The conversion for GURPS Star Frontiers is still coming along, and I am still working through the equipment list. Some items, like the gas mask and life jacket, come from other GURPS gear lists. The equipment list is elementary, but with a few unique items. Many items seem stuck in time, like they were pulled from an 1980 Sears catalog with camping supplies, so this is a retro-future game. No one would notice if I added a thermos, portable cooler, and survival stove to this list.
Sharp-eyed viewers will note I am using GURPS Ultra Tech power cells. The 20 SEU power clip in Star Frontiers is directly equivalent to the C Cell in GURPS, and in our game, we had "mini power clips" and "micro." The GURPS rules have these, so it is easier to use the GURPS cells and have a wider variety of batteries for power items since no one is sticking a pistol-clip-sized battery in their watch.
You can call the C Cell a "power clip," but it is still a C Cell.
A "power belt pack?" A plastic battery case with a D Cell, belt hooks, and a few power ports. The "power backpack?" The same thing, but with an E Cell in a backpack harness.
I have the doze grenade in there but have not vectored out the effects. This will require a designed superpower-style effect. It is funny how every "standard equipment pack" comes with a single gas grenade that puts people to sleep and a spray hypodermic, which is essentially a reusable syringe. If we were talking "what we know today," then every dose of a drug would be its own single-use injector. A "stim dose" should be one plastic, self-injecting, single-use dose.
But remember, we are stuck in the 1980s here with this game. It is too easy to say everything is this hyper-slick "Iron Man tech" where helmets nano assemble and every piece of gear looks super modern and sleek. That is modernist garbage, Unreal Engine 5 asset flips, 3d Studio Max sci-fi items, and VFX slop. Not everything has to "look and feel" like super-science modern tech. You will lose what makes the original setting special and extraordinary.
We will stick to the spray hypo and single-dose cartridges.
We saw the original Traveller turn into Mega Traveller, and they did the same modernization. Back then, we said the entire game looked "California-ized." We loved the retro-1950s original look and feel of 70s Traveller, and to see the game turned into modern sci-fi made it feel like the game lost something. Computers weighed tons, and could never be carried around with you. You radioed back to the ship if you wanted someone to look up something from the ship's database.
If we want the game to feel as it did, we are sticking to the retro-future, early-80s pastiche, cut off at 1982. Even Aliens is out since it is from the late 80s, along with Return of the Jedi from 83. We are stuck with Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, Alien, Tron, E.T., The Thing, Flash Gordon, Logan's Run, UFO, and Blade Runner. There are some Roger Corman films here, as well as Thundarr and Planet of the Apes.
Also, note that in Star Frontiers, there is a subspace radio. This is faster than light communication, at 1 LY per hour. This changes a lot, and news can spread quickly in this universe, with most planets learning of major news within a day. Distress calls can be "phoned home" to planets. The consequences of this were never explored in the game, so to keep lore-accurate, there needs to be a strict rule for the limits and capabilities of communication in this universe.
In GURPS-speak, Star Frontiers is closer to a tech level 7+2, like Tales of the Solar Patrol, a 6+3 setting.
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