New Rome

[Adam Dray]

Lots of good stuff, Xerxes. This is me nodding vehemently at most of it. A couple things I want to talk about, though.

have you removed traveller jump drives entirely, then? Again, that would change the standard assumptions quite a lot. if ships effectivly only need to carry P plant fuel, it means they are much more capable than the standard traveller designs.

I didn't remove anything. I just never added them.

No, there are no Traveller jump drives IMTU. Just sungates/wormholes.

Forgive me, as I'm pretty new to Traveller (but I've read a lot in a short time). What is "P plant fuel" and what is the consequence of what you're implying?

then again, by standard MgT rules, Nova Roma can only build ships up to 50,000 Dtons anyway, due to tech-imposed computer limits. Nova Roma's largest battleship would be a simmilar size to low end heavy cruser of the third imperium.

A rival, TL 10 polity could only build 10,000 Dton ships, and a TL9 early jump civ is limited to 5,000 Dtons by comp limits. Low TL traveller is practically a Small Ship Universe!

Remember, speed is not limited by mass or size (and acceleration is essentially a non-concept). Shields are. Once you have a shield around something, no matter how large, a hackdrive with clock X can move it around at speed X, regardless of mass.

I picture my ships as really huge. As technology improves, they might get smaller, but right now, New Rome needs to move people around quickly. These are huge ships. I haven't played with the ship rules enough to know what "huge" means in Traveller terms yet.

Also, bear in mind that Traveller's standard gravtic M-drives give you reasonable speeds and travel times and fuel economy. A zero/zero trip of 1 AU at 1G is less than 3 days, and only 28 hours at 6G.

unless you're taking out gravity manipulation tech, in which case your hackdrive needs to be accurate enough to land or launch a ship with, or else the costs of getting things into orbit will be, to excuse the pun, astromonical.

I had this long diatribe about how no one actually makes straight-line journeys from one destination to another in space, let alone one near the Sun (see my link to the Mercury Messenger mission, above) but then I remember that IMTU, you're actually aiming at the Sun and you want to hit it as fast as possible. The worm hole will point you back out of the star on the other side and (with an M-drive or whatever), your velocity would be preserved on the other side.

The optimal M-drive trajectory would actually be to thread the needle at 6G, punch straight into the wormhole at top speed, and use the momentum on the other side to escape the star's gravity well. By my calculations, it's a 20 hour journey at 6G, and a 48 hour journey at 1G, and you use half the fuel.

Good luck hitting your target on the other side, though. That's where the fuel and time will go.

You won't have those problems at all with a hackdrive. Gravity doesn't affect you. You have a clock speed (and effective ship speed) and that's it. No acceleration, no momentum, just translative movement through space.

rather like a Black Globe Generator, then? intresting......

have you considered how a P-sheild and Spinal mounts interact? while standard laser turrets may not be up to scratch, large spinal mounts may be able to dump enough energy on target to breach a sheild......

Basically like a black globe generator, yeah. The problem with traditional closed-space miniverses is that there's no way to propel the craft. My hackdrive uses the conceit of "hacking the universe" to allow "rounding error" (and other handwaves) to move the craft in any direction a small distance during one computer clock cycle. The more cycles you generate, the more movements you get. Run multiple clocks, get more hacks. Run a trillion clocks at 100GHz, get 10E22 hacks per second.

Now, I wrote some dumb shit on my wiki before I checked my math. I didn't realize the Planck length ℓP was so damned small (1.6E-35 m). Dividing c by ℓP gives 3E6 m/s / 1.6E-35 m = 1.9E41/s which is a lot of Hz. Even assuming superfast computer clock cycles of 1GHz (realize that modern CPUs, even 4GHz computers, are run on 80-100MHz oscillators) gets us to 1E9 Hz. That's deficient by 1E32, which is way too large to work with. Starting with a couple million transistors per computer today and doubling every two years, I can get to 1E13 transistors per computer in 100 years. That knocks 1E32 down four notches to 1E28. Hrm. So a proton's charge diameter is 1.755E-15, some 1E20 larger than the Planck length. Fine. Let's say the hack drive moves a proton's charge diameter each cycle. That gets us to 1E12 to deal with. Still pretty huge, just to get to 1c, so that doesn't work.

Fine, let's say that the thickness of the shield barrier is the translated distance. The thicker the shield, the farther you can hack. One light second is 299,792,458m, let's call it 3E8 m. A clock running at 3E8 Hz (0.3GHz) with a shield 1m thick would translate at 1 light second / second (= 1c). Let's assume clocks run at 3GHz and the hackdrive can work only with one clock, then our shield need be only 10cm thick.

Thinner shields use less power, but thicker shields produce faster speed. Faster clocks produce more speed but have a hard upper limit with diminishing returns in cost-to-performance.

worry not, the temp values are misleading.

the corona is "hotter", yes, in that each particle has more energy, but the particle desity is very low, which means it won't have much heating effect on a starship placed inside the corona, as their would be only a few collisions with the starship.

certainly, the effects would be very minor, compared to the direct, radiation heating form the sun only a few thouand KM away.......

Are you sure about the heat the ship would take on? I understand what you're saying and have a rudimentary physics background, but I'm no physicist. (Are you?) I'd love to just go back to what I had.

 

[Adam Dray]

I added a lot of discussion to the FTL page on my wiki.

 

[mike wightman]

You may want to rethink using planck length in your description of how it works. To move a ship 1 metre would require a clock operating at a frequency of 6x10^34, this is about 20 orders of magnitude higher than our bets quantum clocks today, and about 11 orders of magnitude higher than the highest frequency gamma ray ever observed. Quark diameter perhaps.

The good news is moving 1 kilometre per second is only 3 more orders of magnitude

Good news for the corona.

There are holes, regions of low density, regions of high density. Which means you may need to navigate these features to get to the jump gates, which means adventure opportunity

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

Lots of good stuff, Xerxes. This is me nodding vehemently at most of it. A couple things I want to talk about, though.


I didn't remove anything. I just never added them.

No, there are no Traveller jump drives IMTU. Just sungates/wormholes.

Forgive me, as I'm pretty new to Traveller (but I've read a lot in a short time). What is "P plant fuel" and what is the consequence of what you're implying?

in the OTU, a jump drive comsumes 10% of the ships total mass in hydrogen fuel, per parsec (jump number) traveled. So, a big, fast j-4 warship has about 50% of it's total hull space dedicated to fuel, power plant and drives, and needs constant refueling to travel any long distance, making control of high water worlds and gas giants a strategic priority, and forcing an attacker to take each system in turn, or face being cut off form his fuel supply.

you ships, by contrast, only need to carry enough fuel for their main fusion reactor (the power plant, or P-plant). for small ships, this is about 25% of the P-plants tonnage per 2 weeks, while on captial ships, it's 66% of the P-plant per two weeks.

what this means is that, compared to a J2 OTU ship (say, the 200 ton Far trader in the core rulebook), a J2 Nova Roma ships has about 20% more space that can be used for things like cargo, crew quarters, or weaponry. In effect, a 200 ton Nova Roma ship is 40 tons bigger than the far trader.

thats what i meant when i said it would effect shipbuilding. The majority of published designs are for jump-capable ships, so wouldn't be suitable for use in Nova Roma. their are ships designs without jump drives, normally called System defense boats, but thier s fairly small subset of the available ships.

the above all assumes standard traveller gravtic based M-drives, which means the effects of your hackdrives are not accounted for. You'll need to work how big or small you want your drives to be, at some point. But the point is, your ships can keep jumping as fast as they can transit wormholes, making the stratgic ground in a system the space near the star, and any battles are likey to take place in and around the Corona.

Remember, speed is not limited by mass or size (and acceleration is essentially a non-concept). Shields are. Once you have a shield around something, no matter how large, a hackdrive with clock X can move it around at speed X, regardless of mass.

I picture my ships as really huge. As technology improves, they might get smaller, but right now, New Rome needs to move people around quickly. These are huge ships. I haven't played with the ship rules enough to know what "huge" means in Traveller terms yet.

In standard traveller, "huge" is in the hundreds of thousands of D-tons range (largest canonical ship, as far as i know, is the Tirgress class battleship at 500,000 D-tons).

to give some idea of scale. the World Trade center towers are, roughly, 118,000 D tons each.

a sphere with a radius of 507 meters (ie a ball just over kilometer form edge to edge) has a volume of about 498,000Dtons.

The max size the offical contruction rules go to is a million D tons, which is a sphere of just under 640m raduis. or a box 1,370 meters long, 100m high and 100m long.

That big enough for you? if not, your just going to have to make up the ship stats, becuase your "off scale".

I had this long diatribe about how no one actually makes straight-line journeys from one destination to another in space, let alone one near the Sun (see my link to the Mercury Messenger mission, above) but then I remember that IMTU, you're actually aiming at the Sun and you want to hit it as fast as possible. The worm hole will point you back out of the star on the other side and (with an M-drive or whatever), your velocity would be preserved on the other side.

The optimal M-drive trajectory would actually be to thread the needle at 6G, punch straight into the wormhole at top speed, and use the momentum on the other side to escape the star's gravity well. By my calculations, it's a 20 hour journey at 6G, and a 48 hour journey at 1G, and you use half the fuel.

Good luck hitting your target on the other side, though. That's where the fuel and time will go.

while nobody uses a straight line shot in real life spaceships, that's becuase the abosolute, overriding consideration is fuel enconomy, and thierfore minimising your Delta V. a traveller electrically powered gravitc drive has very low fuel consuption, by modern standards. every published ship carries enough fuel to burn at full power for weeks , without eating up very much hull space, unlike the jump fuel.

It makes all that mucking about with Hohmann transfers and Gravity assists a thing of the past. You can have your engines lit the whole trip, every trip. You burn to halfway, turn over, and carry on burning to break to a stop. ok, it won't be a arrow straight path, but your close enough for roleplay purposes.

I aggree a M drive ship would need to come in pretty fast if it was to climb back out agian, as our Suns surface gravity is about 29g, which is FAR beyond the acceration anything in traveller can pull. Then agian, the escape velocity is about 620Km/s which isn't impossible to hit, and pretty easy if you have a 150 million gravity assisted run up. dive in, pass though the gate, and coast to a stable orbit around the new star, then boost out to the destination planet.

You won't have those problems at all with a hackdrive. Gravity doesn't affect you. You have a clock speed (and effective ship speed) and that's it. No acceleration, no momentum, just translative movement through space.

you'd still need a normal space drive of some sorts, to counteract the effects of external aceleration. While i get that P sheild sorta "disconnects" you form the rest of universe, it don't see how it can cancel existing speed and velocity without dumping or pumping truely mind boggling amounts of energy into or out of the ship, so a ship is still going to retain whatever speed it had when it switched the P sheild and hackdrives on.

Plus their are those times you need to manuver in close proximity to something you don't want to screw up (for example, the ground, or another starship).

And, of course, theirs the question of what powers the smaller craft. if your planning on having massive, kilometer long hackdrive ships for interstellar travel, your going to need lots of smaller, conventionally powered interface craft, unless you can think of a way to make a 1000 meter wide sphere land on a planet that doesn't qualify as a WMD attack.

Are you sure about the heat the ship would take on? I understand what you're saying and have a rudimentary physics background, but I'm no physicist. (Are you?) I'd love to just go back to what I had.

i'm not a physicist, but conduction heating is caused by the atoms litetrally banging into one another and transfering energy like that. The atoms in the corona each have very high energy levels, but the density is really low, so the amount of interactions between the plasma and a ship hull would also be very low, meaning the amount of energy, and thus heat, would also be low.


Low, at least, compared to being within touching distance of a 1.3 million kilometer wide nuclear fireball . if your ship can survive being that close to the solar surface, the corona isn't a problem.

 

[Adam Dray]

I think I can handwave the shipbuilding differences and say that ships require liquid hydrogen (or preferably water) for jump cooling instead of liquid hydrogen for jump fuel. That lets me use published designs, if I want to.

I can probably also say that the hackdrives take up the same area/volume of a ship's design as OTU.

Standard Traveller's "huge" is big enough. I'm rethinking size, and might go with smaller ships so that the New Romans eventually can encounter some truly enormous ships, and we can play out a Rome/Carthage situation.

It's fairly easy to straight-line from Earth into the Sun and hit a sungate at the right time with an M-drive. It's easy to use that momentum on the other side to escape Alpha Centauri's gravity well. My point about M-drives was that once you escape the gravity well, there's a pretty good chance that you are not pointed anywhere toward your planetary destination. Assuming your destination star has the same mass as the one you left, you can coast out to 1 AU on momentum alone, but you might have to burn considerable fuel to get halfway around the star to reach a civilized planet.

Speaking of star masses, Alpha Centauri is 1.100 solar masses. Proxima Centauri is just 0.123 solar masses and a few of the other nearby systems are red dwarfs and other tiny things. Sirius is 8.6 ly away and is 2.02 solar masses and has a companion with 0.978 solar masses so escape velocity would be trickier there with an M-drive.

Yes, the p-shield preserves momentum, energy, relative velocity, etc. between the "on" and "off" of the ship. I realize that "preserve relative velocity" is utter scientific nonsense, but I'm probably going to handwave it. How about this: If you have momentum p relative to your ship's axis when you turn on the shield, you'll have momentum p relative to your ship's access when you turn off the shield.

It lets you do some crazy, crazy things. For instance, you could use normal rockets to accelerate to 80,000 kph, activate the shields and use the hackdrive to flip you 180 degrees (all of that shield and flipping taking a fraction of a second), and then turn off the shields. From outside the ship, you'd see it travelling 80,000 kph in one direction and just flip around instantly and continue at 80,000 kph in the opposite direction, with the barest flicker as the shields were raised and dropped.

You're right that a normal space drive of some sort would be required for maneuvering near space stations and other ships when the shields are down. You don't need an M-drive for and kind of distance moving. You might use small compressed-nitrogen thrusters for very slow, close-in maneuvering, back up to safe shield distance and turn on the hackdrive for the rest of the movement.

Hackdrive ships don't have to be streamlined, ever. They can enter an atmosphere without trouble. What they can't do is land. The p-shield just harmlessly bends space when the ship touches the planet. Maybe you get "close enough" and drop the shield and let gravity drop you onto landing gear, but it's a rough way to do things for a small ship. I can't imagine a large ship doing it, let alone one of those behemoths you were discussing.

 

[Carlobrand]

... It lets you do some crazy, crazy things. For instance, you could use normal rockets to accelerate to 80,000 kph, activate the shields and use the hackdrive to flip you 180 degrees (all of that shield and flipping taking a fraction of a second), and then turn off the shields. From outside the ship, you'd see it travelling 80,000 kph in one direction and just flip around instantly and continue at 80,000 kph in the opposite direction, with the barest flicker as the shields were raised and dropped. ...

Ooh, instinctive physics-shudder up and down my spine.

 

[Adam Dray]

You basically just dropped a U-shaped wormhole in front of you.

 

[Adam Dray]

Character Generation

My first campaign set in this universe is going to focus on a handful of active military characters. The charge rules (I'm using Mongoose Traveller) don't provide for active duty PCs.

How have other people handled this?


Here's my plan:

1. Make up a character as usual.
2. Not everyone is career military. I encourage players to have terms in other areas before they end up in the military, but it's not required.
3. Your final term must end in the Army, Navy, or Marines.
4. If you muster out of a military role, you can switch to another military branch but you can't choose a non-combat role now.
5. Alternatively, if you muster out of a military role (or fail a survival check), you can end your character generation there, and pretend you're still in that branch, but assume your PC just made a big mistake and is in trouble with the military.

Remember: In MgT by default, you don't die in service, but you can fail a survival role and be forced out.

 

[whulorigan]

5. Alternatively, if you . . . fail a survival check, you can end your character generation there, and pretend you're still in that branch, but assume your PC just made a big mistake and is in trouble with the military.

Remember: In MgT by default, you don't die in service, but you can fail a survival role and be forced out.

Perhaps you just completed a long stay in a medical bay and have just been discharged from the hospital, and have somehow managed to convince the bureaucrats in the Personnel Branch to let you remain in the service. Perhaps you now owe someone a favor . . .

 

[Jame]

The title of this thread reminds me of the culture in the book series Tour of the Merrimack by R M Meluch. Basically it was anyone who would have a chance to learn Latin as a language, such as doctors and lawyers, took to starship and founded their own "New Rome" among the stars. Link to the RM Meluch wiki (it's quite brief): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.M._Meluch

Remember: In MgT by default, you don't die in service, but you can fail a survival role and be forced out.

In MGT you could die as a result of bad rolls on the Injury table but you do have to roll really badly. My own house rule, especially for new players, is that the first rolled mishap can be rerolled if it's in the character's first term - technically not rules-as-written, but I'd rather not sour a new player on Traveller too much.

 

[Adam Dray]

I'll check out Tour of the Merrimack! That sounds cool.

I will probably pre-generate the characters for my campaign rather than have players do it. I want a specific mix of characters for this.

The other night, I rolled up a fantastic general PC. He started out as a Rogue for one term but failed the survival roll and ended up drafted into the Merchants where he spent one more term before pirates destroyed the ship he was on, and he ended up enlisting in the Army. From there, he had a miraculous career where he was commissioned in his first term and advanced every single term after that, until he was a General. Lucky dice!

So he'll be a great leader/combat character for the New Rome game I plan to run.

 

[Adam Dray]

So help me with adventure planning.

A half dozen members of the 772nd Legionary of New Rome have a few thousand troops at their disposal, including soldiers, scientists, explorers, sociologists, language experts, and so on, all on one starship. They're assigned to explore a new world and make it part of the New Roman Republic. The world is low-tech, like Earth ca.1950.

Tell me, what challenges do the legionaries face?

 

[SanDragon]

Science-fiction B-movie hysterics.

 

[JimMarn]

So help me with adventure planning.

A half dozen members of the 772nd Legionary of New Rome have a few thousand troops at their disposal, including soldiers, scientists, explorers, sociologists, language experts, and so on, all on one starship. They're assigned to explore a new world and make it part of the New Roman Republic. The world is low-tech, like Earth ca.1950.

Tell me, what challenges do the legionaries face?

Not much in the way of technology facing them.

Convincing the locals to become part of New Rome would be the problem. Then... there would be the millions of people who would need to be convniced the invaders came from another planet, not part of the planet. Even if the ships could be seen up in orbit.

 

[Adam Dray]

Not much in the way of technology facing them.

What if the New Roman's starship broke down and they had to crash land? Sure, they have people and maybe some armored vehicles, but nothing that can go orbital and nothing with shield technology.

If the legionaries don't report back within a month according to protocol, the army will send a scout, but by then, who knows what could happen?

 

[McPerth]

Depending on how close this planet is to Earth 1950...

There could also be a cold war on it, and any unpalnned visit cana be confused for the first attack of the "other side", and so responded in kind...

 

[Carlobrand]

So help me with adventure planning.

A half dozen members of the 772nd Legionary of New Rome have a few thousand troops at their disposal, including soldiers, scientists, explorers, sociologists, language experts, and so on, all on one starship. They're assigned to explore a new world and make it part of the New Roman Republic. The world is low-tech, like Earth ca.1950.

Tell me, what challenges do the legionaries face?

Didn't I see that in a Star Trek epi ... oh, wait, it was reversed.

Science-fiction B-movie hysterics.

Which is actually a good answer. 1950's tech locals, just beginning to put things in orbit, suddenly Invaders From Outer Space arrive saying, "Take me too your leader." Panic ensues.

Grab any halfway decent B-movie and you've got a feel for the prevailing attitudes we Earth humans had at the prospect of strangers from the stars coming down to say, "Hi." Now compound that with the fact that you're coming to visit in rather large numbers, with a rather large ship, and you walk around with these very well armed guards. You look like them - what does that mean, are you really like them and how could that have possibly happened, or did some bizarre alien race create artificial men to lull the locals into a false sense of security? They are going to be suspicious of you - what if you've come to enslave them? They are going to be suspicious of each other - what if you're making secret deals with this or that local power? They are going to be afraid, and it will make some of them very careful, and it will make some of them very irrational. If the circumstances are right, you could accidentally trigger a nuclear war between two local powers.

 

[JimMarn]

What if the New Roman's starship broke down and they had to crash land? Sure, they have people and maybe some armored vehicles, but nothing that can go orbital and nothing with shield technology.

If the legionaries don't report back within a month according to protocol, the army will send a scout, but by then, who knows what could happen?

Would depend on how much armor they had. And how desperate the locals were. If the locals, according to old sf books, were very desperate, they might drop nukes on their own cities to stop the spread of the invaders.