Ship Races?

[HiverLord]

I'm wondering if anyone has ever run Starship Races, where contestants enter ships in various categories (sort of like Star Wars' Kessel Run, as an example). For instance, standard ships (scouts, free/far traders, etc) for one category, and 'Elite' categories, such as the ship which that one obsessed Noble enters every year...

While the 'standard' categories would be open to anyone with an appropriate ship (who has the entry fee), the 'elite' categories might only be open to nobility, or very rich individuals. The ship designs entered for such contests would of course be many and varied...

I did a search through these forums, but came up empty for any references to this topic.

I can see such a contest being held yearly or every few years at a sector or the Imperial (or other) Capital, with much media coverage, weeks and months of social events and intrigue (both between contestants and their sponsors, as well as political...). There would be attempts to lure away the best engineers and pilots from one's rivals to your own team, bribery, sabotage, and so forth. I see lots of potential for mischief and adventure. The public would watch these races and events leading up to them, perhaps similar to Nascar in our present day.

Has anyone out there run or heard of such a scenario? I'm interested in seeing how someone else may have run one.
Thanks!

 

[HG_B]

Never seen one. Probably because the Traveller ship design rules create ships with very defined speeds. Not really anything to compete for.

 

[jdegraff]

There's always the (IN)famous Famille Spofulam J-Class Racing Yacht....

.....Oh, the horror

While not a rules write-up or anything like that, the ship design and the write-up is a priceless piece of work in the long and sordid history of TML FS posts

While I have a print-out of the afore-mentioned piece, I tried the TML Archive on travellercentral.com but they didn't go back far enough. And while I could find the threads using the Wayback Machine, the posts were not there A true pity, as the FS threads were always amusing

I'll try to OCR the printed e-mail I have.....give me a bit.

Jesse

 

[rancke]

The chronology in GT:Behind the Claw has a number of entries about a race called the Spinward Point-to-Point Race.

1103

The First Spinward Point-to-Point Race was begun on 067-1103 from the specially constructed launch station in orbit over Trin. Constestants in the race were required to collect encrypted data chips from offices on Glisten, Mora, Lunion, Rhylanor, Lanth, Regina, and Frenzie, returning the set to Trin in the shortest time. [...] ...several nobles entered the race in person, as did teams from the Imperial Navy, Scout Service, and strangely, the Army, competing against sponsored vessels representing corporate and planetary interests. An early casualty was the Tukera Lines entry, which suffered a jump-drive [sic] failure and never cleared the system. The skipper was philosophical: "Someone sabotaged us. It happens."

1104

Nine vessels out of the 17 entries of the Point-to-Point returned with the data chips to the starting point on Trin by the end of 1104. Six dropped out or returned without a complete set, or were disqualified. One never cleared the system, and Sir Yaricht Fruenelle is still missing in his private jump-4 yacht. He is believed to have attempted a trans-Abyss transit from Ivendo.

1113

The Second spinward Point-to-Point, following the same "course" as the first, began on Trin, on 001-1113.

1117

The Third Spinward Point-to-Point fell apart in disaster on 222-1117, when an experimental vessel entered by students of the Jumpspace Institute collided with the launch platform and apparently exploded. Neighboring vessels were damaged or destroyed in the disaster, which claimed 49 lives and left many more injured. [...]​

(I've elided a couple of uninteresting bits).

A jump-4 ship should be able to run that "course" in about 30 jumps, give or take, which would take it perhaps 300 days -- less if they're smart about the refuelling. Just what it is that takes an extra year is a mystery to me. Even jump shadowing and jump masking isn't going to account for a fraction of that.


Hans

 

[HiverLord]

Thanks, all, for the input. I didn't recall seeing anything in CT way back when.

However, if one wishes to, the Gurps space rules could be used. Ship agilities are based on thrust-to-mass ratios, not direct engine output for the ship size/volume. Playing with ship designs, a designer could come up with one that maximizes the ratios, depending upon the nature of the contest.

For instance, in response to a particularly 'interesting' bit of a planet's history, a 'Smuggler's Run' contest could be held, where the racers simulate a run to the planetary surface and back, with full cargos, in the quickest time. All while avoiding the local patrol, which fires blanks, scans for participants, etc.

I'll have to think about these possibilities for a bit... Too many ideas clogging the brain right now.

 

[jdegraff]

Okay, I got it to work, more or less....first time I've tried to OCR something and I had to fix a few bits There may still be errors in there, for which I apologize.

Here's a blurb from the Traveller Wiki talking about the circumstances, if you're un-familiar with them.

Quote
===================
FS, established by Feringapar Spofulam, was currenly run by his son, Hengabar Spofulam. Hengabar, through some selective genetic enhancement programmes, managed to produce a number of notable nieces and nephews, but Ditzie is the forefront, achieving notoriety in her abusingly excessive use of Fusion Plus.

As far as we can tell, Ditzie was born in year -005, Day 327 (November 23) Imperial. Known siblings include Shidaar (also born -005) and Niipita Indifar, head of the starship weapons division, who is apparently much older.

Shortly after turning 7, Ditzie (and others, apparently) was moved out of Compliance and promoted to Executive Vice-President of Famile Spofulam's High Energy Solutions branch, where she turned out such abominations as:

A battledress-mountable PAW gun with a 600km range.
A 4-meter-long meson gun.
An elephant-mounted PAW.
An overpowered PAW that fits on a 200t ship.
A 100-ton a SDB mounting a 600 megajoule laser, impenetrable armor, a nuclear damper, and more.
A grav bike capable of 5.7 G's, with room for a weapon.
A semi-automatic 120 mm gauss gun firing twenty 30 kilo steel darts at 4000 meters per second in thirty-six seconds.
You get the idea.


[edit] Background (OOC)

Back around 1997, when Fire, Fusion, and Steel 2 was being readied for production, many members of the Traveller Mailing List tested the system out by designing equipment and ships. One notable designer, Ian Whitchurch, crafted truly amazing things, under the guise of a Milieu 0 company (created by Roderick Darroch Elliott and shared by other TML members) named Famille Spofulam, or FS for short.

Ian, seeing too much power in Fusion Plus, used FS in general, and Ditzie as particular, as a platform for editorializing on an error that saw its way to print.

Unfortunately, Ditzie became a popular celebrity due to her audacity, and the whole point about the abusability of FFS2 was largely ignored.

Ian here. Ditzie might have been part of campaigning against The Abomination Known As Fusion Plus (mostly because it broke the economics of Trav), but she was mostly an excuse to build really, really abusive thing with lots lots lotttssss of fun writing them up up up in a waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay that would keep me sane during a fairly crappy part of my life.

On more specific matters, you forgot the Jet Bike (a FFS2-legal TL6 personal aircraft, powered by a hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide rocket. Zero to a thousand and forty in ten point five flat) But I'm glad the EmPAW got remembered.

3jun08 I'd also argue some specific things, like the PAWs for 200 dton ships, are canonical - at least, they were legal FFS2 implementations of stuff you could do in High Guard. Also, if anyone has classic Ditzie posts/designs from the TML, I'd like them linked *hint* Finally, FS is so Canon - check the stencils on crates on the covers illustrated by Jesse DeGraff on various G:T products. (I couldn't help myself - Jesse)

=============
End Wiki quote



And here, for your edification, is the J-Class Racing Yacht from Famille Spofulam.

edit - Unfortunately, the total post ended up over 5k characters over the limit for a post, so here's a link to a .pdf of the e-mail. Please note that my e-mail address in there is now invalid

http://visionforgestudios.com/jesse/traveller/famillespofulam/j_class.pdf


And there you have it
Jesse

 

[BeRKA]

A few moths ago, I posted something about the Vasaloppet Space Race.

 

[Caelarch]

In a different game system (one involving a class of mystics with pseudo-magical powers and glowing laser blades) I GM'd what I thought was pretty cool race idea.

The 50 year race. The competing ships all lauched from a world orbiting a typical star. The first team to orbit the star 50 times was the winner. Ships generally plunged deep into the star's gravity well, circling just high enough above the star that the ships shields would not overload. Some ships were built for speed and stayed higher, travelling further on each orbit, but not needing as much power for shielding. Others were heavier armored and shielded and circled almost on the surface of the star. Pilot checks to deal with solar prominances, flares, gravity etc... Decisions about how far from the star to fly, how much power to divert to engines (at the cost of shields), and of course: can the mechanic (and his trashcan shaped android assistant) keep the ship operating in a such an extreme condition long enough to make it around 50 times.

 

[the angle]

Mayday included a racing scenario, but that was within a system using maneuver drive rather than intersystem with jump drive. It was quite a fun scenario, too, because it involved navigating around and onto planetary bodies with gravity fields. If you miscounted your movement, you could overshoot a target or crash into it. It was all about rewarding the most efficient course. An option was to give ships a fuel cap (limited number of vector corrections) to make things even trickier. As I recall, you could visit the 'pylons' in any order, provided you landed on all of them.

With computers plotting the courses, it would all be academic, but one assumes that racing ships would have those types of computers removed or disabled.

Steve

 

[boomslang]

Has anyone out there run or heard of such a scenario? I'm interested in seeing how someone else may have run one.

Some years ago (circa 2001), we ran a couple of starship races in the 1105-era Spinward Marches over on the ct-starships mailing list.

The first was a proper yacht regatta, with waypoints and budget limits and safety requirements and so on -- rules galore.

The second was a free-for-all rally using whatever could be salvaged for the task.

Jonathan Lupton refereed both. Since we mostly had similar performance envelopes in the original race, the racing element centered around the variable length of Jump durations, and the size-dependent travel times to and from destination worlds visited for refueling en route to designated waypoints.

The second contest mostly involved breaking as many design and operations rules as possible, rewarding creativity and inventiveness.

For your purposes, the central idea is that specific race parameters may be set beforehand: as laid out, our Spinward Marches circuit, for example, required vessels to make Jump-6 in order to avoid falling at least a week behind the pace on one particularly-long trans-waypoint leg; unrefined fuel was allowed, but it had to be purchased at a starport, not dipped or skimmed (receipts might checked and/or a race official carried as a passenger to sign them, but we dropped this as too expensive); 24-hour layovers at all stops were required (again with SPA receipts to verify); minimum crew and survival gear was mandated; and there was a budget cap (which translated into a de facto displacement limit).

These parameters produced some rather similar hull designs, but route choices (for intermediate refueling purposes) and crew skills (Nav skill as a DM to avoid exiting Jumpspace excessively far from the destination world as per the CT Tarsus module, et cetera), plus dumb luck on Jump duration die rolls, made it a lively contest.

 

[HiverLord]

Mayday included a racing scenario, but that was within a system using maneuver drive rather than intersystem with jump drive. It was quite a fun scenario, too, because it involved navigating around and onto planetary bodies with gravity fields. If you miscounted your movement, you could overshoot a target or crash into it. It was all about rewarding the most efficient course. An option was to give ships a fuel cap (limited number of vector corrections) to make things even trickier. As I recall, you could visit the 'pylons' in any order, provided you landed on all of them.

With computers plotting the courses, it would all be academic, but one assumes that racing ships would have those types of computers removed or disabled.

Steve

I never saw that one, though it sounds like an interesting variation.
I'll have to look into that one; it seems similar to what I may try with my players someday.
Thanks.

 

[HiverLord]

Some years ago (circa 2001), we ran a couple of starship races in the 1105-era Spinward Marches over on the ct-starships mailing list.

The first was a proper yacht regatta, with waypoints and budget limits and safety requirements and so on -- rules galore.

The second was a free-for-all rally using whatever could be salvaged for the task.

Jonathan Lupton refereed both. Since we mostly had similar performance envelopes in the original race, the racing element centered around the variable length of Jump durations, and the size-dependent travel times to and from destination worlds visited for refueling en route to designated waypoints.

Sounds similar to the rules others have mentioned, and what I was thinking towards.

The second contest mostly involved breaking as many design and operations rules as possible, rewarding creativity and inventiveness.

Too bad I'm not playing in it; sounds right up my alley.

For your purposes, the central idea is that specific race parameters may be set beforehand: as laid out, our Spinward Marches circuit, for example, required vessels to make Jump-6 in order to avoid falling at least a week behind the pace on one particularly-long trans-waypoint leg; unrefined fuel was allowed, but it had to be purchased at a starport, not dipped or skimmed (receipts might checked and/or a race official carried as a passenger to sign them, but we dropped this as too expensive); 24-hour layovers at all stops were required (again with SPA receipts to verify); minimum crew and survival gear was mandated; and there was a budget cap (which translated into a de facto displacement limit).

These parameters produced some rather similar hull designs, but route choices (for intermediate refueling purposes) and crew skills (Nav skill as a DM to avoid exiting Jumpspace excessively far from the destination world as per the CT Tarsus module, et cetera), plus dumb luck on Jump duration die rolls, made it a lively contest.

Good ideas. Thanks again.

 

[abomination]

While not a race as such I can see passenger liners competing for a version of the Blue Ribband on various routes.

 

[Gray Lensman]

If you realloy want to race.........

Just do it, Geez how hard can it be (Okay, I admit, it depends on the rules you are using)

Oh, wait a minute, that is purely my attitude speaking, last time a guy threatened to kick my ass I told him to be like a nike commercial "just do it"

 

[PDXWiz]

The Great Starship Race...

...is a Star Trek novel by Diane Carey. An alien race meets the Federation, and is happy to learn about all the different races. So, they celebrate with the title event. Starfleet sends the Enterprise, a Romulan ship joins, there is a Klingon ship on the cover, and lots of civilian ships. Fun and merriment and sabotage and navigational hazards and good characters among the civilian ships. I think it could be well-adapted to a Traveller race. I think they had to travel to specific way points on their course. Several sessions worth of adventures in this story!

http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Great_Starship_Race


Gordon Long