Insomniac Soldiers

My wife is looking at me (at 11:35 am) and asking why I'm not in bed yet. I hate it when my schedule is like this.

My Space Opera Military mini-project goes apace, with my load-outs nearly complete. This little project is doing just what I hoped it would do: motivating me to work on something (for my players) in such a way that will benefit my long-term project, namely to create enemy templates. Already, I'm getting a picture of what a (human) TL 10 fighting force will look like. Now I just need to create some "player" templates for these lesser soldiers (not the be confused with the Soldier, who I should probably rename the Space Marine, since he's even on tvtropes), and those will serve as the prototypes for my NPC soldier stats.

Interesting tidbit: I hate power cells. I don't mind the concept of them, but I hate the fact that your space opera hero has like 50 different gadgets with 50 different power cells that run out at 50 different paces. It's too much to track! So, I've been coming around to the idea of unifying multi-gadgets (such as complete armor systems), and one idea that popped out was a single power-cell pack that powers all the gadgets.

Ultra tech discusses how best to do this, by simply noting all the power-cells and then bundling them all under the next higher power-cell-category. If you have 10 different gadgets all with B/10 hours, for example, you can just have 1 C cell power them for 10 hours. Easy! Until you have an A/1 hour gadget and a 2B/2 day gadget, and so on.

So here's what I did: assume that an AA cell has 1 "power point," an A cell has 10 "power points" and so on. Determine the power/hour ratio for all gadgets (for example, an A/5 hour gadget uses 2 power points per hour), add these all up, and you'll know how much power every gadget uses per hour, and then you simply apply whatever new power cells you want, and determine how long those power cells will last (assuming continuous usage). For my soldiers, I found that all their gadgets used 46 power points per hour, so I replaced all those power cells with 3 C cells (providing 3,000 power points), which gives the soldier 65 hours of power, just shy of 3 days.

Nice, huh? ^_^