Forums of the Megaverse®

I have been looking over the forums for some clarification on just how radioactive the Catyr actually are? All the book says is other species can be damaged after prolonged exposure. Is it like being in close proximity to too many x-rays or is it like being too close to reactors that are not properly shielded? The book says they tend to stay in their own enclaves or many are spacers. For those dirtside or on space stations that's fine but for those on ships aside from having specially shielded rooms do they use clothing made out of special materials to limit the radiation they emit? If they are on a Catyr crewed ship then the radiation is not a problem but what about in mixed crews, like on a CAF ship or a merchant vessel. How do crews mitigate against this or can they?

I tried looking on the forums for more insight but could not find anything specific.

Cheers

It's really one of those things that needs GM interpreting.

I know that Heroes Unlimited has a description of what radiation poisoning does (under the Control Radiation power in the main rulebook), but that seems to assume intense exposure. Whereas I imagine Catyr are more like being around a cache of uranium rounds. Now that I think about it, Triax and the NGR might have some information on that which could be useful for coming up with some house rules on the subject. Yeah, check out page 142, "The Problems with U-Rounds" which gives some guidelines for dealing with low level radiation.

As for your other questions, I imagine body armor with some lead lining would help significantly, as long as most of their body was covered. The guidelines in Triax and the NGR suggests that you'd have to be around them for months at a time in order to have any permanent afflictions, so the lead-lined armor/clothing would probably increase that to years, maybe even decades.

Still, I don't imagine most crews would be keen on having one around even under those circumstances, unless they had no idea and/or were immune to radiation. If they were forced to have a Catyr onboard, I imagine they'd get outright hostile if they caught them wandering around without some full protection on, and they'd probably be wearing some lead-lined underroos themselves just for an extra layer of protection.

In a lot of sci-fi works, futuristic medicine offers up all kinds of radiation sickness medications, so I guess you could assume those would exist in the Three Galaxies, too. A regular regimen of them would help alleviate a good portion of the problems, but still, I'd imagine crews would really prefer not to have to deal with either the medication or the Catyr on a regular basis. I mean, why should they have to jump through all these hoops when they could just find someone who wasn't radioactive to do the same job?

Crimson Dynamo wrote:As for your other questions, I imagine body armor with some lead lining would help significantly, as long as most of their body was covered. The guidelines in Triax and the NGR suggests that you'd have to be around them for months at a time in order to have any permanent afflictions, so the lead-lined armor/clothing would probably increase that to years, maybe even decades.

Environmental Body Armor feature lists generally say they are resistant to radiation/posses basic radiation protection. (RUE pg261 (CS armors), pg267
(civilian armors) for example)

so i'd assume that wearing EBA will protect you from the Catyr ambient radiation. so long as you wear it.

the bigger issue i'd imagine would be contamination.. since the catyr are radioactive, this means they have radioisotopes intergrated in their bodies. very likely they require a certain level of such to be healthy. radioactive micronutrients so to speak. but this also means that any hair, skin flakes, fluids, etc that come off them will have radioisotopes in them as well. which means they will leave trace contamination everywhere they go. probably not enough to be a hazard if they are just passing through, but anywhere that a group of them have been living for a prolonged time is likely to have a health hazard level of build up of such contaminants. radioisotope contaminants of these sort are part of the reason why when entering palces like the Chernobyl exclusion zone that warn you from touching some types of things or going to certain parts of the forests, etc.. and why when leaving such places they do geiger counter sweeps and make people do decontamination showers if they tromped around in the wrong places. to get those contaminants off them and keep them from spreading.
food could also be an issue too, given that the biggest danger is breathing in such contaminants, or eating them. either way, once they get into the body they can cause all sorts of health issues even after prolonged exposure to low levels.


Catyr technology too i'd imagine could have some hazards.. being immune to radiation, they could get away with cutting down on radiation sheilding on stuff like reactors. M/AM reactors would put out a ton of high energy radiation (gamma rays mostly).. which normally require a fair bit of heavy shielding to block (thick lead sheeting, bit tanks of water, etc), and even advanced technology isn't likely to reduce that mass requirement by much.. but the Catyr could leave off nearly all such sheilding, letting them get a better power to mass ratio from their antimatter powerplants. the same would go for fission and fusion power as well. hardware they produces radiation as part of its operation, like particle beams, could also be cut down giving them even more oomph for the mass. and for all we know parts of the CG drive tech generate radiation too, which would let them build more powerful drives. etc.

a Catyr ship built only for catyr might be fatally lethal inside to anyone but catyr, but be faster and harder hitting than other ships of the same size and mass.