Re: [HOE] now some technical questions

[Robert Holland <robert@macauley.com>]

>O.K., here are more of the questions i said I was going to ask a couple days
>ago:
>
>1) When placing a turret on top of a vehicle (in this case, a bus), it has a
>360-degree arc horizontally, but what about vertically? How much of an
>up-down arc does a turret have?

Marshall's call. The rules gloss over elevation issues for vehicle-mounted guns
(since there's no rules about fixed weapons being unable to target other
vehicles while on a hill), but a real-life turret could probably aim (wild
guess) 30 degrees above or below level; potentially less if it's mounted low and
the roof gets in the way.

For a simpler solution, you could refer to the aircraft rules in Iron Oasis,
which say that, for an aircraft in level flight to fire at a target, the
horizontal range to the target must be greater than the difference in
altitude--in other words, the angle to the target from horizontal can't be more
than 45 degrees. That assumes a fixed weapon but also assumes an aircraft
capable of changing its pitch, so it makes a reasonable approximation to the
case of a turret-mounted gun on a fixed-pitch ground vehicle.

>2) When armoring a vehicle, you have to use the vehicle's size to calculate
>Load. Now, I take it this is the Size modifier (such as +2) and not its
>Frame size, yes?

That's right. There's no official conversion from Frame Size to Size,
unfortunately, but comparing the frame size examples to the vehicles in Road
Warriors makes most cases pretty clear. Here's the table I came up with, based
on that:

Frame
Size	Size
7-8	+1
9-11	+2
12-14	+3
15-16	+4
17	+5 or +6
18	+7

Vehicle smaller than Frame 7 are probably to small to armor effectively with
scrap metal, but you could call them "Size +0.5"; the load point calculation for
body armor is (2 LP * armor level * size) per side, so this would just give you
a figure of (1 LP * armor level) per side.

>3) The posse wants to convert the bus's engine to run on spook juice. What
>would this require in time, effort, and parts/cost?

Absolutely nothing, I believe. Any ordinary internal combustion engine will run
on spook juice. The upside is that it's much cheaper than gasoline (one ounce of
ghost rock will make five gallons of spook juice); the downside is that horrible
screaming noise that emerges from your tailpipe.

If you're talking about a junker-built bus that currently runs on G-rays, you'll
need to build a new engine (Powerplant) for it, using the normal junker rules.

More information about various kinds of vehicle fuel is in The Wasted West, pg.
26-27.

Long enough for you? I think too much. :)

--Robert Holland