Auto-Astrogators... not that bad?

tytalan said:
No a tender has the facilities to refuel and repair an X-Boar look at the design. It’s not a tug and I’d like to know what you’re quoting? If it Mongoose T1 than I wish they hadn’t dropped it from the game for T2 though tenders by their design are not tugs and it would cost way to much to use them as such. I still don’t understand the reluctance to put maneuver drive on the X-Boat it just makes economic sense.
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Everything I posted is in quotes, it is all taken directly from canon. JTAS 6 scouts, S:7 T&G, MT:I.E. MgT1e Library Data

Until Mongoose overwrite it that is the canon for the Third Imperium.

The xboat is a relic of the 77 edition, it is an illegal design in 81, just about every other iteration can make a better one with jump 4 and m-1.

Why it has not been retconned is a mystery considering everything else that has been changed.
 
Thanks for those quotes Sigtrygg. I guess I rely on CT Traders and Gunboats a bit much and had overlooked those.

As far as M-0 being some kind of "space anchor", that's special pleading. Stations ARE in motion. Everything is in motion, that's how it works.

You put your station in a stable orbit, but the gravitational effects of every other damn body in the system, the pushes and pulls from every ship that docks and departs, even stuff like people walking around in the station imparts unpredictable forces on it, and it will vary in its orbit over time. That is what the zero rated drives are correcting; providing THRUST to correct the vector.

The fact that High Guard lumps in reaction drives with the M-Drives in that bit about "no great distance" shows that.

I'm quite comfortable with zero rated drives being no more than 0.1G, and SOME of them being considerably lower. That feels about right, and would be about what I'd use for a full 1% of hull one (which is a lot of machinery, really). If you want something smaller, I suggest to just build a unit for a fraction of the hull; 0.1% of hull for a 0.01G version.

Further thought, at least as far as M-0 drives go, that 1% is likely mostly there to cover the grav plates. So maybe it should remain as a minimum volume and cost. The reaction drives don't have that consideration, so a sub volume reaction drive that produces fractional thrust still works for me.

Edit: Just realised G-Plates are stated to be part of the hull cost, and you can get a cheaper hull by omitting them. So scrub that thought. Either drive might still have a minimum volume dictated by the technology, of course.
 
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Station keeping drives are going to be optimized for intermittent short bursts (which is why it is cheaper 1 MCr/ton) correcting errors in the orbit. M0 would be a fractional g drive capable of steady thrust which is why it still costs 2 MCr/ton. My take anyhow.
 
Fluffy Bunny Feet said:
Station keeping drives are going to be optimized for intermittent short bursts (which is why it is cheaper 1 MCr/ton) correcting errors in the orbit. M0 would be a fractional g drive capable of steady thrust which is why it still costs 2 MCr/ton. My take anyhow.
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The smaller the fractional thrust of the engines, the longer they need to be on to "maintain" it's position. So, if you go with a really small engine, it may take 24 hours to make the correction. So, I am not fond of your theory on why the price is different. My thought on the difference in price would be the lack of G-compensators on fractional drives. They do not need it as they never generate enough Gs to have any real affect on the station or it's sophonts.
 
Design rules, unlike for jump drives, show no volume overhead for gravitic based manoeuvre drives.

Even for reactionary rockets, I would suppose, not being a rocket scientist, that there may be some unspecified plumbing and nozzles included.
 
Well... sort of.
The zero rating drives have volume, so I'd take that as the minimum machinery required component.
 
MasterGwydion said:
The smaller the fractional thrust of the engines, the longer they need to be on to "maintain" it's position. So, if you go with a really small engine, it may take 24 hours to make the correction. So, I am not fond of your theory on why the price is different. My thought on the difference in price would be the lack of G-compensators on fractional drives. They do not need it as they never generate enough Gs to have any real affect on the station or it's sophonts.
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I said "optimized for intermittent short bursts" for station keeping not smaller thrust. For the M0 I said "M0 would be a fractional g drive capable of steady thrust".

Think of station keeping as being like a CPU capable of really high clock cycles but lousy cooling so it gives seconds of 10 ghz then 0 while it cools down vs a CPU that might only do .1 ghz but can do it indefinitely without overheating. If you just need those bursts of calculation who cares about the shut down time, you got what you needed. If you don't need lots of calculation speed but need it steady you take the low speed chip, that is your M0. If you need both you get M1 or higher.
 
Well... you're probably only bothering to do a course correction now and then.

The IISS is in low Earth orbit and has to deal with some amount of atmospheric drag that affects it, but even then only needs occasional boosts. A station further out would need even less, and with fusion backed M-Drive technology you'd not even bother tracking it.
 
Also this:

"The International Space Station (ISS) has been in orbit since 1998 and space debris has forced evasive maneuvers dozens of times. According to a December 2022 NASA report, the ISS has course-corrected itself 32 times to avoid satellites and trackable space debris since 1999."

(Source: https://www.space.com/international-space-station-space-dodge-debris-how-often, 2023)

So roughly once a year, they shift it a bit to avoid some object. Usually drag drops its orbit by several kilometres between supply ship visits, but they use the supply ship to boost it back.
 
Rules say that you can't accelerate more than the factor cap defined by the technological level it was manufactured at.

Two times factor/zero at half percent volume each, equals one percent, at technological level nine.
 
rinku said:
Thanks for those quotes Sigtrygg. I guess I rely on CT Traders and Gunboats a bit much and had overlooked those.
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No problem, tracking down canon quotes is a fun little hobby :)

The thing with S:7 T&G is that it concentrates on the ships, while the network itself gets more detail elsewhere. It is similar to how S:9 concentrates on warships and neglects the most important ships of the IN fleet, the tenders and battle riders.
 
The other thing is that overall the game (and certainly those supplements) focuses on ship encounters. Players won't randomly encounter scout bases - those are destinations - but they will randomly encounter tenders and X-boats.
 
And scout stations, every system on the xboat route has at least one scout xboat station.

There are scout xboat stations, scout bases, and scout waystations.
 
Yep. Although it's not clear if those are sited where the boats usually come in... mostly you'd think so, but in other systems it may be more convenient for logistics or defense reasons to have it inside a gravity well and have tenders roam the 100D. (Which also gets back to how precise you think a jump can be. If it's not unusual that a boat can arrive 10,000km from a station, send out a tender to retreive or refuel it).

Normal orbital matters may affect things too. There's going to be days where the station isn't in the best part of its orbit for the boat, or a minor misjump delays the expected arrival time.

And actually... I guess yeah. Incoming ships may occasionally arrive near a far orbiting station they weren't expecting to, for the same reasons.
 
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