Sci-Fi hardness and sacred handwaves

[PapaGolfWhiskey]

I think it's exactly what you said.

A magic drive that doesn't squish it's users. or even make them use bulkheads as decks.

I'm not sure though. 'reactionless drive' is not something I complain about much.

 

[manley_t]

Yes, the reactionless drive does work without turning the crew into paste.

The impression I have is that the drive is a 'thruster plate' where-by one end of the plate is placed within the other end and the "natural" action of the plates to not occupy the same place at the same time causes acceleration. The fact that grav plates generate a gravity field on the ship overcome the gravity that would be generated by the ........ hey, it's magic man

That's why in the house-rule in system game I ran I used rockets and different types of fuel had differnt ratings on how useful it was. It was a very B R O A D simplification of how specific impulse works.....

But, to be honest, the game is what is most important, not the science. If the science gets in the way of the game, then you're not laying it right....

 

[Rodina]

I think I brought up my beef with the universe being one-parsec thick...

I don't -really- care; I just think it's funny in a game which is otherwise pretty careful about being at least.... well... if not plausible, exactly, than at least not implausibly implausible.

I like the 3D detail of the 2300 universe... just a bug of mine.

 

[themink]

But traveller contradicts Hard Science (Jump drive, lasers, antigrav, reactionless drives etc) much less now than it did when it came out.

in the 70's there were no commonly accepted ways to travel faster than light. Reactionless drives were total fiction and lasers were designated as impractical for weaponry.

There are at least two ways that I've heard of that are commonly accepted as FTL travel. Plus countless others involving other dimensions (hyperspace - ie jump space). The biggest current stretch for Jump Drives is that it takes a finite time that is not related to the distance.

Reactionless drives (ie those that operate without throwing stuff out the back) were origionally pure fiction however now we have actions that operate at a distance, gravity waves and other spooky stuff - It is now just implausible rather than garbage.

Lasers - Yes they are arround right now. And each year they get closer to operation in a mil sense - there have been demos of laser tanks, etc etc The practical difficulties will take a long time overcome, but the OTU is a long time away still.

Anti-grav. This used to be my main sticking point, till there was observed reduction of grav above spinning superconductors and negative energy density measured between charged plates. Now I am much less willing to say that it's not possible.

Fundamentally, 30 years ago pyhsics was at the end of it's run and had discovered everything important. Then Quantum mech came allong and there is a whole universe of strange things out there.

You can no longer make any real statement about things that won't be discovered.

As to a pancake universe - That isn;t a traveller rule, that's just OTU - Traveller itself doeesn't require one. So get out your 3D paper and start mapping.

The Mink (Slightly disgruntled that people were confusing OTU with traveller)

 

[PapaGolfWhiskey]

I donno. I think, in my ignorance of physic and of interstellar cartography, that Traveller and the OTU are much harder sci fi than Star Trek or Star Wars.

For me it's a cool playground that requires very little suspension of disbelief.

 

[Liam Devlin]

I answered the Three-D question on the 2D map this way to my players:

"See the empty parsecs between stars? This can be interpreted by either "up" or "down". The J-1 mains the same way. I can add an extra roll to let you know, but in the vastness of space, does it really matter unless you misjump?"

They admitted, unless they were"off the map" it didn't really matter. I used to roll percentile die to see if a system is "higher or lower", than the one they were adventuring in. Now they don't even bother...they have more important things to worry about!

 

[T. Foster]

Originally posted by thrash:
I sincerely wish you would stop calling the result "hard science fiction." (There is only one place that I know of in all classic Traveller that comes close to claiming it is "hard science." T20 Lite alone uses the phrase four times.) Twenty-five years later, it is demonstrably not true (or perhaps you are using some radically different definition of the term?). The empirical laws of geography, economics, astronomy, engineering, etc., are as "immutable" as those of physics, and as deserving of consideration. Calling T20 "a space opera game that preserves the flavor of classic Traveller" would be much more accurate.

I've been calling Traveller 'hard space opera' for a while now, with a working definition of "closer to RL science than Star Trek or Wars, but don't look too closely at anything." For the types of games I run (focused mostly on individual personal interactions) and the scale I'm operating at (4 subsectors AT MOST) I can comfortably gloss over the implications of all the RL laws that are being violated. That said, there's definite room for adjustment/improvement in the rules (IMTU I no longer do either Worlds or Trade strictly by the book) but a balance needs to be maintained, and IMO that balance should lie much nearer the 'playable' than the 'realistic' end of the spectrum.

 

[DaveC]

Originally posted by thrash:

*My fundamental objection to the flat map is not that it exists, but that no official explanation has ever been offered for it. If Marc Miller or Traveller had ever once said, "The universe is 3-dimensional; the flat map exists as a playable abstraction," I would have no more problem with it, though I would still pursue playable 3D representations. It is the total silence on the matter -- as if it were somehow not wholly unrealistic -- that rankles.[/QB]

 

[DaveC]

Originally posted by thrash:

*My fundamental objection to the flat map is not that it exists, but that no official explanation has ever been offered for it. If Marc Miller or Traveller had ever once said, "The universe is 3-dimensional; the flat map exists as a playable abstraction," I would have no more problem with it, though I would still pursue playable 3D representations. It is the total silence on the matter -- as if it were somehow not wholly unrealistic -- that rankles.[/QB]

Err... in an interview in White Dwarf #19 or #20, back in the late 70's, Marc Miller actually did say that. I've got the issue somewhere, although not immediately to hand.

I use 2D because, as MM and Garf (and probably lots of others have said,) its what happens at the next star system thats important, not that the universe is an accurate 3D map. Much the same reason why my worlds are just a set of linked encounter areas, nice though geodesic maps are to look at.

 

[DaveC]

I've found the issue of White Dwarf now, it was issue #23 in March 1981. They published a two page interview with Marc Miller and specifically asked him about 2D space, he replied that it was simply a game abstraction to make things easier, although if refs wanted to go ahead and use 3D mapping that was ok.

 

[alanb]

Originally posted by Brass-Jester:
Much the same reason why my worlds are just a set of linked encounter areas, nice though geodesic maps are to look at.

You too, huh?

I once had a mad plan for rationalising all my mapping so that everything would basically be a bunch of links and nodes.

J-Drive would have been replaced with a vaguely equivalent wormhole system, systems would have been abstracted to "interesting worlds" and a patch of tactical space around them, and worlds would have been a set of "interesting places".

I never quite got around to it, but the concept is still present in how I do things.

Alan Bradley

 

[DaveC]

I once had a mad plan for rationalising all my mapping so that everything would basically be a bunch of links and nodes.

J-Drive would have been replaced with a vaguely equivalent wormhole system, systems would have been abstracted to "interesting worlds" and a patch of tactical space around them, and worlds would have been a set of "interesting places".

I never quite got around to it, but the concept is still present in how I do things.

Alan Bradley[/QB][/QUOTE]

This is pretty well how I do things. My worlds are a set of encounter areas (eg: starport, colony, city, industrial area) each one with a few lines of description and perhaps an encounter table or two, linked by travel routes indicating what sort of route (land, sea, air) and how long the route is. The PC's just get the description (" you travel in the air/raft north from Barras into the rural area, all around you are croplands and small farms and villages.")Each encounter area is an undefined size, but small-scale maps can the be used if required.
Note, using this system, my worlds also tend to be 2D, but so what? It's the adventure that counts, not a great detailed discussion on whether the PC's should have flown a Great Circle or not.
Yours from Flatland