IanBruntlett
Emperor Mongoose
Me too 
2300 AD Errata
- Thread starter chrisdw
- Start date
Page 33: Colonial history of Tirane. Lists dates of 2137 & 2138 for exploration of Alpha Centauri system, this is earlier than the 2146 date for the first working stutterwarp ship according to the background on page 3. Either the first ship is 2136 (as in earlier editions) or the exploration dates need to be moved up ten years or so.
GJD said:
I've found the large crew complement for the Thorez (and other ships) to be a little baffling. There are only five stations on the bridge, and the requirement for a full station around the clock 24/7 seems a bit of overkill in interplanetary space. Whatchoo gonna run into?
Even sea-going vessels are lightly stationed when plowing deep ocean.
Lemnoc said:
The thorez counts as a commercial vehicle - as it can carry passengers and freight - so it needs one full watch (5 people) and a 2 half watches. That said, the figures in the M2300AD book actually give you 2 full watches and one half watch.
Nobody wants an 8 hour on/8 hour off schedule , so run 3 watches and it's 8 hours on the bridge and 16 hours for maintenance, personal time, eating and sleeping and the off duty watch can cover breaks for the on-duty watch. Same with engineering - you only need one engineer for each watch.
G.
GJD said:
This is a good explanation, but I’m still baffled. Which watch in interplanetary space would warrant the full watch? They’re all about the same.
A more reasonable alternative might be to have a lightly stationed bridge at all times, with lots of short overlapping watches, with a requirement for a fully manned bridge and engineering section whenever in planetary space. Long watches at all hours in the latter condition.
It strikes me the main bridge activities at warp would be keeping the vessel on course and monitoring the gauges. With a nice big panic button nearby in the event of an emergency. Two people would be prudential overkill.
Having sailed long distances, I can tell you it can be hours between course corrections. And that’s a fairly manual system. Not a lot to do meantime but learn how to tie fancy knots.
I'm inclined to agree. It may be that the watch regulations require the ship to have a fully staffed bridge during the two day watches when passengers are up, and a skeleton watch at night - hence the 2 full, 1 skeleton in the main book. These could be the "insurance requires us to have a fully staffed bridge when the passengers are up" kind of thing. That accounts for the difference between commercial and private levels of crew.
I do like that you can't run a starship with just one person, flying with one hand and firing the ships lasers with the other, though. As I keep having to remind my players - this is a hard scifi game, not Star Wars.
I do like that you can't run a starship with just one person, flying with one hand and firing the ships lasers with the other, though. As I keep having to remind my players - this is a hard scifi game, not Star Wars.
GJD said:
I always interpreted the crew numbers as "fully staffed according to regulations." I figure the only time you'd see full crew compliments is in the core. Out in the frontier I'd bet the crews would be smaller for a variety of reasons: illness, difficulty in finding qualified or trustworthy personnel, or economics (freeing up more space for paying passengers).
Captain Jonah
Mongoose
Lemnoc said:
Rogue planets, asteroids, Giant space amoebas, Juggernauts, left over mines/missiles from a long ago war, new alien species, sub light ships from hundreds of years ago, hollow asteroids containing the remnants of ancient civilisations, Orion raiders, Space boar on a mating rampage, Klingon renegades, bored Romulan’s having a merchant hunt, some races deep space rubbish dump, wormholes to the future/past, unique space phenomena, a giant turtle with four elephants on its back holding a flat world, 27 varieties of sentient or semi sentient space dwelling plants, planet killers, Wynn renegades, a ship from a rival company looking to arrange an accident, a genuine accident, planet eating monster, ship eating monster, another ship that has had an accident or been raided, a wreck dating back to the time of the Kings (pre spaceflight for the main races), Salvage opportunity, mining opportunity, temporal warp/dislocation, sub space rip, vanguard of an intergalactic invasion, Psionic event that turns everyone asleep into homicidal maniacs, the great space beast of Blagblatterstell 3, sub space life forms on a sightseeing trip and you look so weird, a life pod full of Orion Slave girls and much more besides.
Space is vast, its not empty :lol: :wink:
Captain Jonah said:
So much junk! :lol: But, really, can sensors outperform the FTL drive? I think when the Jerome Drive is on, you're pretty much committed to what lies ahead.* Extra alert personnel do not change this equation.
(* and if I understand the quantum tunneling effect, you're likely to blink right through most things smaller than Pluto.)
Captain Jonah
Mongoose
GJD said:
True but this is an Adventure game not a totally accurate representation of life. :wink:
You have a one in a thousand chance of running into something in the vast emptiness of space. So you make two jumps a month, 25 in a year. After 40 years you may, statistically bump into something.
It doesn't matter how vast and empty space is. Traveller in its many forms is a Sci Fi adventure game of exploration, danger, thrills, missions, daring do and more. The men and women of the shipping line make 25 runs a year and find nothing.
The adventures find something on the third trip, they find it not because space is so full of junk that they cannot move for it. They find it because they are Travellers and they are drawn to adventure and adventure is drawn to them by the great cosmological power of the universe.
Once you walk the Travellers path your life will never again be boring or mundane. :lol:
Strithe said:
Problem here is your FTL drive would almost immediately overrun whatever you could detect through passive [non-FTL] sensors, the way your car can overrun its headlights at high speed at night. Anything a few light hours away will be overrun by the stutterwarp in seconds or minutes.
The situation might actually be worse with active [non-FTL] sensors. It would take hours or weeks for whatever active echo or ping or whatever to return.
I'm not sure, really, what sensors would be trying to detect and how they might go about doing that. There's not exactly a medium or "illumination source" to create the kinds of distortions / anomolies sensors are typically designed to detect.
Captain Jonah said:
I think this is all too true
Lord High Munchkin
Mongoose
The stutterwarp would tunnel you past/through anything you could detect at short notice within (at minimum) an hour, or so, of operation... sensors aren't that good unfortunately.
Lord High Munchkin said:
Yes. My read of this would be you would have xx.xxx% chance (probably beyond / above any random dice roll) of blinking / tunneling right through any Kuiper or smaller object. In a strange but beautiful symmetry, any grav well insufficient to discharge into would IMO be similarly insufficient to crash into under stutterwarp.
Without such a reciprocal, you'd plow into even micro-micrometeorids at ++FTL speeds. Disaster.
YTUMMV.
Ships sensors still work at superluminal speed, but as stated your active will be useless as you'll overtake the pulses from your emitters with each jump.It's not inconceivable that a 1-2 second lag is built into a stuttercycle every X number of cycles to open up a sensor "window" when travelling through hazardous waters. Passive detection will still work, of course, but the difficulty in detecting cold, dark objects in space is not trivial.
The gravitational scanner is one that intrigues me. How does it work? Our current grav scanners are based on mechanical observations - distortions caused by gravity over very large or very small distances that can detect anomalies from a baseline. What sort of technology have we detected that lets us plot the gravity gradient at range? How does that work?
The gravitational scanner is one that intrigues me. How does it work? Our current grav scanners are based on mechanical observations - distortions caused by gravity over very large or very small distances that can detect anomalies from a baseline. What sort of technology have we detected that lets us plot the gravity gradient at range? How does that work?
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