Rationale Needed...

[rancke]

I've asked other questions like: How long to cold-start a fusion PP once your dirtside and powered-down and got a variety of
answers.

ISTR the figures 20-40 minutes (one to two combat turns) for CT rules, but I can't remember where I saw them.

From MT rules (on p. 92 of IE), it takes (on the average) a bit less than five minutes to warm start a starship and a bit less than 50 minutes to cold start one. (3D-<Engineering skill> times 30 second for the warm start and 3D-<Engineering skill> times 5 minutes for the cold start). Call it an average of four minutes/40 minutes.


Hans

 

[sabredog]

I just scanned the adventures, not even Kininur has anything on starting a dead plant. It'd be fun to watch the players try.

"Hurry up and get the pilot light lit for heck's sake! If we don't have power in 10 minutes we'll be dead meat!"

"Och Cap'n it dinnae work tha' way in this universe."

 

[Mithras]

How about this (and I'm thinking along these lines for MTU): the gravity drive works by creating a bias in the gravity field, and it moves a volume of space, a field that encompasses the ship. That's great in a vacuum, but what happens when this field drive works in an atmosphere? It will carry along parts of the atmosphere, it may create unacceptable friction and heat.

Maybe only reaction-drve small craft can enter atmospheres, of small ships fitted with reaction drives.

 

[Icosahedron]

Logically, starship M-Drives and vehicular G-Drives have to be different beasts. The gravitational field strength in deep space is many orders of magnitude smaller than the grav field of a planet. This has proven to be a major 30-year headache for me - I can figure a pseudo-science inverse square rationale for G-drives, but a rationale for a deep-space 'reactionless' drive has eluded me.

Not that this really helps the problem at hand - I'm just saying they have to be different...

 

[mbrinkhues]

MT had two types of Thrusters:

The older required a gravity-field to "push against" and lost effectiveness the further away from said field you where. Was also described as the typical set of Grav vehicles IIRC.

The more advanced one worked without an external gravity field

 

[Icosahedron]

The more advanced one worked without an external gravity field

Yeah, that's the one I can't begin to explain the mechanics of.

 

[aramis]

MT had two types of Thrusters:

The older required a gravity-field to "push against" and lost effectiveness the further away from said field you where. Was also described as the typical set of Grav vehicles IIRC.

The more advanced one worked without an external gravity field

Wrong on both counts. Antigravity modules are not the same as the vehicular gravitics (which, BTW, are thrust/mass based, while neither maneuver drive is, being volume based).

The difference is not explicit in rules other than power, cost and mass.

However, COMMON PRACTICE is to presume some restriction on distance for them often 10 or 100 diameters, or 0.01, 0.001 or 0.001 G. Others simpy reduce their effect by multiplying by local G's... but there is no official rule for that in MT.

The actual rule was in FF&S2... which limits T-Plate drives to within gravity wells above 0.0001G, and antigrav by local field.. This was done to prevent the "hyperkinetic missile" effect possible with the T-Plate (and unfortunately, it is canonically possible to get those speeds on MDrives from the descriptions of N-space STL travel in Imperium and Dark Neubula).