TL 10 Dynamic Sportscycle
HP 22
Hand/SR +4/3
HT 11
Move: 20/100
LWt 0.3
Load 0.2
SM 0
Occ 1+1
DR 6
Range 300
Cost: $20k
Locations E2W
This TL 10 Sportscycle uses rechargeable power-cells to get a 3 hour endurance and top speed. It uses dynamic wheel technology for superior grip and it adjusts its aerodynamics to improve handling at high speeds. It can fold into an SM -1 box, 200 lbs in weight. Additionally, it has programmable camouflage (allowing it to change color and pattern on command), an inertial compass, a rugged small computer, a small ladar, a small radio, and a small biometric lock.
Someone lamented the lack of a "Smart cycle" and pointed out the only Ultra-Tech motorcyle we got was the grav-bike, which was useless for a "hard science" campaign. However, I've been having an increasing suspicion that most of the vehicles in Ultra-Tech weren't designed by a "secret sauce" design system that the SJGames freelancers have been hiding from us. Instead, I think Pulver had a underlying ideas and principles and applied them. For example, the Dynamic Car looks like a normal TL 7 Sedan but with energy cells in place of fuel tanks, superior handling, superior materials for the body and a bigger price tag. So, in essence, all I did was take the sportscycle from GURPS Basic and applied the same proportional changes that Pulver had made to the sedan, and then fudged some things to make it look nice and even. I suspect that was the intent of why Pulver made the changes he did to obvious vehicles that we already had, so it was easy to reverse engineer what he did.
If you find yourself stuck and you don't want to mess with a complex vehicle design system, I think it's important to grasp that most of the vehicles in GURPS weren't made with a complex vehicle design system anyway. Just take an existing vehicle and apply some appropriate changes to get the thing you want. The only real benefit of using a complex design system is if you want to design something for which there is no real-world parallel you can easily find. For example, if you want to know what it takes to get an orion pulse drive to near C speeds for interstellar travel, you'll need something like GURPS Spaceships to work that out, unless you're happy noodling around with real, honest-to-god rocket equations.
You are pretty much right about the vehicles in Ultra-Tech, well a lot of things actually. Steve Jackson Games wanted the book to follow the stats in Basic Set as much as possible, at lest early on, so a lot weapons, armor and vehicles were figured from the examples in the book. This was part of the reason that the TL 9 guns kinds sucked a lot. Another side effect of this is some things in the book go off of the Basic Sets rules for increasing power cell endurance as TL goes up rather then the 4x standard the book would adopt for most things. Yeah, if there is one book that needs an rewrite it's Ultra-Tech heh.
ReplyDeleteAlso fun fact, for the most part whenever possible I also base Ultra-Tech vehicles I write up off of real world designs and just adjust them based on lighter materials that would be used, increased Horse power, better drag coefficients and so on. For example the F-227 Skyfire was 90% just an F-22 Raptor with it's frame weight reduced by about 20% do to the use of advanced composites and resin reinforced reflex used on high stress areas. The only things I really ran through a design system was it's engines and it's senor systems.In general, if you have real world date use it!
As a general rule of thumb, weight goes down following the SS/R table. +1TL reduces weight by two thirds, +2 TL halves weights, +3 TL thirds the weight. Acceleration also goes up by a similar standard. A TL9 car with have 1.5 times the acceleration, a TL 10 would have twice the acceleration of a TL 9 one (probably do to going fully electric, given how things are going IRL atm I would be tempted to make the TL 9 car all electric and give it an acceleration of 4 and a top speed of 65. The TL 10 car would stay the same), and a TL 11 car would probably have 3 times the acceleration of the TL 9 one (or twice if you go by my suggestion to bump the TL9 one) to 3/65. Speed would be roughly (future cars acceleration/2)^(1/3)*50.