David replied to me: > > The drawback is that only the color text can tell bioships from > > metal and composite ones. > > That's not a disadvantage! That's the Generic and Universal bits of the > name. > If the two things have the same results, the only thing that should be > different is color > text.
Hello David, you're right when it comes to different explanations/technobabble for exactly the same effect. It shouldn't matter if the stardrive uses "subspace field theory", "telekinesis" or plain "magic", if the game mechanics are the same. I would expect some game mechanics differences between bioships and dead steel technology: * A living, fundamentally healthy bioship should be able to regenerate minor damage or wear and tear. * On the other hand, a bioship should be less resistant to gross physical damage (bone is weaker than steel), and damage may snowball until it dies if major organs are hurt. A steel hull might be salvaged and fitted with new power plants or computer systems. * A bioship cannot shut down completely and go into mothballs. I've recently written some TL15 vehicles which were hybrid robotic and crewed craft -- they had robot brains, but also controls and maintenance access space like a regular ship. Perhaps the bioships could be written as a genuine robot craft, i.e. without maneuver controls and access space. That would turn the crew into passengers and landing parties, but the ship command and control runs through orders to the robot brain. The implicit assumption is that humans don't do routine maintenance, and that major repairs cannot be done from inside the ship. Of course the maintenance man-hours have to come from somewhere, so perhaps there are lots and lots of cyberswarm hives to get "ship-sized blood cells" for self-repair. A result would be to make the machinery denser, i.e. allow more weight of engines for a given hull size. On the other hand, the armor will be less dense, so it becomes attractive to use more force screens and less hull DR. Perhaps it is possible to get the performance of a TL15 steel ship out of a TL14 bioship. I'll have to try that out. Increasing force screen DR means increasing FSR, so as a side effect it becomes less necessary to have a box or sphere hull, instead I can afford wings, pods, spines, etc. Does that sound logical? Regards, Onnoa _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
