Roger Burton West wrote: > Jon Lang wrote: > > To be fair, Star Trek wouldn't have gotten off the ground if they hadn't > > had transporters. > > To me they're kin to artificial gravity. We can't do convincing zero-G > on a TV budget, so we'll say there's gravity; we can't do convincing > spacecraft-on-planet or shuttles on a TV budget (or, in the case of ST5, > on a film budget!), so we'll say there's a teleporter. Both of them were > clearly invented as money-saving devices without any thought as to the > implications of such technologies' being available.
Absolutely. But without those money-saving devices, the show would never have made it on air at all. Onno Meyer wrote: > * TL10 has super reactionless thrusters which are marginal for > a surface landing. Add the thruster itself, vectored thrust, > and the power plant, and you get 0.4 lbs. of engine per lb. > of thrust. Some worlds might have a slightly higher gravity > than Earth, so we're talking about half the loaded weight > for engines and power plants alone. Add grav units (8 tons > at this TL) and the FTL drive, and there is little left for > payload. > > What you get is a Firefly, where a big ship carries just a > little bit of cargo, and the default planetary vehicle is a > ground vehicle. > > * At TL11, even standard reactionless thrusters allow a surface > landing. With vectored thrust and fusion power, 0.085 lbs. > per lb. of thrust. A starship could easily get 50% payload or > more. Either that, or you can make it faster with a multiple > of the normal FTL speed. Still, flyers need either expensive > reactors (minimum one ton, too) or expensive power cells, so > there will be plenty of heavy-duty ground vehicles and a few > light flyers planetside. > > Star Wars, in a way. > > * At TL12, contragrav gives a small saving for ships that can > pull a few G, as vectored thrust is no longer required. The > big difference is that most planetary vehicles will fly, too. > > * TL13 gives the VXii force fields for small ships, with all > their exciting options. Shaped force screens allow bricks to > land, and manipulator fields help to unload. Personally, I prefer the TL11 option, in terms of power and thrusters. I'd rather have a setting where "air cars" tend to be found more on affluent "core worlds" than on struggling "frontier worlds", and even then tend toward streamlined and/or winged designs over "flying bricks". OTOH, spacecraft as "flying bricks" are perfectly acceptable. I prefer cargo ships that can be at least as much cargo as ship. > Jon wrote: >> Warp Drive, sure; but leave out as much of the other >> Treknobabble as possible. > > I find warp extremely difficult to handle, as far as game > mechanics are concerned. When ships in warp meet each other > or pass by a planet, one-second turns just don't work. FTL Drive, then. The point wasn't the specific nature of the FTL Drive; it was that some means of FTL travel be possible. A Firefly-like "dozens of habitable worlds in one star system" premise snaps my reality-suspenders something fierce. More generally, I prefer to minimize my use of superscience, generally restricting it to _just_ FTL Drives, Artificial Gravity, and Reactionless Thrusters; I don't even allow Artificial Gravity to turn into Contragrav, even though that's a logical extension of the concept. My own default sci-fi setting uses a mixture of stargates networking the core worlds together (high "buy-in" cost" to set up a gate, but with a subsequent economic boom as the world becomes much more accessible to trade) and hyperspace drives used by ships that intend to visit worlds outside of the stargate network: generally obsolete within the network because they're no good for in-system trips (I tend to assume that stars impose a "blackout zone" of roughly 10 AU for both hyperdrives and stargates; most travel by all ships takes place in-system using conventional propulsion) and are slower than stargates for interstellar trips; but they're the only game in town out among the frontier worlds that are too far away and/or too poor (or too isolationist) to hook themselves into the stargate network. That said, I've played around with several variations on the theme; one approach that I've especially liked has been an inertial dampening system that's gravity-inhibited – not so much for reducing the acceleration felt by the crew (though it does that, too), but mainly to reduce a spacecraft's inertia so that more traditional thruster systems (rockets, ion drives, space sails, and so on) can be given unrealistically high performance characteristics. Since it's gravity-inhibited, it only works in space, leaving planetary vehicle designs unaffected. For ship design purposes, I co-opted the Artificial Gravity stats (the exact benefits vary due to the "gravity-inhibited" constraint; IIRC, I set it up so that in optimal conditions, one "inertial dampening unit" would reduce the effective mass of anything within it to roughly a third of its un-dampened mass – but conditions are rarely optimal, and even in orbit around a planet, the benefits are severely curtailed); and as a bonus, I threw in the notion that an inertial dampening field can be configured to also provide artificial gravity at an extra cost (but without the need for additional hardware or even power requirements). This lets me reduce my superscience assumptions from three (FTL, reactionless drives, and artificial gravity) to two (FTL and Inertial Dampening). I even toyed briefly with the idea of reducing it from two to one by taking something akin to Lensman's assumption that inertialess objects can bypass the lightspeed barrier; but I found that I needed to push the inertial dampening to absurd extremes in order to make interstellar travel practical; and even then, the resulting travel times were far too slow for my taste. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
