Ok, the jump points are just gravity well'less points in space that folks jump
to and from. Presumably the civil ships will jump from System to system so as
to be near some lanes of travel if something goes wrong. Military ships could
do the same or be more risky and take routes that pass through points where
there "aint nothin out there".
This leads to a few questions. Do all battle occur at some point just off a
star system or are there battle that occur further out in the interstellar
deep reaches?
How do you protect a system? Can you have some sort of early warning system
that will tell you someone is in FTL travel X hours away?
If not, what about placing interdictor ships like used in StarWars that will
generate a Gravity well to drag a ship suddenly out of FTL on likely avenues
of approach to a system and warn you of their impending approach.
It would work something like this tactically...(assuming there are finite
approach routes to a system via FTL...or your grav wells were suficiently
sized to protect a system).
System Omicron has several Interdictor craft positioned around it. They are
staffed by minimal if not robotic crews way way way out from a system. There
are allowed approach corridors to a system that craft could take.
A Red Taskforce makes an FTL approach to Omicron and runs afoul of the
Interdictor ships Artificial Grav well. They may be able to destoy the
Interdictor ship easily (good reason to staff it with computers). But the
Interdictor ship sends a robot courier to the system to warn of the impending
Taskforce's arrival ~4 hours hence. Remember FTL drives take a
bit of time to recycle after a jump.
Blue force can send renforcements to the location of the I Ship, or just use
the time to get everyone to GQ and be waiting for the Red guys to show.
Sure the Red Force can send a ship in to see where the interdictor ships
are placed this week (they can move around to keep the red force guys
guessing), but then redforce has shown their hands by sending a scout in.
The questions are: How big would the interdictor system be? Should be pretty
damn large and expensive, but doable. 50 Mass system (FB Mass size) What are
the deleterious effects of dumping out of FTL due to an Uncharted Interdictor
ship? Can you really place enough ships around the system to really make a
fence/tripwire that the Red Force guys will trip and show their hand?
As far as ships transiting in and out of a system normally, they could be
given clearance through certain paths or they could jump to the
I-Ship location and transmit the correct codes to get it to drop the
Grav Well after they've recycled their jump drive.
Thoughts, comments?
Wrong game universe for most of this theory. There aren't any 'jump points' in
the Tuffleyverse, as a normal jump can spit you out several light minutes off
your plotted exit point.
Pg44-45 of FTFB covers all the known details of jump theory.
The closer you are to a gravity well, the shorter the jump. So if you have
picket ships in the outer system, the energy of jump translation should be
picked up, unless its a large system, or their navigators make a very risky
jump strait into a gravity well.
If you play in the Starwarz universe, I use 5% mass per gravity well
generator, with the effect of dragging a ship out of hyperspace & causing a
4+threshold on the hyperdrive.
'Neath Southern Skies
http://users.mcmedia.com.au/~denian/
> -----Original Message-----
> Military ships could do the same or be more risky and take routes that
> pass through points where there "aint nothin out there".
<snip>
> The questions are:
> On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Robertson, Brendan wrote:
> Wrong game universe for most of this theory. There aren't any 'jump
WEll I know there aren't Jump points per say. But just like a desert there are
places that humans will congregate. I mean jump points are anywhere there
aren't some big gravity well that will drag you back to normal space. If you
had a fleet that was planning on leaving my system,
and I wanted to stop you, generating a grav well out where you plan to make
your jump from would certainly screw up your plans...
> This leads to a few questions. Do all battle occur at some point just
I'd say No and Yes respectively.
> How do you protect a system? Can you have some sort of early warning
I'm partial to detection only in normal space, but I also think that the
transition out of jump makes an awfully big signiature.
> If not, what about placing interdictor ships like used in StarWars that
Nah, I don't like it.
> Ryan M Gill wrote:
The way the Tuffleyverse is written battles should only occur around important
strategic pieces of terrain. Space is big, and as someone (can't remember who)
said, "Only fight battles you have to win." Without jump points defense of a
system is next to impossible, you can only defend the planet or the asteroid.
This is fine, but realize all those empty space battles wouldn't happen.
A campaign without jump points is rather difficult, there is no such thing as
a rear, everything is frontline. That makes choke points impossible. It also
means that in reality, unless your intelligence told you where your opponent
was going, the attacker would always be able to muster overwhelming force.
We are getting ready to play with jump-lines instead of jump points.
You may only jump between certain systems however you may arrive any distance
you wish out. It just takes longer to get to your destination.
We'll see how it works.
> How do you protect a system? Can you have some sort of
As described in the Tuffleyverse, no. You are at Point A, then, with no
measurable transition time, you are at point
B.
If you use another universe, eg Honor Harrington, then FTL travel takes time
and I suppose you could do this.
> If not, what about placing interdictor ships like used in
Might as well put a few black holes out there, let the incomings hit a steep
gravity gradient and shred themselves. That way you watch your detection
system kill the enemy, while you lay back and sip your banana daiquiri.
My solution was to have Jump Points, with the recognition that the "point" is
a fairly big volume and wanders around a bit. Put a battle station there and
it will at least observe an enemy arriving, but it may be too far away to do
anything about it unless the station is mobile (or has fighters).
In a message dated 8/23/99 7:00:00 PM Central Daylight Time,
> monty@arcadia.turner.com writes:
<<
How do you protect a system? Can you have some sort of early warning system
that will tell you someone is in FTL travel X hours away?
> [quoted text omitted]
If you are actually twisting time and space, something is going to make a
demonstrable signature of some kind, and that signature should be detectable
somehow or other.
> Roger Books wrote:
> A campaign without jump points is rather difficult, there is no such
Seems to me, that the size of the jump point makes the difference. Each has
its own effects on campains.
A "point" sized jump point, is very easy to protect. These types are small
enough for a ship or station to cover the entire point area with it's weapons.
This makes point defenses cheap. (TFG's Starfire uses this type.)
A "cloud" sized jump point, is on the order of a million miles across. Ships
could arrive anywhere in the cloud. This makes point defenses very difficult
and
expensive. (Michael McCollum's books "Antares Dawn" and "Antares
Passage" are of this type. In the books one jump point was covered by 60
massive armed stations. Very cool books, I hear he is working on another book
in this series.)
A "system" sized jump point, ships may arrive anywhere in the system. Though
they are usually limited to the outer fringes in most settings. (Most
hyperspace type
drives -- including the Tuffleyverse -- are of this type.
> Popeyesays@aol.com wrote:
> <<
Ah, but the detection apparatus would also have to work at FTL, otherwise
there wouldn't be much point would there? You couldn't use any 'standard' em
or radiation signature...
If you are working on a 'warp' principle -i.e. the ship shifts out of
the 'known universe' to go FTL then you could possibly detect the point at
which it is
going to re-emerge (although spotting jump points never helped anyone in
B5..).
If you go for the Star Trek way of fiddling with C locally then you need a
detection method that doesn't rely on any sort of 'real world' emission by the
target object.
TTFN
Jon
> -----Original Message-----
I always used the PSB of tachyons escaping the jump point/area
for detection. This should give some warning.
For jump points/areas I have always used one of two methods:
1) The jump point is above/below the stellar pole at a sizeable
distance. This would allow for ships near the important worlds time to meet
the incomming force away from the property they protect.
2) The jump area is a hollow sphere about 1/2 way to the Oort
Cloud and about 1au in width. Again, this allows ships to be stationed near
the important real estate, but have time to travel out for battle.
> On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Bell, Brian K wrote:
> For jump points/areas I have always used one of two methods:
Easy area to build your gravity well "fence" at.
> 2) The jump area is a hollow sphere about 1/2 way to the Oort
Woo thats going to be a big area of real-estate.
AO, mistake
Add a tow mass of two on a 100 mass ship and the FTL drive mass does not go
up.
The problem with space is that it is literally space. The amount of space you
are talking about is difficult to imagine. I mapped out our solar system and
the distance of each hex was 0.4 AU's. In the accepted tactical of
1"
equals 1,000 km's, that means the are of that 0.4 AU hex is about 3.6 BILLION
square inches. Of course space is three dimensional so the actual area is MUCH
larger... Earth is a 1 AU (149,597"), Jupiter is at 5.2 AU
(778,412"),
and Pluto is at 39.5 AU (5,906,376"). I don't see how you could defended it by
placing interdicter cruisers in jump lanes. I don't think there will be
jump lanes as such. Earth is covered 2/3 water, and that is two
dimensional (for shipping, there haven't been that many merchant submarines).
Space is about 99.9% space, and it is THREE dimensional for shipping. That is
one huge difference. Your going to defend systems by having enough at the site
to tie down the attacker while the fire brigade somewhere else in system
hurries to that location, hopefully ariving just in the nick of time... Or
they are going to just get close enough to positively I.D. the attacker, and
then send that info. to fleet and leave you to your fate...
Unless you don't want to make it realistic, and then you can do whatever you
want...
> On Wed, 25 Aug 1999, Imre A. Szabo wrote:
> The problem with space is that it is literally space. The amount of
Cue Hitchhikers Guide "space is big, really really big,...."
> and the distance of each hex was 0.4 AU's. In the accepted tactical
Oooh, scale...*notes scale down...*
Theoretically there would be more likely places that ships could JUMP in.
Pretty much where the planets and moons/asteroids aren't.
If jupiter and Saturn are on the other side of the Solar Hemisphere, then it
would stand to reason you could jump in there safely...Put an interdictor ship
there and it may cause problems when they un fold space
for that point...
Ryan M Gill said:
> Theoretically there would be more likely places that ships
Which is pretty much everywhere.
> If jupiter and Saturn are on the other side of the Solar
Depends on what area you're thinking an interdictor can cover, but you realize
that Saturn at its closest to Jupiter is still as far away as Jupiter is from
the Sun? Assigning ships to cover the whole volume of space (rather than Jump
Points) is rather like assigning a few guys in Humvees to cover the continent.
> On 25-Aug-99 at 23:29, Ryan M Gill (monty@arcadia.turner.com) wrote:
> If jupiter and Saturn are on the other side of the Solar Hemisphere,
I don't know, I think it stands to reason that the only place a ship can jump
in is the Lagrange points between the local star and a large (Saturn, Jupiter,
or binary star companion) body.:)
There you go, should be what, about 5 per large planet, which could go away as
other planets were too close. It would be next to impossible to put orbital
forts at all of these, however, you could patrol them.
> Roger Books wrote:
> On 25-Aug-99 at 23:29, Ryan M Gill (monty@arcadia.turner.com) wrote:
There are at least five Lagrange for each planet in the solar system. That
means you are going to have to cover at least 45 locations... As for the
Interdicter cruiser, it will have to have an incredibly huge area of effect.
Remeber, space is three dimensional. Why do you have to jump through the
orbital tracks of the planets? (most of the time it would not be a problem)
Why can't you jump in over them or under them?
> On 26-Aug-99 at 17:49, Imre A. Szabo (ias@sprintmail.com) wrote:
> > There you go, should be what, about 5 per large planet, which could
That
> means you are going to have to cover at least 45 locations... As for
PSB? Need to keep the number down? 45 locations is better than a sphere 5
light minutes across? Remember, I did say the Lagrange points for a large
planet and its associated star. Should reduce it to 8 or nine usable. Too many
to cover with orbital forts, but not too many to watch.
> PSB? Need to keep the number down? 45 locations is better than a
Roger,
I hate to rain on your parade but depending on the alignment of the planets,
even if you just used large Lagrange points for gas giants only, your looking
at distances of 198.4 to 393.6 light minutes between lagrange points of
different planets for our solar system. This is still a huge area to cover...
Your idea also has another problem. Trojan asteroid fields. We know that
Jupiter, Mars, and Earth have Trojan asteroids. Jupiter has over 450 known
trojan asteroids in its L4 and L5 positions. We don't have data on the other
gas giants; but there is a good chance they have Trojan asteroids fields in
their L4 and L5 positions too.