[4th May, 1999: Due to the restructuring that has occured, Car Wars:Flesh has undergone a revision. As a result, those notes that tackle submarines and animals that now exist on another part of the website.]

This is a subject that I've tackled lots of time in the past. I've always had a huge interest in dinosaurs, and I think what helped was when I read Flesh Book I, a strip from the annuals of 2000AD, back in the seventies. (I was very young and the comic was my brothers, okay?). Then a while after that, they did Flesh Book II, and it was something about man harvesting dinosaurs for food that really spurred my imagination. Then I got introduced to my first roleplaying game, and after that things just shot off. And it seems that nearly every game I bought, I would try to recreate Flesh, with that system - I did it for Traveller, Dungeons and Dragons, Gamma World, Palladium, and countless others, but I never could get the right feel.
Then Cadillacs and Dinosaurs the RPG came out, and then I started getting the comic, and then Jurassic Park came out, and now The Lost World, which, while it's a lousy film, does look pretty enough to get my interest back into things, and hence this...

Why I didn't think of using Car Wars for this ages ago (I've had the game since 1983) I have no idea, but now I have, and here is everything, and it wasn't that easy too I might add!

The Dinosaurs:

Perhaps the easiest and hardest thing to do. I've assumed that the dinosaurs where warm bloodied. It makes them faster, meaner, and while an armed vehicle will still take them out, it makes it just a tad more difficult. Seeing the films Jurassic Park and The Lost World had nothing to do with it, honest...
About the most difficult thing about the dinosaurs is finding hard statistics. Some books will give you weights, others will give you lengths, and others will give you height. hardly any will give you all the relevant details in one place (I have a reasonable size dinosaur library, so I'm not just saying this). And then there are the pictures. Sure, you can get a name and details, but not all books show pictures of what you are supposed to facing. (I haven't included pictures here as I don't want to infringe too many copyrights, but I've used the main dinosaurs for ease). So I've had to make some up some of the details, but hopefully nothing too major. I've assumed that creatures move like pedestrians because it makes a distinction between vehicles and animals, and because it works. Live creatures do get a slight advantage as their movement is spread out over the turn regardless of their speed, but as they move in 1/4" squares, I think this cancels out. Combat was quite easy, and I've gone down the film route, so they can be quite lethal, but then considering that some dinosaurs could supposedly swallow human sized prey whole, I don't think I've gone too overboard. And they do have a hellova lot of weight they can put behind their blows...

Submarines:

Another difficult subject. Boat Wars provides for surface ships, and yet some rules are there for undersea objects (hence depth charges and things) as well, and yet subs are absent. A point I had to rectify as Flesh Book II is set almost solely in the seas, and most of the action is underwater. But what to base the subs on? I know nearly nothing about this subject, so using up too much work time I did lots of searches on subs and their usage. Almost everything I got back was about research subs and bulky tourist subs, which are big, heavy (several tons too many), slow (4-5 knots). Not in the Car Wars vein at all. I wanted smaller one man subs zipping around, not huge things lumbering.
Then a search result came back with something called Deep Flight - an experimental new type of sub that works in a different way. It's lightish, fast (in comparison to subs), and looks the part. It was almost exactly what I wanted!
The vessel doesn't use ballast and supposedly handles like an aircraft, so I was relieved there as well as I didn't have to invent stacks of new rules for movement, and I could just use selected parts of Aeroduel. Which was fab as far as I was concerned.
New equipment had to be added, but I didn't want anything to make subs invincible or totally crap. I think I've hit a balance. Nothing is too drastic.
Subs are not quick in relation to modern surface vessels (Deepflight, which is supposed to be nippy only manages 12 knots (about 15 mph). Even modern nuclear subs only manage about 30 knots (or 35 mph), well, naturally I had to change that, but even now, subs aren't quick in relation to surface vessels. But their major factor is that they move underwater, and thus they can avoid a lot of obstacles. Sub weapons were another factor that I had to try and address. At the moment, a subs weapons are Blue Green lasers and torpedoes. This can lead to very expensive machines, and with normal equipment (sonar and communications), a sub gets expensive very quickly. As Flesh deals with fishing, I though spearguns would work, slightly more powerful than hand held models. And then the Whale Harpoon (due to the fact that's it's big and probably would be the type of thing used by whalers). With explosive warheads, subs can get quite damaging. Then, I had to include AquaMines, after all, where would the fun be if subs didn't get anything that you could put in their way.

Depths were something that I had a few problems with, and finding information about this isn't easy on the web. There's a lot of info, but not enough details. At the time of this writing, I still don't know what should happen to subs that go too deep, and I've decided to leave decompression well alone. I'm not a diver, can barely swim, so maybe I've made some mistakes. If I have and you know better, please correct me. My thinking about decompression was that if you had to stop for about five minutes at certain heights, you certainly wouldn't do that in the middle of a combat, where five minutes is 1500 phases...

The Rider Watersleds (what a name huh?), were inspired by the commando raids of WW2 where divers would sit on engines and get to their targets to plant limpet mines. I treated these as armoured motorcycles, but they steer like a cow.

Divers:

As I had to develop stuff for subs, I also had to develop stuff for divers. This is the area where I have least knowledge about, and thus most of this is informed guesswork. I hope I didn't screw up too royally...