Scanners in DB 6

[Nikoli]

I love you guys at PB, but with all due respect:

What was the author (or the editorfor that matter) smoking when he wrote those prices?
1.5 million for the basic, common, every ship should have a couple of these laying about model.

But the TB memory chips cost 5k...
Right...that makes sense.

[Nikoli]

So now they can buy 5 guns for the price of one scanner instead of 50...
I'd personally as GM see reducing it by dividing my 100 or more.
Guns should be the most expensive personal item, followed by armor. Everything else is superlative.
I see a fair price being closer to 10 to 15k for the basic model and the add-ons being priced lower accordingly.

It says in the main PW book that most everyday items are so much cheaper but weapons and armor are kept artificially higher to discourage purchase. A 1.5 mm credit scientific device makes no sense.
Given how many scientists work for the CAF, they couldn't possible furnish these as a couple dozen runs close to the price of a starship...

[DhAkael]

it should fit your model.

I feel that almost every starship engineer is going to own one and use one, including having backup units.

then there are "knockoffs" which can further reduce price (and range/performance) which might be in use by "tramp" freighter personnel who still need to rely on them.

If you make them too cheap, then everyone is going to carry them and it looks like Star Trek/Star Fleet on an away mission. It's likely they'll have all the add-on features too, if those are just as cheap.

I don't think I'd change the prices on the UWW version, since they provide both tech & magic features and I don't want cargo-loads of Arcane Scanners popping up on CCW worlds, etc.

Anyway, my idea would be to make them cheap enough to be utilized by those that need them, but not attractive enough so that every adventurer has one too.

You have your ideas on how things should be run... we others have ours.
Personally I WOULD have the arcane scanners as common as normal ones, due to the large number of transdimensional phenomena that occour THROUGHOUT THE TRI-GALCTIC CLUSTER!. No crew would be stupid enough to go out exploring the 3-G's without at least half a dozen scanners with 'arcane' mods, and no spacer store would be stupid enough not to have a few crates in stock (ergo; low prices).
But as I stated, every GM has their own interpretation of what technology is available at what price.

But I agree with the original poster; $1.5M for the add-ons?! Bollocks to that

[DhAkael]

that's why I put on the first line: it should fit your model meaning your own needs...but I could see how people might not grasp that

In the most polite context possible;
Byte m3!

[GhostKnight]

Haven't electronics always been the most expensive piece on a ship?

[Greyaxe]

I agree the price of scanners is a bit prohibitive. Although that may have been the goal. only the most well equiped groups will have portable scanners. In addition like the field raidos of WW2 the commander of a platoon will hover next to it to gain as much tactical information about the combat situation as possible. It may have been entierly intentional

[glitterboy2098]

and the basic package isn't even that. it's stuff like a barometer, thermometer, spectral analyser, basic thermal imageing, PDA functionality, ect. stuff which costs a few hundred to a few thousand credits each if bought individually as a seperate device. so if buying each device seperately might only add up to a few dozen thousand, why would a device that just packs them into a single frame cost 100 times more?

[Braden Campbell]

In modern-day terms... a scanning electron microscope is expensive as hell, but your field scope isn't going to cost nearly as much.

Won't do as much either...

[rat_bastard]

gee I wonder if he naruni brought any of these to earth for the second naruni wave...

[shadrak]

So what makes these scanners so expensive? A lot of these features don't look like they are too far beyond current capabilities.

[shadrak]

And a terabyte for a picture? What kind of program is that? What kind of picture is that?

[Gomen_Nagai]

I just divide all the values by 1000 and leave it at that. ... the Whole pricing in that part of the book was wonkers.

[glitterboy2098]

And a terabyte for a picture? What kind of program is that? What kind of picture is that?

subatomic resolution? three google-pixel's? who knows.

in general, storage requirements go down as technology advances, part of the improvements in programming and compression. at the same time hardware capabilities go up. so this device could have terabyte storage and be able to store hundreds of thousands of high resolution images.

[shadrak]

That's what I am saying!!! 1 Terobyte for a single picture...that is unimaginable!!! I mean, today a high quality pic might be a few thousand kilobytes, extremely high quality artwork might be stored for a few megabytes.

I can't imagine a pic a gigabyte in size, let alone a terabyte.

[Gomen_Nagai]

i think the Imaging was supposed to be 3d (Solid) holographic, a technology not even shown in 3G.

[shadrak]

I guess a 3-D image is more believable, but that would still be a large image!!!!

[Nikoli]

And it was 1000 picture/TB Which puts it in the giga-pixel range.
I was discussing this with a buddy, and I've come to some conclusions for my game:

1: The base line scanners are suffering for an over load of 0's, therefore, they are all divided by 1000. At 15,000 credits, the basic scanner begins to make sense when compared to the supposed proliferation of the device and it's capabilities compared to the basic sensor-hand in 100 or so years. I still think it is a little underpowered.
2: The device is underpowered, ranges are x2 baseline.
3: the options are a little over priced, divide the TB chips by 10, and most of the addon's by around 50 to 100.

I am of the firm belief that the writer that postulated this had little idea what a TB was or just how much information it can hold. To put it in perspective, if you took a copy of every book ever written and converted it to basic text/unicode it might take up most of a TB. That's a lotta dang books there. I have a suspiscion they heard the term, thought it sounded cool and went from there, with little regard to just how big it really was.

[Gomen_Nagai]

Laser Scanners take 1mb per Inch of surface.
assuming you are rendering to a 3d engine.

[Gomen_Nagai]

after the TOS the scanners in star trek became really fictitious.
all you need is a few infra-rometers, A Gamma ray Tester, a Gas measuere, and some other stuff and thats how current astronomy charts are done. they do not use Googleplex's of data... the whole milky way Star map is 3 mb in size. the entirey of scanned space fits in 300mb.
also realized the most advanced CPU in space right now is a MIPS 4600 running at 66 mhz. ... that's slower then a P90

[Gomen_Nagai]

yes, Star trek pretty much operates on a parallel universe where subspace and parallel universes are constantly seen and accessed. oh and Somehow, Jazz and Country survives to the 25th Century, but rock, Synth, Disco, Techno become extinct.

[Braden Campbell]

oh and Somehow, Jazz and Country survives to the 25th Century, but rock, Synth, Disco, Techno become extinct.

Gene Rodenbury hated New Wave, I guess?