Yep, that could work too.
Basically, sub-surface and geo-thermal will be the GM making up an efficiency and swag based on your rolls.
All the other stuff, surface wave induction, solar panel, solar tower, hydroelectric, are all heavily documented (KwH's per solar panel is all over the internet, the Hoover Damn's wikia entry shows it produces 4 billion KwH's per year (!!!!), and so on). But the theoretical stuff will have to come down to a SWAG on the GM's part. I have no trouble with that of course, just letting you know.
And yes, the silicic acids and water should produce everything you need except the carbon, but there's a ton of C02 in the ocean as well, so that works as well.
Basically, it comes down to where you want spend your experience points you just earned. Some of you have more to spend than others (since some of you speak English and some don't).
Sorry, let me rephrase that. Red might not realize he's an autobot, in that he slept through most of the war. Once he finds out about the war, and that the Prime is the leader of the Autobots, he'd likely put on an Autobot symbol. No problem with that. Just meant that as a city speaker who slept through most of the war, he's not a war weary autobot veteran, and hasn't actually joined up officially is what I meant.
Does that make sense?
No, I got what you meant. I was saying that the very first Autobot Redshift encountered (or any other mechanical who was able to give him a reasonably accurate run-down of the war), would have immediately sealed his decision.
"The Prime is an Autobot? Right. That's settled."
the sweeps are listed as "cannon fodder"! cackle!
I remember seeing this back when he posted it, and thinking that he had done some DEEP digging if he went so far as to include Dion (though he needs to update his bit about the Dion fan theory, since Hasbro put that to bed definitively with "Dion was never rebuilt into another robot").
And yeah, the Sweeps truly are cannon fodder, but not as much as Cyclonus' Unicron-granted "Armada."
Which didn't even make it out of the movie. Sweeps for days, but no clones for poor old Cyclonus.
And then Tranfsormer's Prime introduced the Decepticon Drones, which were supposedly not real Decepticons, except when they were (when Ratchet went power mad on bad Synth Energon).
Apparently they were not real enough to worry about blasting them to scrap 20 times an episode, but were real enough to not use a blowtorch on the noncombat drone model's face.
Hasbro, they name is not internal consistency. :P
Ok,
So, sounds like the general consensus (although we're waiting to hear back from some) is to prioritize the energon issue first, probably with a wave generator device, and then the ships computer, followed by sensors.
Modifying the ship to use a wave induction system will allow it refill it's energon reserve completely in 12 hours, so long as it doesn't move while recharging. On the bright side, you got some points back, so were able to fix more of the energon tanks while working on it.
Energon Reserve : 120 Points (Ship Scale), Recovery 10 / hour, requires 20 minutes to start, bulky OAF focus (ship at half DCV while recovering).
On another note, I found a bug in the original design, the drive systems didn't require energon depletion. That's been corrected, flight in the ship costs 4 endurance per hour of operation now, regardless of what flight mode you're in (that is, swimming around in the ocean at 190 KPH uses as much energon per hour as hammering through the solar system at 1.5 million KPH uses as much per hour as nearly going superluminal at .95C). You should avoid going near the speed of light, as you'll experience temporal displacement doing so (travelling at the speed of light or near it for 1 year might only seem to take an hour or so, but a year will pass to everyone else).
The advantage of this is that my blunder freed up 20 points for you to repair your computer. Since the computer can have some disadvantages as well, this probably means you can build a 40 point computer. Every point someone is willing to add to that increases the active points of the computer by 5.
I also have some costs for getting the sensors back on line :
Radio Transmit/receive : 2 character points
Energy Sensors (Passive, 235 km range) : 12 character points
Mass Sensors (Active, 235 km range) : 12 character points
The base perception roll will be 9 or less, so you might want to consider increasing the ship's base perception roll from 9- to something more. Every +3 perception is 2 character points (roughly).
Do you want me to stat up a basic computer using the 20 points (plus any disads) you saved for it (4 character points)? If so, do you want a dumb system or a smart system (IE: Non-AI vs AI)?
cool. So I think you said a basic english language package is 3 points, so if I take that, I can throw the other 2 at the ship.
I like the idea of a ship AI, but we may have to start dumb and work up to AI as we go.
There's a lot of indications throughout all the various shows and cartoons that even the lowliest of machines on Cybertron are in some way self-aware. Nothing's "just" a dumb machine. We could spend a lot of time restoring the ship to its former self, as it were.
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just using the word in more of the "Not as up to snuff" level. Honestly I always felt like there were times when Teletran-1 was Sherlock Holmes and times when it was a talking calculator
A very loquacious calculator. Also voiced by Kasey Kasem.
On an Energon note, I'm still trying to figure out how it was that the Decepticons were able to get massively explosive Energon potential out of a bunch of rubies.
If that's a thing, all we really need to do is find an undersea vein of gemstones and we're set for life.
I think someone got Rubies confused with Piezoelectric Crystals.
On board for donating 1 XP (or more!) for a computer for the ship.
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I like the idea of the wave generator to power up our Energon reserves.
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Sorry for the delay again, this week post Monday should be quicker responses from me as I am just about back to normal and work should finally settle in post Monday. The 4th I may be silent though as I have my daughter that day and I'll be out at Fireworks somewhere...
I think someone got Rubies confused with Piezoelectric Crystals.
Have you read the Transformers Wiki Page on the rubies?
It makes some good cases for why you shouldn't wear them as jewelry, and it's not because of the conditions the miners deal with.
Yes I have,
I meant, I think the writers of the show got rubies and piezoelectric crystals confused, because they just thought 'pressure makes electricity in crystals, where are crystals, oh, burmese rubies, my wife wanted those, they should blow up, then I don't have to buy any' and it made it into the show. This was back before wiki or anything, so they probably went to a college, asked some professor about natural sources of energy, and were told about piezoelectric crystals and in their pointy little heads, that was rubies.
I'd heard something about how the writers just knew that you could use rubies in lasers, and didn't realize that the rubies were focusing elements and not actually power sources.
But your idea also makes a ton of sense, as well. I just remember as a kid going "Wait..."
Could be both, or it could just be poor quality control at Marvel. :P Not like that hasn't happened before! LOL
considering they also had some BS thing about tapping into the earth's core and it causing the earth to freeze, I don't think accurate or even plausible science was their goal
At least their science was ridiculous and comic-book, unlike the crap explanation for how entropy works in Puella Magica Madoka.
Don't eeeeeeven get me started.
And hey, Eventually, they put Cybertron in a stable orbit between Earth and Mars, which, you know, would destroy all life as we know it, eventually.
Yeah, they'd have needed to put it on the opposite side of the sun from Earth, to keep it stable. Or put it in orbit around Jupiter, that gravity well can soak up a bunch of problems without batting an eye.
Any of those solutions would have been temporary at best if the animated series used the same proportions for Cybertron as they did in the original Marvel comic - in that, the planet was a solid world the size of Saturn.
In G1 it was somewhere between the size of Earth and Mars, depending on what they needed for the shots...
Still, yeah, moving it out near Jupiter actually makes a good deal of sense for how long it takes Optimus to get to Earth from Moonbase 2 in the animated movie.
First off, I don't think a rocky planet can form that's the size of Saturn. Saturn is huge, but not very dense, thus giving it a surface gravity about the same as Earth. Which is probably what some writer read and didn't understand. A rocky planet the size of Saturn would be MASSIVE, and would actually be the core of a Brown Dwarf, since it would attract all the gas in it's vicinity. Needless to say the gravity on a Saturn sized rocky planet would be enough to turn humans into paste when they visited, and even Cybertronians would get crushed.
What they probably meant was as massive as Saturn. But that puts it into the earth/super-earth range (1 to 10 times the mass of Earth). The exact gravity depends on how dense it is of course. Given how hollow the planet is shown to be, I would not be surprised if it's 2-5 times the diameter of Earth, with only two to three times the mass, giving it a surface gravity that's equivalent to Earth.
Oh, I agree with you, I'm just telling you what Bill Mantlo and Ralph Macchio (the writer, not the actor) put on Page 1, Issue 1. But then, that issue also had a cover featuring a thousand-foot-tall Optimus Prime looking like the Demon Bear from New Mutants and crushing Starscream in one hand, thanks to Bill Sienkiewicz.
This was also the arc that told us that Shockwave's armor had been "hardened in a nuclear furnace," rendering it impenetrable to pretty much anything.
Scientific accuracy was so absolutely not on the minds of the Marvel writers at the time.
On the one hand, I'm sad Mantlo stopped writing the stories, because they were goofy and more than a little odd. But it meant we eventually got Simon Furman, who gave us Primus and some of the best writing to come out of the series. So, I'm conflicted.
I'll be honest, I stopped caring after they killed Optimus in the movie. I was 14, and they killed Optimus. I actually threw away some of my toys at the time in a fit of rage.
I didn't get back into them until, oddly enough, Bay brought them back to the big screen. That first movie was actually pretty decent (other than the teen dramamance). Once he proved it could make money though, they gave him too much free rein, and we know how Bay is if you don't ride herd on him. You end up with ball jokes and ghetto thug bots with gold teeth.
Then I started going back through and watching all the backlogs of things like Beast Wars and when it came out Prime. I really liked both of those, especially the animation/art styles.
When they went back to cell shading on the sequel to Prime (in disguise), I kind of gave up again. Not so much the cell shading (although that didn't help), but the story went much more pre-pubescent instead of teen/adult.
Plus I really don't like the fact they had Bee go back to Earth as a sequel and never visit/talk to/call his 3 human friends from Prime series. Totally not a Bee thing to do.
If you want more mature, layered stories, definitely pick up the various IDW series. They go some pretty amazing places with the mythos and characters.
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one of the coolest things to me as an adult was introducing my kids to the Transformers via all the toys and original cartoons. At this point the instructions had been long lost on how to transform the bots, so I had to show them how to do it. It was like being a deity. (This was all pre-Bay)
LOL
Just a note, the GM is waiting for people to post in game. :P Unless you want another time skip. You now have the ability to speak english, a computer (of sorts) and a ship with an energon source. No scanners though.
I was waiting for people other than me to talk to the ship. :D
Could all players (especially Chatterbox and Warhawk) check in in the discussion? I'm feeling like I've lost half the player base already. :(
Dude, you lost me during the math discussion of energon conversion. I'm more into the giant robots turning into tanks. I can't roleplay physics.
I was more wanting to make sure you're still here. The energon conversion stuff was OOC. :P In character, your newly awakened AI tried to blow you all up, and Chatterbox was silent... Seems odd for him. And that was all RP with giant robots...
Sorry, I thought we were still on the scouting mission while the murderous ship tried to kill the ones remaining behind to fix it.
No problem, everyone wanted to skip ahead to where the ship was repaired (as much as you could repair it, and the computer was up again). So we did a quick fast forward.
As I said earlier, a lot of the stuff on the campaign tab probably won't be important to the players. It's mostly stuff for the GM so I can be consistent in the game. I don't have a Transformers game system, so I have to come up with all the background stuff, and how to convert energon and such, so I'm consistent down the road.
I really prefer to have the ground work laid out so that in game when you're dealing with resources, I can consistently tell you how much energon you make over time, rather than me making it up on the fly every time. I prefer to do it that way so you don't feel like the GM is ramming 'low power' plot down your throat when you've been being careful to stockpile energon and everything. By getting all the math out of the way (and letting the nerd players who get into that kind of stuff help) it ensures I'm consistent going forward. That's all. We should be at the point where 'playing giant robots' is the main focus. :P
I'm here, just a little overwhelmed by lore, system I haven't played for a while, and not feeling totally comfortable in the genre. Also being negligent as a player, for which I apologize.
1) Lore - Don't worry about it too much, Jem & I are nerds, so we talk about lore a lot, and I put a bunch of it in the campaign tab to help me keep it straight going forward. You can ask Jem, we've played in several games, and I tend to be OCD about putting information in campaign tabs (for that matter, just look at my active campaigns campaign tabs!). Don't worry, you won't be tested on it...
2) System - It's a pretty easy system, and I'll help you out whenever you need it. Just holler if you're not sure about something.
3) Genre - That I can't help you with. :( The genre is the setting/campaign/etc. So if you're not enjoying Transformers... :(
4) Negligence - I'm sure life is busy, just try to RP if you're enjoying it. If you decide you're not enjoying it, let me know, so I know to re-recruit for it, ok? Don't feel obligated to post, that never ends well. I'd rather know you aren't into it, I don't bite, I swear. :P
Just to clarify, everyone is on the ship right now, that includes Warhawk, Ula, and Chatterbox. So they can contribute to the conversation with the new ship computer.
3)I'm enjoying it, just worried about mistepping. I'll try to not be such a worry wart.
I live once more.
I should be good to go for a while with one of the worst stretches of my life (quite literally) just about in the rear view mirror.
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Yes I am no science whiz nor am I a Transformers historical buff but I figure that's why we have a DM and multiple players so we can each contribute in a meaningful way :-)
BTW MDT, this game has inspired me so much that in a few years (after I finish my current D&D campaigns and learn the rules here a bit better) I may use the Hero System to run a table top He-Man game :-)
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EDIT: DM, post conversation, how would I go about utilizing my XP to assist in repairs and parts? Does that involve going out and getting parts and the repairs are complete without rolls? Just trying to understand how that works mechanically within the rules. Thanks.
You contribute XP toward ship/team pool. Then in game, everyone RP's out going out and finding resources, etc. When you find them in game, you get the thing you paid XP for.
Example : Radio system for the ship. That requires 2 XP from someone, since it's 10 points on the ship. Once someone donates that, you spend some effort in game to find a radio system (I suggest locating a downed ship with one in it, for example, a WWII sunken naval ship) and strip it out, and then salvage more stuff from the local ship. Then Skitter (and everyone else) makes electronics rolls to repurpose it into the ship's comm system. Once the checks are made, there's a brief time skip, and you have a radio.
Some things, like sensors, may require much more time as you have to build tools to build tools to build tools to build the device (which is fine, since it will take awhile to save up the XP).
Thanks MDT. Hey guys, I have 5 XP, I can donate at least 4 to ship repairs at the moment as I think it's a priority.
Ok, you have your computer and your power source.
Next steps?
Options :
1) Begin trying to get a new radio relay together by (A) trying to find local components on the sea floor or (B) trying to find local components on shore that you can take without anyone being upset (Kind of requires 2 below).
2) Begin exploring the native habitat, picking a city and driving through/flying around by night, trying to get more information on the locals.
3) Have Ula scan her fourth mode from a local device that helps you get information (Cell tower, large scale commercial computer, etc). This also requires 2 above.
4) Something else you guys come up with (as the GM, I can go with the flow).
I think exploring has the best chance of returns. Explore a bit, scrounge if we can, see what kind of situation we're in. Hard to make any informed decisions without information
Chatterbox and Ula are the only ones who are really set up for exploring. Skitter's forms will be hard to hide, Warhawks works for flying around but not exploring cities (he can certainly fly around and get the lay of the land though). Red's form will draw attention (although he won't know that until the first cop pulls him over, LOL).
Do you want to explore Anchorage, or are you going to try to find a different city (you don't really know of any others, although Ula's and Warhawk's GPS systems have other cities listed, but they have no details about them).
Yeah, especially since my vehicle form isn't entirely Earth-standard.
We need to make sure we all find a way to get Holomatter avatars, so when the cops pull us over, they aren't met with a talking car, but rather Josh Human, Vehicle Driver.
perhaps Chatter and Ula should take the recon then, at least during the day. Wait, what does Warhawk transform to? And the others of us stick to night or underwater/unihabited
Wait, what does Warhawk transform to?
A frickall huge Sikorsky, I believe.
oh yeah! totally incognito :P
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Warhawk is not stealthy.