No apology necessary, and if my tone led you to feel one was necessary, then I in turn apologize. Salochin was indeed talking about the Traveller setting, so your observations of the Traveller setting are certainly appropriate. However, the Traveller game rules are setting-neutral; the player is free to use them to craft whatever setting he chooses based on whatever inspirations he chooses. Salochin's suggestions may have potential application for players developing their own settings.
New thought about the course of Traveller
- Thread starter Garyius2003
- Start date
No apology necessary, and if my tone led you to feel one was necessary, then I in turn apologize. Salochin was indeed talking about the Traveller setting, so your observations of the Traveller setting are certainly appropriate. However, the Traveller game rules are setting-neutral; the player is free to use them to craft whatever setting he chooses based on whatever inspirations he chooses. Salochin's suggestions may have potential application for players developing their own settings.
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
Nope, cost is a trivial issue once you have cheap fusion and magic manoeuvre drives.
Just look at how much modern passenger/cargo aircraft cost and compare. $300million for a 777, $250million for a 787, $400million for an A380
Cheap spaceflight means cheap resources from space, much cheaper than going down to an inhospitable world and gathering them there.
That still doesn't convince me, Sigg. And, transport in the OTU isn't that cheap, especially if micro jumps are used.
Just look at building a house on an Earth type world versus what you will need when hollowing out an asteroid.
On the world, you can go dirt cheap. You can put a log cabin together, if you want. Not in space. You've got to have a sealed environment and life support systems. Communication equipment. And, that's before you go to the cost of hollowing out the asteroid.
If you get hungry on the world, you can just walk to the store, or go hunting, or go to a restaurant. If you get hungry in space, you've got to wait for a supply run (or go to more expensive building agri-pods in space).
No matter how you slice it, it's just easier (and cheaper) for humans to live on hospitable worlds rather than in space.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I'm not talking about setting up shop on a terran normal world, they will be settled and used and probably get high populations, but in systems where you have to fight against the planetary conditions anyway you may as well stay in space.
The garden worlds don't need to exploit resources because they have space based industries for that.
As an aside the costs of those aircraft make me think Traveller ships are too cheap by far.
The garden worlds don't need to exploit resources because they have space based industries for that.
As an aside the costs of those aircraft make me think Traveller ships are too cheap by far.
Supplement Four
SOC-14 5K
I've always compared Traveller ships to the equivalent of a shrimp boat.
I always compare to the Alaskan crab and salmon boats and ships, myself.
salochin999
SOC-13
It depends where on the utopia-dystopia spectrum you imagine the future to be but I think people on the lower levels of a hive planet somewhere would prefer to be on the middle of the scale on a new one. Think of the adverts in Bladerunner for off world colonies - who were they aimed at?
Imagine now if it was possible for people in slums around the world to sign up for a farm on Alpha Centauri.
salochin999
SOC-13
Nope, cost is a trivial issue once you have cheap fusion and magic manoeuvre drives.
Just look at how much modern passenger/cargo aircraft cost and compare. $300million for a 777, $250million for a 787, $400million for an A380
Cheap spaceflight means cheap resources from space, much cheaper than going down to an inhospitable world and gathering them there.
Ah sorry you were talking about inhospitable worlds - yes i agree, mining colonies, religious cults, political factions, research stations, secret bases etc.
That's true dirtside here as well, and yet easy and cheap are not the overriding considerations for building homes on Earth. Here, we build homes where the jobs are, where there's some productive work we can do that will pay for the home and put food in our mouths. There are lots of nice homes out in the farmland, but there are lots more deep in cities - who by the way are dependent on those aforementioned supply runs to keep the stores and restaurants supplied. Some of those cities are located in pretty inhospitable climes: out in some desert, up in the frozen North, or in some misbegotten mosquito-ridden place you wonder what possessed people to live there. Some of them are located in really nice places - it's just that the crowding in that comes with building a city turns them into basically the same things as those supply-run-dependent cities in inhospitable climes, just with nicer scenery.
If there's enough money to be had in living there, people will build there, and they will build in whatever numbers are supported by the money to be had there.
On the other hand, cheap and easy ground-to-orbit travel means there is absolutely no reason for a TL9+ culture NOT to settle on some pleasant earthlike world, even if it IS plagued by this mass-sucking gravity well. Worlds are big places, humans NEED some gravity (at least until someone evolves or produces a zero-G subspecies), there's resource wealth to be had down there as well, and most people would rather retire in Florida than in Death Valley or Siberia. Not to mention, better opportunity for a tourist industry.
All of that being said, the prime consideration is going to be a cost-benefit analysis of where there's money to be had and how much it's going to cost to extract the money. Sometimes that'll favor paradise worlds, but sometimes that'll favor a hellworld closer to the market or a hellworld that has something precious and hard to find.
One thing about Traveller that I've always wondered about, is that even though I understand that vehicles lean towards real world physics and science, we're still talking about vehicles that use gravitics at standard Imperial tech. As such, I'm curious if maybe in the future there will be more free form vessels that, although not streamlined, can still navigate through atmosphere.
Stuff that's functional, but perhaps doesn't give a whole lot of credence to aerodynamics for a variety of reasons; i.e. it's simpler to rely on gravitics to allow more interior space, even though the ship is slower achieving orbit.
Stuff that's functional, but perhaps doesn't give a whole lot of credence to aerodynamics for a variety of reasons; i.e. it's simpler to rely on gravitics to allow more interior space, even though the ship is slower achieving orbit.
David Johansen
SOC-12
You mean like flying air rafts and flying arcologies?
I mean like anything. A Star Wars example; the Millenium Falcon has (as my friend used to describe my van) "the aerodynamics of a brick". Yet it moves through sky and space under full thrust (the Falcon, not my van). I think ships that are a bit more free form, yet functional (and not tacky like that three pronged Droyne "flying saucer" / caltrop design) would be welcome to liven things up.
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Sonic Fold
One idea that comes from Larry Niven's Ringworld novels is the idea of a "Sonic Fold": Part of the avionics system on flying vehicles within an atmosphere is a device (be it laser or gravisonic based, etc) that causes the atmosphere ahead of the vehicle to become rarefied, creating a low-pressure "bubble" that allows the craft to hypercavitate (thus significantly reducing drag and/or air-resistance) and allowing very high speeds for non-streamlined vehicles.
(See Supercavitation { http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercavitation } for a discussion of modern applications in water).
One idea that comes from Larry Niven's Ringworld novels is the idea of a "Sonic Fold": Part of the avionics system on flying vehicles within an atmosphere is a device (be it laser or gravisonic based, etc) that causes the atmosphere ahead of the vehicle to become rarefied, creating a low-pressure "bubble" that allows the craft to hypercavitate (thus significantly reducing drag and/or air-resistance) and allowing very high speeds for non-streamlined vehicles.
(See Supercavitation { http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercavitation } for a discussion of modern applications in water).
Garyius2003
SOC-13
In real life, the SR-71 Habu looked super streamlined http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird because even at 80k feet Mach 3 gets things really hot.
Even though bondedsuperdense may have the ability to take the heat without swelling, that's a lot of heat...
insert the usual two page discussion about Traveller has some sort of heat sink/disposal tech in the drive or powerplant, pretend we did it again...
so that is why I assume streamlined ships of some kind if you are landing or skimming. It may be ugly like the former US Space Shuttle or pretty like the SR-71.
Even though bondedsuperdense may have the ability to take the heat without swelling, that's a lot of heat...
insert the usual two page discussion about Traveller has some sort of heat sink/disposal tech in the drive or powerplant, pretend we did it again...
so that is why I assume streamlined ships of some kind if you are landing or skimming. It may be ugly like the former US Space Shuttle or pretty like the SR-71.
Well, I don't believe anyone thinks the Far Trader is an example of streamlined beauty. And, the various torpedo-shaped small craft, streamlined though they may be, have no lifting surfaces and must either depend on gravs, vertical thrusters or flight at some awkward angle to maintain altitude. Or else the drives provide some percentage of thrust at right angles to their position, as in that Starship Operator's bit.
As I understand it, streamlining is mostly a help for improving atmospheric speed and control. The more air resistance you encounter, the more effort you have to put into shoving your way through atmosphere, and the lower your top speed - and if your surfaces deflect the air in funny directions, then it may make for a bit of a headache trying to keep it pointed in the right direction. However, a brick can fly so long as you give it some way to lift and to control its direction - it's just not going to fly very fast.
The real issue for me is whether a ship is designed to bear its own weight in any direction other than the direction of thrust. I tend to assume a non-streamlined ship is not. This means that, for many Trav non-streamlined ships, trying to fly them in atmosphere is like putting an engine at the base of a skyscraper: best keep that puppy point-upward, or it's likely to break up. Less true of high-agility warships - they've got to be built to swing those engines around fast in order to throw on evasive thrust.
Me, I would let a streamlined ship fly through atmosphere at Mach-1 or better(See Striker for some G to velocity conversions) and manage a meteoric re-entry. I'd make a partially streamlined ship crawl through atmosphere, top speed of 300 KPH relative to the prevailing air flow. An unstreamlined ship would break up in a significant gravity well unless contained in a ship that provided a zero-G field or lowered by several gravitic tugs in a very carefully orchestrated maneuver calculated to prevent load on stress points.
And then of course you've also got to think about how these things are going to put down. MT suggests a Broadsword masses in the vicinity of 2300 tons. That mass rests on 4 6-meter diameter landing pads: ~20 tons pressure per square meter. That's a serviceable foot for most ground types, though some soils may compact as much as 2-3 feet under the load. However, a ship not built to land may not have the necessary "legs" to support the ship on land: they may be entirely absent or only strong enough to support the ship on a very light world, or they may be adequate but only sufficient for bedrock or reinforced concrete surfaces. You may take the ship through atmosphere only to require a cradle or a water landing in order to support the ship's mass.
tim_manley
SOC-12
Why need legs at all? Why not just float, tethered in gravity, since we're using gravity based maneuvering engines?
I like it, especially since it adds a new reason for the convention that the first week of berthing is 100Cr, and then it's 100Cr per day afterwards. Clearly, the first week is just "floated up to the dock", but after that, you get moved into longer term storage (powered down engines, etc.).
It would work for Class-C and better ports, at any rate.
Depends on how you see the engines, and presupposes the engines are left on.
If the engines are on, you're discharging heat somewhere while you run the plant to power them. CT Supplement 9's Gig (P. 27) talks about the little boat having a heat spill problem that required addition of protective shields, so we must assume there's some degree of heat being radiated from these drives. If your designers took that into account - which presupposes they thought of you being parked somewhere that your heat output was a concern - then you're radiating heat up and away from anyone or anything that might be affected by it. On the other hand, if they took that into account, they most likely also gave you some way to rest your ship on the ground and turn off your engines for maintenance. If they didn't think about you aground with the engines off, then it's unlikely they gave much thought to you aground when the engines are on.
If you suppose you're hovering butt-down with the engines pointed groundward, you can hover on your engines while your maneuvering thrusters or gyros or whatever hold you over them. Makes for something of an awkward transition between ship and ground since a lot of the ships have their internal grav fields aligned at right angles to the engines, but it's doable - far from ideal for loading cargo and taking personnel aboard, but doable. I don't see much maintenance happening while you're using the system that needs the maintenance, though.
If you want your internal fields aligned with the planet's natural gravity, and you're one of the many ships with engines at the back instead of at the bottom, MT Starship Operator's Manual suggests drives can apply up to 25% lateral thrust - at a right angle to your drives. This isn't any help unless you can do 4G or better, but they also suggest you can overdrive your engines for brief periods - key phrase being brief periods: with a 1 or 2G ship, you can hover at a right angle to your engines for only a few minutes.
Starports could provide you with a cradle, either structural or gravitic, but that's a prepared service - no help if you're trying to land someplace other than a starport (or naval base, if you're a warship). I would consider it the equivalent of drydock. Might be a better wartime alternative than having your drydock in space where an enemy fleet can throw missiles at it.
Chuck Anumia
SOC-14 1K
Downport
The only reason for going down to a planet to unload and load goods would be because it is either faster or cheaper to do so (or your client pays you better for the service)
right?
The only reason for going down to a planet to unload and load goods would be because it is either faster or cheaper to do so (or your client pays you better for the service)
right?
I could think of a half a dozen plot complicatio--- er, reasons.
All of which is exceptionally true. I guess what I'm getting at is that there seems to be a predilection towards what Traveller naval architects consider "aerodynamic". Ergo you get a lot of bullet or arrow shaped craft that, although they have no control surfaces, they have a "streamlined" look that I think the player/designer believes is aircraft-like, as opposed to an airframe whose sole purpose is to let atmosphere slip around the vessel.
I like your notion about letting a non-streamlined hull do over just mach-1. I don't have Striker, and it's the one module I never bought, but assuming your correct, then I think that's a good rule. I think there's a lot of vessels that with gravitics would be designed and constructed in lieu of needing to travel high and fast. They might be more cost effective to operate too.
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