 December 1, 2008 - 11:18am | A discussion in the Setting thread brings up the issue of how our FTL travel is going to work. Do we
have "jumps" like in Star Frontiers where the travel time is mostly
spent getting to jump speed or a safe distance from the gravity well
and the actual FTL part is nearly instanteous or do we have some sort
of "warp" drive that allows you to move at some specified speed (i.e. 1
ly per day) so that you travel at a fixed rate? What other issues about FTL travel should we be considering? Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 December 1, 2008 - 11:43am | There is also the jump-gate method (via 'hole', folded space, etc)... controled via mechanism. Travel to new regions is extra-extra-slow, but once a route is found, some sort of 'speed-up' mechanism is in place... maybe even some sort of space-buoys along the way that do some sci-fi thing with gravity or acceleration physics.... exploration to regions unknown would take months/years of slow movement... which is why routes go normally just to areas where other known planets (Mclass) are or regions where other species can build from the other side (space tunnelling of a sort). Anyhow, I am probably not the best to describe such, but surely we can bring up a method that is relatively plausible yet hasn't been overdone before. <insert witty comment here> |
 December 1, 2008 - 11:59am | Well, we can look at how other sci-fi series have done this then pick and choose the best parts. Basically there is the fast calculation, fast jump; slow for both and a combination of in between possibilities. For methods, there are worm holes, folding space (you don't actually go anywhere space folds in to you for instantaneous travel), jump/push gates, "standard" FTL jump drives and just plain really fast but within current physics. The long calculation, long travel was one of the reasons the Frontier was not as explored as you would think for being there for so long. That and the ships did a straight line of travel meaning that in order to get to some places you may have to calculate twice and "jump" twice to get around an object. I am in favour of a medium (i.e. 1 hr/ly to travel) calculation with long (i.e. 1 day/ly travelled) travel format myself. I liked the fact that you couldn't just pop in and out at will, you had to actually plan your moves and be ready to deal with what was on the other side without being able to run right away. Made things tense at times and made it make sense in the concept of story as to why there were unexplored star systems. I like the use of a ship's drives being the main force behind stellar travel, but this could be something that is normally only on "explorer" or military ships, with most commercial travel being done via some kind of rail gun that just fires the ship off, no navigator required as all calculations are done by the "gun" controller. Never been a fan of instantaneous travel or the idea of a sub-layer of space that was independant of the physical such as in Babylon 5 or Andromeda (both of which I like as shows). I like the risk of smacking right into a rogue comet or having pirates tow a hulk into the path in order to get a ship to "drop" to normal speed and attack it. "I reject your reality and substitute my own."
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 December 1, 2008 - 12:23pm | Corvus wrote an excellent FTL article that maybe we should revisit and consider the possibilities of. He's pretty well-read in science fiction and did a really good job classifying the FTL options. I can't remember which issue of the SFman it was in... 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
 December 1, 2008 - 3:59pm | I'm in favor of a warpdrive type system myself, particularlly something along the lines of an inertialess drive. Here's the wikipedia article, if anyone's interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertialess_drive "You're everything that's base in humanity," Cochrane continued. "Drawing up strict, senseless rules for the sole reason of putting you at the top and excluding anyone you say doesn't belong or fit in, for no other reason than just because you say so." —Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stephens, Federation |
 December 2, 2008 - 7:40am | You care read FLT Travel which appeared in the Star Frontiersman Issue 4 here. Space is big. It's the Frontier. I'm a big fan on long travel times and I like fixed rates. To me it makes going places worth the effort to get there. I like the idea of rim worlds - far from the core worlds where technology and farming are mixed. 1 day per light year is acceptable to me. How you get there is not so important to me but I would stay away from Gates, Folds or Catapults. I like starship drives taking you from point A to B without extra hardware involved. I'm not a big fan of almost instantaneous travel (like in Star Wars). On a side note, our setting could be very frontiers'ish in the beginning and work it's way to faster and faster travel time. |
December 2, 2008 - 9:42am | I'm not suggesting any form of instant travel either... that would be the OPPOSITE of a frontier feel to the campaign. Yes, rim worlds sound just right. Gotta have places for pirates to hang out and not worry about star law, right? hehe Anyway, my only suggestion for wormholes is as follows... and it's just an idea maybe better discussed in the setting... but take a look at this very rough map below:  So imagine that the sectors shown in this map are each quite huge.... maybe 100LY. At conventional 1LY/day speeds, it would take 100 days to cross one of these hexes. If you zoomed into one of these maps, though, it would show a 100x100 hex map full of stars and nebula strands like the Frontier map of Alpha Dawn. So each race has a native sector where only it became the dominant spacefaring race. Within one of these sector maps, an entire campaign could exist, since speeds are 1LY/day, there is plenty of room within the sector for action and adventure. And just because I call it the "Human" sector doesn't mean there aren't a handful of "lesser" races in that sector - it's just that Humans became the dominant race either through colonization, conquest, diplomacy, or whatever. Likewise for the other racial areas. But the races are so far apart that it would take many years of flight for one to have run into the other - which is unlikely. That's where the Vortex comes in. The Vortex is an unusually dense sector, with a huge gaping black hole or some other freakish anomoly in its center hex. For some unknown reason, wormholes exist in the frontier but lead only to fixed points in the Vortex sector. Once an object travels from the Human Sector to the Vortex, there is a period of time that the wormhole remains and a return trip is possible. Once races discovered this process, they began to merge their kingdoms/cultures in the sector of space called the Vortex. To facilitate transport back to their own world, though, Vortex Gates were erected around these fixed locations, which periodically sends mass back and forth through the wormholes, keeping them in a permenant state of stable existance. Over time, instead of raw mass being sent, it became mail packets and data - to keep the racial sectors informed of the politics and conditions of the Vortex sector. Just as travelling within a zoomed-in sector is at 1LY per day, trave between the sectors using the four stable wormholes is at a rate of 1Sector per day. Therefore, when a human ship commits to travelling to the Vortex sector, it takes them 4 days to emerge from the wormhole... plenty of time to get into trouble lol. This set-up allows the races to excel independently from one another, allows for sectors to exist with racial pre-dominance, and allows for a densely populated central area which is a melting pot full of politics and intrigue and pop culture. It allows for "ports" to exist where piracy is a problem (at and around the Gates). Over the centuries, some corps have began expanding and exploring beyond the Vortex sector into the surrounding sectors, thus we have the more frontierish Outer Rim sectors where worlds don't benefit from the existence of the gates, but anyone willing to spend a lot of time flying could get to. And it also allows for a LOT of unexplored vastness. A new race, at any time, could discover a wormhole in their sector and suddenly appear in the Vortex, adding new races to the game easily. So that was the basic idea. No instantaneous travel... lots of frontier... Maybe I could adjust some scaling, maybe reduce the sectors to only be like 50LY instead of 100LY but space the races farther apart. 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
December 2, 2008 - 9:48am | I think the scale of each 'racial sector' fits much better with my own understanding of the vastness of galactic distances... and oh so much room to develop material. <insert witty comment here> |
December 2, 2008 - 11:31am | One additional thing I like about your method, Bill, is that each and every additional race can be optional and totally dependant upon the ref's tastes. But, in order to keep this quality of 'each sector being optional', we must keep details of the vortex area rather sketchy when it comes to how exactly each race is mixed in... just stating details like there are several cosmopolitan regions where multiple races coexist, or individual races have carved out their own chunks of space out in the rim. Later, as we determine races that the whole audience deems 'core' we can start to support more detail about specific aspects of the interior. For now, it ought to be rather vague, as was discussed earlier. Perhpas to keep our more science-knowledgable types on-board, we call the worm-holes by another term or use some other descriptions to make it plausible... for instance, the spacial phenomenoms called 'vortice tears' seem to occur (at least on one end) to regions of space with extreme gravity wells (black holes) where distortions in distances, acceration constants, and gravity occur in stable forms. Some scientists describe the effect as a fold or bend in space, and others call it a tunnel of sorts. Regardless, ships must be equipped with special gravity drives which produce a gravity shell of sorts around thier hulls to keep the vessels safe from the strange forces found within the vortice tear. anyhow, it certainly can be written out by one with a tad more writing skill that I have. <insert witty comment here> |
December 2, 2008 - 11:39am | One additional thing I like about your method, Bill, is that each and every additional race can be optional and totally dependant upon the ref's tastes. Well if we do use a system such as this, then we NEED a plausible fantastic-science ("technobabble") description of how we achieve such speeds through stable tears or anomolies (100LY/day is quick!) and the limitations of it (like, I think the trip is committed, taken, and you arrive - there should be very little reason to ever "drop out" of high speed)... and we need someone to make it who would normally have a hard science bent to their preferences. That way the community can embrace it more effectively. I don't want to simply call it a wormhole and say BAM! it's superscience magic, just accept it. I'd prefer some sort of ficticious superscience discovery to force plausibility.But, in order to keep this quality of 'each sector being optional', we must keep details of the vortex area rather sketchy when it comes to how exactly each race is mixed in... just stating details like there are several cosmopolitan regions where multiple races coexist, or individual races have carved out their own chunks of space out in the rim. Later, as we determine races that the whole audience deems 'core' we can start to support more detail about specific aspects of the interior. For now, it ought to be rather vague, as was discussed earlier. Perhpas to keep our more science-knowledgable types on-board, we call the worm-holes by another term or use some other descriptions to make it plausible... for instance, the spacial phenomenoms called 'vortice tears' seem to occur (at least on one end) to regions of space with extreme gravity wells (black holes) where distortions in distances, acceration constants, and gravity occur in stable forms. Some scientists describe the effect as a fold or bend in space, and others call it a tunnel of sorts. Regardless, ships must be equipped with special gravity drives which produce a gravity shell of sorts around thier hulls to keep the vessels safe from the strange forces found within the vortice tear. anyhow, it certainly can be written out by one with a tad more writing skill that I have. 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
 December 2, 2008 - 2:01pm | one thing that allways buged me about FTL travel was that all ships travel at the same rate i think that some ships should be faster than others then their cold be scouts and and speacle delivery crapht. (insert sarcastic comeback here) |
December 2, 2008 - 2:17pm | one thing that allways buged me about FTL travel was that all ships travel at the same rate i think that some ships should be faster than others then their cold be scouts and and speacle delivery crapht. Very insightful, Colt45. I agree with that. the 1LY/day was an oversimplification in Alpha Dawn that was made obsolete with the addition of Knight Hawks... Maybe we can have a couple levels of speed: 0.5LY/day for small civilian craft, 1LY/day for most industrial or security craft, 1.5LY/day for recon or military craft. I don't know - something to consider.3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
December 2, 2008 - 2:54pm | one thing that allways buged me about FTL travel was that all ships travel at the same rate i think that some ships should be faster than others then their cold be scouts and and speacle delivery crapht. Ships speed test == Kessel Run.  Bill and Colt - I think it's up to the technology we pick. In KH your faster because your ADF is faster and you reach void speed quicker. Also travel will also have todo with spacer skill - Astrogation. |
December 2, 2008 - 3:14pm | Basically we have to determine how it is that the ships travel in order to then begin assigning values to travel. If we used the current SFKH as the example, the time it takes to do calculations could be done faster by a better navigator and a faster computer. The time it takes to travel can be done faster by faster engines and better pilot. The best of the best means you can plot and arrive much faster than the average crew on an average ship. Largely dependant on a method of travel that is dependant on staying in the physical space and travelling at or over light speed. For the use of jump gates or folding or worm holes, the only real variation I can see would be if the ships engines had something to do with the travel time. Allowing technology to be diverse enough to factor into travel time is a good idea as it will even allow for military and civilian grades, as well as variations in corporate models, i.e. Corp A engines can go 10% faster but Corp B engines can go longer before an overhaul. It may go so far as to have some ships be "tricked out" with the best combinations for speed and firepower, or generic "corporate" ships that are average in every way. "I reject your reality and substitute my own."
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December 2, 2008 - 3:43pm | We need a simple but plausible way for people to cruise around 1LY/day (plus or minus based on performance or various factors). Plus, if we go with the larger sector map to justify racial origin locations, we'll need a plausible method of "wormhole" (or whatever) travel that is roughly 100LY/day. How about a technobabble contest? People could submit ideas, we could put them together and have a poll on which to use? But then again, everyone would vote on their own, and we only seem to have 10 or so votes per poll :-S 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
December 2, 2008 - 3:46pm | Bill, just choose one (great leader), then let the verbose story (and technobabble) writers parse it out to an extent. I have opinions but I am pretty flexible about it, as I think most here are. anyway, each Ref can always choose to do things differently for their own campaigns. <insert witty comment here> |
December 2, 2008 - 4:02pm | One thing to consider here is whether or not we are going to have artificial gravity generators. If not (my vote) there will be limits to how fast your ship can accelerate for extended periods of time. Using some numbers from KH, it takes ~83.3 hours to accelerate from rest up to 1% the speed of light at 1g (10 m/s^2). That is just over four game days. during that time you've covered about 3AU. If you were in Sol System and started at Earth, that would but you at the outer edge of the Asteroid belt but not quite out to Jupiter. At 2g, you get to the same speed in half the time and cover half the distance putting you out 2.5 AU from the Sun in the middle of the asteroid belt. But now your crew and passengers have been under a constant 2g for two days and are starting to get exausted and you have just as long to slow down at the other end. Another thing to consider is the effect of gravity on whatever FTL method we use. Do you have to be so far out (or inside) a gravity well for the FTL drive to work? Does it work anywhere? The SF system works anywhere but requires a certain speed and travel time is really spent getting up to that speed. Also can you manuever while under the influence of the FTL drive or do you have to travel in 'straight' lines? This has impacts on the importance of the jump calculations. Small errors in your velocity vector can put you way off course adding days of travel time as you limp in from the outskirts of the system. Anyway, more food for thought. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
December 2, 2008 - 7:23pm | it really dosnt matter how t works just give us something that will brake and be fixed something that we can race our buddies with and sounds cool. (we can allways explain tech latter) (insert sarcastic comeback here) |
December 2, 2008 - 7:37pm | Okay - decision made... The core setting that comes with the game will have a new starmap - including somewhere between 20 and 40 solar systems and some spacial regions with nebulas etc. Travel between established routes will be at 1LY/day, no explanation as to how. There will be a mysterious badguy race detailed in the Referee's manual. a basic timeline will exist, but won't explain how one such-and-such a date humans "arrived in this region of space". A handful of worlds will be heavily detailed, some maybe even partially mapped. Other worlds will have only sketchy information. We can all divvy up some of these responsibilities to make each detailed world unique. Any discussion of other sectors of space, wormholes, stargates, areas of racial origin, technology behind star travel, etc. won't occur in the core setting book... but can be added later by anyone who wants to make a new setting or expand on the existing one. Sound good? 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
December 3, 2008 - 7:38am | Okay - decision made... The core setting that comes with the game will have a new starmap - including somewhere between 20 and 40 solar systems and some spacial regions with nebulas etc. Travel between established routes will be at 1LY/day, no explanation as to how. There will be a mysterious badguy race detailed in the Referee's manual. a basic timeline will exist, but won't explain how one such-and-such a date humans "arrived in this region of space". A handful of worlds will be heavily detailed, some maybe even partially mapped. Other worlds will have only sketchy information. We can all divvy up some of these responsibilities to make each detailed world unique. Any discussion of other sectors of space, wormholes, stargates, areas of racial origin, technology behind star travel, etc. won't occur in the core setting book... but can be added later by anyone who wants to make a new setting or expand on the existing one. Sound good? Agreeable. We can always go back and fill that stuff in if need be. (I'm with Terl on his post about traveling KH sytle) |
December 3, 2008 - 8:51am | I like the harder science behind Terl's post too, and it's accurate to KH for sure... but to be honest it bores me in-game. Four days of acceleration means 4 days of deceleration... then "void travel" is nearly instantaneous. And of course acceleration depends on ADF, right? Which ADF did you use to figure that 4-day acceleration rate? So an 8-day trip to go anywhere desired... without touching a single point in space between two solar systems. Pirates would only be able to mess with you within a solar system, which would be easy for star law to patrol. You didn't even leave the solar system of Earth before reaching FTL... and you appear in the solar system at your destination. You never leave sensor range of civilized worlds... Those numbers on the star lanes of Alpha Dawn's map became useless in Khight Hawks... every trip you take is of identical duration. I don't remember there being a maximum distance to jump... though I think misjumping had a radius of error dependant on the distance of your "jump". Another thing that bugged me about KH is the assumption that we can't overcome inertia. The "gravity" generated by 1g of acceleration is just the relativity of inertia... kinetic action/reactive force, right? The frontier has technology to counteract that... just on a smaller scale: inertia screens. If it can slow a bullet or hurled knife, why couldn't they develop inertia dampeners to allow for more advanced g's of acceleration? Accelerate in a few hours... assume voidspeed is 1LY/day... and there ya go. 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
December 3, 2008 - 9:09am | I like the harder science behind Terl's post too, and it's accurate to KH for sure... but to be honest it bores me in-game. Four days of acceleration means 4 days of deceleration... then "void travel" is nearly instantaneous. And of course acceleration depends on ADF, right? Which ADF did you use to figure that 4-day acceleration rate? So an 8-day trip to go anywhere desired... without touching a single point in space between two solar systems. Pirates would only be able to mess with you within a solar system, which would be easy for star law to patrol. You didn't even leave the solar system of Earth before reaching FTL... and you appear in the solar system at your destination. You never leave sensor range of civilized worlds... Those numbers on the star lanes of Alpha Dawn's map became useless in Khight Hawks... every trip you take is of identical duration. I don't remember there being a maximum distance to jump... though I think misjumping had a radius of error dependant on the distance of your "jump". Why don't we say that you have to be a certain distance from objects or gravity wells in order to use the "jump" technology. This is between instantaneous and days, right? Another thing that bugged me about KH is the assumption that we can't overcome inertia. The "gravity" generated by 1g of acceleration is just the relativity of inertia... kinetic action/reactive force, right? The frontier has technology to counteract that... just on a smaller scale: inertia screens. If it can slow a bullet or hurled knife, why couldn't they develop inertia dampeners to allow for more advanced g's of acceleration? Accelerate in a few hours... assume voidspeed is 1LY/day... and there ya go. Wow, I missed this. Excellent idea. Let's implement it (along with my comment above) Interia dampeners are good for x ammount of G's worth of acceleration - so you could push your ship and your crew for a number of minutes or hours to get away from the bad guys. /me feels like we all have just arrived at an agreement.  |
December 3, 2008 - 10:01am | Humans gray-out (clouded or occluded vision from lack of blood-carying oxygen to the sensitive sensory areas of the eyes/retina/brain) at about 4.1G's (+/-). They black-out (complete sensory deprivation) at around 4.7G's. Complete unconsciousness occurs about 5.4G's. If inertia screens can reduce the acceleration of kinetic mass by half (thus it "absorbs" half the kinetic damage from a pistol), then that would allow acceleration of around 8G's before vision would cloud... and acceleration of nearly 10G's would be possible if risk of blackout is acceptible. Hell, of the 1,000 tests performed by navy aviation, they found individuals who could withstand 7.1G's before even vision clouding occurred... meaning that person with inertial dampening could withstand 14.2G's before being minorly inconvenienced! That's quick acceleration... how does it play out in numbers? TerlObar? 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
December 3, 2008 - 10:37am | I like the harder science behind Terl's post too, and it's accurate to KH for sure... but to be honest it bores me in-game. Four days of acceleration means 4 days of deceleration... then "void travel" is nearly instantaneous. And of course acceleration depends on ADF, right? Which ADF did you use to figure that 4-day acceleration rate? So an 8-day trip to go anywhere desired... without touching a single point in space between two solar systems. Pirates would only be able to mess with you within a solar system, which would be easy for star law to patrol. You didn't even leave the solar system of Earth before reaching FTL... and you appear in the solar system at your destination. You never leave sensor range of civilized worlds... Those numbers on the star lanes of Alpha Dawn's map became useless in Khight Hawks... every trip you take is of identical duration. I don't remember there being a maximum distance to jump... though I think misjumping had a radius of error dependant on the distance of your "jump". That was based on an ADF of 1 = 1g of gravity. If you go to ADF2 that means you are under 2g for two days. As for Star Law patrolling, they don't have enough ships, There would be a different space lane for each jump route in/out of a system separated by days of travel time. They would be streched pretty thin to cover everything in all systems. But I agree that method makes it easier for them than it might be otherwise. On the other hand, if you can zip around anyway you want in space with some "warp drive", which is what we're talking about for a 1ly/day travel speed (BTW for those who care, 1ly/day = warp 7.1 in star trek), pirates don't have a chance to catch you in deep space anyway. You just take a random offset as you begin and compensate once you are on your way. That effecively puts you billions of miles in a random direction and unless the pirates have been following you the whole time they will never find you. They have to try to catch ships in the systems. You'll never find them between the stars anyway. This mechanic does provide for "boring' space travel, but in the end it is anyway you do it. Plodding through space at 1ly/day isn't much more exciting. Nothing is really going to happen between the stars unless someone is chasing you from the system you left. Also, if we wanted to keep this mechanic, I have several ideas to tweak the mechanics to make your arrival location in your destination system a bit more random (too close, too far, off-course). Of course, this would tend to make your trips longer as you have to maneuver to get back on course. But if you are up against a deadline, you might have to scramble to still make it. It would make interstellar travel more risky and less sure, but not more exciting from an adventuring standpoint. Another thing that bugged me about KH is the assumption that we can't overcome inertia. The "gravity" generated by 1g of acceleration is just the relativity of inertia... kinetic action/reactive force, right? The frontier has technology to counteract that... just on a smaller scale: inertia screens. If it can slow a bullet or hurled knife, why couldn't they develop inertia dampeners to allow for more advanced g's of acceleration? Accelerate in a few hours... assume voidspeed is 1LY/day... and there ya go. Interesting idea, I never imagined the inertia screen to reach out and change the inertia of the incoming object, but rather more of something that applied an outward force to slow it down and dampen the kinetic energy, something on the lines of these screens used in the begining of the old Dune move. It slows down the incoming particle so it doesn't do as much damage. I have to think about this some more. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
December 3, 2008 - 10:41am | Humans gray-out (clouded or occluded vision from lack of blood-carying oxygen to the sensitive sensory areas of the eyes/retina/brain) at about 4.1G's (+/-). They black-out (complete sensory deprivation) at around 4.7G's. Complete unconsciousness occurs about 5.4G's. If inertia screens can reduce the acceleration of kinetic mass by half (thus it "absorbs" half the kinetic damage from a pistol), then that would allow acceleration of around 8G's before vision would cloud... and acceleration of nearly 10G's would be possible if risk of blackout is acceptible. Hell, of the 1,000 tests performed by navy aviation, they found individuals who could withstand 7.1G's before even vision clouding occurred... meaning that person with inertial dampening could withstand 14.2G's before being minorly inconvenienced! That's quick acceleration... how does it play out in numbers? TerlObar? But what were the durations of those tests? Even at 'only' 8gs of real accleration where you are only feeling half you are talking about 10-11 hours under that type of stress (4g's of accleration) to get to 0.01c. What numbers do you want? Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
December 3, 2008 - 11:09am | Also, if we wanted to keep this mechanic, I have several ideas to tweak
the mechanics to make your arrival location in your destination system
a bit more random (too close, too far, off-course). Of course, this
would tend to make your trips longer as you have to maneuver to get
back on course. But if you are up against a deadline, you might have
to scramble to still make it. It would make interstellar travel more
risky and less sure, but not more exciting from an adventuring
standpoint. This idea is very exciting to me because I like the frontier'ish feel. I can see myself improving the technology over time in my campaigns. Another thought; if the game setting is primative tech there is lots of room for a webzine, improvements in technology (Yes I restated this :-P), community input and fan generated ideas. If the tech is "way out there" then it would seem your stuck with it or would have to come up with your own ideas and hope they fit into the game. Back to space travel, even in SW hyperspace ins't like dust'in crops boy.  |
December 3, 2008 - 11:42am | This idea is very exciting to me because I like the frontier'ish feel. I can see myself improving the technology over time in my campaigns. Back to space travel, even in SW hyperspace ins't like dust'in crops boy. Me too. That is one of the things I like about the KH jump rules. The races weren't supposed to have FTL travel. It was a complete serendipitous find and defies the laws of physics. Which makes it a tool they use but don't completely understand. If you plot you jump just right and don't make any mistakes and control everything properly, it works. If you try to take shortcuts, you might just wind up somewhere completely unexpected. In fact I always felt KH made it too simple but just chalked it up to ease of play.Here's a number. If your direction when you enter the void is off by 0.1 arc seconds (that's 0.46 microradians = 0.000028 degrees) and you make a 5 ly jump, you end up 23 million kilometers from where you intended. That is a tad more than 0.15 AU, or about half the distance between Earth's and Venus's orbit. It's going to take you some time to recover from your navigational error. If you figure you travel 1ly/sec in void (which is what the KH rules seem to imply) that means that if your timing is off by 1 microsecond, you miss your target by about 9.5 million kilometers which is about .063AU. Again, you're going to have some maneuvering to. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
December 3, 2008 - 11:50am | And none of that factors in any gravity effects from the planets and smaller objects in the system. If you have to know where those are and you have an old ephemeris, you've got a lot of number crunching to do. If you don't have an ephemeris for your target system (i.e. exploration) you're in even deeper trouble as you may just bounce right in on a collision course with something and not have time to reach. I always took this as the reason you needed such long calculation times. You had to know exactly where you were in the system you were leaving relative to all the large masses, you had to know exactly where everything in the target system was relative to where you plan to come out, you had to get your velocity vector, just right, etc. And if you get interupted along the way and have to maneuver, you have to redo some of your calculations because you will now have a new starting point for the jump and the work you have already done just went out the window.  Of course all of this is just optional flavor that we could add if we wanted to. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
December 3, 2008 - 11:58am | And none of that factors in any gravity effects from the planets and smaller objects in the system. If you have to know where those are and you have an old ephemeris, you've got a lot of number crunching to do. <snip> Gilbert suggested "navigational buoys" in chat. OTBR (off topic but related) Is our setting going to have subspace radios? (to communicate with nav buoys) |
December 3, 2008 - 1:12pm | Okay so I was just reading KH again... ADF1 isn't 1G. It's is a rate of acceleration equal to one hex per 10 minutes (we'll call this 10,000km/t). 1% of the speed of light is 179,875,474.8 km/turn, or 180 hexes per turn. This is the magic 0.01C that causes magical "void" travel (no more or less supersciency than stargates, but for some unknown reason is accepted by the hard science lovers among us). That means it takes 1800 turns (30 hours) of acceleration and covers 162,900,000km of "runway space" (haha) to reach 0.01C. The table below illustrates:
Note: it's 149,669,000km from the sun to the Earth. So, was your calculation of ADF1=1G a proposed new system or your interpretation of the ADF rules from KH? Just trying to understand... :-) 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
December 3, 2008 - 2:21pm | 1% of the speed of light is 179,875,474.8 km/turn, or 180 hexes per turn. This is the magic 0.01C that causes magical "void" travel (no more or less supersciency than stargates, but for some unknown reason is accepted by the hard science lovers among us). To be clear and help you over the worm hurdle...  stargates are "fixed" right? You have to navigate to them in order to use them. On the other hand, engines that produce magic can be used almost anywhere. hehe.Stargates remind me too much of SG1. Wormholes remind me too much of Star Trek I. Void engines remind me of *p0000f* |
