mechanoid technology

Shades of Eternity · Fri Jan 27, 2006 4:37 pm

what technology are the mechanoids known for?

would like to compose a list to see how it could be used creatively.

R Ditto · Unread post by **R Ditto** » Fri Jan 27, 2006 7:17 pm

Well... off the top of my head... (and a glance or two at Rifts SB2)

Genetic Engineering and Cloning. This includes them having "genetic memory", so the clones know more or less everything that was known by whatever Mechanoid they were cloned from.

Medical Stuff. They know a lot about stuff about medical things, even about stuff like humans... probably from dissecting survivors of attacks just to pass the time. (Along the lines of "Bring some back alive, so we may entertain ourselves with some experiments and games until we find another planet to rape.")

Planetary mining... the economy sized brute force approach. Cutting up an entire planet, processing the chunks and dumping the waste, creating a nice new asteroid field.

Turning suns into their power crystals (they should just use fusion power for crying out loud... They take a hundred million years of power potential and turn it into 50 years of power potential...)

Anti-Gravity based propulsion systems.

"Super-Scale" Construction Capabilities.

Not so pitiful Particle Beam weapons.

Robotics.

Cybernetics.

Mass Production.

More or less anything that could be used to kill, torture, maim, dissect, vivisect, mutilate, alter, disfigure, pervert or otherwise royally fubar the typical human(oid) life form.

SkyeFyre · Unread post by **SkyeFyre** » Sat Jan 28, 2006 1:46 am

Everything. They are essentially the perfect race. They can excel in any area.

Killer Cyborg · Sat Jan 28, 2006 12:38 pm

They tend to have good plasma and particle beam weapons.

Marrowlight · Unread post by **Marrowlight** » Sat Jan 28, 2006 1:24 pm

but did he take the skills twice for professional quality? DID HE!

TimeDancer · Unread post by **TimeDancer** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 1:00 pm

R Ditto wrote:
Turning suns into their power crystals (they should just use fusion power for crying out loud... They take a hundred million years of power potential and turn it into 50 years of power potential...)

Actually, I had the same opinion for quite some time, as I had thumbed through sourcebook 2... but then I got the original trilogy collection, and realised that the power crystals were mis-represented in that printing.

The trilogy tells us that an earth-sized planet can produce a power crystal capable of operating a mothership for... uh... I forget, 100 years, I think. Said power crystal was stated to be the size of "a two-story house". We can imagine that using an entire star would yield a much, much larger crystal, seeing as how most stars have probably a good million times that amount of power, with lifespans in the billions of years... So I would say that a sun-crystal would probably power the mothership for a minimum of 1000 years, and that's a really conservative number. (personally, I rate it as 10,000 years of power from a star the size of Sol)

Thus, I've come to the conclusion that the mechanoids must be taking these gargantuan mega-crystals, and slicing them into little pieces, sized to give 50 years of power to a given type of mechanoid. Perhaps (I'm just inventing these numbers here, There's no real thought to them so don't quote me, I may decide to do some science later, as I happen to like maths) a standard wasp crystal is 20 cubic inches, an overlord mightbe 800 cubic inches (cause it's friggan huge), a spider fortress 10,000 cubic inches.

Just tossing that out there, so any GM's who want to toss in a few mechanoids know what the capabilities really are...

-TD
Uber Gaming Nerd
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/User:TD

R Ditto · Unread post by **R Ditto** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 6:28 pm

Is the power crystal lifespan how long it can be used?
Or is that its shelf life in general?
Can they be used on an off?
Or are they "activated" and then continue to produce power until they expire?

Back to the thing of power crystals and how they are made and of crystal size... I pulled out my 32 digit capacity calculator and did some math of my own...

If I got the numbers right... (using metric)
The Volume of Earth is roughly 1 * 10^9 cubic km (a good 1 trillion)
The Volume of Sol (our sun) is roughly... 1.4 * 10^26 cubic km...
which makes the sun have 1.3 * 10^15 times more volume than Earth...

So...
a power crystal made from a planet is the size of a house...
if a house was 200 cubic meters...
that means a sun could produce roughly 260,000,000 cubic km worth of power crystal... (or roughly 1/4 the volume of the Earth...)

Since a cubic meter is equal about 61,000 cubic inches... and there are 1,000,000,000 cubic meters in a cubic km... um...
well, that's a lot of power crystals...

If the average power crystal size was 5cm cube (125 cubic cm)... there would be 8000 per cubic meter... and if there were a 100 trillion mechanoids (including robots) that used power crystals... um... that comes out to... 1 million such crystals per mechanoid... or enough for 50 million years of power per individual mechanoids unit...
Okay, why do they need to wipe out stars again? It seems like wiping out a single star should have them set until the Old Ones come home...

TimeDancer · Unread post by **TimeDancer** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 10:40 am

R Ditto wrote:Is the power crystal lifespan how long it can be used?
Or is that its shelf life in general?
Can they be used on an off?
Or are they "activated" and then continue to produce power until they expire?

Unfortunately, those questions are not answered in the trilogy, and not even hinted at in SB2.

I would imagine the crystals would be highly stable by nature, certainly some decay would occur, but I would think it was minimal... after all it is a crystalline matrix. I guess we need Kevin or Wayne to field this one here...

Kevin?
Wayne?
Maryanne?

TimeDancer · Unread post by **TimeDancer** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 4:02 pm

I love finding another person to feed my imagination... and if there's one thing Rditto has a talent for, it's feeding my imagination.

Assuming a good sized home, we can look at 2000 square foot ground area. That's approximately 44 feet to a side, but then, we're not going to have a cubic house, so maybe we go upwards by 30 feet or so?

Thus, our house sized power crystal is 58080 cubic feet, or apparantly...
13.4112 meters to a side, and 9.144 meters tall, we'll round down for convenience, and that way we err on the conservative... 1521 cubic meters, and I'll round small again to 1520 cubic meters per house. That's a big friggan crystal.

The question is, how much more energy does a sun have... in comparison to Earth's core? Any excessivley nerdy astronomy or astrophysicists here? Crap, where's Baron von Clogg when you need him?

TimeDancer · Unread post by **TimeDancer** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 9:19 am

More Useless Math:
~Or; "Just how big is a Mechanoid Mothership, anyways?"~

I traced the Mechanoid mothership onto paper, and scaled it out to get the approximate size. The scale is pretty massive, close to 4500 km per inch on the page, so there's a signigicant degree of inaccuracy possible. Yes, I said kilometers.

From bow to stern, we have a length of about 85,000 km on a mothership. From lowest point to Highest point (top of a command tower) we have a height of nearly 17,060 km. However, the thickness of the mothership, depending on section goes from as little as 4000 km to as much as around 8000 km thick. It's probably safe to assume that the mothership has an average thickness/height of 5000 km.

From sketches which are admittedly tiny, but serve as the only useful guide, the width of the mothership is exactly 4 times the height. This gives us a typical width for the main body of 20,000 km.

Taking these numbers, 85k km, times 5k km, times 20k km, gives us 8.5 million cubic km. Assume that only 40% of that volume is "ship", it gives us 3.5 million cubic km, and just to be on the safe side, I'll chop off the half a million, giving us the nice even figure of 3 million cubic km of internal space.

This gargantuan behemoth of a starship can run for 100 years off of my afore-mentioned 1520 cubic meter crystal. That's powering everything on that ship... An overlord then, would barely use a fraction of this crystal over a 50 year period.

1520 cubic meters is 1,520,000,000 cubic cm...
An overlord takes up far less space than 1 cubic km...
An overlord is maybe, 1 1-billionth the size of a mothership?
That gives a 1.5cc crystal lasting an Overlord for 100 years?

I'd guess that a 50 year crystal for most mechanoids may well be the size of a tiny hearing aid battery.

Man, I've got to drop one of those bad boys into an e-clip! My players are so friggan hosed!

So yeah... Mechanoids are the very definition of Munchkin...

R Ditto · Unread post by **R Ditto** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 1:53 am

I doubt the e-clip trick would work.

Dropping a power crystal into an e-clip might be as effective as trying to mount a bunch of nitro-glycerin filled rocket engines on a small car. You could go fast, you could blow up, or you could win a Darwin Award for not remembering to figure out how to stop in the end of the trip...

They likely need special systems to not only contain the crystal when it is in use, but to also manage the extreme levels of power it puts out. There might even be a need for a system to convert whatever "energy" the crystals put out so it can be turned into useable electricity.

There is also a question of just how much energy they can put out at once.
It might be pure power output, able to put out required on demand, or their could be a limit with a supemental power storage system for times of high power usage, such as combat.