The Gravity Detection thing needs 1d6 x 10 x (distance in parsecs) for each scan. So, I guess @MarcusIII thinks that 2000s era technology is more advanced than future Traveller technology. He may be right. Traveller tech was created in the 1970s... lol
in 2,000 an off the shelf PC system could do it in about 4 hours but the distance being out to Mars from Earth. This will require signal processing of about 150 gigapizels per two hours, and take a terabyte of storage per sweep. Today's system and many times faster so say about 30 minutes.
So you are only considering the data processing aspect which is the easy bit and l agree it would be well within the capability of future systems. I have my doubts about the sensor aspect.
Yes, I do think it does. It's true that the data is light-speed limited and years old when coming from other systems, in-system it means that you'd have realtime (if delayed) data of all starship traffic. And it's not limited to just jump traffic. Per the explanation it detects the gravity disturbance of anything with a large enough gravity field. So along with starships you can detect asteroids and stellar objects. As far as I recall there would be no occlusion detecting objects through larger stellar bodies like planets, gas giants and the system's star. Being able to plot traffic from it's origin to its destination means a huge change for gameplay. Not only the end of stealth, but any kind of "hidden" base or installation. I don't recall if a ship that, for example, was lying doggo within the upper atmosphere of a gas giant would have a separate reading or not.
My guess is that you could conceal the gravity emissions of your ship by concealing it within a larger, more powerful gravity well.
This is somewhat of a strawman argument. Passive sensors ability to detect anything falls off with the square of the distance from the obiect to the sensor. And space is really, really big. So if you aren't emitting a lot of heat you simply won't be detected. Now that depends also on just how big and sensitive your sensor is - if your sensor area was say 1x1 km, sure you'd have more sensitivity deeper into space. At a point you simply don't emit enough heat to be detected at a distance. Just how far that distance is varies based upon multiple factors.
Perhaps. One would think that if it uses gravitic disturbances to detect things, there would be a distance at which a more massive object would simply radiate too much gravitic distortion to allow for identification of smaller objects within its area of distortion. Suns would have the largest, then gas giants, planets, moons, etc. Maybe you could use the same 100D rule for such a thing.
Yeah. What happens when the IR emission is smaller than a pixel on the screen you are viewing it on? Eventually, no matter how powerful of an emission something has, with enough distance, it cannot be detected.
Is that in HG2022 edition? I have it, but haven't gone through it in a lot of detail.
Once in a place far, far away (Falkland Islands) I was on duty and bored. I looked at the RADAR screen and saw a blip a long way off. So I zoomed in on the blip and measured the trace.
While I am all about a good story, if a good story can't be told within the rules (physics), perhaps it shouldn't be told or perhaps the rules (physics) need to change to allow for telling different stories. Changing the rules for the purposes of "story" almost always leads to unintended consequences. Why? Because when you change a rule to tell a story you have an extremely narrow focus on the story you want to tell and usually give no thought to the wider effects of said rule change. It is why all of the adventures and campaigns that I write, follow the rules. Most of my players are extremely good at taking any rules that I change and then turning them back on me at a later date. So, I learned my lesson on that one. lolI’m trying to not let the physics get in the way of a good story
Thanks for all the contributions to this thread, I am enjoying the conversation
Agreed.
Gavity Detection Suites have enough range and are passive and can detect things as small as comets automatically at 3,000,000,000,000km. That is trillion with a T. You are still going to have the lightspeed delay though.
I'd have to go pull the PDF to verify, but from what I recall it's more than just emergence. It will track the ship from the time it arrives till it leaves (only reappearing on sensors 3years later 1 parsec away). So any object in a system would show up on the sensors, moving or not, starship or not. Just mass.
So Mars to Earth at its closest is 55 million km. The surface area of the sphere of that radius is over 38 peta kilometers squared (excuse the compound prefix). If that was represented by 300 giga pixels then each pixel covered an area of over 125,000 square km. That is quite an area to lose a ship in. The volume that cone would represent is huge and the ship could be anywhere in there since you have no mechanism to triangulate.
