[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by tsofian

The project had to acquire vehicles. There are several paths they can use to do so. They can buy new military gear. They can buy obsolete military gear. They can do a design build of their own stuff. They could also buy prototypes and refurbish them. Each has its own merits and pitfalls and looking through the published canon (which is always dangerous and often contradictory) the publishers over the years have done a little bit of each

Is there a reason you would consider the publishers' previous efforts to be a good guidemap? They were wildly inconsistent and many later modules pointed out how often the equipment was a hindrance more than a help. They seemed to have been going for a "cool" game, but created something that was just broken in many ways.

Originally Posted by tsofian

Scratch Designs
MARS-1
Science Rover
Gyroscout
The three Hovercraft from Lonestar
HAMM Suit

MARS-1, the HAAM Suit, and the Gyroscout never made an appearance in the game that I can recall, and with good reason - they were unbalanced and/or dumb. The "Science Rover" appeared only for NPC's and was the only good idea of the bunch. The Lonestar Hovercraft were great examples of screwing the players by forcing them to use garbage. The players are already getting screwed by the rest of the world, having stupid Project decisions pile on doesn't help the game.

Originally Posted by tsofian

Experimental or semi experimental
SK-5 (a total of 14 of these were built including the SR.N5 version built in the UK, so two more than the AH-56A)-These could be included as obsolete or no longer in service instead since the US Military use of the PACV version went out of service in the 1970s
XR-311 I thought Israel had bought a small production run of these but I can't find the reference any longer, It seems the US bought about a dozen for trials.
FACME engineering equipment

The SK-5 was a terrible design, and that is why it was barely used in real life. The one time it appeared in the game, the stupidity was driven home. The XR-311 and FACEME were odd choices but as supporting vehicles were largely harmless and close enough to realistic to justify.

Originally Posted by tsofian

In production open market vehicles
CG Commando
CG Ranger
CG Scout

Not necessarily great choices, but reasonable given the mission and the constraints.

Originally Posted by tsofian

Personally I did the same. I don't see taking a prototype and saying "in this fictional universe it actually worked as designed" being any more handwavium than "The Project did a design build of some limited production run equipment". In the later case the Project has to do all the development from building the prototype.

And that can work when (a) developing from the prototype is plausible within Project limitations and when (b) the prototype is pretty close to what you actually want.

The XV-15, for example, was a test bed and performed pretty well. But developing it into a production model (and actually test-flying all the production run) would have drawn a lot of attention to the Project in a world where the XV-15 never got past prototype. You can retcon the real world to say it was a US production model, but you have not mentioned doing so and I would not recommend it - the real world is already a functioning system, why mess with that?

With the HML, it was designed as a special-purpose vehicle designed to operate in specific areas hauling a specific load to survive a specific threat. Developing that into a general purpose vehicle designed to go anywhere and survive against anything would require so much effort that starting from scratch would make more sense. Especially since the vehicle itself was under tremendous scrutiny and classified!

Originally Posted by tsofian

I have some very specific reasons why I use existing vehicles in preference to stand alone Project only ones. One is I can get things like the videos that show machines in operation. I can often get drawings and sometimes even manuals to hand to the players. I can almost always get a few decent pictures. All these help the players visualize their equipment. If the vehicles are stand alone it requires a lot more work, although I am certainly willing to do so. The St. Louis MP crew of days gone by did full manuals for the Science Rover, the three hovers from Lonestar (very heavily modified) and several other vehicles and load outs.

I have zero problem with using existing vehicles, the only time I recommend going away from that is when there is a specific need that cannot otherwise be met. So I don't use the ludicrous MARS-1 because there are other vehicles that could do much better. And when I do use existing vehicles, I try and figure out something that would be plausible and broadly effective - for example, using the proven and available V-22 instead of the prototype V-15 with it's 1500lb payload.

And if you need art, you need art. I don't know that many players who prefer a pretty picture of a bad vehicle to a rough sketch of something that actually works. The only one I can think of who would just turned 13.

Originally Posted by tsofian

So looking through the canon it doesn't seem that the originators were adverse to using prototypes, production machines or design builds depending on what was available.

They weren't, but they choked on their own bad choices because when you design the foundation of your game poorly then it becomes very hard to build on it. Why repeat that same mistake? I think TMP had an excellent core, but there were a lot of things that drove people away so I don't see a reason to venerate those design choices.