Multiple FTL Types in same setting?

[Quint]

I've done this a couple of older campaigns, but in looking at MgT with it's nice and explicit rules for multiple FTL systems (and power sources) I was wondering how that's worked out for other people (not specifically the MgT ones, but feel free to discuss those if salient to your experience).

One relatively simple thing I've done in the past was simply saying that ships plotted however long a course of travel that they wished - and then moved at the speed of their Jump Drive. If you wanted to pack the stores, and do the navigation plot (which was the limiting factor) you could travel six parsecs with your J1 ship with a single jump - it just took you six weeks to get there. This changed the dynamics of play pretty significantly but implementing rules for "jump rutters" and making navigation a crucial task that became harder and harder the longer the jump kept the things recognizably Traveller-ish.

I also experimented with giving an alien race some variant of T2300's Stutterwarp, I can't remember the precise details of how I made it work, but it didn't end up being a real game changer. Another time I used warp gates that allowed travel between them at up to misjump ranges (J36), again, not a huge game changer.

But in working on a new MTU, I'm kind of attracted to the idea of multiple different FTL types to give different flavors to the races. How has this worked out for people? In general, I'm looking at keeping things within the general "maximum" range of basic Traveller (J6ish) rather than adding in Hop or Skip Drives from T5.

D.

 

[BlackBat242]

I did a "hyperdrive", which was much like your first drive - I actually had it run slower than Jump (10 days), but the principle was as you describe - if you had fuel tanks for 10 parsecs and a H-1 drive, you could travel up to 4 parsecs in one go - at 1 parsec per 10 days.

I seem to remember that I had it use only 7.5% of ship's tonnage per parsec's worth of H-drive fuel, but it had to be specially-refined - a ship could not carry the purification systems needed unless the ship had room for a 500-dt refining plant.

While you could preset your course/time in "hyper" to "drop out of hyper" at a pre-set location, you could also "drop out" any time you wanted - the distance covered was a direct function of how long you were in "hyper". Yes, no nearby mass needed to "target" on for "drop-out", and you could re-enter "hyper" after "dropping-out" any time you wanted - but you lost a lot of later "drop-out" location precision each time you did that.

 

[Lycanorukke]

But in working on a new MTU, I'm kind of attracted to the idea of multiple different FTL types to give different flavors to the races. How has this worked out for people? In general, I'm looking at keeping things within the general "maximum" range of basic Traveller (J6ish) rather than adding in Hop or Skip Drives from T5.

One possible one could be something like the Babylon 5 hyperspace. You enter hyperspace through a jump gate (or a ship with a _very_ expensive generator) and then 'drive' to the exit point and re-emerge.

To integrate it with J-drive tech you add some limits - your 'range' is limited by your M-drive. This because you have to emerge from H-space to 're-normalise' after a certain time (a higher M drive allows you to move further before you have to leave). Also while you don't need to generate a Jump calculation, it is critical you have nav beacons. Go off the nav beacons and you're not coming out.

J drive has the benefits of going anywhere you want and no concerns of getting lost in jump or being followed. The downside is fuel consumption, the 100d Limit and you can't change course after jump.

Hyperdrive requires you to follow Nav beacons (no nav beacons in backwater systems), you have to pay a jump gate fee (and hence be tracked) and may run into hyperspace events, but the space taken by fuel is much less, the 100D limit isn't factor, and you can change course midway.

 

[rhialto]

But in working on a new MTU, I'm kind of attracted to the idea of multiple different FTL types to give different flavors to the races. How has this worked out for people? In general, I'm looking at keeping things within the general "maximum" range of basic Traveller (J6ish) rather than adding in Hop or Skip Drives from T5.

D.

I've added in the Psionic-powered Jump-drives from MgT Psion: same distance limits as canon, and it's worked out fine. Of course, that may be because my players haven't yet figured out these "Void Goddesses". :rofl:

My rationalization is needing a Void Captain who has the particular Psionic talent.

 

[DickNervous]

I am using MgT for my campaign and while it is just starting I will have multiple drive types available and even designed an NPC ship around an Anti-Mater Power Plant and Warp Drive (both pg. 109 of Mongoose Core Rulebook). To start with the only place to find this tech would be on TL15+ planets, "top secret" Imperial ships, and in the hands of the ridiculously rich and powerful.

The way I will work it is that the Anti-Mater power plant has 30 days of fuel. The Warp Drive will Warp you the M of your M-Drive per time period. I haven't worked out if it will be per day or week. If I do per day, the Warp drive will use 4x the normal fuel per day, otherwise it will be 2x per day. So a ship that was just topped off have 30 days of fuel. Using the M parsecs/day if you have a M3 ship and wanted to jump 6 parsecs it would take 2 days and use 8 days worth of fuel. So they would have only 22 days left after the Warp.

I am not sure how/if/when I will make that available to the players. If I do it will be ridiculously expensive and need a TL15 planet to build it. Of course, this is subject to tweaking as it actually comes into play.

But to answer your question, I don't see any reason not to have different technologies in your Traverller Universe. After all it is yours. The key will be how you account for impact it makes on the game, determine how/where it is available, etc. I think making systems that are arguably better than the standard hard to get (ie: only TL14/15+) and very expensive is a good start.

 

[Selandia]

One possible one could be something like the Babylon 5 hyperspace. You enter hyperspace through a jump gate (or a ship with a _very_ expensive generator) and then 'drive' to the exit point and re-emerge.

I use the jump gate Babylon style In My Alternate TU. The jump drive capacitors get loaded as the ship (as the projectile of a gauss rifle would do) gets accelerated through the gate. When far enough, jump drive triggers No jump fuel needed, you could have freighter with JD-6, PP-1, M-1 no jump fuel.


a) You do not exit from a gate, cargo space used for fuel on the jump back.

b)the option that I work with: jump gates at both end, One link per gate set, jump whatever jump needed for the adventure, exit beyond the known Traveller Map, Welcome to a brave new galaxy. Ok, it is kind of Stargate Atlantis, with Deep Space Nine's ship sized wormhole, that are produced by a machine like the one of the Preachers in SG-1. But I got the Idea from Babylon 5 to start with, and it look like theirs.

This ancient artefact allows to depart from a world in Foreven for elsewere.

have fun

Selandia

 

[DickNervous]

I use the jump gate Babylon style In My Alternate TU. The jump drive capacitors get loaded as the ship (as the projectile of a gauss rifle would do) gets accelerated through the gate. When far enough, jump drive triggers No jump fuel needed, you could have freighter with JD-6, PP-1, M-1 no jump fuel.

Kinda sounds like the Mass Effect Relays in Mass Effect. You can "jump" from any one of them to the other, no matter how far, in a matter of minutes without additional fuel. But to be usable in the Traveller Universe there would have to be one in every system.

 

[Lycanorukke]

Kinda sounds like the Mass Effect Relays in Mass Effect. You can "jump" from any one of them to the other, no matter how far, in a matter of minutes without additional fuel. But to be usable in the Traveller Universe there would have to be one in every system.

Though the a mass relay system in Trav you would have a reason for all those crappy little worlds right next to supertech worlds. The relay acts as a highway, and the systems on a relay route are key (hi tech, hi pop) worlds. But the worlds off the main road can only be reached thorough normal FTL jump and thus are much less desirable.

You want to get to Planet Podunk, you jump along the relays till you get to a close relay, and then spin up your jump drive and slog along the rest of the way. So unless something valuable in in the system (say a garden world) they are usually ignored.

The main catch with mass relays though is the travel time. You could jump along the relay system from the Marches to the Soli Border in a few hours to days which would cause a major shift in Imperium. And then of course, suppose the Zhodani got it into their head to drive an asteroid into the relay....

 

[Meeko100]

Though the a mass relay system in Trav you would have a reason for all those crappy little worlds right next to supertech worlds. The relay acts as a highway, and the systems on a relay route are key (hi tech, hi pop) worlds. But the worlds off the main road can only be reached thorough normal FTL jump and thus are much less desirable.

You want to get to Planet Podunk, you jump along the relays till you get to a close relay, and then spin up your jump drive and slog along the rest of the way. So unless something valuable in in the system (say a garden world) they are usually ignored.

The main catch with mass relays though is the travel time. You could jump along the relay system from the Marches to the Soli Border in a few hours to days which would cause a major shift in Imperium. And then of course, suppose the Zhodani got it into their head to drive an asteroid into the relay....

Wouldn't a ME Style Relay just send them along the way, but then leave them with no way back?

I was figuring a way to make the hyperdrive a bit star wars-y IMU (I've basically thrown most of the Traveller part out...). A ship would jump into hyperspace, but there'd be routes to planets that going off would be dangerous. Kinda like how B5 Hyper was explained, but Having it be feasible for short trips off the mains, and if you muck it up, less trapped forever in hyperspace, more violent explosions.

And of course, speeding the travel up or down depending on if its Star Wars where travel is faster then Jimmy Johns, or a more Traveller Pace where it takes weeks to get places.

I'm just going to nab the Hyperdrive from MgT Mainbook, and Stuff the whole dangerous "off-road" flying in. Maybe Free Traders/Millennium Falcons can get through these boonies better, because their size make them more able to navigate the hazards.

 

[Quint]

Thank you everyone for your thoughts and experiences! At the moment I'm leaning towards a "Deep Jump" Jump Drive (that allows for multiple weeks of travel) and very large (a small ship universe with a max 30K dtons) ships, a Warp Drive used by one of the other races that is easier to navigate with across long distances, and then a TL16 Hyperdrive (with TL14 or 15 prototypes/early models) but that is limited to no more than 5K dtons. Plus some version of Psy-driven drives either as Forerunner or another races drive type.

I'm going to dust off my "jump rutter" rules and tweak them for MgT, and I I've always liked the B5 version of Jumpgates mixed with the Fading Suns rules, so I'll think just to complicate things I'll have a series of Jump Gates as well - so that "step one" of character independent travel is a ship that can travel by Gate, the upgrade is a ship that isn't tied to the Jumpgate Network.

D.

 

[Timerover51]

I could see multiple types of interstellar drive as long as they were fairly close together in capability. However, if one works like the hyperdrive in H. Beam Piper's Space Viking, you are going to have problems.

A ship in hyperspace logs about a light-year an hour.

That would mean a parsec every 3.26 hours, or in a week, a ship could cover about 51 parsecs. Rifts become a non-factor, and you no longer have a need to basically colonize to a greater or lesser degree every star systems.

In some of his earlier books, Piper did use a different standard. In Four Day Planet, Fenris is 650 light-years from Terra, and it takes 6 months to cover the distance. That works out to 3.6 light years a day, or about a parsec per day. That would be closer to Traveller, but again, you are not restricted to a limited number of parsecs per jump.

 

[aramis]

I could see multiple types of interstellar drive as long as they were fairly close together in capability. However, if one works like the hyperdrive in H. Beam Piper's Space Viking, you are going to have problems.



That would mean a parsec every 3.26 hours, or in a week, a ship could cover about 51 parsecs. Rifts become a non-factor, and you no longer have a need to basically colonize to a greater or lesser degree every star systems.

In some of his earlier books, Piper did use a different standard. In Four Day Planet, Fenris is 650 light-years from Terra, and it takes 6 months to cover the distance. That works out to 3.6 light years a day, or about a parsec per day. That would be closer to Traveller, but again, you are not restricted to a limited number of parsecs per jump.

Easily nerfed by requiring more fuel than jump takes...

 

[Blue Ghost]

I've done this a couple of older campaigns, but in looking at MgT with it's nice and explicit rules for multiple FTL systems (and power sources) I was wondering how that's worked out for other people (not specifically the MgT ones, but feel free to discuss those if salient to your experience).

One relatively simple thing I've done in the past was simply saying that ships plotted however long a course of travel that they wished - and then moved at the speed of their Jump Drive. If you wanted to pack the stores, and do the navigation plot (which was the limiting factor) you could travel six parsecs with your J1 ship with a single jump - it just took you six weeks to get there. This changed the dynamics of play pretty significantly but implementing rules for "jump rutters" and making navigation a crucial task that became harder and harder the longer the jump kept the things recognizably Traveller-ish.

I also experimented with giving an alien race some variant of T2300's Stutterwarp, I can't remember the precise details of how I made it work, but it didn't end up being a real game changer. Another time I used warp gates that allowed travel between them at up to misjump ranges (J36), again, not a huge game changer.

But in working on a new MTU, I'm kind of attracted to the idea of multiple different FTL types to give different flavors to the races. How has this worked out for people? In general, I'm looking at keeping things within the general "maximum" range of basic Traveller (J6ish) rather than adding in Hop or Skip Drives from T5.

D.

Quint; I started a similar thread some years back. I can't remember all of what I and other said, but the gist was a possible exploration of other or alternate interstellar drives or methods for getting from star to star. If you do a search you might find some thoughts from older board members.

 

[Silver]

I've screwed around with multiple forms of FTL in other scifi systems, with varying results. For something to be a game-changer, it really needs to break with how the universe as the characters know it works. Which generally means introducing it mid-campaign, and making it radically different from the normal means of getting around.

So, something like a hyperdrive isn't exactly going to be that much different from the traditional Jump Drive. But if you're using the "Wormhole Jumpline" method of getting around, introducing the means for a ship to generate its own wormhole would be a real game changer- ships are no longer bound to travel between jump points.

That all said and done, if you really want to see what having four or five means of getting around at FTL velocities is like, you might want to read up on David Brin's Uplift universe. It has at least four or five different means of getting around across the Five Galaxies.

 

[aramis]

For something to change the feel, it needs to do more than just make cosmetic differences.

Changing to warp drives from jump drives makes some differences that change the feel.

Jump	Warp
Fixed time (1 week)	Variable time
Fixed fuel	time-derived fuel
No interactions with N-Space†	Potential interactions with N-Space
No course changes; commit at initiation	Course changes can be made
Massive fuel requirements	Merely Significant Fuel Requirements‡

† CT is pretty clear that only gravity wells at the ends, and maybe in between, at the time of jump will interact with the ship; nothing else can affect the ship, and once it's in J-space, it comes out in roughly a week. It cannot be affected by changes in n-space unless the ruleset in use is T5.
‡At least as presented in 2300, in MGT, and in TNE. Significant, but less than Jump.

 

[Lycanorukke]

Wouldn't a ME Style Relay just send them along the way, but then leave them with no way back?

In the ME-verse relays are point to point. No one way trips

Primary relays only connect to only one other and have massive range (1000s of ly), while secondary relays can connect to any other secondary relay within a few hundred ly. Ship based FTL (very slow compared to the relays, but much faster than jump ~15ly/day ) is used to get to the nearest star system with a relay.

There was the experimental relay in ME1 which was 'one way', but it still required a 'reciever'.

 

[Selandia]

Though the a mass relay system in Trav you would have a reason for all those crappy little worlds right next to supertech worlds. The relay acts as a highway, and the systems on a relay route are key (hi tech, hi pop) worlds. But the worlds off the main road can only be reached thorough normal FTL jump and thus are much less desirable.

You want to get to Planet Podunk, you jump along the relays till you get to a close relay, and then spin up your jump drive and slog along the rest of the way. So unless something valuable in in the system (say a garden world) they are usually ignored.

The existence of two sets of economic paradigms would explain the coexistence of a small ship universe with its market rules for free trader and the Merchant Prince universe with large scale trading. Like the period of when Sail still coexist with Steam (not to say that the same paradigm as those of the sail/steam era applies here, just showing that global economic paradigm could be broken down in two subsets.)

The main catch with mass relays though is the travel time. You could jump along the relay system from the Marches to the Soli Border in a few hours to days which would cause a major shift in Imperium. And then of course, suppose the Zhodani got it into their head to drive an asteroid into the relay....

That is the reason why I use one only to gate to go from the TI to another region of the galaxy. Implanting it in the TI would require a whole new ATU. What I am working on is a CT/T5 conventionnal setting in a new sector. Not a new universe. It is however tempting

have fun

selandia

 

[Enoff]

Looking at the GURPS Space 3rd ed book which lists multiple FTL ideas, I thought how fun if the Zhodani with their emphasis on Psionics used a Psionic based FTL like described by the "Guild" in Frank Herbert's "Dune" or in SPI's "Universe" roleplaying game.

 

[WistfulD]

Easily nerfed by requiring more fuel than jump takes...

Unless it takes more than 100% of a ship's mass to go 7 ly, it's already chaged the universe.

 

[Quint]

Thank you! I'll do just that.

D.