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Time dialation in Traveller

Shonner

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Anyone try this in their game? I don't recall if Space Gamer had an article about it or not back in the day. Maybe it would apply only to drives beyond jump-6 to allow for time dialation events/disasters.
 
I used it once way back as a misjump mishap. They were in Jump space for a week while 1000 years passed in real space.
 
Anyone try this in their game? I don't recall if Space Gamer had an article about it or not back in the day. Maybe it would apply only to drives beyond jump-6 to allow for time dialation events/disasters.
The Megatraveller Referee's Companion had a table detailing the travel times for some long-range in-system maneuver drive trips. The time dilation is a fairly simple formula, and ships with enough fuel for a four week journey (or more) could get up to some reasonably relativistic speeds. Mind you, hitting a small asteroid at those speeds would be "interesting".

I only use it in real space, not jump space.
 
Ships moving fast enough to consider time dilation would need some sort of protection from the interstellar medium, even hydrogen atoms become problematic at near c velocity.

The original enterprise from star trek was the first ship to acknowledge this, with it's navigational deflector.

Other solutions include ablative shielding, sometimes made of ice cladded on the front of the ship.
 
Time dilation is a can of worms that you really should not bother opening up in a systematic way.

First off beacuse it only really "works" as you approach the speed of light. The closer you get to c, the more drastic. Jump 1 in traveller means traveling at approximately 160 times the speed of light. As soon as you get faster than the speed of light you start modifying the time by the square root of a negative number. To apply the time dilation number means that the passage of time is multiplied by i*0.00625. (the square root of negative 1 ~ i)

If that does not mess with you, then go and speak to one of your math nerd friends. Moving time along the imagninary axis is not something I can really get my head around or meaningfully describe. You might want to check out the Joe Haldeman book 'The Forever War'.

Buy hey it is your call really.
 
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