Ive always thought that stutterwarp technology, as it exists in the 2300AD universe, was over powered and tainted what is otherwise a beautiful sci-fi setting by nullifying the effectiveness of so many typical science fiction elements. The supervelocity combats, rediculously long ranged weapons and seeming impervious nature of stutterwarp vessels to conventional weaponry destablizes the entire setting and removes so many interesting possibilities.
Exactly what do you mean by "coventional weaponry?" Are you talking about surface-based / space station weaponry or ship-mounted rockets and railguns? I'm not sure what type of combat scenario you're trying to re-create that you can't with the current rules.
1. Spacecraft may not manuever while in warp. Stutterwarp "runs" are preprogrammed and proceed with only one alteration possible, dropping out early. It is used to move from one place to another, period.
I'm not sure what you mean by "used to move from one place to another." That's pretty much what any locomotive system does. Do you mean it's only for interstellar travel and transit between planets as opposed to space combat and near-planetary operations?
2. Sensors, communications and the weapons tracking equipment cannot function while in warp. Teleporting several thousand times a minute doesnt allow any connection with the universe around a spacecraft. The milliseconds between each jump arent enough time for any interaction. Once has to drop out of stutterwarp to perform any of these operations, or indeed interact with reality.
So effectively there's no functional difference between FTL & STL travel in stutterwarp with regards the ships being blind? Are you basically saying that the drives are more like an Alcubierre drive in that it's pretty much always on then?
The consequence of this might be that the craft would be undetectable by conventional means while it's warping.
3. Stutterwarp navigation requires time, hours typically, to plot. Stutterdrives require time, minutes at least, to "warm up" if you will and a like period to "cool down" after disengaging. A spacecraft cannot simply push a button and jet off.
Is this regardless of distance? So if I want to make a relatively short hop at STL speed from Earth to Mars it's the same level of calculations as plotting a course from the outer Solar system to Nyotekundu?
Do you still have the 7.7 ly limit and the requirement to discharge in a gravity well? Remember a ship near the end of its range limit needs 40+ hours to discharge before it can go "jetting off" at FTL speeds or it risks blowing the drive & irradiating the crew. How does the "warm-up" and "cool-cool down" cycle affect discharging?
4. Stutterwarp drives suffer increasing difficulty within the .0001G threshold and fail completely within the .1G wall. Conventional thrusters are therefore common place on all vessels.
Stutterwarp drives in the rules as written suffer increasing difficulty within the 0.0001 G threshold (their pseudo-velocity drops drastically) and they already are effectively non-functional within the 0.1 G wall, so I'm not sure what actually is different there. Are you suggesting an even steeper efficiency drop from the standard Ly / Day to 0.645 AU / day?
Weapons Note - space based weapons that fire 600,000 kilometers dont exist. The scale of all weapons is more or less that of vehicle weaponry, increased for the lack of atmophere perhaps. Lasers, rail guns, nuclear detonation lasers and such are all still useful but on a more conventional scale while missiles and other typical weapons systems are now equally useful against spacecraft which must now operate by newtonian physics and thrusters when engaged.
I think that the problem is that 2300AD has huge scale discrepancy in the rules.
The Star Cruiser rulebook states that the space combat scale is 600,000 km per hex (or 2 light-seconds), and turns represent 1 minute of time. This means that a ship with a stutterwarp efficiency of 1.0 (tactical speed 2) covers 4 light-seconds per 1-minute turn.
Meanwhile, the Adventurer's Guide lists the STL speed of a stutterwarp drive to be 0.645 the efficiency in astronomical units per day. For the efficiency 1.0 ship above this translates to about 322 light-seconds per day, or about 0.2 light-seconds per 1 minute turn.
So, either the STL travel times are way off, or Star Cruiser's scale is 20 times too big. Given that 2300AD doesn't have the kind of gravitic-lensed lasers that would make 600,000 firing ranges for lasers possible, we can assume that the correct scale for space combat is instead 30,000 km per hex rather 600,000.
Things suddenly make a lot more sense if you go to the smaller scale: the pseudo-velocities in space combat are more reasonable (although still way better than conventional thrust vehicles) and the weapon ranges become more plausible.
I suspect the reason for the Star Cruiser scale was simplicity in mapping: you can fit a large gas giant into a single 600,000 km hex. On the 30,000 km scale it gets a bit more complex.
If you want to keep the Star Cruiser scale for STL movement, then I suggest you divide the transit times inside the 0.0001G limit by 20 to balance out the fact that your drive is useless except for in-system travel.
As I dont utilizes any of the Kafer military history, Im not concerned how this would affect any of that but otherwise, do you see this move seriously harming the 2300 setting?
It's going to alter a variety of things. Military operations get pretty hairy. If your warp drive is effectively a cloaking device, then it's possible for you to carry out some really nasty surprise attacks. In effect the starships still have an advantage, it's just the flavor that's different.
If you're going to be realistic, every starship has to get re-designed, since it seems to be implied that all combat maneuvering requires conventional thrust. This means that ships have to get bigger, a LOT bigger even with nuclear rockets. Either that or you'll have to give the ships magic reactionless thrusters.
Overall what I'm seeing here is that you seem to be basically re-creating standard Traveller tropes: stutterwarp becomes a "jump" drive of sorts and you're using reaction drives for the "maneuver" drive. At which point I'd suggest you pick up the Outer Veil sourcebook (which has a Traveller-style sector map based on real-world stars) and shoehorn the 2300AD polities into it and make all the drives capable of 2-parsec jumps with the Jump-drive ratings regulating the "speed" of the jump.
