Future rules for vehicles?

[Lane]

The above assessment means your fuel consumption numbers are a bit off.

Most in universe fuels will be alcohol based, either ethanol or methanol. Biodiesel has better energy density (about equal to regular diesel fuel) but would require animal fat or much larger volumes of crops for vegetable oil. For steam power you could use wood but at 2/3 efficiency compared to alcohol.

For simplicity let us create some new materials
Fuel 2lb common
High quality fuel 2lb uncommon
Gasoline 2lb (very) rare

The use of scenes does not translate well into fuel use. You could drive for 6 hours (60 miles) or maybe only 3 miles in a scene. Distance would be better. our materials list would look like this.
Fuel 2lb common 2 miles
High quality fuel 2lb uncommon 3 miles
Gasoline/ diesel 2lb (very) rare 3 miles
wood 2lb common 1 mile

I agree that water would be required for steam transport. In fact it would lose water at a fair rate (leaks etc). A car sized steam plant would need at least 20L of water and lose about 1 unit (.5L ?) per hour. Steam plants would be too heavy for air transport, other than airships. However using dirty water would not necessarily expose crew/ passengers to radiation. Instead it would build up in the boiler. For every 10 units of dirty water used the boiler becomes a +1CD radiation source. This can be removed by purging the system, which takes 1/2 the boilers capacity (20 units to purge) and leaves a radiation source where dumped.

[Shroud]

Alright. I finished my basic Vehicle rules for the game I’m running. It’s a simple 4 page document that gives you the ability to construct, modify and use vehicles in the game, although it’s pretty abstract for the most part because I do not want it to be overly-complicated. It basically is on-par with the rules for power armor / weapons, etc… This link will take you to my shared Google Doc folder which also has files for an Overseer Screen as well as a comprehensive Equipment and Mod list so you don’t have to flip through a ton of pages for the basic info. Fallout 2d20 - Google Drive

[i26c2]

the highwayman in FO2 used energy cells or fusion cells to operate (so its essentially an electric car powered by either batteries or miniture hand held fusion cores). These cars were fairly rare before the war, as minture fusion had just been discovered, and there would not be many functional ones after the war, but still enough your PCs might find one they can fix up given just how many cars there would be by 2077. Even using today’s standards, assume that the highwayman was about as rare as electric cars are today, and then try to figure out how many would be in repair condition 100+ years after a nuclear war, and how much repairing would be required. I am assuming that number would be greater than 0, but how much so would be hard to guess. Gasoline and Diseal are both used for generators in fallout, so most cars probably got ciphoned of their fuel for use in generators as power is mroe important to settlements than mobility, but there might be some lying around still, especially in holding tanks under gas stations, for example.

[i26c2]

It’s probably the best one ever made IMO. You really should paly it. It has a lot fo the cool stuff from 1 but adds the car for fast travel, and ahs many more locations and jsut things to do. Its a big sandbox game, where 1 tried to be sandbox but msotly railroaded you. One thing to note in 2, is, it will make it seem like there is a timeline to find the g.e.c.k., but there really isn’t. You can take as long as you want without affecting the story.

Some of the cool things you can do are:

1. get a car working and drive it
2. become a boxer and fight in matches for prizes
3. have sex/work as a ■■■■ star
4. work for a Reno style organized crime family (you choose which one)
5. talk to intelligent death claws
6. Get some cool companions like a robot dog, someone who claims to have invented jet, a doctor with a shotgun, etc.

and so much more

[tomguff]

Yes, thank you, this is great! I’m definitely stealing this for my upcoming roadway segment.

I’m also negating damage from inside the vehicle. If a bug or a raider manages to hop onto the vehicle and attack it from the inside, that will negate the usual physical and energy damage resistance (unless the vehicle has some special internal armor or something).

Defense
Vehicles will have a Defense of 0 when at rest, since it’s not hard to hit. But as they speed up their Defense increases.

Driving allows characters to move quickly, thus making them more difficult to hit. A parked vehicle will have a Defense of 0, while driving at max speed (let’s say 100 mph) would raise Defense to 5. Other vehicles traveling at roughly the same speed can negate this, but any moving vehicle will have a Defense of at least 1.

So a car traveling at 100 MPH would have a whopping 5 Defense, but if there was another vehicle matching speed it would only be 1 Defense.

Certain vehicles, like planes, vertibirds, and other craft could go so fast that they’d be impossible to hit, but these stats would still be used for landing and take-off.

Roadways might limit the maximum speed. An open highway will allow speeds up to a 100 mph (5), while a heavily obstructed street would limit speed down to around 20 mph (1). This will limit the number of successes that characters will need to pass through the area.

Max Speeds

Open Flat Land = max 100 MPH, max Defense 5

Highway (good condition) = max 80 MPH, max Defense 4

Roadway (good condition) = max 60 MPH, max Defense 3

Highway (damaged) = max 40 MPH, max Defense 2

Roadway (damaged) = 20 MPH, max Defense 1

To reach maximum speeds, a different kind of Piloting test is done. The number of Successes made during the Test will act like Action Points (sort of) but for determining what you can do on the road. A lot of this would be GM discretion, but here’s the basics:

No Successes are required to maintain current speed and trajectory.

Each Success after that can be used to increase speed, or make various maneuvers like a sharp turn, or quickly changing lanes.

More advanced maneuvers, like ramming into another vehicle, would require more Successes.

[manunancy]

For fuel, ther’s several possibilities :

• good old refined oil - even if oil was on the way out, there was still some. Add 200 years for some bit to seep n from the remotest corners of the fields and you can have some limited extraction to fuel the very reduced demand
• alcool works as a replacement for gazoline, brewing fuel isn’t much more complex than moonshine
• methane can replace gazoline - you need to completely replace the fuel tanks but it works. You can get methane from most decayng organic matter inclusing ■■■■ (Mad Max 3 and Bqrtertown come to mind)
• more complex, coal to liquid processes can get you usable fuel ouy of coal. Great in places like Pensyvlania where there probably enough coal left
• gazogènes : yes you can get a gazoline car to work with wood ! You loose power, it’s long to get started and range sucks, but it sure beats walking.
• you can also use vegetable oil in a diesel engine.

[tomguff]

Love this list, thanks @manunancy

I was already thinking of making my Mr. Handy character “eat” fuel like the other PC’s eat Food. (It feels unfair that robots don’t need anything while all the other PC’s need to worry about water, food and sleep.)

But I was thinking, like food, different fuels would have different effects.
Good old refined oil would give bonus max HP, while alcohol would let the PC re-roll on END test once per scene, vegetable oil would have no bonus but would be cheaper and more common, et cetera.

[manunancy]

Using alcohol insted of gazoline means some loss of mileage and power, but nothing drastic - say 10% horsepower and 10-20% on the mileage. the main reason is that there’s simply less energy per volume of ethanol than gazoline.
Methane doesnt degrade power but range isn’t very good - being a gaz, energy per volume sucks compared with liquid fuels
Gazoline out of coal-to-liquid processes works as good as the oil-based one, though it has probably more sulfur and similar impurities, making it harsher on the engine
Vegetable oil is pretty much on par with diesel as far as performance go - you just need a good filtration to remove solid bits from the pressing process which may damage the injection system. Also depending on exactly what oil you’re using, temperature may be an issue - too cold and your oil turns solid. No worries if you’re zipping around the sun-baked mojave, but go high up the rockies or go north and you’ll need some heating system to keep your oil liquid.

[DoctorX]

My last game could’ve used some water vehicle rules, too.

[Lane]

Robots have several drawbacks so eliminating one of the few advantages they have (no need to eat/ drink) hurts them even more.

Think of the Mr Handy thruster as a turbofan engine connected to an electric motor. A turbofan is basically a jet engine that drives a large fan to get extra thrust. By driving the turbofan with an electric motor you do not need to burn fuel. Your nuclear battery will last longer but it’s not required. It doesn’t even need to “burn” fuel. The combustion chamber could instead be a heating chamber where almost any liquid is vaporized and released under pressure to drive the turbine. Mr Handy Fuel is just a high efficiency thrust medium that also acts as lubricant and cleaner. Most Mr Handy probably run on water. They may even have a feature that allows compressing and releasing air to collect moisture.

[Zcb]

Don’t know if anyone has said but the Enclave NPC pack has rules for vehicles. It added tge virtibird.