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GURPS Ultra-Tech is the GURPS supplement dedicated to futuristic and science-fictional technology (apart from bio-tech, which gets a whole separate book to itself). GURPS third edition had two volumes covering these topics; the material was updated and consolidated into a single volume for fourth edition.

Tropes notably invoked by Ultra-Tech:

  • Abnormal Ammo: Smart missiles are detailed as characters. Any ability a character can have, and any item a character can carry, can be the payload of a smart missile.
  • Antimatter: Briefly discussed. One microgram is enough to vaporize a normal human and incredibly expensive. There are also stats for antimatter bullets.
  • Arm Cannon: At least one version of the supplement lets a gun be implanted inside a character's hand or arm. Alternately, the entire arm can just be replaced with a weapon mount.
  • Attack Drone: There are fully sapient missiles which guide themselves but have no initiative and must be given orders by radio. There are also shurikens with basic reasoning skills.
  • Auto-Doc: The book has several versions for different Technology Levels, from the TL9 Automed (a sealed trauma pod with automated functions, but which needs advice from a real doctor if anything unexpected happens) to the TL12 Medical Bush Robot, which has multiple medical instruments on its fractal "branchesstar" enabling it to perform any surgery.
  • BFG: The Grav Railgun can be carried by people in a good suit of Powered Armor and fires with enough force to punch straight through a tank from five miles away... with more accuracy than a sniper rifle... twenty times a second... completely without recoil.
  • Brown Note: Sonic nauseators make people void their bowels as side effect of knocking them out. Just don't mix one up with a sonic screamer, which produces a sound that melts the target.
  • Buried Alive: The result of being teleported into a mountain is this. A 2-cubic-meter column of stone appears in the teleport chamber as a form of Equivalent Exchange.
  • Cool, but Stupid: The rocket striker is a swinging melee weapon with a rocket engine attached for extra power. Yes, you read that right. May be either So Bad, It's Good or just far too silly.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: One weapon releases nanites into your blood. After a few minutes, your blood explodes.
  • Deadly Disc: Rubber coatings can be put on the rims of disc grenades so they bounce off walls, with a (probably timed) warhead inside.
  • Death Ray: The book has a slew of these, from a half dozen weapons that disintegrate the enemy to Mind Disruptors that make the target's body want to die.
  • Deployable Cover: The book has various portable force screen generators.
  • Disintegrator Ray: The "Reality Disintegrator" and the more traditional "Nucleonic Disintegrator".
  • Fun with Acronyms: High Explosive Multi Purpose warheads.
  • Gatling Good: The book has Gatling versions of just about every firearms type it covers which are at the low end of the high-power weapons but have four times the rate of fire and about twice as many shots.
  • Goggles Do Something Unusual: Hyperspectral Goggles show you the entire electromagnetic spectrum and have a zoom function. The same supplement may allow other technology to be built into goggles or their frames.
  • Grey Goo: Discussed in a section on Von Neumann machines, which points out that the waste heat of the goo eating a planet is likely a more pressing threat than being eaten by it. On the upside, they require extremely high-level technology and are expensive to make; on the downside, some versions might be able to fly or travel through space.
  • Impossibly-Compact Folding: This appears to be possible at Tech Level 10, which includes such things as the "Suitcase Doc", which just keeps unfolding life support systems, surgical manipulators and diagnostic sensors as needed, the "Dynamic Car", which folds into a box when not in use (or, if an enemy hacks its systems, while in use) and the "Backpack Dragonfly", a microlight aircraft that can be carried in a backpack, and unfolded in seconds.
  • Invisibility Cloak: Various versions are described. At the most advanced level, the Invisibility Surface works not only in the visual spectrum but well beyond it.
  • Jet Pack: The book has a nuclear jetpack that lets out a torrent of irradiated plasma below it. It's cool but neither particularly safe nor stealthy.
  • Latex Perfection: Active Flesh Masks even have tiny motors to make them move properly.
  • Lie Detector: Ones that operate on micro-expressions and brainwaves have been perfected.
  • Matter Replicator: They're balanced by truly massive power demands that require "cosmic" energy sources to be economical.
  • More Dakka: The Grav Heavy Needler is a rifle-sized weapon that fires 100 explosive armor piercing rounds per second with superscience stabilizers that give it extreme accuracy and zero recoil. Its average damage causes instant death for a normal human hit by a single round from up to a mile and a half away. A group of soldiers carrying these have almost begun the approach towards beginning to have enuff dakka.
  • Neural Implanting: Instaskill nano rapidly reorganizes a person's brain to give them basic knowledge of a new skill.
  • Overheating: There are optional overheating rules for energy weapons.
  • Plasma Cannon: There are stats for a variety of plasma guns, but notes that they are all "superscience" and therefore shouldn't be included in "hard" settings.
  • Powered Armor: The book has a slew of suits. The most powerful is the TL12 "Warsuit" which, just for starters, is armored with layers of hyper-dense regenerating metal alloy and multiplies an ordinary person's strength 25 times over. There's also the clever "Exo-Field Belt", which is Powered Armor made out of nothing but force fields.
  • Power Fist: The book has an advanced version of brass knuckles and zap glove, along with a system that makes your punches stick grenades to the enemy.
  • Ragnarök Proofing: Anything that is made from Living Metal will last forever because the material will automatically repair any damage that it incurs.
  • Robotic Assembly Lines: The book has rules for setting these up, specifically focusing on the product being made so that you can get along with the game.
  • Rocket-Powered Weapon: The book comes with many templates that can be applied to low-tech weaponry to make it far more effective against modern armor, including, you guessed it, an option to put a small solid rocket booster on the back end of an axe, mace, or spear for an extra-powerful swing (or, in the spear's case, a rocket-powered, ultra-long-range throw).
  • Sharpened to a Single Atom: The book has a number of (increasingly super-science) ways of working this into the game mechanics. Superfine blades divide damage resistance by two. Monowire blades divide damage resistance by ten. Nanothorn blades divide damage resistance by ten and shreds the bonds that hold the atoms in molecules together.
  • Shoulder Cannon: There are shoulder mounts for any large weapon. Naturally, they're difficult to aim.
  • Sniper Rifle: Ultra-tech sniper rifles are naturally depicted as utterly terrifying. For example, the grav railgun can be carried by someone in a good suit of Powered Armor and fires with enough force to punch straight through a tank from five miles away.
  • Spy Bot: Robobugs are good for this. The much larger nanomorph is basically James Bond with superpowers.
  • Static Stun Gun: Electrolasers cause stunning effects in the early editions of the game, but in 4th edition, the laser element causes a modicum of burning damage. However, attacks with the Surge modifier always force characters to roll to avoid stun if enough damage is taken.
  • Sticky Bomb: Limpet Mines work this way. The supplement even came up with good reasons to stick them to yourself.
  • Teleportation: Teleporters are assumed to be of the translocator variety — it is explicitly stated, for example, that attempting to teleport someone into a mountain would result in a 2-cubic-meter cylinder being teleported into the teleporter chamber and the person being placed in a 2-cubic-meter air-filled cylinder inside the mountain.
  • Tractor Beam: Attractor and pressor beams exist as superscience devices. They're mainly construction tools, but powerful ones can be used in combat.
  • Variable-Length Chain: The Monowire Whip is so thin, you can fit miles of it in a spool the size of your hand. (It's also invisible, unless you deliberately build markers into it.)
  • The Virus: A metamorphosis virus can be weaponized into either this or a version that turns everyone into random things, which can be much worse.
  • Wave-Motion Gun: The Heavy Disintegrator Cannon is probably the book's grossest super-weapon. It's available at the highest Technology Level covered, and is also flagged as "superscience".
  • Weather-Control Machine: There are weather control satellites described, but they're huge, expensive and limited in effect.


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