yards.
TL is 1 at TL9, 1.5 at TL10, 2 at TL11, and 3 at TL12.
Gravity-Ripple Communicator
Weight: 0.0004×Ur×TL
Ur is the units range in miles. Note that at TL10^ Gravity-Ripple Communicators have a minimum range of
TL is 10 at TL10^, 1 at TL11^, and is 0.5 at TL12^.
Cost: (Uw/0.04)0.7×$200.
Uw is the units weight in pounds
Duration (in hours): (Cs/Ur)×TL.
Cs is 50 if a AA cell, 500 if a A cell, 5,000 if a B cell, 50,000 if a C cell, 500,000 if a D cell, 5,000,000 if a E cell, and 50,000,000 if a F cell.
Ur is the units range in miles.
TL is 0.01 at TL10^, 1 at TL11^, and is 2 at TL12^.
Neutrino Communicator
Weight: 0.0004×Ur×TL
Ur is the units range in miles. Note that at TL10^ Neutrino Communicators have a minimum range of 100,000 miles.
TL is 10 at TL10^, 1 at TL11^, and is 0.5 at TL12^.
Cost: (Uw/0.04)0.68×$1,000.
Uw is the units weight in pounds
Duration (in hours): (Cs/Ur)×TL.
Cs is 50 if a AA cell, 500 if a A cell, 5,000 if a B cell, 50,000 if a C cell, 500,000 if a D cell, 5,000,000 if a E cell, and 50,000,000 if a F cell.
Ur is the units range in miles.
TL 1 at TL11^, and is 2 at TL12^.
FTL Radio
Weight: 40×Ur×TL
Ur is the units range in parsecs. Note that at TL11^ FTL Radios have a minimum range of 2 parsecs.
TL is 5 at TL11^, and is 1 at TL12^.
Cost: (Uw/0.04)0.64×$10,000.
Uw is the units weight in pounds
Duration (in hours): (Cs/Ur)×TL.
Cs is 0.0005 if a AA cell, 0.005 if a A cell, 0.05 if a B cell, 0.5 if a C cell, 5 if a D cell, 50 if a E cell, and 500 if a F cell.
Ur is the units range in parsecs.
TL 0.2 at TL11^, and is 1 at TL12^.
Neural Communicator
Weight: 0.002×Ur.
Ur is the units range in yards.
Cost: (Uw/0.04)0.65×$2,000.
Uw is the units weight in pounds
Duration (in hours): (Cs/Ur).
Cs is 0.5 if a AA cell, 5 if a A cell, 50 if a B cell, 500 if a C cell, 5,000 if a D cell, 50,000 if a E cell, and 500,000 if a F cell.
Ur is the units range in yards.
No comments:
Post a Comment