Battle Dress in Combat

[Condottiere]

It's very localized, I'm still wondering how far the field extends beyond three metres.

 

[Ulsyus]

Do grav belts even work if the local gravity is artificial?

There is an interesting death in Consider Phlebas when a merc jumps from the superstructure of an ocean ship to its deck below - the ship is floating on the ocean of an orbital (really big ring shaped space station) that generates gravity by rotation.

The merc's grav belt does not work as it needs real gravity - splat

Great book, all his were inspirational.

The orbital itself would, with its mass, generate some degree of gravity itself, but that would need to be supplemented by the spin to induce something like human preferences.

Anti gravity drives need mass to push against.

Artificial gravity might induce mass to allow objects to fall against.

That depends on the artificiality of it. It sounds like your perspective is that it generates a mass artificially from which the gravity is derived. Or were you thinking of a field that pushes/pulls everything in a particular direction so that it appears as if there is an effective gravity?

To produce a pseudo-mass based artificial gravity means that the ship has to have the same mass as the Earth as pseudo-mass to have a 1g field.

F = G (m1 x m2)/r^2

A ship with a pseudo-mass based artificial gravity will cause tides,, bump satelites out of orbit,

Artificial gravity can not work in that way.

Yeah, if taken as a pseudo-mass that's pretty reasonable.

It's very localized, I'm still wondering how far the field extends beyond three metres.

That would depend on how you envisage the mechanism that generates the artificiality of the whole thing. Welcome to fiction.

 

[JFGarber]

Do grav belts even work if the local gravity is artificial?

I'm going to go with "yes". A graviton is a graviton, no matter how it was generated.

There is an interesting death in Consider Phlebas when a merc jumps from the superstructure of an ocean ship to its deck below - the ship is floating on the ocean of an orbital (really big ring shaped space station) that generates gravity by rotation.

Spin doesn't generate gravitons. So IMTU I completely agree with "splat". Plus the imagery amuses me.

Back to the topic - T5 still needs some work to fix its various combat subsystems.

In just about every previous version of Traveller you could take down BD with a RAM grenade, so that should be the starting point.

Yes, oh yes. I'm adding two house rules from the responses to my question.

First, PEN will be increased by (STR/3.5)*dice for melee. Roll once at start of combat, or once on each hit, I don't know yet. Will play it out.

Second, on the bottom of page 216 H2 and H3 FOR LAUNCHERS ONLY may be swapped at designer's discretion. A "Frag/Blast" pair may be swapped for a "Pen/Blast" pair or a "Frag/Pen" pair may be swapped for a "Pen/Blast". As written, the AT missile is optimized for fragmentation. That makes no sense.

This swap allows an Alternate Heavy Grenade Launcher at TL 7 with PEN-5 and BLAST-2. That's just enough to make a successful attack feasible but still preserve the overwhelming advantage of BD.

 

[David Johansen]

To produce a pseudo-mass based artificial gravity means that the ship has to have the same mass as the Earth as pseudo-mass to have a 1g field.

F = G (m1 x m2)/r^2

A ship with a pseudo-mass based artificial gravity will cause tides,, bump satelites out of orbit,

Artificial gravity can not work in that way.

Though the hyper drive in Asimov's Nemesis does.

Anyhow, as I've said before, I'm convinced that the Pen damage on various animal attacks indicates they were never intended to represent increased armor penetration because that would be ridiculous. Also, the = [C1] should probably be the number of dice the species rolls for Strength or perhaps just points of damage equal to their Strength rather than dice.

 

[kilemall]

I've been working on the principle that antigrav AND ship's gravity/intertial compensation is strictly repulsion.

 

[Condottiere]

My theory is that inertial compensation is a general field effect projected forward.

 

[kilemall]

My theory is that inertial compensation is a general field effect projected forward.

That's where I'm going with that, then 'normal' gravity is pushing down, compensation against more then 1G planets are fields 'pushing up'.

This makes being right under a major grav vehicle or starship taking off a dangerous place.

The lack of an 'attraction' artificial gravitic field however means a less then maneuverable or easy way 'down' other then the G of the planet.

 

[whartung]

So, is Centrifugal force not gravity?

 

[Condottiere]

Is it?

Seems a byproduct of acceleration.

Mass based gravity seems pull, whereas acceleration seems push.

 

[whulorigan]

So, is Centrifugal force not gravity?

Is it?

Seems a byproduct of acceleration.

Mass based gravity seems pull, whereas acceleration seems push.

Now here's the rub :

According to General Relativity, an Accelerated Reference Frame and a Gravitational Field are formally indistinguishable. Any Unified Field Theory that quantizes gravity must account for this.

 

[Adam Dray]

Gravity is just curvature, not a force. Any SF technology that can create gravity either ignores this (gravitons, etc.) or works with it (the plates curve space).

 

[Condottiere]

You're in a hamster cage generating one gee standard normal Terran gravity.

Your spaceship is accelerating at one gee constant, with the manoeuvre drive.

Wait.

The hamster cage is spinning at half gee, the ship is accelerating at half gee, and the floor is tilted at forty five degrees.

 

[whulorigan]

I believe it has been stated in canonical sources that artificial gravity in Traveller is NOT gravity, per se, but a related spin-off force discovered as the result of future Unification Theories. As such, the force is very short range, and does not decrease as an inverse-square.

(It might decrease exponentially as a consequence of carrier-particle decay).

 

[kilemall]

Gravity is just curvature, not a force. Any SF technology that can create gravity either ignores this (gravitons, etc.) or works with it (the plates curve space).

Mass creates curvature, and the curvature creates acceleration towards the mass?

 

[kilemall]

You're in a hamster cage generating one gee standard normal Terran gravity.

Your spaceship is accelerating at one gee constant, with the manoeuvre drive.

Wait.

The hamster cage is spinning at half gee, the ship is accelerating at half gee, and the floor is tilted at forty five degrees.

That's not nice!

 

[whulorigan]

Mass creates curvature, and the curvature creates acceleration towards the mass?

More specifically, under classical General Relativity, mass distorts spacetime and creates curvature, and objects moving in straight lines thru a curved spacetime appear to be moving in curved/accelerated trajectories to observers within the curved spacetime environment.

Think of drawing a straight line on a piece of graph paper. But then "curve" or "twist" the graph-paper grid itself (leaving the line "straight" thru the warped/curved graphing-grid lines). If you re-plot the "line" on an un-warped graphing grid using coordinate-points derived from the line on the warped graph paper, the trajectory on the un-warped graphing grid will be a curve.

 

[Major B]

That's not nice!

No it's not but the image Condottiere conjured is similar to something I was just trying to figure out.

It made my head hurt so if anyone here can help, please reply.

I am working on a ship with slab decks rather than stacked (slab=parallel to thrust, stacked are perpendicular).

The M-Drive can produce more than 4G thrust (4.8 actually) but the drive is only rated for use up to 4G. IMTU that means that the inertial compensators only cancel up to 4G. This means the deck fields are important as they provide 1G, making "down" the direction of the deck.

However, if you drop the tonnage of the carried craft the ship is capable of 5G but can still only compensate for 4G. What would the crew be feeling with a 1G deck field AND a 1G force directing them toward the aft bulkhead? Would a human be able to move around under those conditions?

 

[Condottiere]

Using the classic Azhanti High Lightning as the template, you turn off the artificial gravity, and accelerate at one and a half gee constant, and despite the higher gravity, the crew should be able to tolerate it for quite a while without undue side effects.

 

[whulorigan]

However, if you drop the tonnage of the carried craft the ship is capable of 5G but can still only compensate for 4G. What would the crew be feeling with a 1G deck field AND a 1G force directing them toward the aft bulkhead? Would a human be able to move around under those conditions?

There would be a 1.4142g force directed aft and downward at a 45^O angle. It would feel the same as someone piloting a jet plane flying level to the ground on earth subjected to a jet thrust of 1g. Moving around unaided would be fairly difficult - you would want to be strapped-in to an acceleration couch unless you had gravitic assistance from a grav-belt.

 

[Fovean]

There would be a 1.4142g force directed aft and downward at a 45^O angle. It would feel the same as someone piloting a jet plane flying level to the ground on earth subjected to a jet thrust of 1g. Moving around unaided would be fairly difficult - you would want to be strapped-in to an acceleration couch unless you had gravitic assistance from a grav-belt.

This is how I do it IMTU. The M-Drive provides inertial compensation equal to its maximum rated Thrust/acceleration. Beyond that additional compensation is required:

TL7-8: Acceleration couch/bench, +1G, standard ship fitting
TL8-9: G-drugs, +1G for six hours, suffer 1D3 hits to END per hour of additional acceleration, Cr250 per dose
TL10-11: Improved G-drugs, as above, 1D2 hit to END, Cr500 per dose
TL12+: Personal G-Belt, +2G, allows personal movement, Cr varies

This is also how I justify 1G ships landing and taking off from bigworlds and skimming gas giants with Gs greater than 1, on a 1:1 basis. So a 1G trader skimming a gas giant with 1.4 Gs can maneuver at 2G by shunting the compensation energy to the MDrive but the occupants suffer an additional 1G of force (strapped in a couch/bench without drugs) during the maneuver, and the effective thrust/acceleration is 0.6G - gonna take a while!

It's hand-wavy and simplistic but it does add some verisimilitude to spacecraft ops.