On Tuesday, August 14, 2001 9:53 AM, Brian Burger
> [SMTP:yh728@victoria.tc.ca] wrote:
I usually look at it as 2 thrust = 1g. This gives about the right "feel" with
some of the published tuffleyverse background, as the inertial
compensators/artificial gravity can't cope with heavy thrust (hence why
most
non-essential crew strap in). This also gives the right feel to several
other universes (Battletech etc).
A thrust 4 ship therefore pulls about 2g of non-constant acceleration
during combat. Given unlimited feul, I presume that any acceleration of more
than 1g will get you offplanet *eventually*, if inefficiently.
'Neath Southern Skies - http://home.pacific.net.au/~southernskies/
[sstrike] Raider Fleet of War Leader Kel'em'all
> From: Brian Burger
Escape velocity from Earth is 11.186 kilometre per second. With the above 1
Turn = 900 seconds, we have...
11.186 km/s x 1 MU/1000 km x 900 sec/Turn = 11.186 x 9/10 MU per Turn =
10.0674 MU per Turn, just get up to movement farther than 10 MU.
Even a speed 2 SDN can orbit 6 or 7 turns till it moves 12+ MU per turn,
its centrifugal force should overcome gravity trying to pull it back to the
surface.
And for taking off from the surface, current rockets take a little while till
they reach speed to put them in orbit, yet they do it before gravity pulls
them back down. Just use constant acceleration till they get up there.
My math is about 30 years too old to try to remember how to calc the exact
amount of pull in MU this force of gravity would be each turn. (And my science
is from the days when we thought that Venus was the Earth's twin sister we
could colonize.)
> From: "Robertson, Brendan"
> From just Full Thrust by itself, just about any distance to time scale
> p.s. My previous 2 years per turn when a MU is 1/2 AU was just
ok, but if you're accelerating all the way, you get to multiply by time^2
which improves things quite a bit (68 hours, wasn't it, rather
> At 3:57 AM -0400 8/14/01, Jerry Cantrill wrote:
I looked at the jump distance, total distance and regeneration time for
military craft (~6 hrs) to get about a months travel time from
one side of the NAC to the other using Winchell Chung's Mostly-Canon
Map.
A repost of what I figured. Feel free to check my math.
I got to looking closely at the FTL background the other day.
The longest successful jump was 7 Light years, that was with a specialized
scientific research craft. That ship tried a longer jump and never returned.
Figure a bit over a Parsec (1 Parsec is = 3.3 Light Years) is about the
standard for civil shipping 4 LY in other words. Military grade FTL drives are
a bit better, put them at 5 LY. Anything further is too risky and isn't really
done unless you have a fast courier. Also included is recharge time between
one FTL hop and another. ~6 hours is what the book says (I was recalling an
hour, sorry...).
Some of these planets are right at or under a parsec. So a quick jump from one
to the other is easy. A long trip from
one side of the NAC Mu Arae (9:-3:-2) to GJ 1289 (-2:7:-3)
is about 11.7 parsecs or 396 Light years. If we can do that in 4 LY hops we
are talking about 99 hops and probably about 594 hours given no drive failures
or other problems. That comes out to 25 days worth of travel.
Merchant vessels with passengers tend to only do their FTL hops at night when
the passengers are sleeping since it does take a bit out of you. The books
describe it as a very sickening feeling.
The 25 days worth of travel is about right for what you'd expect for such a
scale on the map. It does make for a good ability to move around, however, its
not a quick thing.
So with 3.5 parsecs being 11.55 LY, and assuming that a 5 LY hop for a
military Grade FTL drive, you're looking at 2 jumps at 5 ly apiece and then a
.5 ly hop for the closer jump. Presumably there is an extra jump or two there
for refining your position to the system hyperlimit so 5 jumps total. 6 hrs
each minimum, its a 30 hour trip doing the hyper space thing. Some depends on
your FTL navigator's ability to precisely refine his coordinates and get the
insertions right. Likely it would take less with an ace navigator.
> On Aug 14, Ryan M Gill <rmgill@mindspring.com> wrote:
I had thought that 6 hours between jumps was only done in emergencies, and
that most ships jumped only once per day whenever possible. Still, in that
case all that is needed is to multiply your travel times by four.... I haven't
looked at the rules lately, so I'm not sure which is correct.
> A repost of what I figured. Feel free to check my math.
I've found one minor problem, which I'll discuss when it comes up.
> Figure a bit over a Parsec (1 Parsec is = 3.3 Light Years)
I check you on 1 parsec = 3.3 lightyears. Further....
> Some of these planets are right at or under a parsec. So a
The distance from Mu Arae to GJ 1289 is:
SQRT( 11^2 + 10^2 + 1^2 ) parsecs = 14.9 parsecs
14.9 parsecs = 49.2 lightyears. That's quite a bit off. Even 11.7 parsecs =
38.6 lightyears.
It looks like you're off by a factor of 10 in distance. Thus, in 4LY hops, it
looks like 13 by my calculations and 10 by yours. At 1 jump every day, that
comes out ot 13 or 10 days respectively. For military ships (5LY), it looks
like 10 or 8 jumps, taking 10 (2.5 rushed) or 8 (2 rushed) days.
> So with 3.5 parsecs being 11.55 LY, and assuming that a 5 LY hop
I check you here.
That would be in an emergency situation. Using the NORMAL military transit of
one per day, it would be 3 days (1 jump per day) plus the jumps out of and in
to the gravity well of the systems (depends on the mass of the system, but I
would suggest 6 each way (1au, 2au, 4au, 8au, 16au & 32au; Pluto is about 40au
out and the Ort Cloud somewhat further).
A ship could do a jump or two at near the minimum turn around time, but then
crew quality would begin to decline due to jump stress (even with the drugs).
Remember minimum should not be taken to mean usual. I would suggest in a
campaign setting to make a threshold check for crew quality each jump after
the 1st without at least an 18 hour rest. Failure treats all targets as 1mu
further away per 6mu distant (that is if the target is at 22mu, treat it as if
it were at 25mu) and treat the ship as if it had one less damage control
party.
-----
Brian Bell
-----
[quoted original message omitted]
> At 2:09 PM -0300 8/14/01, Brian A Quirt wrote:
~6hrs is the minimum recharge time. I'm looking at a fast transit for a
military vessel. Its the difference between a Battle Cruiser making a transit
across the ocean and a standard freighter.
I suspect that a military vessel deploying on a combat operation will be
hoofing it. A Leisurely transit by a bulk freighter or the slightly more
upbeat speed of a liner will be of course slower. Though given the preference
for jumps while passengers are asleep, one would expect a liner to only make 2
jumps per 24 hour cycle if they can cut that 6 hr recharge time down. If they
have really fancy hardware (Cunard lines in the 22nd century?) they may be
able to have
two sets of capacitors for two sequential jumps over 2-3hrs.
> I check you on 1 parsec = 3.3 lightyears. Further....
Constants are easy...
> > Some of these planets are right at or under a parsec. So a
strange, I don't know what happened, but still, I guess its good. Transit time
from one edge of the NAC to the other isn't nearly as bad.
> On Aug 14, Ryan M Gill <rmgill@mindspring.com> wrote:
You are.
> ~6hrs is the minimum recharge time. I'm looking at a fast transit for
Kind of like saying "With aerial tanking, an Eagle can fly at Mach 1.2
non-stop all the way from California to Kuwait." Well, yes, but it
wouldn't be a good idea to go straight into combat when you arrive. My
impression is that you don't make 6 hour jump cycles unless it's critical
("there's a SDN
division coming towards us--6.5 hours to intercept") or possibly if you
only need a couple of cycles to get there and you believe you'll have recovery
> At 3:44 PM -0400 8/14/01, Chris DeBoe wrote:
Its probably more like a CVN trucking from Norfolk to the Med at 32+
knots. There isn't a need for Unreps (unless FT ships have a fuel tank we
don't really show..), they don't zigzag and excepting for the working up
cruise they normally go through prior to a deployment for training, they're
ready to get on the ball.
Naturally in FT, there isn't a possibility for groups of ships to stay
together so she's on her own for the most part between jumps. But then the
open vastness of space where these jumps occur make being found hard.
> be a good idea to go straight into combat when you arrive. My
Granted. However when war occurs, you do have operational tempo that isn't
always as paced as you like it to be. Transfers of units into theatre occur
with ships far faster than ground combat units tend to be. Look at the Solomon
islands campaign during WWII. DDs and CAs were getting rotated in and out at a
bloody absurd rate and no one had time to get aclimated before getting thrown
into action. All they could rely on was training and doctrine.
Naturally there is a balance between arriving too late and arriving strung
out, worn out and tired out like the Baltic Sea fleet did at Tsushima...
I was looking at absolute shortest time. A military packet ship on a shortest
time to point for major flag signals would take this route likely.
> >Kind of like saying "With aerial tanking, an Eagle can fly at Mach
No, because the FTL jumps explicitly have an effect on the personnel that
requires recovery time.
> I was looking at absolute shortest time. A military packet ship on a
Maybe "a string of", like Traveller xboats which jump in, transmit the
message, then the recipient boat jumps out for the next leg. Not the
same
[quoted original message omitted]
> >Kind of like saying "With aerial tanking, an Eagle can fly at Mach
Other than the fuel issue which I would agree with I have to mention that I
see a whole lot of assumptions in this statement...
<SNIP>
> >be a good idea to go straight into combat when you arrive. My
Keeping in mind the PSB flavor text of FB1, no time passes in Transit. In the
greater scheme of things having a fresh crew is probably going to be better
than saving yourself the day or two of "extra" travel time. If couriers zip
off at the first sign of trouble, and the Red Force still has
to travel in-system there will be a fair amount of "overlap" with Blue
Force (Reinforcements) coming to the rescue and the Blue Force (Home) fighting
a
semi-retrograde battle until they get there.
A more interesting issue is if the placement of planets and other forces
dictates certain routes that ships can Transit to safely? These would
naturally be the areas most highly defended and there would always be the
temptation in the Red Force to "push the envelope" and take a slightly
less-safe route in...
Until somebody reminds the Navigator/Captain/Admiral of the Disaster of
Nueswanfeld when the NAC lost half their force, including all the DN's and
SDN's, with such a tactic... <g>
Sounds like an interesting set of bits. Have you spun up a "game setting" to
use this? May I borrow this for my own gaming?
(I also prefer some type of hyperspace travel to jumpers...not that Jon made
any bad choices.)
Donald Hosford
> Bif Smith wrote:
> I alway prefere a universe where a ship is in a hyperspace instead of
I timed one of the last shuttle launches. (Yes I get NASA TV! 8D)
The astronaut/commentator mentioned that the shuttle takes off at about
3Gs, and only takes about 12 minutes (it has been awhile) to reach LEO (about
156 miles or so.)