Emergency Situations and responses

[Hal]

Hello Folks,
This thread is inspired by the Lifeboats thread elsewhere. To that end, I'm thinking that before one can credibly discuss what the design parameters for a lifeboat should be, that we first examine what happens in an emergency situation. To that end, I'd like to propose that we discuss potential emergency situations, and then - either within this thread, or perhaps start a new thread "Solutions to Emergency situations" and keep an ongoing running thread.

For instance, let's presume that you have a 200 dton ship leaving a world. We will further stipulate, that this ship is a jump 2 ship. In addition, the exit port is a world with a population of 8, and that there are a total of 4 stars within 2 parsecs jumping distance from the exit world.

First - from the perspective of the world's starport authority, we will note that our 200 dton ship has filed a flight plan, and that said flight plan indicated which world it was intending to go to (note that in the traveller universe, ships must pick a destination before it can embark cargo and/or passengers).

So, when will ANYONE have a clue that something is wrong when it comes to our hypothetical ship (Let us call it the Credit Dew just for fun).

We can't determine what went wrong as yet, until we can determine that something is in fact, wrong. So, let us call the exit world "Alpha Century" and the destination world "Neocourageous World".

Ship leaves Alpha Century, makes it within 100 planetary diameters before it disappears in a gravitational electromagnetic flash as it enters into jump space.

A) how long will it be before anyone knows something went wrong when Credit Dew doesn't make it to Neocourageous? How does Neocourageous know that Credit Dew is even coming? How does Neocourageous Starport Authority even know that the Credit Dew is overdue? At what point will the Neocorageous SPA begin to mount a search rescue team?

Assuming that Mis-Jumps are understood well enough that they can place a starship up to 36 parsecs away (GULP!), what is the standard protocol for mounting a search and rescue?

Until we can answer those questions, it sort of doesn't make sense to worry about design considerations for lifeboats. Why? Because if we can't know how the rescue efforts are being mounted, and how long it takes before they are mounted - we can't really determine just how long any given lifeboat has to hold out waiting for rescue.

So, what happened to the Credit Due? It never showed up at Neocourageous one week later. You're the lead investigator for the SPA at Alpha Century. How do you determine if the Credit Dew showed up where it was supposed to show up? If youre the SPA lead investigator at Neocourageous - how do you know when the Credit Dew was supposed to show up and that it is now overdue?

Inquiring minds wanna know

 

[Fritz_Brown]

First, departure/arrival data is uploaded with every data dump to every departing ship, then downloaded by the SPA at the destination. (Yes, you can stop this, but it might get flagged.) That way, records get propagated throughout the system.

Second, lifeboats wouldn't be terribly useful if something went wrong in jump. Ship goes bang in there... well, X number of souls lost. It's figured out when the data is checked: arrivals at Neocourageous vs departures at Alpha Century.

Third, when lifeboats are useful, you should still be within 100D of Neocourageous (or after coming within 100D of Alpha Century). This normally puts you within easy sensor range of the authorities, and an emergency beacon going off gives them a clue within the lightspeed envelope. They are now hours or days from rescue.

If you jump into the outer reaches of a system - naughty boy, you, trying to hide yourself like that - then you might have a longer wait. Ever seen the Firefly episode "Out Of Gas"?

Mal: It's possible someone might pick up that signal.
Wash: No, Mal. It's not possible. No one's gonna pick up the damn signal. You wanted us flying under the radar, remember? Well, that's where we are, out of range of anyone or anything.

If you aren't talking passenger liner sort of stuff - military, government, someone who really likes his passengers and has money but doesn't usually pop in and out at the 100D limit - then you might want to make your lifeboats survivable for a bit longer than a week.

(As a side note, the only real reason to depart a damaged ship is to avoid being within the blast radius when it goes kablooey, or to signal that "this ship is out of action and we are no longer combatants, so please stop shooting at us." Neither of those scenarios are actually very likely for most passenger ships unless you contemplate your fusion plant turning into a bomb on a somewhat regular basis. Otherwise you are always much better off staying with a crippled ship.)

 

[PFVA63]

Hi,

Overall my feelings are that you probably really need to try and think through all the phases of operation for the ship(s) that you are considering and try and brainstorm the different type stuff that could potentially go wrong, beyond just Jump operations.

For instance, getting away from Free Trader operations for just a moment, looking at the similarly sized 200 dton Yacht, a question comes up as to why they might be unstreamlined and what that might mean about their operations. One thought I had was a potential good reason for being unstreamlined might be that they have a lot of viewports for "seeing the sights" in system. As such instead of just travelling from the High Port in one system to the High Port in the next system could there be the potential instead that the owner(s) may spend some time in system, doing close passes of the rings of Saturn like Gas Giants and or making relatively high-speed near passes of asteroid belts, and/or perhaps hanging in low orbit above some primitive satellites of a gas giant (like Jupiter's moon Io) so you can watch the sunrise over an active volcano, etc?

If futuristic Yacht owners are anything like modern day rich/well to do people who like to buy expensive sports cars and/or Super Cars and do some kind of risky things with them, I can see the potential (to misquote the cartoon "King of the Hill") for "many wonderful opportunities for hardships", etc.

 

[Carlobrand]

...For instance, let's presume that you have a 200 dton ship leaving a world. We will further stipulate, that this ship is a jump 2 ship. In addition, the exit port is a world with a population of 8, and that there are a total of 4 stars within 2 parsecs jumping distance from the exit world.

First - from the perspective of the world's starport authority, we will note that our 200 dton ship has filed a flight plan, and that said flight plan indicated which world it was intending to go to (note that in the traveller universe, ships must pick a destination before it can embark cargo and/or passengers).

So, when will ANYONE have a clue that something is wrong when it comes to our hypothetical ship (Let us call it the Credit Dew just for fun).

We can't determine what went wrong as yet, until we can determine that something is in fact, wrong. So, let us call the exit world "Alpha Century" and the destination world "Neocourageous World".

Ship leaves Alpha Century, makes it within 100 planetary diameters before it disappears in a gravitational electromagnetic flash as it enters into jump space.

A) how long will it be before anyone knows something went wrong when Credit Dew doesn't make it to Neocourageous? How does Neocourageous know that Credit Dew is even coming? How does Neocourageous Starport Authority even know that the Credit Dew is overdue? At what point will the Neocorageous SPA begin to mount a search rescue team?

Assuming that Mis-Jumps are understood well enough that they can place a starship up to 36 parsecs away (GULP!), what is the standard protocol for mounting a search and rescue?

Until we can answer those questions, it sort of doesn't make sense to worry about design considerations for lifeboats. Why? Because if we can't know how the rescue efforts are being mounted, and how long it takes before they are mounted - we can't really determine just how long any given lifeboat has to hold out waiting for rescue.
...

Depends on traffic levels. Assuming a reasonable traffic load at a reasonable starport (A/B/C), it's likely they communicate traffic information back and forth by some means - easiest by paying some of the outgoing ships a small fee for carrying a data packet out. Could be part of that mail subsidy. In that case, if data packet arrived documenting that ships X, Y, and Z jumped out on date A and are expected at the world on date B, then the receiving world would know there was something amiss when the data packet (which of course is behind the departing ships) arrives and there's still no sign of Z.

In other words, Neocourageous would know something was amiss about one day afterward, when the data packet arrived and Credit Dew hasn't. Might be a little more - if I recall, some rules vary the time in jump by a bit.

I don't know if it's possible to infer a ship's destination by observing it's outbound jump. If you can, then the origin world, Alpha Century will begin rescue operations the moment the ship's jump signature failed to match its flight plan. If you can't, then the best that can be hoped is that Neocourageous - after realizing there's a problem - sends data packets to neighboring worlds, who forward it to other neighboring worlds, and so forth, instructing them to Be On the LOokout for a misjumped ship. And, recall that failure to arrive could also mean the ship captain lied on his flight plan. Absent some means of telling where they're going by the outbound jump signature, I suspect the best you're going to get is a BOLO and neighboring systems keeping their port staff on continuous alert for any SOS.

Scout Service might have the additional duty of going out to systems with little or no port facilities to look for signs of castaway ships - or perhaps of hanging out in such systems listening for an SOS; I don't recall anything in canon like that, but theres certainly enough budget for that kind of thing, though that latter idea seems to invite pirates to prey on scouts.

Remember some of those SOS's will be coming from dead ships. Misjump also means a random roll for time in jump space. 5-6 weeks in jump space usually means the ship arrives with no power and dead bodies, the only thing functioning - maybe - being a few battery-operated automated systems designed to trigger on emergence from jump space, and that depends on how the gamemaster views such systems: just how long can those batteries hold out.

As to misjumps to open space: I don't see much of a chance of anyone finding them, much less finding them soon enough to do them any good. Maybe a neighboring world would pick up a faint radio signal a few years later.

In most cases, it's still better to shelter on the ship. Abandoning ship occurs when the ship is either at imminent danger of destruction or can no longer support life. That latter possibility could occur to a nonstreamlined ship that found itself misjumped to a world with no significant starport or space infrastructure, in which case a small-craft-style lifeboat would be used to either ferry folk down to the (hopefully habitable) planet or fetch food and fuel up, or barring that would be used to land someplace where the lifeboat can refuel itself. Either ship or lifeboat would carry supplies needed to recycle water from wastes, and food concentrates to forestall starvation. (Shipboard stores ought to be good for 2 to 4 weeks, the Marooned survival kit offers you 30 days of food on top of that, and you might manage about 3 weeks after that - longer if you went Donner Party.:devil

 

[Hal]

Barring some form of standardization for jumps and misjumps and duration in jump space - which in turn depends on whether one is using:

Classic Traveller
Megatraveller
Traveller: The New Era
Traveller 4
Traveller 5
T20
Mongoose Traveller
GURPS Traveller

Let's just presume for now, that the variables for jump are +/- 10% of 168 hours. I don't recall of Classic Traveller permitted one to know the jump destination of a ship entering into jump space, but if Classic Traveller permits it - then we'll go with that presumption that you can. If it doesn't, we'll assume that it can not.

What I find interesting, is that information regarding ships departure times and estimated arrival times will depend upon whether or not starports share information on flight plans or not.

I also presume, that ships who vary their flight plans to where they don't follow them, will likely result in the captain being fined for failure to adhere to the flight plan. Why? Because failure to adhere to the flight plan could result in a massive search and rescue effort being undertaken in order to find the missing vessel!

So, we sort of need to flesh out the standard operational theater regards to civilian traffic before we start making assumptions about lifeboats and expected durations of how long a ship has to hold out.

In addition? We probably should consider whether or not any given powerplant can be made to work on a lesser power output such that its fuel supplies can be made to last for longer durations. For instance? One would presume that the power requirements for maintaining low berths will be significantly lower than that of a maneuver drive at 1 G. How much energy does a low berth require? In addition, aren't there rules for how long life support lasts (batteries) in the event that the power plant fails?

 

[Carlobrand]

...In addition? We probably should consider whether or not any given powerplant can be made to work on a lesser power output such that its fuel supplies can be made to last for longer durations. For instance? One would presume that the power requirements for maintaining low berths will be significantly lower than that of a maneuver drive at 1 G. How much energy does a low berth require? In addition, aren't there rules for how long life support lasts (batteries) in the event that the power plant fails?

Consolidated CT Errata 07 introduces the option to power down a power plant to PPl-1, but that's as low as it goes without shutting the plant down, and of course it's no help if you only have a power-plant-1. I haven't been able to find any rules that actually define how much battery power is available or how long it would last.

 

[CosmicGamer]

In that case, if data packet arrived documenting that ships X, Y, and Z jumped out on date A and are expected at the world on date B, then the receiving world would know there was something amiss when the data packet (which of course is behind the departing ships) arrives and there's still no sign of Z.

Just a personal bone of contention, not that you are implying such, but there is no reason information can't travel as fast or even faster than the typical trade ship. Granted, in this case, the data that the ship actually has jumped out of system, is LIKELY to not precede the ship, but it certainly need not be long behind it.

I say LIKELY because while I'm not familiar with all the versions of Traveller, but Hal also discusses that time in jump is not a fixed amount. It is possible for a ship that leaves hours after another one to arrive before it.

This of course is a situation with many variables, so as Hal says

So, we sort of need to flesh out the standard operational theater regards to civilian traffic

A ship that Jumps to Neocourageous after the Credit Dew can have the information from Alpha Century of the Dews departure and can arrive before the Dews "window of arrival" has expired and it is possible people could start wondering where the ship is as soon as it is "past due". On the other side of things, information might only be sent on military or scout ships or even not be passed back and forth. The destination system might not have the resources or legal requirements to send any search out. Why waste time and money on a possible missjump or a ship that purposely filed a false flight plan? Just fill out some paperwork and "file" it.

Perhaps certain OTU assumptions are implied by, at least the stuff I've seen for the 2 versions of Traveller I have, the short span of survivability for all the rescue bubbles and emergency gear?

 

[Hal]

Ok - let us presume the following, and see where it gets us...

As this is an issue regarding tracking ships between worlds, that this comes under the heading of "Starport Authority". As such, Starport Authority will have the following powers when it comes to handling administrative issues:

A) Any ship that is heading towards a given destination with regular traffic, will be obligated to carry data packets on behalf of the starport authority. Such authorized transit of SPA data, likely carries a premium not unlike that of carrying small items in the original Traveller rules for cargo. It doesn't come under the heading of even "1dton" of cargo, as it is something that could be carried on a portable drive - preferably one that is tamper-proof etc.

B) Any worlds that are off the trade lanes and rarely see ships at all, will be serviced by packet ships operated by the Starport Authority. Said duties for the packet ships would require that they deliver mail and small cargoes (if any), and possibly carry passengers as needed. They would likely be treated as subsidized merchant activity, but would be small ships to fill in a niche that no one else wants. Perhaps they are subsidized by local governments, perhaps they are subsidized by Barons of worlds, or what have you.

C) as a consequence of B, the delay between information being filed for flight plans (for destination worlds) may be as much as 2 or more jumps out of date.

What does this arrangement suggest? Can anyone IMPROVE upon it? The idea here, is to find out what is the worst case scenario for how long it takes for SPA to determine that a ship is overdue, perhaps involved in a mis-jump or in need of investigation?

Note: it is entirely possible, that Naval assets of a smaller level, say, escort sized ships or perhaps destroyers - may be tasked with investigating the whereabouts of a ship that is overdue or even presumed lost. In addition? Ships who are on a payment plan, may have missed one or two month's payment, and presumed either mis-jumped, lost, or even to have skipped.

The trick here, is to identify what elements of the Imperial or planetary governmental organs will be tasked with determining the fate of ships who do not appear where they are supposed to.

This means that the problems are not only that of transit speed of communications, but also in the ability to determine what happened when.

 

[Hal]

Consolidated CT Errata 07 introduces the option to power down a power plant to PPl-1, but that's as low as it goes without shutting the plant down, and of course it's no help if you only have a power-plant-1. I haven't been able to find any rules that actually define how much battery power is available or how long it would last.

The information you are looking for, will be found under "Drive failure" in the classic Traveller book page 6 of Book 2 Starships. It is also found in the Classic Traveller Book page 51. It reads:

"Batteries will provide life support and basic lighting for ID days"

Megatraveller doesn't seem to have the same deal as listed above, and I'm not familiar with other game system versions to know whether the too have that same reference. I do know that with GURPS TRAVELLER, battery powered devices can be known as to how long they will last, and low berths can be hooked up to batteries to power them.

 

[Carlobrand]

The information you are looking for, will be found under "Drive failure" in the classic Traveller book page 6 of Book 2 Starships. It is also found in the Classic Traveller Book page 51. It reads:

"Batteries will provide life support and basic lighting for ID days"

Megatraveller doesn't seem to have the same deal as listed above, and I'm not familiar with other game system versions to know whether the too have that same reference. I do know that with GURPS TRAVELLER, battery powered devices can be known as to how long they will last, and low berths can be hooked up to batteries to power them.

Thanks!

MegaTrav, you can buy batteries to do the job, but there's no absolute requirement for them. (And I prefer to rely on solar panels.)

One consideration: there's not actually much one can do for a misjumped ship. There's about a 50:50 chance the ship's going to find itself in the empty space between stars, in which case there's no finding it - not unless some very powerful radio telescope manages to catch its dying emissions a few years after it disappears. If it manages to find itself in a star system, there's a 1 in 3 chance it will arrive with fuel exhausted and everyone dead: 1D days on batteries will not see you through an extra week or two past fuel depletion in jump space. So, a 4 in 6 chance the ship is doomed.

If the ship gets lucky, it should arrive with just enough fuel left to make planetfall. Odds are good it will find itself in an inhabited system with some form of rescue to help it out: under the Book-3 world generation system, only 1 in 36 systems is uninhabited, 83% of systems will have a starport D or better, 90% of the inhabited worlds will be TL7 or better. Even if it finds itself at a world with no help, it can usually refuel itself and start making its way back home unless it's taken damage along the way; the odds of a world being uninhabited and without a gas giant and without water are very low.

In other words, at the point the ship is determined to be missing, it will either be doomed or will already be in the midst of rescue at whatever world it happens to find itself. The only thing the Imperium needs to do is maintain an observation ship at those few worlds where an unlucky ship can't find help. There is nothing the origin or destination world can do to alter the ship's situation.

 

[Hal]

Before making assumptions that ships will be dead in space, no chance of rescue and all that, the idea is to flesh out the operational environment(s) involved in the Traveller Universe, or the likely environments (aka filling in the blank holes not detailed by the Traveller rules sets in any incarnation).

That is the WHOLE reason I started this thread rather than respond on the original lifeboats thread that started my train of thought.

How long will pass before anyone even thinks they should be looking for the missing ship?

In the event that a ship ends up in deep space - how long before anyone can jump to within a given distance of that ship in deep space, do a quick scan, and maybe listen around in the hopes that a distress beacon is beeping its heart away merrily over and over again.

If a ship mis-jumps and its occupants don't have a snowballs chance in hell that anyone will go looking for them, chances are then, that the only people who come looking for them will be salvage operators looking for easy money - an empty ship!

So, let's put our heads together and see what things a functional third imperium society is likely to do to keep these events from ending in tragedy. Hell, it could be as simple as emergency low berths that operate on battery power for a year at a time. In GURPS TRAVELLER, this is possible. In the classic Traveller rules set - the question becomes one of "is it possible to await rescue, or is a misjump an automatic death sentence?"

 

[Whipsnade]

How long will pass before anyone even thinks they should be looking for the missing ship?

Days after an ETA along well traveled routes, weeks or months or worse in backwaters.

An analogy can only stretch so far, but I believe looking at oceanic sail shipping in the pre-telegraph/radio/satcomm era would help. Ships arriving in a destination port would be asked about which ships had cleared their origin port around the time they left. Factors, chandlers, freight brokers, and the like were always sending multiple messages aboard multiple vessels regarding which ships were traveling where with what cargo while the practique/zarpe system meant governments knew where ships were heading too.

"ETAs" were listed by which week a vessel was due, so, when it was finally realized a vessel was overdue, it was usually far too late to do anything. Accordingly, search - not rescue - vessels were rarely dispatched and then only months or years after the fact. That even held true up through the early radio era with steam shipping of which SS Waratah is a good example.

She left Durban for Cape Town on 26 July 1909 and her estimated arrival date of 29 July was telegraphed ahead. She was sighted a few times by other ships on the 26th and then passed from the knowledge of man. When she didn't arrive in Cape Town on the 29th, it was initially blamed on a storm. When other arriving vessels reported the storm's ferocity, it was feared she was adrift. Only then, over a week later, were a pair of warships which happened to be in port dispatched on a quick search along the Waratah's route. Another search using a charted vessel took place three months later. Nothing was ever found.

This seeming lack of concern was primarily due to technological limitations. It was 1909. Waratah had no radio, there were no helicopters, no long range search aircraft. There was no way for the news of a disaster to quickly reach the authorities and no way for the authorities to quickly reach the site of a disaster.

The parallels between the story of the Waratah and the Credit Dew should be obvious.

If Alpha Century and Neocourageous are linked by x-boat or other daily traffic, Credit Dew's non-arrival will be noted in days. If links between the two systems take longer, it will take longer for Credit Dew to be missed. And even when the ship is missed, where should the authorities begin to look?

 

[whulorigan]

There's about a 50:50 chance the ship's going to find itself in the empty space between stars, in which case there's no finding it - not unless some very powerful radio telescope manages to catch its dying emissions a few years after it disappears.

Two things to consider (as an aside - I know it is not strictly related to emergency procedures):

1) Even an "Empty Hex" is not truly empty. There are the odd chunks of cometary ice floating about interstellar space, and most systems have a cometary halo out to about 1.0 lightyear or more (in fact, the ice chunk may have been the reason for the mis-jump, precipitating the ship out of Jumpspace at about the 100 diameter limit). But realize that if the ice-chunk wasn't the reason for early precipitation, the chance of locating or being near one of those ice chunks is probably vanishingly small. But if one were located, they are typically composed of various ices that could be used to refuel the ship.

2) The placement of stars in the 1pc-scale hexgrid does not mean that the stars shown lie in the exact center of their respective hexes (otherwise the hexgrid would not be a grid, since stellar positions are for all intents and purposes randomly distributed). The stars lie somewhere within that hex's volume of space (at least as far as the jump-drive and jump-physics is concerned). Therefore, even if a ship emerges in an "interstellar" hex, there is a chance it may be within a possible (albeit long-haul) maneuver distance from a nearby star if, say, the ship actually emerges close to the "edge" of the interstellar hex, and the nearest star in question happens to lie close to the "edge" of its hexgrid location. That likewise means that the lightspeed travel time for a signal may not in fact be years, but rather may be merely weeks or months. A ship could vector with all remaining delta-V toward the star and transmit a signal with its location/timestamp and velocity & acceleration vectors, and projected fuel reserves in a Signal GK toward the destination star-system, thus allowing the destination-system to get a fix on the current position of the ship.

 

[Hal]

This seeming lack of concern was primarily due to technological limitations. It was 1909. Waratah had no radio, there were no helicopters, no long range search aircraft. There was no way for the news of a disaster to quickly reach the authorities and no way for the authorities to quickly reach the site of a disaster.

The parallels between the story of the Waratah and the Credit Dew should be obvious.

If Alpha Century and Neocourageous are linked by x-boat or other daily traffic, Credit Dew's non-arrival will be noted in days. If links between the two systems take longer, it will take longer for Credit Dew to be missed. And even when the ship is missed, where should the authorities begin to look?

Based upon that statement above, one could almost presume that rescue efforts in the Third Imperium would have similar constraints. If that is the case, then lifeboat strategies would either be non-existent, or they would be designed for worst case scenarios where the time required would be successively LONGER than implied.

One might guess then, that lifeboats would have to be more capable of withstanding not a matter of weeks - but possibly months or even long haul strategies for survival based upon low berths being powered for a longer period of time. Getting into a lifeboat under those circumstances might also be accompanied by a sense of despair knowing that rescue is highly unlikely.

So, CAN a lifeboat be crafted, whose only task is to get away from the ship in question, and permit a low berth system to remain running for long periods of time using standard rules? Therein lies the question. GURPS TRAVELLER, yes. But what of the other traveller systems?

 

[PFVA63]

Hi,

Not to sound like a broken record or anything, but I really think focusing in only only a limited part of spaceship travel may be leaving out a large part of what may be happening in a Traveller style setting as well as reasons why a lifeboat may be of use.

Taking our Solar System as an example, while many inbound Travellers may come on ships that exit jump space @ a 100D limit and travel directly to Earth where they conduct all their business or sightseeing/vacationing etc, there are many other places in the Solar System that may also see both in-system and perhaps even interstallar traffic that really shouldn't be ignored.

One example may be Belter operations. Because (as I understand it) asteroid mining operations are very muchly part of Traveller canon, travel to and from the asteroid belt from Earth would seem to be very much within Traveller canon, not to mention the possibility of even some direct "flights" from the belt to nearby star systems, skipping a trip to Earth altogether.

Add to this the possibility of manufacturing, mining, archeological and/or sightseeing attractions on other planets and satellites in our solar system would suggest the potential for even more in system travel.

To try and assume that most/all travel in a system like our solar system would be solely limited to travel to and from the 100D limit of the major habitated location in system would be kind of like having a sign at an airport in modern day Jamaica that reads;

"Welcome to Kingston. Everything of any importance to any traveller is located within a 100D radius of the city. Travel outside of this radius is not prohibited but no one does it so don't even try finding a boat or plane that will take you any were else to nearby islands, etc. Please enjoy your stay"

To me, I could see ample in-system travel from Earth to say "supposed ancient ruins on Mars", workboat travel to and from the mines in/near the Asteroid Belt, and maybe even sightseeing trips to the Vulcanos of Io, etc. And to me additional travel like this would seem to offer additional potentials for accidents and such.

Just some thoughts.

PF

 

[Fritz_Brown]

And, I still say that there is really no reason for any civilian ship to ever use lifeboats. Any event (short of biological, possibly - but even there you can seal yourself into a portion of the ship) that would cause you to "abandon ship" would probably eliminate any lifeboats that launched. The only reason for lifeboats on a seagoing vessel is because it can sink. Even a ship driving toward a planet at high velocity with no ability to brake or maneuver - the lifeboats won't be able to get away unless they're way out... in which case it would be *much* easier to have rescue vessels match speed with the ship and get everyone off from one place.

 

[PFVA63]

Hi,

To me, looking through Canon sources, the Adventure Annic Nova strongly suggests the possibility of some sort of "medical outbreak' as possibly leading to the original crew of that vessel having possibly "abandoned ship' in the missing ship's small craft.

Also, (if I am recalling correctly) Canon also strongly suggests the potential for "mental problems" being triggered by individuals exposed to seeing jump space.

Additionally, I believe that its in Canon that some vessel (possibly the Scout/Courier) is known to have a faulty life support system which can lead to unpleasant odors etc. Since modern day bacterial infections such as Legionnaire's disease can be spread by "air conditioning units in large buildings" ( http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/legionnairesdisease.html ) it would seem possible that a faulty life support system on a starship could also allow for the spread of bacterial (or possibly viral) diseases.

Beyond this Canon also makes reference to wilderness refueling, which I believe could expose a ship, and its internal fuel systems and external control surfaces etc to various sorts of plants and animals *similar to barnacles, moss, tube worms, zebra mussels and other such items) which could potentially foul or disrupt such systems.

Additionally, current experience with materials in space have highlighted issues with such things as "cold welding" and "galling" as noted in this Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_welding ), and summarized below;

"...the European Space Agency published a peer reviewed paper detailing why cold welding is a significant issue that spacecraft designers need to carefully consider. The conclusions of this study can be found on page 25 of "Assessment of Cold Welding between Separable Contact Surfaces due to Impact and Fretting under Vacuum". The paper also cites a documented example from 1991 with the Galileo spacecraft high-gain antenna (see page 2; the technical source document from NASA regarding the Galileo spacecraft is also provided in a link here).[4][5]

One source of difficulty is that cold welding does not exclude relative motion between the surfaces that are to be joined. This allows the broadly defined notions of galling, fretting, sticking, stiction and adhesion to overlap in some instances. For example, it is possible for a joint to be the result of both cold (or "vacuum") welding and galling (and/or fretting and/or impact). Galling and cold welding, therefore, are not mutually exclusive."

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_for_use_in_vacuum )

Also, I believe that here are also issues with oxygen (and other gasses including sulfur etc) outgassing in a vacuum (potentially changing the characteristics of those materials possibly making seals and such more brittle, etc) with the possibility of these gasses be re-adsorbed on other surfaces (potentially affecting those surface and materials as well).

Other issues could also include various chips and electronic components eventually failing after repeated use of long periods of time etc (or in other words "sometimes electronics fail after awhile" - not to mention other complex systems etc).

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Also, (if I am recalling correctly) Canon also strongly suggests the potential for "mental problems" being triggered by individuals exposed to seeing jump space.

Which would suggest to me that you wouldn't want anyone to be able to launch lifeboats in jump. Heck, not in normal space, either. Which means they have to be centrally controlled or a crewman has to launch each one.

Additionally, I believe that its in Canon that some vessel (possibly the Scout/Courier) is known to have a faulty life support system which can lead to unpleasant odors etc.

Yep, but that's caused by a poor filter, not a faulty one. Escaping the Type S in a lifeboat would be a little drastic for mold and mildew in the HVAC.

Since modern day bacterial infections such as Legionnaire's disease can be spread by "air conditioning units in large buildings" ( http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/legionnairesdisease.html ) it would seem possible that a faulty life support system on a starship could also allow for the spread of bacterial (or possibly viral) diseases.

Again, leaving the ship doesn't achieve much except leave a VERY expensive piece of hardware floating in space, and scattering your passengers and crew all to heck and gone. Especially when the easier answer is to cut off the HVAC and put people in sealed environments like vacc suits or survival bubbles.

 

[PFVA63]

Which would suggest to me that you wouldn't want anyone to be able to launch lifeboats in jump. Heck, not in normal space, either. Which means they have to be centrally controlled or a crewman has to launch each one.

Hi,

To me it also means that the guy in the next cabin and/or one of the crew could also end up experiencing mental/emotional issues resulting from exposure to jum p space such that he could becomed a serious threat to everyone else onboard, and hance you may need to escape from him/her.

Yep, but that's caused by a poor filter, not a faulty one. Escaping the Type S in a lifeboat would be a little drastic for mold and mildew in the HVAC.

The eco-sphere on different planets can have organisms within them that represent a more serious threat to human, vargyr, aslan &/or other such sophonts and such its canon that filters on some ships may not work properly that would seem likely to open the door for a variety of different types of organisms taking hold in a place like life support system with faulty filtering.

Again, leaving the ship doesn't achieve much except leave a VERY expensive piece of hardware floating in space, and scattering your passengers and crew all to heck and gone. Especially when the easier answer is to cut off the HVAC and put people in sealed environments like vacc suits or survival bubbles.

Depending on how virulent an outbreak of an illness may be it kind of seems to me that a crew & their passengers options and actions ,ay vary. It appears that virus's can infect all types of organisms including "animals and plants to bacteria and archaea.[1]" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus ) and since viral infections on Earth could be as severe as something like Ebola, staying onboard a ship that may be harboring infected lifeforms with severe hemorrhagic illnesses of potentially unkown origin etc may not be the preferred option by some, etc.

 

[Carlobrand]

Two things to consider (as an aside - I know it is not strictly related to emergency procedures):

1) Even an "Empty Hex" is not truly empty. There are the odd chunks of cometary ice floating about interstellar space, and most systems have a cometary halo out to about 1.0 lightyear or more (in fact, the ice chunk may have been the reason for the mis-jump, precipitating the ship out of Jumpspace at about the 100 diameter limit). But realize that if the ice-chunk wasn't the reason for early precipitation, the chance of locating or being near one of those ice chunks is probably vanishingly small. But if one were located, they are typically composed of various ices that could be used to refuel the ship. ...

It's always good to be hopeful, and any gamemaster who wants to save his players from certain doom can certainly invoke that. However, let's be realistic: even a full-on star system is mostly empty. Good ol' Sol is more than 99.5% of the mass of the solar system. More than 99% of the rest's in the four gas giants, and of the less-than-0.0001% that isnt sun or gas giant, more than 99% of that is tied up in the four terrestrial planets. All the rest - every moon, asteroid, comet and so forth, might all add up to the mass of Mars, maybe a bit more considering the volume in the Kuiper belt and such.

Even given the 100 diameter rule and the fact that they represent a whole lot of very small masses, the percentage of space outside the solar shadow and the shadows of the gas giants and terrestrial planets that's affected by some plutonian-to-asteroid-size mass is literally astronomically small - especially when you consider that a big part of that mass is itself within the jump shadow of the gas giants.

Now we look to the space between stars: wandering cometary bodies, orphan planets - if we're very, very lucky a brown dwarf star. Not even a hundredth the mass of the solar system at its very best, and most likely a lot, lot less. If the odds of a random encounter in the solar system are low, the odds of a random encounter in the space between stars - or of even coming within sensor range of one in the time left before your fuel runs out (assuming it didn't run out while you were in jump space) - borders on the miraculous.

This is the kind of dramatic Deus Ex Machina that you pull dramatically out of the hat for your beleaguered players.

2) The placement of stars in the 1pc-scale hexgrid does not mean that the stars shown lie in the exact center of their respective hexes (otherwise the hexgrid would not be a grid, since stellar positions are for all intents and purposes randomly distributed). The stars lie somewhere within that hex's volume of space (at least as far as the jump-drive and jump-physics is concerned). Therefore, even if a ship emerges in an "interstellar" hex, there is a chance it may be within a possible (albeit long-haul) maneuver distance from a nearby star if, say, the ship actually emerges close to the "edge" of the interstellar hex, and the nearest star in question happens to lie close to the "edge" of its hexgrid location. That likewise means that the lightspeed travel time for a signal may not in fact be years, but rather may be merely weeks or months. A ship could vector with all remaining delta-V toward the star and transmit a signal with its location/timestamp and velocity & acceleration vectors, and projected fuel reserves in a Signal GK toward the destination star-system, thus allowing the destination-system to get a fix on the current position of the ship.

No, a star doesn't need to be in the exact center. It can be closer - or it can be farther. I'm afraid there's no real improvement there. As to the "chance" - well, it's a parsec across, 3.26 light years. Playing Traveller-two-dimensions, that's about 8.35 square light years in which the ship can materialize anywhere, closer to or farther from. I leave to you the task of calculating the probability of a ship coming out close enough to reach a neighboring star system while constrained to less than a month's fuel and a drive that can't exceed the speed of light. And as for rescuers jumping out and trying to find them ... same problem.

These are stratagems you pull out to save your players' collective butts. When they happen to an NPC, they're a miracle, nothing less.