Building buildings
Feb. 14th, 2014 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethMy space colony and my temple for my clerics and my hypothetical dream home can all be made with GURPS rules.
GURPS Low Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics has plenty of rules for building materials, though it only goes up to TL4 and we're in TL8 now. It has rules for mud, thatch/daub, rubble, wood, ashlar and concrete.
Which works out, because you can build most things with those. Adding more metal is for later TLs. But while Campaigns will give you the Damage Resistance for a big long list of materials, it will not give prices.
GURPS Spaceships has armour made of many varieties of high and ultra tech, stone, steel, titanium, and weirder things. So there's costings for amounts not less than 1.5 short tons, with dDR. But stone armour cost is 'negligible' because they reckon you go hollow out an asteroid for it. Building costs on a planet are not 'negligible'. So somewhere between the Low Tech costs and the spaceship costs there's a bit of a gap.
But if you're setting up on a new planet anyway, it's probably pretty low tech. I mean, you could bring in every last bit of metal and glass you'd need to make a skyscraper, but if all you need is somewhere to hang your hat and you know you're moving to a Stargate style planet of terraforming and trees then you're probably going to start with log cabins. That way you import the tools, and factories to make more tools, and mining equipment to supply the factories to make more tools, and you don't so much bring in the housing materials because you can acquire them local.
If you bring people who know how to turn trees into houses, anyways. And can cut them down without getting squished.
... now I'm seeing Wolverine on this colony planet...
GURPS Low Tech also tells you tool kits for a lot of trades. GURPS High Tech does the same but goes up to full workshops and power tools. Would you bring power tools to an alien planet? Like, you know they're going to break, and run down, and you haven't set up the power grid yet, so they'd be inconvenient. But you'd hope the factories you bring could make more power tools, and there's solar panels to recharge from. So probably yeah, power tools.
But if I were bringing people, I'd make sure to bring a mix of tech levels, including some renfaire types as well as the people whose first stop is the hardware store. That way if the factory thing doesn't work out you've got a fallback plan.
A workshop for Electrician, Machinist, or any Armoury or Mechanic specialty is $15,000, 2,000 lbs. Workshops for Electronics Repair specialties are $30,000, 500 lbs. All require external power.
It gives +2 bonus on skills for having the right equipment.
So by weight, you could fit 5 in the same amount of space as a GURPS Spaceships SM+6 cabin with 4 bunks and a compact shower/toilet. But I'm not sure I can see how to arrange workbenches for 5 people in the same amount of space as 4 bunk beds. You'd be all elbows. But, still, 5 workshops to one cabin. Okays.
A standard tool box sort of tool kit that you get no bonus or penalty for using:
for Electrician, Machinist, or any Armoury or Mechanic specialty is $600, 20 lbs. Kits for Electronics Repair specialties are $1,200, 10 lbs. LC4.
So there's 100 of those per ton. In two tons you could pack a toolbox for all of the 200 people in the colony. Not that all of them would need one, but, you'd still have 3 tons of cargo space left for things that are not tool boxes. Or you could have 4 workshops and 100 toolboxes fit in one cabin for transport. Then when you get there you distribute the toolboxes and have a room meant for 4 people to work in. Which is still tight, but, two to a work bench, eight feet of work bench on a side, four feet each to work in. That's plenty unless you're working on a really big thing. Then you'd put a shelter up outside and use the tools just outside the door. Simples.
So enough tools to go around looks easy.
I wonder what tools or supplies a farmer needs? Low Tech has farming in one of the supplements but that's another area where progress has marched. High Tech mentions farming under science labs, but I'm not sure that's quite applicable to day to day work.
GURPS Campaigns has a little table of buildings:
Farmhouse 1,000 square feet
Modern House 2,000 square feet
Mansion 10,000 square feet
and then it has what their damage resistance and hit points would be. also a formula for calculating hit points for a whole building. it's on page 558. you need to know the building's weight in tons to figure the hit points. and handily the Low Tech table can let you figure that out one wall at a time.
Which also lets you figure how much the parts for a house would weigh if you packed them for transport to another world. I can find how much prefabs cost but not, on a quick google, how much they weigh.
If you wanted houses in hurry then you'd bring them flatpacked. If you wanted to put the money and tons of cargo into stuff you purely couldn't get on the new world, you'd limit what you brought to like plumbing and electrical supplies, and scientific equipment and so forth, and then go cut down trees.
GURPS rules for houses reckons planks are sort of cheaper when they're thicker, because thin is tricky. So 8" thick wood costs $1.26 per inch, so a 1 foot by 1 foot by 8 inch thick would be 1*1*8*1.26= $10.08 per square foot.
1 inch thick that same square foot would cost $7.75.
Which is cheaper, unless you compare making it 8 inches thick but all of those inches being 1 inch thick planks, in which case it's more expensive.
... now in my head it's like that optical illusion with the old young lady, where this makes sense and doesn't both at once...
If you had 8 inch thick walls they'd be stronger. Higher DR and HP. Also warmer, but I don't see rules for that.
There are rules for building hypocaust floors, the sort you pump warm air through to heat the places. Also floors very greatly resembling those but for pumping water through for cooling. Cosy.
It kind of irritates me that all GURPS is in feet and inches. But then when I measure my house I tend to use feet and inches too. Also when I measure me.
So, if we're using thick wood, a 10ft by 10ft room that is 10ft tall because maths would require each wall to be 10*10*8*1.26= $1008 , and you need 4 walls. $4032 for a little wood box. Except you'd also need a roof, which would be another 10*10 of wood, or possibly thatch which can also be calculated. Thatch is $0.74 for an inch thick, but I never seen an inch thick thatch roof. Ten inches thick? 10*10*10*$0.74= $740. That's a pretty thick roof now. But then it's also flat. Really it should be two sides of a triangle. I can't be bothered to figure how much would be added at what angle. Stick an extra 20% on? $740*1.2= $888 for an angled roof. And now there's another triangle of timber wall needed but that's even more maths. Boo. $4032*1.2 gives plenty of wiggle room, I am hand waving this roof, it costs $4838.40. So the 10 ft to a side wood and thatch cabin costs $5726.40.
There's actually rules for sorts of roofs further down, if they're vaulted or something. But it doesn't say 'and here's how you calculate a basic wooden roof or floor' so I guess it's just down to us to figure out how much inch thick wood you'd need and maybe add the Tiling option. Tile facings have a basic cost of $3.15 and weight of 5.5 lbs. To tile over floors and roofs, multiply cost and weight by the building’s floor area: length*width*number of floors. Okay, but, nowhere does it mention the general sloping quality of many roofs. Because there's so many variations in pitch? So making stuff up ends up the rule.
Math. why so much of it?
So, anyway, if I'm building a chapel or something in a world where characters have to pay for things then I need the $ , but if I'm seeing if it fits in the cargo then I need the weight.
Bricks. 1 square foot of 1 inch thick bricks costs $3.34 and weighs 7.7lbs. But since when are bricks 1" thick? Bricks have lots of sizes. In the US wiki reckons a house brick is about 7⅝ × 3⅝ × 2¼ in. That's a lot of 1/8s. Reading the description, there's actually got to be room for mortar, so the US measurements are meant for using 3/8 of mortar, so then they work out at 8 by 4 by 2 1/4. But on that list bricks for walls can be anything from 2 to 3 inches thick. 2.5 inches of brick it is then. 1*1*2.5*7.7= 19.25 lb per square foot of brick wall. Ish. One could get fiddly about mortar. But then again walls for houses are often patterns where one brick is sideways, so that's actually 8 inches of brick wall. 1*1*8*7.7= 61.6 lb per square foot. So then in a 5 short ton cargo hold, 10,000 lbs, you could fit 162 and some bits square feet of brick wall.
Even a 10*10 square room with 10 ft ceilings would need 10*10*4 square feet of wall. 24640 lb of brick. 12.32 short tons. 2 and a half cargo holds. Half a shipping container.
One container builds you two 10ft brick rooms.
Or 8, if you go back to 2 inch walls.
If you want to bring bricks for your housing, you fill a lot of containers.
You'd probably just bring tiles and glass, because those are the fiddly pretty ones.
Also lots of rugs and curtains.
And then you'd cut down a lot of trees.
This isn't very interesting to read, but to figure out, it fills a few hours.
Settlers has people cut wood, and mine for clay, stone, iron and sulphur. You then build sawmills, brickmakers, stonemasons, smithies and alchemists. So I reckon the GURPS Spaceships rules for mining and refining cover the iron and sulphur, or rather the many metals and complex chemistries, and maybe possibly cover the stone blocks stuff too. But it seems weird using the same mining machines rules for wood and clay. I don't know though, to use big vehicles to cut trees down is still a control chair plus machinery gig. But mostly it aren't done that way? If it are, then that's 5 tons of machine cutting 0.5 tons of wood per hour. And for refinery read sawmill, 1.5 tons of finishing it off neatly per hour. So you could figure out how many hours of mining or sawmill would get you enough for your walls. Tidy.
Otherwise you'd figure from skill rolls with a toolkit ie a dude with a chainsaw.
Real world numbers ought to be out there but when I started looking I discovered there are different units of measurement just for wood. Cords? So, you know, then I need to learn translations before I even know what they're talking about. And it translates to inches, not weights. And... GURPS might not be very real for this purpose, but it's not like it matters, and if it's all right there looking tidy then it's easier to play with than actual learnings would be.
If you send out big machines then eventually you run out of forest. So if they reckon they've got the whole planet to themselves and there's all these trees around they probably won't be thinking of that. But then this being Stargate some dude from teh future could turn up and be all woah, we used to have trees? Ecology: start as you mean to go on.
If they're running the colony to try and get fast returns and fast growth, to be self sustaining as quickly as possible and to impress the powers back home enough to take the Stargate public, then how they start is not going to be concentrating on green principles. Storing up trouble there.
I keep meaning to just write story, but playing with numbers keeps showing me holes in my story, and ways the initial decisions could be one way or another or a third, and then nothing gets started because play.
I did decide to only have one container of armoury, and make part of that a workshop and a counter for handing out or collecting guns. Also to armour the container. An armoured armoury is harder to nick stuff from. So then you end up with ten or fifteen tons of weapons in there. 200 P90s weigh 0.66 short tons, so I have no idea what they'd put in the other 9.34. That would be really a lot of bullets. Explosives? Bigger guns? Cannons? But whatever you bring there's still only 200 people in 200 shipping containers, versus a 'verse where it's mostly starships and staff weapons. When people come knocking at Atlantis the city wins, not the equipment of the people who went and claimed said city. Starship size weapons need another ship to fight them, which Atlantis is.
You could use the rules for SM+6 spaceship weapons to outfit a container. control room, 2 power plants, 2 weapons. Up to 10 turrets in a secondary battery, so that setup would get you 20 turrets of defense, around a 200 person colony. Or if you stick with low tech conventional guns, rather than honking great space guns, and don't bother with a central control room, you can have all 25 tons as turrets, or up to 50 turrets to play with. Each turret has its own controls. That's a lot of gunners with a lot of options.
But you're still just sitting there. Sitting ducks. It seems to me that if it gets to a shooting war from orbit against a planet, the planet loses.
I could game it out though. See what SM+6 TL7 guns could even do against SM+9 up to TL12 ships. ... it looks pretty futile from the get go though.
Or they could just be fortifying against what might come through the gate.
I could go through GURPS High Tech and pick out the exact guns they brought, or just write down 5 tons of SM+6 Weapons: Secondary Battery: Gun (TL7) 8cm caliber 50 shots, and be done with it. Large caliber conventional gun like a modern tank or naval weapon, 10 turrets, $600K. And then the other 5 tons of cargo are weapons that wouldn't be described as turrets; or, of course, mostly ammo for the big guns (150 8cm rounds per ton, $100K).
But how useful is it packing tank guns when the opponents are going to be either spaceships with at least advanced metallic laminate hulls, or just dudes on foot in armour. It seems like too little or too much gun. And it's an attitude statement.
Most planets in Stargate don't fortify around the gate at all. One wonders why.
If I was making a new planet I'd want to leave the guns behind and start clean, but I don't reckon a colony going through the Stargate from America would even consider it.
So, there's only one armoury container, and most of the contents stays packed for a long while after arrival. But there is an armoury, and there are many people trained to use the contents.
I'd want to put the colony near caves and trees, and the first defensive strategy is to hide the buildings pretty good, and then if invaded to run and hide in caves or take to the trees. It's worked pretty good for many places for a really long time. A cloaking device is just a swish way of doing the same thing. Or a force shield. Hide in deep enough caves and you're shielded pretty good.
GURPS Low Tech also has rules for figuring out how long construction takes, and how much to pay a mason. Pretty cool. But, again, Low Tech is not quite right for offworld colonies. Still, I could use the rules for building my cleric's sanctuary, or for any sort of building that doesn't involve heavy machinery.
High Tech has power tools and surveying equipment, but no tidy quick rules for them being used to build stuff. Individuals would have to roll for it.
(Surveying instruments: +2 to surveying or land navigation, $1,000 , 300 lbs. A new planet would need a lot of surveying. "Starting from a known point, they can locate any point within five miles to an accuracy of one inch. This requires a day’s work." So, is that five miles in a straight line per day, or five in a circle? How fast are they mapping the planet? Cartography search says see B491. B491 says players can map whatever they can travel in a day, with the right Cartography roll. Handy. And what you can travel in a day depends on what transport you bring.)
I imagine it's slower to do geophysics maps or prospecting or whatever. Geology or Prospecting skills, roll to find minerals... length in game time is up to the GM. Hmmm.
So the colony needs surveyors, miners, refiners, factory and workshop people, and some people to use the Science! labs and run the clinic. Oh, and the armoury dude, and someone to be boss of the power supply. And then also farmers. and cooks.
Lots of people.
this is why I poke at space colonies so much, trying to understand the complex systems. is unfortunate I only do it through game rules...
GURPS Low Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics has plenty of rules for building materials, though it only goes up to TL4 and we're in TL8 now. It has rules for mud, thatch/daub, rubble, wood, ashlar and concrete.
Which works out, because you can build most things with those. Adding more metal is for later TLs. But while Campaigns will give you the Damage Resistance for a big long list of materials, it will not give prices.
GURPS Spaceships has armour made of many varieties of high and ultra tech, stone, steel, titanium, and weirder things. So there's costings for amounts not less than 1.5 short tons, with dDR. But stone armour cost is 'negligible' because they reckon you go hollow out an asteroid for it. Building costs on a planet are not 'negligible'. So somewhere between the Low Tech costs and the spaceship costs there's a bit of a gap.
But if you're setting up on a new planet anyway, it's probably pretty low tech. I mean, you could bring in every last bit of metal and glass you'd need to make a skyscraper, but if all you need is somewhere to hang your hat and you know you're moving to a Stargate style planet of terraforming and trees then you're probably going to start with log cabins. That way you import the tools, and factories to make more tools, and mining equipment to supply the factories to make more tools, and you don't so much bring in the housing materials because you can acquire them local.
If you bring people who know how to turn trees into houses, anyways. And can cut them down without getting squished.
... now I'm seeing Wolverine on this colony planet...
GURPS Low Tech also tells you tool kits for a lot of trades. GURPS High Tech does the same but goes up to full workshops and power tools. Would you bring power tools to an alien planet? Like, you know they're going to break, and run down, and you haven't set up the power grid yet, so they'd be inconvenient. But you'd hope the factories you bring could make more power tools, and there's solar panels to recharge from. So probably yeah, power tools.
But if I were bringing people, I'd make sure to bring a mix of tech levels, including some renfaire types as well as the people whose first stop is the hardware store. That way if the factory thing doesn't work out you've got a fallback plan.
A workshop for Electrician, Machinist, or any Armoury or Mechanic specialty is $15,000, 2,000 lbs. Workshops for Electronics Repair specialties are $30,000, 500 lbs. All require external power.
It gives +2 bonus on skills for having the right equipment.
So by weight, you could fit 5 in the same amount of space as a GURPS Spaceships SM+6 cabin with 4 bunks and a compact shower/toilet. But I'm not sure I can see how to arrange workbenches for 5 people in the same amount of space as 4 bunk beds. You'd be all elbows. But, still, 5 workshops to one cabin. Okays.
A standard tool box sort of tool kit that you get no bonus or penalty for using:
for Electrician, Machinist, or any Armoury or Mechanic specialty is $600, 20 lbs. Kits for Electronics Repair specialties are $1,200, 10 lbs. LC4.
So there's 100 of those per ton. In two tons you could pack a toolbox for all of the 200 people in the colony. Not that all of them would need one, but, you'd still have 3 tons of cargo space left for things that are not tool boxes. Or you could have 4 workshops and 100 toolboxes fit in one cabin for transport. Then when you get there you distribute the toolboxes and have a room meant for 4 people to work in. Which is still tight, but, two to a work bench, eight feet of work bench on a side, four feet each to work in. That's plenty unless you're working on a really big thing. Then you'd put a shelter up outside and use the tools just outside the door. Simples.
So enough tools to go around looks easy.
I wonder what tools or supplies a farmer needs? Low Tech has farming in one of the supplements but that's another area where progress has marched. High Tech mentions farming under science labs, but I'm not sure that's quite applicable to day to day work.
GURPS Campaigns has a little table of buildings:
Farmhouse 1,000 square feet
Modern House 2,000 square feet
Mansion 10,000 square feet
and then it has what their damage resistance and hit points would be. also a formula for calculating hit points for a whole building. it's on page 558. you need to know the building's weight in tons to figure the hit points. and handily the Low Tech table can let you figure that out one wall at a time.
Which also lets you figure how much the parts for a house would weigh if you packed them for transport to another world. I can find how much prefabs cost but not, on a quick google, how much they weigh.
If you wanted houses in hurry then you'd bring them flatpacked. If you wanted to put the money and tons of cargo into stuff you purely couldn't get on the new world, you'd limit what you brought to like plumbing and electrical supplies, and scientific equipment and so forth, and then go cut down trees.
GURPS rules for houses reckons planks are sort of cheaper when they're thicker, because thin is tricky. So 8" thick wood costs $1.26 per inch, so a 1 foot by 1 foot by 8 inch thick would be 1*1*8*1.26= $10.08 per square foot.
1 inch thick that same square foot would cost $7.75.
Which is cheaper, unless you compare making it 8 inches thick but all of those inches being 1 inch thick planks, in which case it's more expensive.
... now in my head it's like that optical illusion with the old young lady, where this makes sense and doesn't both at once...
If you had 8 inch thick walls they'd be stronger. Higher DR and HP. Also warmer, but I don't see rules for that.
There are rules for building hypocaust floors, the sort you pump warm air through to heat the places. Also floors very greatly resembling those but for pumping water through for cooling. Cosy.
It kind of irritates me that all GURPS is in feet and inches. But then when I measure my house I tend to use feet and inches too. Also when I measure me.
So, if we're using thick wood, a 10ft by 10ft room that is 10ft tall because maths would require each wall to be 10*10*8*1.26= $1008 , and you need 4 walls. $4032 for a little wood box. Except you'd also need a roof, which would be another 10*10 of wood, or possibly thatch which can also be calculated. Thatch is $0.74 for an inch thick, but I never seen an inch thick thatch roof. Ten inches thick? 10*10*10*$0.74= $740. That's a pretty thick roof now. But then it's also flat. Really it should be two sides of a triangle. I can't be bothered to figure how much would be added at what angle. Stick an extra 20% on? $740*1.2= $888 for an angled roof. And now there's another triangle of timber wall needed but that's even more maths. Boo. $4032*1.2 gives plenty of wiggle room, I am hand waving this roof, it costs $4838.40. So the 10 ft to a side wood and thatch cabin costs $5726.40.
There's actually rules for sorts of roofs further down, if they're vaulted or something. But it doesn't say 'and here's how you calculate a basic wooden roof or floor' so I guess it's just down to us to figure out how much inch thick wood you'd need and maybe add the Tiling option. Tile facings have a basic cost of $3.15 and weight of 5.5 lbs. To tile over floors and roofs, multiply cost and weight by the building’s floor area: length*width*number of floors. Okay, but, nowhere does it mention the general sloping quality of many roofs. Because there's so many variations in pitch? So making stuff up ends up the rule.
Math. why so much of it?
So, anyway, if I'm building a chapel or something in a world where characters have to pay for things then I need the $ , but if I'm seeing if it fits in the cargo then I need the weight.
Bricks. 1 square foot of 1 inch thick bricks costs $3.34 and weighs 7.7lbs. But since when are bricks 1" thick? Bricks have lots of sizes. In the US wiki reckons a house brick is about 7⅝ × 3⅝ × 2¼ in. That's a lot of 1/8s. Reading the description, there's actually got to be room for mortar, so the US measurements are meant for using 3/8 of mortar, so then they work out at 8 by 4 by 2 1/4. But on that list bricks for walls can be anything from 2 to 3 inches thick. 2.5 inches of brick it is then. 1*1*2.5*7.7= 19.25 lb per square foot of brick wall. Ish. One could get fiddly about mortar. But then again walls for houses are often patterns where one brick is sideways, so that's actually 8 inches of brick wall. 1*1*8*7.7= 61.6 lb per square foot. So then in a 5 short ton cargo hold, 10,000 lbs, you could fit 162 and some bits square feet of brick wall.
Even a 10*10 square room with 10 ft ceilings would need 10*10*4 square feet of wall. 24640 lb of brick. 12.32 short tons. 2 and a half cargo holds. Half a shipping container.
One container builds you two 10ft brick rooms.
Or 8, if you go back to 2 inch walls.
If you want to bring bricks for your housing, you fill a lot of containers.
You'd probably just bring tiles and glass, because those are the fiddly pretty ones.
Also lots of rugs and curtains.
And then you'd cut down a lot of trees.
This isn't very interesting to read, but to figure out, it fills a few hours.
Settlers has people cut wood, and mine for clay, stone, iron and sulphur. You then build sawmills, brickmakers, stonemasons, smithies and alchemists. So I reckon the GURPS Spaceships rules for mining and refining cover the iron and sulphur, or rather the many metals and complex chemistries, and maybe possibly cover the stone blocks stuff too. But it seems weird using the same mining machines rules for wood and clay. I don't know though, to use big vehicles to cut trees down is still a control chair plus machinery gig. But mostly it aren't done that way? If it are, then that's 5 tons of machine cutting 0.5 tons of wood per hour. And for refinery read sawmill, 1.5 tons of finishing it off neatly per hour. So you could figure out how many hours of mining or sawmill would get you enough for your walls. Tidy.
Otherwise you'd figure from skill rolls with a toolkit ie a dude with a chainsaw.
Real world numbers ought to be out there but when I started looking I discovered there are different units of measurement just for wood. Cords? So, you know, then I need to learn translations before I even know what they're talking about. And it translates to inches, not weights. And... GURPS might not be very real for this purpose, but it's not like it matters, and if it's all right there looking tidy then it's easier to play with than actual learnings would be.
If you send out big machines then eventually you run out of forest. So if they reckon they've got the whole planet to themselves and there's all these trees around they probably won't be thinking of that. But then this being Stargate some dude from teh future could turn up and be all woah, we used to have trees? Ecology: start as you mean to go on.
If they're running the colony to try and get fast returns and fast growth, to be self sustaining as quickly as possible and to impress the powers back home enough to take the Stargate public, then how they start is not going to be concentrating on green principles. Storing up trouble there.
I keep meaning to just write story, but playing with numbers keeps showing me holes in my story, and ways the initial decisions could be one way or another or a third, and then nothing gets started because play.
I did decide to only have one container of armoury, and make part of that a workshop and a counter for handing out or collecting guns. Also to armour the container. An armoured armoury is harder to nick stuff from. So then you end up with ten or fifteen tons of weapons in there. 200 P90s weigh 0.66 short tons, so I have no idea what they'd put in the other 9.34. That would be really a lot of bullets. Explosives? Bigger guns? Cannons? But whatever you bring there's still only 200 people in 200 shipping containers, versus a 'verse where it's mostly starships and staff weapons. When people come knocking at Atlantis the city wins, not the equipment of the people who went and claimed said city. Starship size weapons need another ship to fight them, which Atlantis is.
You could use the rules for SM+6 spaceship weapons to outfit a container. control room, 2 power plants, 2 weapons. Up to 10 turrets in a secondary battery, so that setup would get you 20 turrets of defense, around a 200 person colony. Or if you stick with low tech conventional guns, rather than honking great space guns, and don't bother with a central control room, you can have all 25 tons as turrets, or up to 50 turrets to play with. Each turret has its own controls. That's a lot of gunners with a lot of options.
But you're still just sitting there. Sitting ducks. It seems to me that if it gets to a shooting war from orbit against a planet, the planet loses.
I could game it out though. See what SM+6 TL7 guns could even do against SM+9 up to TL12 ships. ... it looks pretty futile from the get go though.
Or they could just be fortifying against what might come through the gate.
I could go through GURPS High Tech and pick out the exact guns they brought, or just write down 5 tons of SM+6 Weapons: Secondary Battery: Gun (TL7) 8cm caliber 50 shots, and be done with it. Large caliber conventional gun like a modern tank or naval weapon, 10 turrets, $600K. And then the other 5 tons of cargo are weapons that wouldn't be described as turrets; or, of course, mostly ammo for the big guns (150 8cm rounds per ton, $100K).
But how useful is it packing tank guns when the opponents are going to be either spaceships with at least advanced metallic laminate hulls, or just dudes on foot in armour. It seems like too little or too much gun. And it's an attitude statement.
Most planets in Stargate don't fortify around the gate at all. One wonders why.
If I was making a new planet I'd want to leave the guns behind and start clean, but I don't reckon a colony going through the Stargate from America would even consider it.
So, there's only one armoury container, and most of the contents stays packed for a long while after arrival. But there is an armoury, and there are many people trained to use the contents.
I'd want to put the colony near caves and trees, and the first defensive strategy is to hide the buildings pretty good, and then if invaded to run and hide in caves or take to the trees. It's worked pretty good for many places for a really long time. A cloaking device is just a swish way of doing the same thing. Or a force shield. Hide in deep enough caves and you're shielded pretty good.
GURPS Low Tech also has rules for figuring out how long construction takes, and how much to pay a mason. Pretty cool. But, again, Low Tech is not quite right for offworld colonies. Still, I could use the rules for building my cleric's sanctuary, or for any sort of building that doesn't involve heavy machinery.
High Tech has power tools and surveying equipment, but no tidy quick rules for them being used to build stuff. Individuals would have to roll for it.
(Surveying instruments: +2 to surveying or land navigation, $1,000 , 300 lbs. A new planet would need a lot of surveying. "Starting from a known point, they can locate any point within five miles to an accuracy of one inch. This requires a day’s work." So, is that five miles in a straight line per day, or five in a circle? How fast are they mapping the planet? Cartography search says see B491. B491 says players can map whatever they can travel in a day, with the right Cartography roll. Handy. And what you can travel in a day depends on what transport you bring.)
I imagine it's slower to do geophysics maps or prospecting or whatever. Geology or Prospecting skills, roll to find minerals... length in game time is up to the GM. Hmmm.
So the colony needs surveyors, miners, refiners, factory and workshop people, and some people to use the Science! labs and run the clinic. Oh, and the armoury dude, and someone to be boss of the power supply. And then also farmers. and cooks.
Lots of people.
this is why I poke at space colonies so much, trying to understand the complex systems. is unfortunate I only do it through game rules...
no subject
Date: 2014-12-20 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-21 06:13 pm (UTC)