Star Heist, a Campaign Setting

 The Magic Vegas campaign I was playing in is on a break and the group discussed options and we went with one of my older campaign settings.  It needs some update and revisions but is bascially a TL10 Space Opera setting.

This group is playing a Decker, Pilot, and Diplomat as insurance investigators.

Inspiration

Ghost Ship by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller for the Pilots and revisions to how I was handling psionics. Basically aside from racial psi people can get it from travel trough subspace and the core mechanics is Wildcards. Each psi trait is built with a wildcard skill as the power talent and abilities are primarily versions of ESP and Probability Alteration.

Lensman by EE Doc Smith for some background and overall concepts.

The Ship Who Searched and other novels by Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey for an overall sense of the setting.

Harrington novels by David Webber for some of the FTL, though highly adjusted so ships travel far slower in real space.

Traveler for idea of Jump Drives.

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein

Assorted other scifi

GURPS Materials

GURPS Ultra-Tech and Transhuman Space for the tech.

A blend of GURPS Cyberpunk, Action 2: Exploits, Telepathy powers, and some Pyramid articles by W.A. Frick for hacking and netrunning as well as possessing vehicles.

GURPS Spaceships

Setting Conceits

The campaign takes place in the Commonwealth, a human centric space government.

It uses three primary FTL types. 

Jump Drive (Called a Dive Drive) that uses contrgav to punch a hole into subspace for hopping between stars.

Star Gates for wormhole travel between known locations. It is fast but limited by gate size.

Sling Drive (alucabrd drive idea) with hyperspace highways. Very fast, built by precursers but travel is outside the heliosphere. Ships can use this method inside a solar system but only for short skips and they may get destroyed by space debris.

Building a Space Opera Setting: Personal Weapons

 Combat is an important part of most RPGs, so in a Space Opera setting what should we use?

GURPS Ultra-Tech gives us a good assortment of tech but its a grab bag covering multiple tech levels and sciences. So how should we choose what to include?

Weapon Effectiveness

We want our weapons to be cool and invoke something we think is fun. They also need to make sense for the science of the setting. Good choices will make combat fun and interesting. They should be more effective than modern weapons but not too lethal or else everyone hits dies.

GURPS has a reputation for deadliness, though in my opinion its a bit exaggerated. If you go past 0 HP you risk falling unconscious and start requiring death checks at fully -1* HP. A person with average HT and HP has a chance to die after 5d6 average injury. Lucky rolls, armor, higher HT or HP can make it take more. Modern firearms can do this kind of damage, though small arms will usually require several hits. This means a big damage boost can be very lethal.

The author of GURPS Ultra-Tech, David Pulver considered this and one of his solutions was high armor penetration.

I prefer high armor penetration over massive damage as our heroes can still survive if caught outside their armor, or only wearing minimal armor. I do not want characters to feel the need for battlesuits outside of military actions. Armor Penetration makes armor less effective but gives unarmored people a batter chance than just scaling up the damage.

I also like high accuracy (ACC) and lots of shots so we can avoid reloads or carrying tons of magazines or battery packs. Energy weapons that can be recharged can also reduce accounting. Just recharge between fights.

Star Heist Weapons (TL10)

So I want grav weapons since the technology is a key part of the setting. Grav weapons can do crushing damage and be less than lethal and just recharge back at the starship.

Lasers are a classic, highly accurate, good range, quiet, and also rechargeable.

Slug throwers are often favored by players and can be good when you have special needs or a lower tech base such as on a frontier world.

These are all in Ultra-Tech and I think will use the same stats. So I list this in my campaign bible as..