My players are on their way towards the core, in a small expedition.
Their governments gave them all a nice budget, and they have gone and
purchased the best equipment that money could buy (TL 14, 15, and a
couple examples of TL 16). They are going to be many parsecs from
a TL13+ planet, and want to carry some "Electonic and mechanical spares".
I am not going to let them get off that easily: The following is a plan
I have for repairs, I would appreciate your comments, and any comments
you would have on what the planets would be like towards the core. After
all, there is no empire that way, the ancients, as far as I know didn't
proceed overly far in that direction.
Optional repair rules:
Assume:
1) All equipment can be broken down into 4 types: Mono-material, simple,
complex, and highly complex.
2) There are only a limited number of "critical" parts, the rest can be
fashoned from generic spare parts. e.g. your TV has some ciritals, Picture
tube, tuner, flyback transformer, etc. However a lot of the secondary
circuitry can be repaired with a good selection of standard electronic parts.
Rules:
Any time damage results, roll once on the critical part tables per 10%
damage done to the object, re-rolling most duplicates. Each critcal part
should appear once on the chart, have an average value of 5% of the price of
the entire object, and be placed on the table in a semblance of frequency of
damage.
Note that spare parts of one tech level difference, increase the repair task
difficulty by one level. Otherwise use the standard repair tasks. A higher
tech level will have parts on hand for 1-3 tech levels lower, and can
fabricate parts of many tech levels lower. A lower tech level will have
limited ability to produce items at the next tech level.
Most parts, with time, may be able to be fabricated from their componet parts,
others should be so indicated (eg. Lanthium grid, no lanthium, no repair).
Table examples:
Mono-material: e.g. Chair
Table? - Only a limited amount of material types. A piece of wood,
metal etc. is all you need (plus the corrrect tools to cut and
otherwise shape the material, and fasten it together).
Simple: eg. Fuse Box
Use an equal, probability table, d3, d6, d10, etc. depending on the
number of "critial" parts. Multiple occurences are common.
eg: 1) Fuse 2) Socket 3) Casing 4) Wire
Complex: Eg. TV
Use 2 dice probability table, 2d3, 2d6, 2d10, etc. very few parts
will be multiple occurences.
eg: 2) Speaker 3) Chassis 4) Horizontal control 5) Transformer
6) Tuner 7) Knobs 8) Picture Tube 9) Automatic adjustment
10) Vertical Control 11) Amplifier 12) Sync Circuit
Highly Comples: Eg. Jump Drive
Use either 3 die table, or use 2 die with subtables
(e.g. 8-fusion plant, and generate a table for this, or conviently
use a table already generated. eg computer could use TV table for
a monitor).
Notes:
Not all the parts need to be named (I'm not a starship drive engineer), and
made-up names can be just as good. "It's the Flux-amplifer captain"
The most common parts, could be the least expensive or the most depending on
how delicte the machine is, and how mean you are.
These rules assume you use the x% damaged results, and that the material cost
is approx. 1/2 the repair cost - the rest is labour, which the PC's are
supplying.
These rules allow the PC a contol over what spare parts they are getting.
They can estimate based on the table, if they really need to get that
spare amplifier circuit for their holodisplay.
Maintenace to equipment could also use these tables, to repace a single part,
or a good mechanic after examining the equpment, may be given the results of
one die roll, so they can have an idea where the next failure will
probably occur. (Uncertain task).
-Dan
Dan Corrin, System Manager, Mechanical Engineering, UWO, London, Ontario
TML FTP site coordinator: [email removed] ...!watmath!julian!engrg!dan