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Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

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Fellgar said:
On the other hand battletech jumps drives are literally instant. It just takes time for them to charge up but once it has a charge it can go anywhere in range instantly.

So... uh... kind of broken.
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Actually no. Jumping takes at least 30 seconds to transit. Longer for greater mass being moved and the distance. With a arrival bloom of anomalous heat where a ship will arrive that grows with jump time until the ship actual translate in. A fun factoid with the largest shipjump/warships the heat bloom can appear at the arrival point even before the ship initiates jump.
 
KugelBlitzner said:
How does the battletech armor compares to traveller?
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That's honestly a good question. I do know later tech level Traveller armor, like say Superdense, Bonded Superdense, & Coherent Superdense armor all rely on gravity manipulation and electrical manipulation in order to be created.

For those unfamiliar, Superdense armor is very much like Mass Effect's Silaris armor while Bonded Superdense armor is pretty much a weaker serial numbers filed off copy of the famous Known Space GP hull (in that electricity is used to artificially strengthen inter-atomic bonds). Coherent Superdense is basically Bonded Superdense with a computer controlling the electrical current enhancing the armor, so as to speedily react to any attacks attempting to hit the hull.

I think the current armor in use is Crystaliron armor and that basically relies on metals being forged with perfect crystal structures (sort of like monocrystalline steel IIRC).

I think @cliffc999 would be able to give more specifics. I recall Traveller armor uses specific thicknesses of steel as a comparison for toughness.
 
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Slayer 10321 said:
Mech bias and the Mother Doctrine reared its ugly head.

Plus not even the Star League/Terran Hegemony wanted to shell out the funds to give their infantry anything good to use when said funds could go for more warships/mobile oppression palaces, battlemechs and mega-scale engineering projects.
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I think you're missing the point.

A next gen infantry tech, well, there's basiclly two choices for the Star League. One, mass produce it, use it everywhere, and use "legal" methods to slow everybody else getting them.

Or, as the Star League did with a whole bunch of stuff, never show that you have it in the first place.


So, if you're never going to show it off, then you only use it in the shadows. Then? You design it for that use, and that alone. And, that's what they did.


That's why the Nighthawk, the power armor that the Star League made, is pretty much the best infantry sneak tech in the game, even centuries later, and was pretty much completely unknown, even amongst the Clans.
 
Simonbob said:
That's why the Nighthawk, the power armor that the Star League made, is pretty much the best infantry sneak tech in the game, even centuries later, and was pretty much completely unknown, even amongst the Clans.
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Yeah but frankly, everyone has built better than the Nighthawk by the Jihad->Republic/Dark Age->IlClan eras. As in full battle armors with stealth armor beyond what the Nighthawk used.
 
wellis said:
Yeah but frankly, everyone has built better than the Nighthawk by the Jihad->Republic/Dark Age->IlClan eras. As in full battle armors with stealth armor beyond what the Nighthawk used.
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So, the moment the secret got out, it became something that everybody else came up with their own versions?

I guess the Star League chose the right option for what they wanted, huh?
 
Blade4 said:
Actually no. Jumping takes at least 30 seconds to transit. Longer for greater mass being moved and the distance. With a arrival bloom of anomalous heat where a ship will arrive that grows with jump time until the ship actual translate in. A fun factoid with the largest shipjump/warships the heat bloom can appear at the arrival point even before the ship initiates jump.
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The jump itself is functionally instant, but the jump spin-up cycle is what takes time (and what allows the jump-18+ trick by double-jumping). The HPG permit real-time communication via rapidly cycling what is basically a K-F jump drive a small area (instead of the entire device) while pumping a high-frequency radio wave into it.
 
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Simonbob said:
So, the moment the secret got out, it became something that everybody else came up with their own versions?

I guess the Star League chose the right option for what they wanted, huh?
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I guess? But it's kind of funny how quickly everyone improved upon the Standard Stealth armor the Nighthawk used and just a few years later developed Improved Stealth armor for battle armor. Heck there's an Elemental armor (the Elemental III) with Standard Stealth armor (the same type as the Nighthawk) so the Nighthawk just isnt that special anymore in the modern day of the setting.

I actually like how BattleTech is a setting that actually advanced technologically past its predecessor pre-apoc golden age. You generally don't see that in a lot of fantasy or scifi settings.

Traveller is also great like that since the Third Imperium (a polity several thousand years removed from the Interstellar Wars era) is also 5 tech levels past both the Ziru Sirka (First Imperium) and the Terran Confederation during this period.
 
Prince Chrom said:
Traveler has lasers and they're fairly nasty but to use them requires a battery the size of a back-pack.
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Sophia already created massively better energy storage though, so the Traveler lasers would no longer need such a huge battery as much smaller batteries with greater capacity now exist.
 
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