| From: | Gurth gurth@******.nl |
|---|---|
| Subject: | SOTA |
| Date: | Wed, 10 Feb 1999 12:06:56 +0100 |
the street was...
> FASA's SRC SOTA rules seems to indicate SOTA is like inflation- old
> stuff does less.
> In fact, SOTA is more like a disappointing investment- you spend a lot
> of money, and realize down the line that you could have spent it better,
> but you don't loose anything except the chance to have purchased something
> better.
Perhaps a computer analogy works best to explain this: dig up a copy of a
really old game -- I'm talking 1984-vintage or something like that. Hang a
5.25" disk drive onto your Pentium-300, insert the game's disk into the
drive, and start up the game. Now watch it give you a "game over" message
before you even knew it was running.
Then find a working 8088 PC and start playing the same game. This will
work fine, because the computer is so much slower than modern PCs that the
game will run at an acceptable speed.
This is SOTA: the new computer running the old software will do everything
much faster than the old computer running that same software. The old
computer works just as well, but won't be able to run new software because
that requires too much processing power and add-ons that the old computer
simply doesn't have. Neither computer works better or worse than the
other, they're just working at different speeds.
For cars, however, the only place SOTA would really apply is in extreme
cases: Formula One race cars, for example, push the limit of what's
technologically possible; everyday passenger cars don't, so SOTA doesn't
really apply to them. And even at that, as Mongoose said, an X-year-old
car performs just as well as it did X years ago (provided it's been
maintained well) regardless of the performance of today's cars.
This is where FASA went wrong with the SOTA rules: old things don't get
worse when new items are developed. If they did, there wouldn't be lots of
countries still using WWII-vintage weaponry, for example. However, the
alternative -- making new items better than old ones -- makes the game too
deadly or overpowering.
--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
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