Troy replied to me: >> A FTL ship needs FTL sensors or really, really tough frontal armor :-) > >I'm not sure how to justify that in my head. The physics I'm using are like >Travis Taylor's "Warp Drive" series: anything traveling FTL must have a >"warp bubble".
I don't know that series, but GURPS traditionally has three types of FTL drive, with the usual myriad options ... * Jump drives allow instant jumps from one suitable point to the next. No time is spent in jump and no interaction with real space is possible. * Hyperdrives allow flight through 'hyperspace'. This takes some time, and some maneuvering is possible, but there is still no interaction with real space. * Warp drives allow FTL flight while at least observation of real space is possible, and it tends to be a very bad idea to warp through a planet or sun, so some interaction with real space is usually possible, too. That means warp ships have to answer the question how they deal with dust, pebbles, and rocks in the way. When it comes to gas and dust clouds, evasion isn't much of an option, but Star Trek (perhaps the archetypical warp) technobabbles about deflector fields. GURPS deflectors are not quite the same, but there is nothing to say they can't deflect hypervelocity dust. Alternatively, the 'warp dust deflector' is an integral and necessary part of the warp drive and thus part of the listed stats. That would be the case if the 'warp bubble' provides some protection, but unless it can protect the ship from brown dwarfs and rogue worlds, there has to be SOME kind of sensor with sufficient speed and range to detect obstacles ahead. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
