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Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...


Kristopher

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

An interesting implication is that any error in moving your ship to its final destination in the other dimension will be magnified by the same factor of 10^11.

 

So if you position your ship one millimeter off target, it will arrive in real space 100,000 kilometers off target.

Yeah, I recognize that also; it means, in all reality, that you can count on spending a lot of time going from wherever you pop back in to your final destination, since manhandling a big rock on a flat surface is unlikely to do much better than 10 cm using eyeball and empty hands techniques.

 

Further, it also relies upon the coincidence of projection of the plane of our Galaxy with the surface of the ground in the other dimension. (Digging a hole to make a detent for your rock to sit in when it's in the right spot means you'll end up being below the plane of the Galaxy when you pop back.)

 

The story as I wrote it didn't address either of these issues (I saw they were there, but they were "out of scope" for the story that was the course assignment), but they were things to revisit. (I focussed on the incongruity of FTL travel via brute human strength.)

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

Oooh' date=' flashback to Bertram Chandler's [i']Commodore Grimes[/i] novels. Early on, the FTL communication system was trained telepaths, and they used disembodied brains as amplifiers. These brains were usually from dogs or cats, and the telepaths treated them as "pets", which everyone else considered rather creepy. Several stories involved crossing into alternate universes (which was apparently easier out on "The Rim"). In one, some rats got an evolutionary boost from a malfunctioning FTL drive and took over in several sectors. Obviously, evolved rats are not going to get along with cat or dog amplifiers, so they used humans instead. The FTL drive in those stories has been loosely described as "going astern in time while full ahead in space".

 

Reminds me of the ship used to explore the galatic core in Niven's Known Space. The hyperdrive and the normal drive run in opposite directions, which the pilot says is typical of the Puppeteers -- "***-backwards into the unknown."

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

You're quite welcome, and I'm glad you are enjoying it.

 

Mr Weber has a real penchant for VERY high-powered female characters, but he carries it off well.

 

Yeah...

 

 

...but so far the writing is good enough that I'll forgive him the slight "wish-fulfilment" setup with Richard and Milla.

 

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

 

If ships have potentially very dangerous reactors, I could actually see it being very illegal to do anything to the reactor unless you're a government-certified highly-trained engineer.

 

If drives are big and dangerous (see also, "the Kzinti lesson"), I could see orbital tugs and orbital pilots being required.

 

Not sure how either really works out for an RPG setting, though.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

A good start would be to have rules that any powered re-entry is going to destroy the ship.

Forcefields don't work in atmosphere, and armour ablates.

 

Another thing to add is a power source that isn't nuclear and won't poison a planet when the ship explodes.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

For the sake of a playable setting' date=' I'm trying to come up with a way to have reactionless drives that are limited in some way as to not make every ship into a WMD.[/quote']

Off the top of my head the best way is to come up with some technobabble reason that limits the maximum speed of any object using the drive.

 

Of course real physics does not allow for something like that, but neither does it allow for a reactionless drive, so it is a wash.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

A good start would be to have rules that any powered re-entry is going to destroy the ship.

Forcefields don't work in atmosphere, and armour ablates.

Well, in this case, that would not help.

 

If the ship is moving at 90% the speed of light, it will do the same damage to a planet if it is solid, or if it has been converted into fast moving vapor.

 

It does not matter if the atoms are connected together in the form of a ship or are moving separately as a fast cloud. They are still going to pasteurize the planet.

 

If the ship had the same mass as a submarine (about 13,900 metric tons) and it was traveling at 90% c, it is going to hit the planet with a force of 380,000,000 megatons, or with a force almost five times as great as the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs. Regardless of whether the ship was solid or vapor.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

Well, in this case, that would not help.

 

If the ship is moving at 90% the speed of light, it will do the same damage to a planet if it is solid, or if it has been converted into fast moving vapor.

 

It does not matter if the atoms are connected together in the form of a ship or are moving separately as a fast cloud. They are still going to pasteurize the planet.

 

If the ship had the same mass as a submarine (about 13,900 metric tons) and it was traveling at 90% c, it is going to hit the planet with a force of 380,000,000 megatons, or with a force almost five times as great as the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs. Regardless of whether the ship was solid or vapor.

 

Once again proving that it ain't the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

Off the top of my head the best way is to come up with some technobabble reason that limits the maximum speed of any object using the drive.

 

Of course real physics does not allow for something like that, but neither does it allow for a reactionless drive, so it is a wash.

 

I guess I didn't realize that a reactionless drive (ie, no reaction mass ejected out the back) automatically allowed accelleration to any physically possible velocity.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

I guess I didn't realize that a reactionless drive (ie' date=' no reaction mass ejected out the back) automatically allowed accelleration to any physically possible velocity.[/quote']

A reaction drive can only accelerate your rocket until the reaction mass is all gone.

A reactionless drive obviously does not have that limitation.

 

Presumably it does require electricity or other power, but that is a much easier limit to overcome.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

A reaction drive can only accelerate your rocket until the reaction mass is all gone.

A reactionless drive obviously does not have that limitation.

 

Presumably it does require electricity or other power, but that is a much easier limit to overcome.

 

Isn't the other limit on the reaction drive that it can only accelerate the vehicle to the same velocity forward as the velocity of the exhaust out the back? Or am I thinking of something else?

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

Isn't the other limit on the reaction drive that it can only accelerate the vehicle to the same velocity forward as the velocity of the exhaust out the back? Or am I thinking of something else?

You are thinking about the Bussard Interstellar Ramjet. The ramscoop causes drag.

 

A reaction drive with no ramscoop is not subject to such a limit.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

You are thinking about the Bussard Interstellar Ramjet. The ramscoop causes drag.

 

A reaction drive with no ramscoop is not subject to such a limit.

 

Or it came from someone trying to give a quick and dirty version of what's being talked about in this discussion.

 

EDIT: So it's not that there's a fundamental difference beween a rocket and a reactionless drive that makes the latter more dangerous, it's just that the former runs out of reaction mass and that limits its maxiumum velocity.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

EDIT: So it's not that there's a fundamental difference between a rocket and a reactionless drive that makes the latter more dangerous' date=' it's just that the former runs out of reaction mass and that limits its maximum velocity.[/quote']

 

Yes, but that is putting it mildly. Using a reaction drive to accelerate something to 90% c with a super-duper technomagic antimatter beam core rocket still means that your rocket will be 99% reaction mass and 1% rocket

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

Yes' date=' but that is putting it mildly. Using a reaction drive to accelerate something to 90% c with a super-duper technomagic antimatter beam core rocket still means that your rocket will be 99% reaction mass and 1% rocket[/quote']

 

Hmm.

 

Unless a ship with a reactionless drive is powered by wishes, it still has a "burn" limit based on how much fuel it carries for its powerplant, right? (Even though it's not tossing it out the back.)

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

Unless a ship with a reactionless drive is powered by wishes' date=' it still has a "burn" limit based on how much fuel it carries for its powerplant, right?[/quote']

Yes, as I said here:

A reaction drive can only accelerate your rocket until the reaction mass is all gone.

A reactionless drive obviously does not have that limitation.

 

Presumably it does require electricity or other power, but that is a much easier limit to overcome.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

Since you're talking about using handwavium technology anyway, I think it's easy enough to make a reactionless drive that can't be a planet buster.

 

  1. The drive requires a powerplant to move
  2. Top speed is based on the amount of energy supplied to the powerplant
  3. If you cut power to the drive the ship comes to a stop - you can have it coast if you want since that's cooler
  4. The drag on the drive is inversely proportional to the gravity well the drive is in. That is, the drive doesn't really work in a gravity well, or works very inefficiently. The deeper into the gravity well you get, the slower the drive goes, regardless of the amount of energy supplied.
  5. You can still use this to power missiles and the like, but they only really work well in deep space.

You just have to add some more handwavium (yes, I know, it's a slippery slope). Just my 2 credits.

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

For the sake of a playable setting' date=' I'm trying to come up with a way to have reactionless drives that are limited in some way as to not make every ship into a WMD.[/quote']

 

If you have teleportation, you can rig a ship that teleports to its own front end. Your speed is limited by the speed of the teleportation process. However, there's no actual motion - when the drive is turned off, you simply stop.

 

(I don't know who thought of the concept originally, but Larry Niven explored it in, "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation".)

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Re: Star HERO with... not magic, really, but...

 

Let me put things another way when it comes to the issue of the "sublight drives": I don't think that my probable players would be interested in a setting that involved detailed calculations of delta v, fuel remaining, burn times, etc, or in taking days to travel between planets in the same system, or in waiting a week to get to "safe FTL distance".

 

So what I want is something that has a "real" feel, but doesn't disinterest those players. I hope that makes more sense and clarifies what I'm going for.

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