Is it time for Jump-7 drives in Traveller?
- Thread starter Shonner
- Start date
I'm not unhappy with J-drives as-is. The practical implications of having substantially longer ranged jumps is that you end up needing a much larger region of space to play in. Having said that, the territory on travellermap.com is pretty extensive.
That is the real question: not how fast should a jump drive theoretically be, but how long should it take at the fastest possible rate to get from one side of the imperium, or of human space, to the other. At Jump-6 it should be possible with J-6 couriers moving you x-boat style to get from Jewell to Terra - nearly at the opposite ends of the Imperium - in about 45 weeks.
That matches certain eras of Earth's history. To get to the most distant point on earth from any other point in 45 weeks you need to average about .74 meters/second, basically walking speed. In the context of travel by sea, this isn't all that aggressive and a ship that could provide its own constant motion at that rate would be simple, but of course during the age of sail it wasn't that easy to predict what the speed of travel would be.
Even so, the rate of travel, and of communications, that the Imperium has compared to the size of the Imperium makes the Imperium more unwieldy to mange than any political structure on earth since the Roman empire.
Jump 7 doesn't change it that much, but there is the question of: why? Is Jump-7 needed from a game perspective because the Imperium is just barely too large? Is the goal to reduce the theoretical best time it takes to go from one end to the other of the Imperium from 45 to 39 weeks?
The other consideration is that it might give players too much choice. Picking a world at random (Carl's World), at Jump-1 there are 3 worlds that can be reached, at 2 there are 9. Jump 3 provides 18, 4: 26, 5:37, 6:55.
Jump 7 brings that up to 79, Jump 8 100, Jump 9 gives 127 and Jump 10 gives 150. Going into Hop drives, or what have you, Jump-20 puts 524 worlds in range.
Thanks to basic geometry, that increase in jump radius of 1/6th yields a 1.36x area increase that can be jumped to, on average. My random case above is actually somewhat worse than average. In terms of trade opportunity, that is an enormous advantage, and if it were a 3d universe it would be even worse / more advantageous - changing from jump radius 6 to 7 is 1.59x the volume.
M1105 is the right timeframe for Traveller, and Jump-6 is the right maximum velocity. And the vast majority of spacecraft should be Jump-1 or 2.
There are two answers to that question: jump should be as fast as the writers want it to be (OTU) and as fast as you want it to be (YTU). If it drives (sic) the narrative of the setting and delivers outcomes they're seeking, then that's how fast it could be. If it drives your campaign, scenarios and everyone likes what you've done, then just depart from canon.
Jumps up to 9 exist in the t5 rules....
But note that, given the minimum sizes of pp, jfuel, and jdrive... J7 is eating 85% of hull, before control systems, crew, and LS.
J8 is 97%...
J9 has to use drop tanks, as the drives, plant, and fuel are 109% of hull...
But note that, given the minimum sizes of pp, jfuel, and jdrive... J7 is eating 85% of hull, before control systems, crew, and LS.
J8 is 97%...
J9 has to use drop tanks, as the drives, plant, and fuel are 109% of hull...
Just do what JJ Abrams did to Star Trek, make space travel move at the speed of story. He had a personal transporter that instantaneously teleports about 60 parsecs while starships no longer used warp speeds but instantly teleported to the next star system (again about 60 pc) while the crew were still discussing what they would do when they arrived.
Star Wars does it all the time. You travel almost literally across the galaxy while walking from the from to the back of your starship.
Remember Dune? The prepping for interstellar travel took far longer than the instant porting to the destination. Just make star travel a fade in/fade out and continue with the story.
Star Wars does it all the time. You travel almost literally across the galaxy while walking from the from to the back of your starship.
Remember Dune? The prepping for interstellar travel took far longer than the instant porting to the destination. Just make star travel a fade in/fade out and continue with the story.
That's the underlying reasoning for small J1-2 merchants. You can do a little trading sandbox game with just a couple of subsectors. If you roll the clock back to (say) 1980 before PCs were ubiquitous, rolling up an entire sector by hand is a very time-consuming job. Rolling up a subsector or two could be accomplished in a few hours.
Even before that, there was the Imperium board game, which also had limited jump range as a factor in the balance.
The opposite of this effect was something I encountered when I did my 'Reavers Campaign' - a Daibei/Reaver's Deep based 'verse set as the Rule of Man was coming apart. In addition to the remains of the Daibei regional government it featured some minor polities that were getting out under from the ROM and the first incursions into the region from the two big Aslan clans that developed jump drives off the crashed Terran ship.
The problem with this is that the polities are too far apart, split across bits of two sectors. I had to do a lot of J3 and 2xJ2 designs (the game was set in a TL12 setting) in order to be able to get around in a reasonable length of time. A little old J1 free trader would be next to useless in that setting. I was seriously considering goosing the 'verse to TL13 in order to add J4 travel.
I'm almost inclined to say the second Imperium would have needed TL13 J4 tech to really manage itself. Perhaps the lack of such tech could have contributed to its downfall, although it had about 4 centuries to develop the tech before things all went to custard.
Enoki
SOC-14 1K
While it's not canon, I simply explain jump being limited to 6 as being the most you can bend space-gravity. Further using that method simply isn't possible. There are already some canon alternatives at TL higher than the game norm, so that alternative exists.
The space-gravity thing also meshes with the need to be outside any large gravity well in order to jump.
The space-gravity thing also meshes with the need to be outside any large gravity well in order to jump.
Spinward Scout
SOC-14 5K
How about Jump-36? I think we should do it.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Not quite.
The hop drive moves ships in increments of 10 parsecs - at one point it was suggested that you would need a jump drive too to move distances of only a parsec or two.
There are questions to be answered about the kop drive. If jump drives can make insystem jumps why can't hop drives? To make a hop of only a couple of parsecs aim your course line at a planet, gas giant or star within the system and let jump physics do the rest.
There is another option for longer ranged jump travel - MWM mentioned in an interview the Hieronymus nexus - s device that links jump drive units and allow one jump drive to raise its performance to the power of the second drive, eg a jump 3 drive linked to a jump 2 drive becomes a jump 3^2=9.
The hop drive moves ships in increments of 10 parsecs - at one point it was suggested that you would need a jump drive too to move distances of only a parsec or two.
There are questions to be answered about the kop drive. If jump drives can make insystem jumps why can't hop drives? To make a hop of only a couple of parsecs aim your course line at a planet, gas giant or star within the system and let jump physics do the rest.
There is another option for longer ranged jump travel - MWM mentioned in an interview the Hieronymus nexus - s device that links jump drive units and allow one jump drive to raise its performance to the power of the second drive, eg a jump 3 drive linked to a jump 2 drive becomes a jump 3^2=9.
Within about 20 Pc, the 100D limit is sufficient to allow using the jump Shadow to willfully drop below H1 or S1. L1 is dicey past about 20 Pc, but within, sure. So you just reserve 1 extra _1 fuel load, and make the final ≤20 Pc jump.
One thing everyone forgets about raising the jump rate is your referee must be willing to create HUGE amounts of known space with all the details for all those worlds. Playing a subsector, a sector at most is more than enough diversity for adventure.
Other issue, how many player group are running around in Jump 6 ships to start with and NEED Jump 7 to adventure? Only real entities using higher jumps are higher tech militaries, governments and corporations in ships with diminishing tonnage for anything but drive and fuel.
Other issue, how many player group are running around in Jump 6 ships to start with and NEED Jump 7 to adventure? Only real entities using higher jumps are higher tech militaries, governments and corporations in ships with diminishing tonnage for anything but drive and fuel.
A domain is plenty big for an H1 ship...
At S1, you can cross the 3I in 3-4 S1. Theoretically. In practice, more like 6 S1...
||: S1 for distance, S1 <20 Pc for refuel. :||x3
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
Mostly Space X player groups. X meaning Opera, Fantasy, Wizards, Patrol, War, etc.
This is only a problem for the canonical setting in a Hop (or greater) context. Once we've expanded "charted" space from 150 sectors to 15,000 sectors, we have to approach the problem differently than we have before.
For the referee, the problem has always been using ANY world as a springboard for adventure (and to not hang a lot of detail on particular worlds). In other words, management of complexity is already the Traveller referee's burden, and his two choices are: (1) learn to be flexible and design your plots and locations so that they can adapt easily to any number of worlds, or (2) drown in the task of detailing too many worlds, most of which the players will never visit.
Regardless of your ship's legs, one subsector is theoretically enough sandbox for a lifetime of adventuring.
Let me put it another way. My group played Traveller weekly for about five years, and we visited fewer than 40 worlds.
Now that doesn't work for all players. Some players thrive on visiting many, many worlds. Proper planning is called for: learn to read the UWP at a glance (Supplement 4 has posted notes here on this) and have an arsenal of world types on hand for when you need to make a planet memorable.
None of mine ever cared about long legs.
But, some players want high-jump ships, for whatever reason.
In that case it really doesn't matter what the rules say: the referee could simply make that a goal of a couple adventures involving espionage, or rescues, or sabotage, or immoral Niska-level gangster crime. The referee could make it clear that this is an experimental design, and requires the best engineering staff money can buy. That the drive requires not just parts from a laboratory, but a prototype Fabricator that builds parts for the drive. But, the ship works, and it does what the players want, and is useful as well. They just have to get it, and maintain it, and treat it nice.
As I said, it doesn't matter what the rules say. However, it's nice to know that the rules support it.
Another thing to consider for a "Hop" Universe is that it will be more likely that systems of no great intrinsic value or easy adaptability will be bypassed altogether unless there is a reason for going there. In a "Jump" Universe, there is a motivation to have a presence in every system (whether outpost or colony) because you need stopover points for your ship as you travel from departure point to ultimate destination. In a "Hop" Universe, there may be many systems that are totally unvisited and/or uninhabited, as it is easy to get from system to system directly, even when they are fairly widely separated. People will not wast time colonizing or terraforming undesirable worlds when it is a simple Hop from point to point in order to go where you need to go.
So the number of inhabited worlds across your larger volume of space may not change by any significant order of magnitude, just the actual physical number of total systems. MOARN.
That's a great point. The metaphor Marc used was that of the Interstate highway system, connecting major population centers while bypassing all of the nothing-towns that used to thrive on the state highways. Route 66 is dotted with now-unvisited towns, since I-40 is a much more convenient way to get around.
So, yes, there will be more significant backwaters in a Hop culture, and clusters of better-off worlds around Strong center worlds. In some ways, Hop routes might be seen to bypass "flyover" parts of a subsector (the Hop-1 drive could be seen as a convenient way to hop from one subsector to the next).
I think we're ready to move the Hop discussion to its own thread (I think I have a thread already on Hop somewhere on this board).
