Karoline said:

In response.

A unpowered component does not mean ALL the power to that component is out most likely only a few subcomponents (out of thousands) have been knocked offline. And for emergency repairs in the middle of battle your repair crews are most likely laying power cables to bridge blown out gaps and reroute power for non- essential components to get power to those essential ones that have been taken off line. It would be very unlikely that the mainline was cut, if there is even a mainline for a component.

Thats just it you don't have A single power cable to a macrobattery array (it make no sense) instead you have many smaller lines going to the different components. The ammo chutes, loading mechnanisms, the guns, the targeters, the tracking systems, capaciter banks etc, etc. can depend alot here on exactly what the gun is. The only main line is near the engines everything else runs off that. In BFG under the fluff for the armageddon and overlord battle cruisers, it talks (a little) about power of the ship and very much gives the impression the whole process is difficult. Especially in the armageddon descript it mentions that adding lances to the ship required 3,500 more men to run them and all the power relays to power them.

The Armageddon is an established ship class and they still require significant crew to maintain the power connections just from 1 weapon battery..

That is a good point. I hadn't really considered that a crit that causes a component to be unpowered could simply be enough to make it not quite work properly as opposed to being something that completely severs a component. The book doesn't bother to make that kind of distinction, but I think it is a quite reasonable assumption.

I still like my rules, but perhaps modify them to 2d10 turns with time reduced by DoS, minimum 1 turn. This means you'd most likely take at least a few hours, but a really good enginseer could make the switch potentially happen in a combat time scale.

I still don't believe the process would involve the laying of any new cables, but shutting down something the size of several city blocks could indeed take some doing.

The emergancy gellar field still baffles me though. It states that it automatically turns on if you are shunted into the warp, which indicates that a normal gellar field is off when you aren't in the warp. This would indicate that the gellar field at least isn't overly difficult on and off, and that you should at the very least get the power for the gellar field back when you aren't in the warp. It would also seem to indicate that this isn't simply common practice, but virtually required, otherwise there would be little reason to have a gellar field that turned on automatically as opposed to simply leaving your gellar field on all the time.

Karoline said:

Actually I just remembered that in the adventure Forsaken Bounty there is a section that deals with this.

Seems you are right about the gellar field not being up all the time. The machine spirit needed a reason for it to raise it since they were not in the warp. Nor does it give a time frame for the field to come up like they did with other actions such as turning the machine spirit on, so I would assume it is fairly fast.

On the other hand turning the spirit on took an hour soo.. Then it had to be placated about it s log discrepancies etc.

The Gellar Field in that case wasn't "unpowered", it was just "off". I think there's a distinction. Capacitors have to be charged, for instance, in the case of "unpowered".

Yeah, but if the capaciters are charged it shouldn't be drawing any more power.

Karoline said:

Capacitors aren't the same as batteries. They only exist to ensure that on an alternating current you don't suddenly lose power each time the voltage drops to zero.

It's really very very simple. If the device is 'off' it doesn't draw power, because it doesn't use power. Thus if a device is off, you will be able to use that power for something else. The capaciters aren't going to continually drain power when the device is off, there is no reason for them to.

Hah found it. But who "hides" the edit button in such a devious position. First time it wasnt right next to the post/report post stuff :S.

@ Fortinbras.

If the Geller field still draws power, i would still say to keep it active. As a player anything else is stupid. Never assign a resource to something, unless it is doing something.

Problem is, this way of thinking invalidates the emergency geller field quite totally.

I was rather thinking, the war drive can be shut off, meaning you cant simply run, any second you want to. But it doesnt rip half your bulkheads to shreds. I would be happier with calling shut down a reduced state of operations, since life support is a separate system. So air wont simply stop appearing in unpowered areas, since that is the Vitae systems job.

OTOH, its your group, so you as a group, can decide what to do. Its not powergaming though, since everybody can do that. Powergaming is playing death company of the blood angels, since no Imperial Guard army has that option. Switching the warp drive into unpowered or less powered, well its still a level playing field.

Think of old school computers that require several minutes to boot up from a cold start then 40K it. If your Gellar Field is powered but deactivated (on standby), you can activate it in moments (the Emergency Field can go from standby to on immediately - that's why it costs extra power). Turning the power off and then on might require hours or days to get the Gellar Field back to ready status.

Which still brings up the question 'why not just have it on 24/7 since standby apparently draws as much power as actually being on?' which yet again invalidates the emergency field entirely.

It's really very simple. Either the gellar field goes into some kind of low power/no power mode when not in use, meaning that its power is available for the rest of the ship, or the emergency field is pointless because no captain would ever bother turning the field off.

Alternatively, the systems require full-power to run all the time as they store the pattern for projecting the field in volatile memory. Lose power, you lose the pattern. Have to reassemble it, which takes a long time. For the sake of convenience and captains wishing to keep their crew from rioting, the field is kept energised, ready to be reactivated at a moment's notice.

The reasons for a geller field not being up at all times are somewhat more iffy though. Blocks astropathic transmissions? Highly visible to anyone in the system?

Voronesh said:

That's not what the rules say. P.191 (Corebook) says that unpowered components don't have air in them and require voidsuits to access. Period. So now not only are you permitting your players to run their ship with no warp engine or gellar field powered, but you're also allowing them a much easier time to power up said system. At that point, why stop there? Just make it an on/off switch.

As to your opinions on what is overpowered or not, that's purely subjective not to mention hyperbolic and I really have no use or interest in it.

Fortinbras said:

Interesting as the part about no air seems to contradict what is said under the critical damage section page 223. At the very least they forgot to add the no air part. Also any damaged component is considered to be unpowered (and thus no air) as well. Which I do not think they meant to do as the no-air/depressurization thing is listed as a separate state from damaged/destroyed/unpowered. Off to check the errata though.

llsoth said:

Unpowered deliberately means the life support will have been shutdown and the section sealed off. Eventually, the air will stagnate and the temperature will drop, moisture in the air will crystallize, etc.

Unpowered from damage means; in addition to other problems, that life support to the component has failed, but the component still has whatever remaining heat and air applied prior to the damage. It will become a cold and lifeless hell in time, but for the meanwhile those stuck within are not in any immediate danger. Time, however, is not on their side.

By the way, lights are also likely to be completely out in both of the above, with the exception of maybe some emergency panels here and there. Hope you have a lamp pack handy.

Part of the length of time involved in the transfer is not just going to be the process of rerouting power from component to component, but also locking control stations down, moving crew from section to section and the newly powered up section getting to "livable" conditions. And those are time consuming points just off of the top of my head.

-=Brother Praetus=-

Astropaths can transmit in the warp (Can't they?), so that can't be it. It might make a ship more visible, but I don't think it could add that much compared to things like void shields.

I think the solution for all this thread's problem is, that the power value is just a ship design value. It's not a concrete value, it's only a design limit to the number of components that you can put into a ship. Like the space value. You have three "pools" of points to spend, when you create or refit a ship. You can't exceed the limit to power, that's a rule:

"However, the Ship Point limit only applies at ship
creation. Afterwards, players are only limited in which
Components they can put in their ship by the ship’s
Space and Power , and their available Profit Factor." - Rogue Trader Core Rulebook, page 207, black box on the right.

You could also call it ShipPointsType1, ShipPointsType2 and Ship Points, if this makes clearer, what I mean. It's like at the moment a new component is built in, every other component on your ship is "on" and drawing power. No way to spend more power than you have by unpowering something else.

gomme said:

This pretty much settles it. The wording of that statement makes it clear that power and space are concrete values, and are intended as a limit for what components you can place on a ship.

Fortinbras said:

Ah missed that part then. Why do we need a Vitae systems then? Yes this is rethorical, but i hate it since we have exactly 3 systems for that slot, and they arent really that interesting.

In regards to powergaming, you flung that into the discussion so dont reciprocate me, if i tell you what powergaming is. If you have no use for that, well coming from 40k (the real one, not this spinoff), there are more definite terms for it; thought id share.

No in the end, they might as well simply have added the wording, that stuff cant become unpowered for any reason whatsoever, unless by damage. Gosh calling it power, and then forgetting we have had power switches for so long is just another one of those things. (like the mass on the ships not adding up)

Voronesh said:

Comparing tabletop 40K to RPG 40K and trying to argue on that basis is stupid.

If my players wanted to do this i'd probably resist a bit then let them get away with it (subject to the rules about it taking time) but make sure if they used the tactic then so did others, particularly whatever rival they had ticked off recently, they cant expect to be the only people in the Expanse cutting corners for power...

Fortinbras said:

Ahh yes, as expected. If out of arguements start calling stuff any way you want. Powergaming s not a term that you can simply name differently just because you switched the hobby marginally.

Voronesh said:

Haha, are you seriously calling me a poser because I don't play tabletop? You can have that badge of honor, if it will stop your braying and neighing like a jackass.

Like Gomme said, there's a certain amount of abstraction taking place in most of the ship stats. The Power rating isn't an indication of the power draw when it is actually in use, if that was the case then activated components like the Energistic Converter, Broadband Hymncasters, or even Weapons (to an extent) would be listed as no power, since they are used for relatively short periods of time. The Power rating strikes me as a measure of the averaged power usage over time, not point-of-time draw, and that's done for simplicities sake, I'd imagine.

Unpowered as a state of being is only used in two situations, damage or improper ship building, both of which are things to avoid. And when something is unpowered, it's "mostly dead" by the rules, only being able to revived with an Emergency Repairs action. There's simply no mechanism for such granular management of power systems, at least not that I can see.

If they want to take it to that level, I would let them, but treat it like a Emergency Repairs action, maybe taking the difficulty down to Challenging since they aren't in a combat situation, but still taking 30-150 minutes (1d5 turns) to power on as well as power off (since you'd want to do a controlled shutdown so as not to upset the machine spirits.

I believe the whole idea of "just throwing a switch" to redirect power is over simplifing the entire process.

In reality (I know some people hate those words - it is a game) it takes hours to flash up an engine the size required to power a small ship. You need constant power to keep it just ticking over ready to be used. On top of that a Macro Battery is not just a stick that goes bang. Its the loading mechanisms, aiming computers synching with the bridge, actual movement of the turret, charging of capacitors and batteries to obtain the power required etc etc. You need to make sure all these are working before making it go bang. Redirecting power is a multitude of small tasks turning on or off quite a number of items/equipment sometimes in a given order or process. The more you need to do it the bigger the chance of something going wrong from blown fuses through to power surges and worse.

With something the size of a small RT vessel and the thinking behind enginseering (part tech part religion) I can see the process taking days.

Damage control on the other hand is just that - controlling the damage. Whether it be laying down emergency power runs, replacing damaged components, sealing bulk heads, replacing wounded personnel and on and on. Any one of these problems could be why the component is out of action not necessarily lack of power. The rule book itself hints at the fact that power is still live in a damaged Component even though it is classified as Unpowered - "A damaged Component is unpowered but also contains other hazards, such as shorting electrical lines..." (RT page 223)

My 2 cents.