Re: [HOE] Cost of spirit batteries?

[Robert Holland <robert@macauley.com>]

>The player of the one (count 'em, one) character I've killed off to
>date is working on his next -- a Cyborg.  Heavy.  And I'm letting
>him.  Luckily, he is running into the limits of the munchkinoid
>poddibilities.  He finds that he can't fire his weapon much, and
>can't afford spirit capacitors with all the other drek he wants to
>wedge in.  So he's pleading for spirit batteries he can tote in his
>utility pack or mount on a hard point.  (Yes, of course they will be
>vulnerable there!  Why else would I even consider allowing it?)
>
>Well, there's no cost given -- "junkers can make them for a cyborg".
>There's no junker in the party, but as he's a VotWW it's perhaps
>plausible that he might have had them made.  What's a good amount to
>set him back for one or two 50-pt batteries?

Semi-related rant here.

Power allotments for cyborgs cheese me off. Firstly, there's an awful lot of
systems that are damn near useless without a spirit capacitor and useful maybe
twice with one. The Sentinel missile is a good example. It has a range of 5
miles and is designed to use a cyber radar system to get a lock, so running it
in tandem with a 5-mile-range cyber radar seems rather reasonable, you'd think.
Just running the launcher takes, for no apparent reason, 4 drain per round.
Running a radar at 5-mile radius takes 6 drain. Don't forget you'll need remote
targeting to fire it without a -4 penalty--that's another 2 drain to run the
CPU.

So firing a single missile within its normal operational parameters requires a
minimum of 12 drain--that's probably overload right there, and certainly maxes
out your power draw unless you were lucky enough to draw a greater manitou. Of
course, you'll probably want to be able to stand up while you're launching this
missile, which means 2 drain to your Samson (I assume you're not mounting a
heavy missile launcher on an infiltrator) and at least 3 to your armor (if
you're wearing a suit with heavy hardpoints, necessary to carry the thing). So
without a spirit capacitor, you're way the hell overloaded, and with one you can
keep it up for maybe two rounds.

As another example, take the Light Can archetype from the Cyborgs book. He's got
that nifty IW-100C plasma rifle--spiffy keen, full-auto plasma blast action. But
it takes 2 drain/shot or 5/three-round burst to fire it. If he's got his basic
combat systems up--cyber eye, Samson, targeting computer, and armor--it uses 6
of his 10 drain, which means he can fire that automatic plasma caster twice per
round, max, without risking overload. So why did Cy-SOG even equip him with a
weapon like this? At that rate of fire, a 20mm grenade launcher with, say, 30
frags costs about the same, has the same ROF and BR, and does way more damage.

The standard argument is that this is necessary to keep cyborg PCs in line. But
it doesn't make *sense*. These aren't slapdash junker contraptions, they're
major military productions that drew hundreds of millions of dollars worth of
development funding to build finely tuned engines of death. What kind of
military would produce a multi-million-dollar weapon that can't even operate
within basic operational parameters without risking meltdown? Why do all cyborg
systems have to run on dangerously limited and unstable manitou power? Normal
human prosthetics can run on standard battery power; why can't at least some
cyborg systems be powered the same way? It would limit their time in the field
to a few weeks without resupply, but that's a small price to pay for actually
being able to use all your equipment; and in any case, it should be possible to
make a conventional battery charger powered by spirit energy.

Besides which, given what's said in the book about cyborg/junker relations, I
can't imagine any can who *hasn't* picked up a high-capacity spirit battery or
two after hanging around the Wasted West for 13 years. A 10-point spirit
capacitor costs $15,000 to buy--the same size spirit battery costs a junker
*twelve dollars* worth of components (an ounce of ghost rock for $10, a
structural component for $2; he doesn't need to charge it, your 'borg can do
that himself), and even if the greedy bastard charges you a hundred times what
it cost him it's less than a tenth the price of a capacitor--and given how much
junkers love cyborgs, he's not likely to charge you much above cost. How could
any energy-hungry can have walked around this wasteland for all those years
without it once occurring to him to charge up a junker's batteries for him or
something in exchange for a couple batteries of his own? The book seems to
imagine this as a rare and special case, and I don't understand why.

--Robert Holland