Patrol Boat, Light

The Cardanian Navy utilizes many salvaged and refurbished boats from before the Crash in their patrols and defense of the Cardanian coast line and it's many rivers.

Generic Patrol Boat (Light)

Engine: Internal Combustion
Speed: (Cruise) 25mph / (Max) 35mph [Speed Class 2 30/20]
Range: 250 Miles

Hull Length: 30'
Crew: 4 (Captain, 2x Gunners, Mechanic)

SDC: 300
AR: 12

Armaments:
1) (Bow) .50 cal -- 315 degree forward arc Dmg: 1D6x10
2) (Aft) .50 cal -- 315 degree rear arc Dmg: 1D6x10
3) (Midship) Mortar -- 360 degree Dmg: varies
4) (optional) Grenade Launcher, M60

Other Standard Equipment:

• Radar
• Sonar/Depth Guage
• Searchlight
• Radio, Mid-Range

[IN THE NEWS] Digital Doomsday

Ever wonder why everyone seems to be down in the dirt in post-apocalyptic settings, even several decades after? Even though we are so brilliant now and would probably be even more some time down the road? Why don't the survivors just use that knowledge to pick themselves up by the boot straps and get back to it?

Because everything we are is built on a house of cards.

Read this Article: Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge

Tom Simonite and Michael Le Page write:

Yet even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?

[snip]

Whatever the cause, if the power was cut off to the banks of computers that now store much of humanity's knowledge, and people stopped looking after them and the buildings housing them, and factories ceased to churn out new chips and drives, how long would all our knowledge survive? How much would the survivors of such a disaster be able to retrieve decades or centuries hence?

[snip]

In 2008, for instance, it emerged that the US had "forgotten" how to make a secret ingredient of some nuclear warheads, dubbed Fogbank. Adequate records had not been kept and all the key personnel had retired or left the agency responsible. The fiasco ended up adding $69 million to the cost of a warhead refurbishment programme.

Something to keep in mind next time your AtB players/characters try booting up an old computer that's been gathering dust in the ruins on the Crash, or wonder why the few surviving humans didn't just rebuild the nuclear power plants and fast food joints.

Of course, since AtB is science fiction, anything is possible.

Embodied Cognition

One of the areas I'd like to explore in the AtB-verse setting is the idea that, before the Crash, people were able to "grow" themselves a spare body for recreational or medical reasons. In addition, these bodies could be customized in whatever way the owner wanted.

Not only could you completely change your appearance, these bodies could be hybridized with any transgenic feature you could think of. You could have a centaur body, a winged body, an amphibious body, etc. Just about anything you could think of would be possible.

One aspect I had not thought of until after watching Avatar recently was how swapping bodies would impact the human psyche. Thankfully, John Pavlus recently posted an article that takes a look at the idea of "Embodied Cognition":

...your mind-your "I"-is a function of a cephalized, bipedal, plantigrade, bilaterally symmetrical body between 1.5 and 2 meters tall with two arms terminating in five-fingered hands with opposable thumbs, two lungs, a warm-blooded vascular system, mostly hairless skin, two front-focused eyes, etc. etc. Change any aspects of that physical configuration-in subtle or radical ways-and the mind will inevitably change too.

You can read the whole article on io9.com or an earlier version on his blog.