Imagine being able to look at an engine and see where it is overheating/undercooling or see which electrical component is running dangerously hot or has blown without needing to dissesemble.

Should IR (natural vs augmented) give a bonus to B/R skills, if so what?

eh. probably not, in most cases. if a player puts up a convincing argument, i might give a -1 TN on a case-by-case basis.

I did once try to set up a character with cyber eyes, eye lights thermo and a tool laser for working on vehicles/electronics but the essence cost as getting reniculus.

I wouldn’t go so far as giving a bonus beyond having it contribute to tools and conditions modifiers.

Edward

I wouldn't give it a bonus, personally. Doesn't seem large enough for most tasks.

If I were to give a bonus, it would only be on a small subset of repair tasks.

~J

Though if you were trying to spot the leak in a warm air duct or somesuch I could see a bigger bonus

Um, just a self-hijacking thought. What about thermo-braile text for reading in the dark?

For certain B/R tasks, I might treat having thermographic vision as an extra success thrown into the test to determine the time a test takes (supposing the player got successes on the B/R test to begin with). Afterall, you'll work faster on your HVAC(B/R) test with thermo...

Otherwise, it's a tools mod waiting to happen.

I wonder if the difference in temperatures would be significant enough to help whenlooking at an engine. A Leaking refigeration line perhaps, though. A Better use for Thermo when it comes to vehicles is to see one car in a line of parked ones has been used recently (the Engine block/Tires should be hotter than a car thats been offline) =)

Engines get so much heat flowing around them its unlikely to be much of an advantage. It would be more useful for delicate electronics with practise (represented by your skill) you would be able to see when the component is just hot enough to melt solder so you can more safely solder components that are adversely effected by heat. Of cause as electronics really refers to optronics I don’t know how much soldering you would need to do.

Edward

Despite the silliness of SR optical computer systems, most electronics will still be solid state semi-conductors, capacitors, etc.

Does anybody have any reference to how precise IR vision is or what tempertures can be seen? Canon references to cyber vs natural seem to indicate that natural is better, but is that just because troll/dwarf brains are pre-adapted to thermal image processing or is troll/dwarf IR vision a mana powered sense and of the same resolution and quality as normal frequency vision?

Thermal IR ranges from about 3 micrometers and up in wavelength, well past 30 micrometers. Below that, but at longer wavelengths than visible light, is the Near IR (NIR) which is dominated by reflected IR light from the sun (and less by emitting IR from warm bodies).

If I had to guess, I'd say metas with natural thermovision probably "see" thermal IR as darker red colors--that is to say, their brains interpret thermal IR as just another color, making quick, precise judgements on temperature possible. Their visual range is just stretched to cover move wavelengths. In contrast, technological IR is most eaisly accomplished by using an overlay system and a scale, making it less intuitive for the user.

With enough practice, I'd imagine so. The peak emission of a perfect blackbody (which admitadly, tea is not) in micrometers = 2898/T(K). That is, most light emitted by an object (and thus, the "color" at which one usually sees it) is a function of temperature. So, looking at a range of temperatures, we get the following peak emissions:

Object---------------T (K)-----Peak Emission in microns

Ice cubes-----------273-------10.62

Lemonade at-------300-------9.66
room temperature

A nice hot dinner---350------8.28

Earl Grey, hot-------373------7.77

Now, within the visible range (0.4-0.7 microns, or so), we can discern millions of different colors seperated by only tiny frations of a micron. With enough practice, a competent cyber-user should be able to distinguish any number of temperatures (even today, I've used IR surveying lasers which give the precise location, and oddly enough, temperature of an object. Not that surveyors really care about temperature. For a computer, knowing the precise temperature is trivially easy, so lock that into a little SPU, and you've got your IR thermometer). For a native IR-seer, it might take some practice to learn to see specific temperature-colors (just as it takes some training to see subtle visual color shades), but the differences between hot and cold objects should be rich, and second nature.

RangerJoe have you still got access to one of those IR theodolytes? If you have can you do an experiment on a warm car engine to see if the different parts are temperature distinguishable?

And then, if you don't mind, could you, y'know, shoot it with a machine gun, or maybe cut holes in some of the hoses and see if it looks any different? Thanks, you're a doll.

Let's tone down the personal insults and name-calling, or I'll have my dad beat up your dad, allright? I was just kidding around. Let's all just be like Fonzie.
I, too, am very interested to know the temperature differential between different parts of a car engine.
Sorry if I offended anyone.

I already have a good idea of what the temperature differentials in an engine are, just not whether a modern IR system can pick them out and hence the usefulness of IR vision in SR B/R tests.

Sadly I've moved on to projects in other parts of the spectrum, so I can't make a quick field test of what various components look like under IR viewing. Here's some numbers to consider, though.

Taking your SOTA IR goggles of today (which according to the webpage are designed for imaging in complete darkness, implying emitted and not reflected IR), which claim to have a "thermal sensitivity" of < 100 mK (i.e., they can resolve temperature differences of less than 1/1000 of a Kelvin/degree C ), I think it's safe to assume that all kinds of objects, from engines to circuit boards, are going to be resolvable in IR, provided you stretch the output enough to make 0.001 K differences meaningful.

Now, the thing is, with a hot engine, you're probably going to be seeing mostly the hot air above the engine, which is turbulently becoming well-mixed, so you're going to have very noisy data as far as temperature differences between components are concerned. This might be less of an issue for somelike with a low heat output, like electronics.

All the same, if I had IR visision, I'd ramp up the stretch at watch convection cells above a radiator all day long. Ooooh.... the colors dance.

having specificaly used IR cameras in the construction of electrical equiptment, i would not award the bonus. We mostly used the IR to check for over heats and problems in the system. The only advantage of thermo on an electronic system would be to detect current and resistance, both of which could just as easily be done with common electronics tools (aka tool kit). I might however lessen the penalties for inproper tools, just as i would for a character with a knife and duct tape as aposed to nothing at all.