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General Collector Discussion

{Casts Thread Necromancy}
Reaching back a bit (and I forgot that I left the thread with the preceding comments)....

It occurs to me that another way that Annic Nova and its Collectors are an artifact of the LBB2 '77 rules are that if you don't have a military or scout ship, this is really the only way to safely get around in regions where there aren't any starports of Class B or better. The rules didn't yet provide for onboard fuel processors, and '77 rules didn't have Jump Governors so you'd burn all of your Jump fuel every time. Nor did they have drop tanks.

Above Jump-3, there's no way to carry your return fuel with you; and even at Jump-3, it's a huge payload hit to do so.

Drop tanks make it easy. Safe wilderness refueling even more so.
Another thing about the Annic Nova that's an artifact of LBB2 '77: the idea that you can drop into a star system with small craft, without anyone being particularly concerned with where or what the parent vessel is. Back then, small craft might possibly have been Jump-capable! (The math makes it extremely unlikely, but probably not literally impossible.)

I have ideas now. A ship similar to Annic Nova could carry a Type S instead of 3 pinnaces (assuming there's a missing third one that used the aft nose-dock). It could carry two of them at the cost of most of its cargo capacity as well...
 
It's not quite dead yet. Maybe.
Also (not linked to the preceding post's interpretation), Stellar Collectors (the DA1/JTAS solar-powered version) appear to be 1 TL lower than Energy Collectors (the MgT/T5 "energy from space itself" version) since in the JTAS article, they could be maintained at TL-10. This implies the ability to build an "experimental" Stellar Collector-1 at TL-10, making "standard" 3 TLs higher than that, or TL-13. By contrast, MgT/T5 Energy Collectors start at TL-14 "standard" TL, and are "experimental" at TL-11.
T5 has Standard (the base TL), and precocious tech of Early (-1TL), Prototype (-2TLs), and Experimental (-3TLs).

Which, going back up the precocious-performance chain, means those stellar (not energy) collectors on Annic Nova could have been built at TL-15 as Standard StColl-3 (at required TL) and Improved StColl-2 (1 TL above required), so of course the Imperials hand it back at the end of DA1. It's no better than anything they've seen before, as far as they know. (They don't know about the sequential jump capability, let alone the drive exponentiation capability -- but, in fairness, the ship didn't know it could do the latter either until it had to rebuild its computer from scratch.) (Link to my You Signed up for This fanfic.)
 
Borrowing from MgT - the lower TL of the Annic Nova collector is why it has the disadvantage it has to be near a star to recharge rather than the deep space standard 9or maybe advanced) version.

I have no idea where the missing pinnace meme came from - the adventure clearly states that the docking port at the back is for when a pinnace is attached to act as a maneuver drive, the nacelle configuration is for jump and they may not be used for maneuvering in that location.

As to if it could jump with a 3rd pinnace - the referee can decide that :)
 
I have no idea where the missing pinnace meme came from - the adventure clearly states that the docking port at the back is for when a pinnace is attached to act as a maneuver drive, the nacelle configuration is for jump and they may not be used for maneuvering in that location.

I believe some referees made an inference from the fact that since the docking space at the rear of the cargo bay can "accommodate" a small craft, that it allowed for the possibility that there was originally another one here in permanent dock (not necessarily a pinnace), and that it had been used by crew to abandon the ship sometime prior to its final jump (or possibly even after the arrival in-system, and that the craft is somewhere in the outer system, possibly with dead crew).
 
I believe some referees made an inference from the fact that since the docking space at the rear of the cargo bay can "accommodate" a small craft, that it allowed for the possibility that there was originally another one here in permanent dock (not necessarily a pinnace), and that it had been used by crew to abandon the ship sometime prior to its final jump (or possibly even after the arrival in-system, and that the craft is somewhere in the outer system, possibly with dead crew).
That's the way I understand it -- there weren't enough corpses aboard to have constituted the minimum required crew. Yes, they could have just dumped the other dead bodies out the airlock (or used one of the pinnaces to get them away from the ship), but it seems unlikely.

Also (in my own weakly-asserted opinion) a third pinnace (or ship's boat) would mean that the three small craft would have a combined total of 600G-tons of thrust. This could have accelerated the ship at 1G, if the acceleration constraint otherwise was that the normal docking points were off-center* rather than a structural limitation in the docking arms or fragility of the collector sail. This would explain why there are skylights on the hydroponics deck and an observation dome on the aft end, when otherwise the ship has no reason to ever be near enough to a planet or star for windows to make any sense -- they'd never get used! With 1G acceleration, it could maneuver in to physically visit worlds (though in fairness, it really ought to keep itself hidden whenever possible since it's lousy in combat...)

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* implied by having to move one to the cargo-bay nose dock to push the ship. On the other hand, if you look at the provided side-view section, the nose dock is also off-center, but vertically (far too low relative to the likely center of mass). It "looks right" since it's on the longitudinal centerline of that deck, though, and that's probably all the thought that was put into it.

...or was it? LOL
 
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Also (in my own weakly-asserted opinion) a third pinnace (or ship's boat) would mean that the three small craft would have a combined total of 600G-tons of thrust. [EDIT TO ADD: (5G x 40Td = 200GxTd per pinnace, 6G x 30Td = 180GxTd, round up to 33.3Td and it could be providing 200GxTd as well) ] This could have accelerated the ship at 1G, if the acceleration constraint otherwise was that the normal docking points were off-center
To clarify: when looked at from the aft end, the pinnaces on the pylons are "way up there", and another in the nose dock would be "way down there". If all three were present, it'd be almost balanced. If all three were pushing, the ship would go in a straight line.

On the other hand, just two mounted on the pylons pushing would either cause forward somersaults, or they'd both have to be pointed nose-down -- and it'd look like the ship was "popping a wheelie"; alternately, a single one in the nose dock would need to be docked sharply nose-up (tail hanging down) to point through the likely center of mass. The deck plans and illustrations don't suggest that's possible though.

The question then is whether the stated 0.1G limit is due to:
a. Inefficiency of small craft drives pushing a starship hull as tugboats (that is, something about the drives themselves)
b. Off-center locations of small craft docks; small-craft drives can't thrust-vector very well (that is, it's about their position)
c. The pylons aren't strong enough to support 200G-Td of thrust each on the mounting points
d. The collector sail is fragile and will be damaged if subjected to more than 0.1G when folded (let alone when open)

EDIT TO ADD: This is with respect to the Double Adventure 1 deck plans, not the MgT High Guard version. The latter plans did not include a nose dock in the cargo hold deck.
 
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