 February 29, 2012 - 9:04pm | Your ship missed jumped and crashed. It doesn't look like you can leave. Radio is a total FUBAR but you don't plan on laying down to die. How would one go about putting a message in a bottle to toss into the galactic sea? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 March 5, 2012 - 9:33am | This is my opinion and you have to remember that I'm a physicist/astronomer and like realism after a few bits of supsended disbelief.  My biggest hangup with automated Void jumps is not that they can't be done, but that they can't be done accurately. Especially not accurately enough to deliver a warhead to a specific target. Here's why.1) Problem one - Time in the Void. Void travel occurs at 1 ly per second. That means if your time in the void is off by 1 nanosecond, your distance is off by 9467 kilometers or one KH hex. If your timing is off by a microsecond which is much more likely, you're off by ~10 million kilometers. Most likely your accuracy in is the few to tens of microseconds so your positional accuracy, just in the distance direction, is going to be off by on the order of hundreds of millions of kilometers. And remember the distance from the earth to the sun is 150 million kilometers. That's the scale we're talking about here. Plus if you want to postulate small random fuctuations in void speed that you can't control, that just makes it worse. 2) Problem 2 - Directional accuracy. Once you enter the void you travel in a straight line (we can argue whether that is Euclidian or Einsteinian another time). That means you have to be lined up directly at your target. And I'd argue that is hard. If you're off by a tenth of an arcsecond (that's a lateral displacement of half a millimeter after traveling 1 km), with a jump of five light years you'd be off target by 2.3 million kilometers (230 hexes) That's a clean miss if you happen to come in close. And I'd argue that you probably won't get lined up better than one arcsecond (since there really aren't any absolute refrence points to use) which means you could be off by at least 23 million kilometers which is an even bigger miss. And those values are with someone watching over the process to make sure that there aren't any random errors and things cropping up to cause problems and such. (Shameless plug: Read Discovery for examples of things that could go wrong. ) Could you automate that? Sure. Would it be just as good? Proabably, most of the time. But the inherent uncertainties will never make it more accurate. For sending a automated distress beacon after you've crashed somewhere it might work but you wouldn't have a sophisticated AI to do the calculations and adjustments on the fly so the accuraccy would be even worse. Although that probably doesn't matter as what you're really after is just something to get in to the system and start broadcasting a mayday so it only takes weeks instead of years to get rescued.Trying to put a warhead on a target with only an hour's notice? I don't think that's going to happen, at least not reliably. You might get lucky once in a while but most likely the warheads will appear many hours if not days away from their targets. Plus if you launch more than one, just the variations in their engines will proabaly spread them out by millions of kilometers at the target system due to slight time variations so only the very first one would have any chance of surprise. After that, the defenses would be alerted. Anyway, that's my thoughts. 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 |
 March 5, 2012 - 12:18pm | In Issue #11 "Star Frontiers Without Subspace Radios" Chis makes this statement, The Knight Hawks rules suggest, however, that even an uncrewed ship capable of jumping into the Void will be prohibitively expensive. Thus, these drones would not be disposable. These very valuable ships are owned by only the richest governments, mega-corps, and probably the UPF. I couldn't find the reference. Unmanned emergency message drones (UEMD) might be something carried aboard life boats and sent to the nearest habitable system.
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March 5, 2012 - 2:32pm | I think what Chris is referring to is not a specific reference but simply the cost of such a vessel. Imagine building a HS 1 drone: Hull: 50,000 cr Class A Ion Engine: 200,000 cr Astrogation Equipment: 24,000cr Fuel: 5,000 cr minimum Drive program: 12,000 cr Astrogation program: 24,000 cr radio: 1000 cr radar: 10,000 cr level 6 robot brain 8,000 cr That's over 300,000 cr just to start and I'm sure there are other things it needs that jack the cost up a bit 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 |
