gravitic drives, contragrav, and ship design

[BwapTED]

I've posted a fair amount in other threads about interpreting and modifying the LBBs so that you have torch-ships and/or fusion rockets.



I want to go the other direction with this thread.

SPOILERS for Space Viking

SPOLIERS
SPOLIERS
SPOILERS

In Space Viking and some other Piper books and stories, ships use contragrav to lift off planets. Float and be towed or just drift up and down.

The Abbot drive provides lift and thrust. It's gravity technology.
The Dillingham hyperdive lets you move FTL through hyperspace.


The big difference from Traveller is that hyperspace jumps are not fixed at a week, but vary depending on how far one is going. They can be microjumps that hardly take any time of long leaps that take thousands of hours.

Let's not worry about that travel time wrinkle right now.

Let's just assume that the M Drives are some kind of gravitic drive.
Jump drive is jump drive.

Why do you need an exhaust? Why are drives positioned aft?
Why design a ship that looks like an aircraft or a naval vessel if you have contragravity?

In Space Viking, the all-important drives are placed dead center of a globular starship, with lots of collpasium plating around them.

There's no exposed bridge or cockpit, either. No way. You put that stuff fairly deep in the ship, too.
No windows that the bridge or control room crew look out, but viewscreens.

Outer shell has weapons, docking ports, sensors, etc.

It seems to me that I can use the ship designs as written and simply ignore the deck plans. Just make my own.

 

[kilemall]

Definitely one way to go. But consider this- perhaps the ships' weight is neutralized or as Aramis put it in my break 1G thread, they provide buoyancy.


Well then, the aft thrusters push the now floating cancelled 1G field forward up into space without all of those tasteless mass problems.

 

[BwapTED]

Definitely one way to go. But consider this- perhaps the ships' weight is neutralized or as Aramis put it in my break 1G thread, they provide buoyancy.


Well then, the aft thrusters push the now floating cancelled 1G field forward up into space without all of those tasteless mass problems.

Aramis' idea seems worth a good look. Thanks for reminding me of it.

 

[aramis]

Aramis' idea seems worth a good look. Thanks for reminding me of it.

I can't take credit for it; it's stock from TNE.

 

[BwapTED]

I can't take credit for it; it's stock from TNE.

I wonder if I ought to give TNE a look.

 

[aramis]

I wonder if I ought to give TNE a look.

The tech bits are all in Fire, Fusion and Steel. The RPG corebook is strongly character centric, and lacks ship design/modification.

The game is quite different mechanically from CT, tho' is scales attributes similarly (not the same - 6 is average, not 7) and skill levels are slightly higher than CT and initially a bit higher than MT. Tasks are rolled on 1d20, aiming to roll under (Stat+skill)×(difficulty); difficulty Easy is × 2, while impossible is × 0.25.

It plays well, as long as players have pre-figured the 5 TN's per skill or are math-comfortable.

Characters tend to have 10-20 skills, with levels of 1-5 (mostly low), but specialists can wind up with skills into the 10 range if they manage a 7-term career and fixate on their key skill - they're still going to have 5-9 other skills at 1-2 each.

Oh, and aging saves are 1d16-1 ≥ Stat, faked with 1d20, reroll 16-19, read 20 as 0. (I bought some d16's from Gamescience, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of faking the d16).

If one looks at the various GDW lines...
... there's a lot of borrowing across the various lines.
The RPG rules are essentially T2K 2.3; you can easily use the careers from T2K 2.0/2.2 unmodified, but with TNE skill gain rates.

 

[BwapTED]

Cool. Thanks for the rundown, Aramis.


:coffeegulp::ssb:

 

[Straybow]

Why do you need an exhaust? Why are drives positioned aft?
Why design a ship that looks like an aircraft or a naval vessel if you have contragravity?

Well, the exhaust is for that pesky 10 million Kelvin waste stream after you've run the 100+ MK fusion stream through an MHD generator for your power. Even measured in grams/second it's absurdly dangerous.


Spheres are most efficient if you want every part of the hull equally armored. If you want the "front" part more heavily armored for high speed microimpacts generated with maneuver drive and the rest less armored to save mass and expense, a narrower cross section is more efficient.

 

[kilemall]

Well, the exhaust is for that pesky 10 million Kelvin waste stream after you've run the 100+ MK fusion stream through an MHD generator for your power. Even measured in grams/second it's absurdly dangerous.


Spheres are most efficient if you want every part of the hull equally armored. If you want the "front" part more heavily armored for high speed microimpacts generated with maneuver drive and the rest less armored to save mass and expense, a narrower cross section is more efficient.

Really, waste heat in general- could be our fusion plants consume less fuel in actual fusion, and far more in just disposing of heat via exhaust rather then finny easily destroyed radiators.


Other reasons include atmo maneuver for combat at speed, emergency landing capability in case of no-gravitic/attitude thruster only, runs through gas giant fueling at speed because the ship does not have sufficient lift to power up and down their gravity well, high speed takeoff at 4G+ goes better/more controlled if the ship is not a brick, and coolness/fashion points.