Astrogation question
- Thread starter bsg1970
- Start date
I seem to remember an Imperium regulation that all starships with a hu-DFW said:Compared to Quantum CPUs, humans are MUCH slower than a Galapagos giant tortoise.
man doing the astrogation calculations himself are obliged to have a suf-
ficient number of low berths for the other crew members, so that they can
be put into cold sleep while the astrogator is working, and do not have to
lose years of their lifetime waiting for his results before each jump. 8)
rust said:I seem to remember an Imperium regulation that all starships with a hu-DFW said:Compared to Quantum CPUs, humans are MUCH slower than a Galapagos giant tortoise.
man doing the astrogation calculations himself are obliged to have a suf-
ficient number of low berths for the other crew members, so that they can
be put into cold sleep while the astrogator is working, and do not have to
lose years of their lifetime waiting for his results before each jump. 8)
That rule was abolished when the Imperium required all jump-capable ships within its borders to be upgraded to the TI 99-4A navicomputer.
And it plays Tetris too!
Imeanunoharm said:Astrogator is not doing the calculations you prawns!
He's directing them with the skillzors of a leet maths jockey.
Right.
Traveller navigators are versed in the theory and practical application of navigating a starship. They are also (presumably) up on all the standard software tools for doing that job, and will be able to more effectively configure and use that software. I suspect any navigator would be very put out to have to compute a jump by hand. That's first semester Nav school stuff they do to torture students.
Can the captain push a button, say "plot me a jump to Wouchiers" and let the computer do all the work? Sure, but unless he has the latest map of jumpspace and gravitational anomalies in the area and he jumps his ship from precisely the correct point, he may not get quite as well made a jump as someone who knows the issues could generate with that same program. And for a merchant, getting better jump accuracy means more money.
(An analogy - we can all use word processors, but how many people are actually aware of good document layout practices?)
Having said that, I think that in practice having a separate crewman to be the navigator is the sort of luxury you could only afford on a very large ship. In practice, you would hope to hire crew with some additional Nav skill or make jumps computed from purchased data. Or maybe buy a Agent/Expert program to act as your navigator; that would work too.
(GM idea - for every month out of date the jump data is, -1 to the jump roll! You can use the cost of new data can offset the "win" of not hiring a navigator. A player with scout contacts might be able to get copies of the latest surveys at the local scout base for free. And some shady port officials might sell the players out-of-date info on discount, etc. )
bsg1970 said:
Had a similar problem turn up during character generation.
The game I'm planning evolves around a mining vessel one PC has inherited however his character generation has left him not only with a lab ship but also a scout ship with his mustering out benefits.
I ended up altering the lab ship to make it affordable for him to keep up with repayments essentially reduced the staterooms so he could add a fuel scoop and enough fuel processors to refuel the ship with a bit spare that could be sold off to keep things viable.
The other alterations included adding crystal iron armour however I'd suggest reducing the cargo by 20 tons and the staterooms by 2 to be able to improve your ships jump capability to jump 2 and the means to refuel your ship accordingly.
On the other hand you could just state they have those fuel bladders already aboard the ship so any cargo area they aren't using can be used to hold spare fuel.
Oh and as for astrogation checks just add the computer running a safety check you know double checks the calculations using a standard system which safely prevents the jump if their calculations are so wrong as to exceed what it considers a safety parameter after all the computer does have jump control software.
alex_greene
Guest
But any computer, even equipped with the fastest TL 15 quantum boojum processors up the wazoo, can only run the programs it has.DFW said:Compared to Quantum CPUs, humans are MUCH slower than a Galapagos giant tortoise.
And those programs were written by bored freelance programmers, or they could be legacy systems handed down from one old operating system to the next, added to, patched but never actually upgraded.
Some people might be operating with an obsolete old system and software, and like any app they'd be too scared to touch it for fear that the computer would lose track of which way was "up."
Like I said, any crew that puts all its trust in the computer is a crew that's risking their lives. All the database updates in space aren't worth the heat of the Captain's spit if the navcom catches a bug, fails to recognise the new database, defaults to an older version and has the ship Jump straight into the destination planet.
Like I said, you underestimate the abilities of a good human mathematician. Look at Andrew Wiles - a human who eschewed computers to solve Fermat's Last Theorem with his brain.
All of mathematical history - even to the invention of computing - is the product of human brains and nothing else. The principles of Vedic Mathematics enable people to work with problems with a speed you would not believe. The simple methods of the Trachtenberg system enables a human to compute problems with numbers of any arbitrary size and total accuracy.
A human can contemplate thirteen - dimensional realities, transcendental and uncountable infinities and infinitesimals, complex numbers, quaternions and equations that would break the most sophisticated computers. Honestly, compared to that, a simple vector translation of three parsecs from one planet to another would seem a doddle.
captainjack23 said:
This I agree with!
I see it as coming under Clairvoyance and is partly precognition in nature, the very best astrogators don't understand why they can do what not even the best TL16+ computers "can" do.
The safety measures possessed in a ship's computer are based on readings taken during other successful jumps and a certain leeway is given which if exceeded causes the jump attempt to not work ergo a failed astrogation check that is really badly failed.
Others that don't fail that badly simply mean they get to wherever the dm planned them to go but suffer some kind of inconvenience strictly by the plot in nature.
Of course some dm's like doing that even when they successfully make the astrogation check, but there are people like that out there I'm afraid!
Without the database, all the human astrogator can do is tell the captainalex_greene said:
that the jump calculation is impossible, because he has no way to know
or find out where the target system - let alone the target planet - current-
ly is.
Stars and their planetary systems are mobile objects. Our sun and its sy-
stem move through space with 220 km/s. A target system 1 parsec away
and moving at the same leisurely pace has moved more than 22 billion ki-
lometers away from the position where the ship's sensors see it "now" -
and without FTL sensors there is no way to determine the target system's
current location within a couple of months.
Unless you think that the human mathematician can remember the motion
of all systems and of all the celestial bodies within these systems in the re-
gion, he will have to rely on his astrogation computer's database - blindly,
because he has no means to check whether these motion data are right
or wrong.
So, unless the astrogator trusts his computer absolutely and has no doubt
that it will provide him with the right data, he should look for another job,
or he will develop paranoia and worse mental disorders rather soon, no
matter how highly developed his mathematical skills may be.
alex_greene
Guest
Look, we could go round in circles, and not reach an agreement. Here's my final word.
How many times has anyone here gone to some office to pursue some minor query, only to have a desk drone tell them "Computer says no?" And if you asked whether there was a human being you could talk to on the other end of the phone, how exasperating is it to be told that "All our phones are busy right now, but if you'd like to call the office again during office hours ...?"
That's a universe with humans taken out of the loop. A world of small errors building up to catastrophe because there's nobody there to see that something's wrong and do something about it before it's too late, or because despite the visible errors people blind themselves to the possibility that a computer could actually be wrong, incorrectly programmed, fed the wrong data or simply be handling numbers too big for its program to handle.
Computers are inherently limited. They do not initiate: they only offer a means of facilitating the human decision. They facilitate it very well, but it must be a human who presses "ENTER."
Humans have different limitations, but unlike computers they can overcome their limitations by learning new things, by training, by using intuition and, above all, by taking the initiative - something no computer can ever do, not even an AI.
It doesn't matter how fancy and flash a machine is - if the power goes off in mid-calculation, that's the crew stuffed, or at the very least seriously inconvenienced. Humans can carry on, at least until the need for food and sleep forces them to take a break.
All this time, I have been praising the virtues of the human over the machine. That will not change. Fancy toys just make the human adventure more efficient, but they could and should never replace a human at the helm, a human plotting the course and a human deciding where the ship goes.
Beyond that, piffling little details such as where the star is likely to be at the end of the Jump become insignificant. The human can do one thing that no computer can, under pressure.
When forced to make a decision based on insufficient data, the human mind can guess. And I'd feel more comfortable with some humans' guesses than with some machines' facts.
For all their organic faults and flaws, humans will always be better than machines. The game is called "Traveller," not "Computer."
The rules of Traveller have been designed such that it requires a person to get their hands dirty - and that includes having a specially trained Astrogator whose brain is capable of handling such complex mathematical problems as they are likely to expect in five thousand years' time.
That's why characters still have access to Astrogator and Navigation skills, it is why they are independent of Computer and Sensors skills, and it's why it doesn't matter how fancy the computers and programs are, no ship in the TU would ever leave without an astrogator on board.
And that's it. Humans rule. Well, in five thousand years, assuming we don't wipe ourselves out between now and then because of an overabundance of stupid in the human population in this century.
Don't call me, because I'm going ex-directory.
How many times has anyone here gone to some office to pursue some minor query, only to have a desk drone tell them "Computer says no?" And if you asked whether there was a human being you could talk to on the other end of the phone, how exasperating is it to be told that "All our phones are busy right now, but if you'd like to call the office again during office hours ...?"
That's a universe with humans taken out of the loop. A world of small errors building up to catastrophe because there's nobody there to see that something's wrong and do something about it before it's too late, or because despite the visible errors people blind themselves to the possibility that a computer could actually be wrong, incorrectly programmed, fed the wrong data or simply be handling numbers too big for its program to handle.
Computers are inherently limited. They do not initiate: they only offer a means of facilitating the human decision. They facilitate it very well, but it must be a human who presses "ENTER."
Humans have different limitations, but unlike computers they can overcome their limitations by learning new things, by training, by using intuition and, above all, by taking the initiative - something no computer can ever do, not even an AI.
It doesn't matter how fancy and flash a machine is - if the power goes off in mid-calculation, that's the crew stuffed, or at the very least seriously inconvenienced. Humans can carry on, at least until the need for food and sleep forces them to take a break.
All this time, I have been praising the virtues of the human over the machine. That will not change. Fancy toys just make the human adventure more efficient, but they could and should never replace a human at the helm, a human plotting the course and a human deciding where the ship goes.
Beyond that, piffling little details such as where the star is likely to be at the end of the Jump become insignificant. The human can do one thing that no computer can, under pressure.
When forced to make a decision based on insufficient data, the human mind can guess. And I'd feel more comfortable with some humans' guesses than with some machines' facts.
For all their organic faults and flaws, humans will always be better than machines. The game is called "Traveller," not "Computer."
The rules of Traveller have been designed such that it requires a person to get their hands dirty - and that includes having a specially trained Astrogator whose brain is capable of handling such complex mathematical problems as they are likely to expect in five thousand years' time.
That's why characters still have access to Astrogator and Navigation skills, it is why they are independent of Computer and Sensors skills, and it's why it doesn't matter how fancy the computers and programs are, no ship in the TU would ever leave without an astrogator on board.
And that's it. Humans rule. Well, in five thousand years, assuming we don't wipe ourselves out between now and then because of an overabundance of stupid in the human population in this century.
Don't call me, because I'm going ex-directory.
Fact is, many modern ships, planes, helicopters and spacecraft all operate without a dedicated (and in many cases, even qualified) navigator on board.
And a great many rely heavily on computers to make it safe and reliable - where human mental retention, error and speed are an issue.
AI, by the way, is quite capable of making 'decisions' based on incomplete or limited data (I know - I've designed and implemented successful AI routines for various applications in the RW).
Do I 'trust' computers - well, perhaps no more than I 'trust' other people or even myself to be infallible (after-all, to a greater or lesser extent*, it is people who designed, programmed and maintained them). But, I still choose to rely on them. My car has a computer, a great many medical devices have a computer, and, well, I'm using this here computer to communicate my thoughts...
Now, don't get me wrong, I think computers are mis-applied as much or more than any other tool - and a human is worth more than any computer to me. Keeping humans 'in the loop' (by this I mean educated, trained and or experienced ones) is only prudent, but by no means absolutely necessary.
In MgT, a Navigator is optional (pg 113).
[*Note: modern CPUs are 'designed' by computers (not just with them - though all are at least indirectly creations of man) - there are just too many components for any one or even a very large group of humans to reasonably deal with... it would take a human 'looking' at 10 components per second over 3 solid years (well over 10 normal work years) to look at 1 billion components - the Intel Core i7 has over a billion transistors alone...]
And a great many rely heavily on computers to make it safe and reliable - where human mental retention, error and speed are an issue.
AI, by the way, is quite capable of making 'decisions' based on incomplete or limited data (I know - I've designed and implemented successful AI routines for various applications in the RW).
Do I 'trust' computers - well, perhaps no more than I 'trust' other people or even myself to be infallible (after-all, to a greater or lesser extent*, it is people who designed, programmed and maintained them). But, I still choose to rely on them. My car has a computer, a great many medical devices have a computer, and, well, I'm using this here computer to communicate my thoughts...
Now, don't get me wrong, I think computers are mis-applied as much or more than any other tool - and a human is worth more than any computer to me. Keeping humans 'in the loop' (by this I mean educated, trained and or experienced ones) is only prudent, but by no means absolutely necessary.
In MgT, a Navigator is optional (pg 113).
[*Note: modern CPUs are 'designed' by computers (not just with them - though all are at least indirectly creations of man) - there are just too many components for any one or even a very large group of humans to reasonably deal with... it would take a human 'looking' at 10 components per second over 3 solid years (well over 10 normal work years) to look at 1 billion components - the Intel Core i7 has over a billion transistors alone...]
To give this discussion a little twist ...
While the starships of my Pandora setting do not have an astrogator, be-
cause there the pilot presses the buttons on the astrogation computer,
most of the sea ships on Pandora do have a navigator.
Of course, he does not really "navigate" the ship in the traditional sense,
because the equivalent of a GPS system does that pretty well. His task is
to collect and integrate all the data (seafloor sonar readings, prevailing
wind patterns, ocean currents, local marine flora and fauna ...) to make
the map programs of Pandora that will provide future seafarers with use-
ful informations for their voyages.
This is very similar to what I would see as the usual task of a trained as-
trogator. Not to "astrogate" merchant vessels on routine missions, but to
serve on survey ships that collect and integrate the data that are used to
create the programs for the astrogation computers of the merchant ves-
sels.
While the starships of my Pandora setting do not have an astrogator, be-
cause there the pilot presses the buttons on the astrogation computer,
most of the sea ships on Pandora do have a navigator.
Of course, he does not really "navigate" the ship in the traditional sense,
because the equivalent of a GPS system does that pretty well. His task is
to collect and integrate all the data (seafloor sonar readings, prevailing
wind patterns, ocean currents, local marine flora and fauna ...) to make
the map programs of Pandora that will provide future seafarers with use-
ful informations for their voyages.
This is very similar to what I would see as the usual task of a trained as-
trogator. Not to "astrogate" merchant vessels on routine missions, but to
serve on survey ships that collect and integrate the data that are used to
create the programs for the astrogation computers of the merchant ves-
sels.
DFW said:rinku said:
Sorry but your confusing two concepts. There IS constant time refs for 2 two different star systems in the same galaxy. So, no issue. Good try though.
I beg to differ on this, but since we do basically agree that most of the time a human navigator is not required, while under some circumstances they may be, it's not really worth doing the rounds on it.
I'll stand by my opinion that Astrogation skill is desirable by someone in the crew, even if the formal position of navigator is not filled. Exploratory and military ships should always fill the position, while commercial ships operating on safe routes most likely will not.
If you are doing a regular run, say up and down the spinward main, your jump calculations only need to be updated to account for steller movement. Unless you are jumping into a system with lots of floating rocks and debris (and that assumes you could actually acount for them all), it's going to be much easier to account for movement. Planets and other stellar bodies are going to be moving in known orbits and known speeds. It should be very simple to account for that in your jump program. A TL9 computer system should easily be able to handle this sort of math.
Lets remember that the concept of Traveller computers harkens back to the days of ye olde mainframe times. A modern PC has more computing power than the mainframes of old. Plotting a jump would not be (presumably) a precision art, as you have an unknown factor in every jump that you will never be able to account for. So the best you can do in your plot is get where you think you might end up. But the decay of your jump field is always going to be a variable that is unpredictable, and therefore that's going to make your jump calculations very generous as far as safety goes.
Lets remember that the concept of Traveller computers harkens back to the days of ye olde mainframe times. A modern PC has more computing power than the mainframes of old. Plotting a jump would not be (presumably) a precision art, as you have an unknown factor in every jump that you will never be able to account for. So the best you can do in your plot is get where you think you might end up. But the decay of your jump field is always going to be a variable that is unpredictable, and therefore that's going to make your jump calculations very generous as far as safety goes.
Since CT days I've used two simplifications related to Jump:
Re-entry to normal space precludes impact within 100D of any mass - so the real danger is re-emerging right in the path of an object without time to get out of the way within the time it takes given the 100D separation.
All systems in the game are moving with about the same velocity - so they are fairly well 'fixed' in relation to one another and no major 'speed' differences exists to account for when jumping.
(Note: I write 'speed', above, because IMTU, the directional component of velocity can change when emerging from jump! :evil:
This makes Jump-ing inherently dangerous (read more dramatic RP-wise) and the time to get to one's destination even less absolute - one may have to reverse direction and make substantial changes in velocity...
)
Re-entry to normal space precludes impact within 100D of any mass - so the real danger is re-emerging right in the path of an object without time to get out of the way within the time it takes given the 100D separation.
All systems in the game are moving with about the same velocity - so they are fairly well 'fixed' in relation to one another and no major 'speed' differences exists to account for when jumping.
(Note: I write 'speed', above, because IMTU, the directional component of velocity can change when emerging from jump! :evil:
This makes Jump-ing inherently dangerous (read more dramatic RP-wise) and the time to get to one's destination even less absolute - one may have to reverse direction and make substantial changes in velocity...
)
Meh, for MTU astrogators aren't just required by the Imperium but actually neccesary. They are trained professionals, able to fully and correctly utilize the jump program and controller to achieve safe and reliable Jump Transits.
Someone with computer as a skill only rolls at -3 to generate a solution, and takes three as long as an astrogator to do it. Without either Astrogation or Computer as a skill, no chance at all.
No automated unmanned jump craft at all, they never arrive at the destination, reason unknown. By the same token no vessel has ever emerged from jump with a dead crew on arrival, nor with the whole crew in cold sleep.
Thats just the way it is in my traveller universe.
Someone with computer as a skill only rolls at -3 to generate a solution, and takes three as long as an astrogator to do it. Without either Astrogation or Computer as a skill, no chance at all.
No automated unmanned jump craft at all, they never arrive at the destination, reason unknown. By the same token no vessel has ever emerged from jump with a dead crew on arrival, nor with the whole crew in cold sleep.
Thats just the way it is in my traveller universe.
DFW said:rinku said:
Sorry but your confusing two concepts. There IS constant time refs for 2 two different star systems in the same galaxy. So, no issue. Good try though.
Actually, rinku is correct. There are (as far as we understand right now) no absolute frames of reference in a relativistic universe. And there are no constant time references between two different star systems in any galaxy.
Causality is violated by any FTL transport method, and there's always a frame of reference in which it appears that the ship arrived before it left and there's always a frame of reference in which time on the ship is going backwards.
I guess the armwave explanation is that for FTL to work there must actually be a single universal reference frame (contrary to our relativistic understanding of the universe), but most people don't really think about it. FTL is just an axiom of most SF settings that is required for them to work.
BP said:
I use a similar set of simplifications. I also like the (non-canon) idea that return from jump space requires a gravity well to "pop you back out" of jump space.
IMTU you arrive in a similar inertial frame around the new gravity well, so it doesn't pay to be going very quickly when you jump in some cases. If you can line things up though, you can shave a lot of time off your normal space travel by burning up to the jump, then decelerating after the jump. That's how I justify the skill tests modifying your emergence location. IMTU it's more a matter of how well placed are you when you emerge.
That has issues for deep-space jumps, but I'm ok with that.
