Jump capacity

[PeterDebney]

I think you dropped some decimals... so Earth, let's call it 30 kilometers per second ( a little high and ignoring that it's an orbit and not a straight line...) then accelerating at, let's just simplify and call it 10 m/s^2, that's 30,000 meters per second, so 3000 seconds to 'match velocity'. About 50 minutes.

The more fun thing is that star are orbiting the galaxy at varying velocity, eccentricity and vector. Most are probably close to another 30 kps in various directions, but some are higher. Groombridge 1830, if I recall correctly, clocks in at about 300 kps relative to Sol. So that's eight hours and change at 1 g. All such factors are generally ignored in Traveller. You could add it to your game, but only if you really enjoy making things extra difficult to play without calculators or spreadsheets. I'm going to stick with my don't-look-behind-the-curtain handwavium answer...

Oops the maths definitely left orbit there. That all seems much more reasonable.
And as for the handwavium, even the hardest SF requires some

 

[Shadowblayde99]

Would there be any significant consequence to halving the amount of fuel needed to make a jump such that a scout or far trader could make 2 jumps on a single tank of fuel and shortening the time in jump space to 3 days?

 

[ProfGrizzlyJon]

Would there be any significant consequence to halving the amount of fuel needed to make a jump such that a scout or far trader could make 2 jumps on a single tank of fuel and shortening the time in jump space to 3 days?

I think that the Advantage could be tweaked better:
Decreased Fuel: This drive uses 5% less fuel then normal.

I would prefer to see it closer to 10 or 15%.

I created rules for Jump Thrust (which shortened travel time). During play test, it has a significant advantage and is amazingly oppressive when scaled to sector-sized governments.

As a one-off, it is ok.

 

[Vormaerin]

Would there be any significant consequence to halving the amount of fuel needed to make a jump such that a scout or far trader could make 2 jumps on a single tank of fuel and shortening the time in jump space to 3 days?

Reducing travel time would have fairly significant effects in terms of speed of communication and the ability of interstellar governments to have more central control, at least on the subsector or sector level.

The fuel cost change would increase profitability because ships would be able to carry more cargo with only half the fuel requirements of before. But that has fairly limited visible effects on the setting. It would tend to reinforce the increased speed of movement and communication, though. The reason Jump 4 commercial activity is rare is because it takes 40% of the ship's hull for fuel If you make it only take 20% of the hull space, it becomes much more likely that such ships are commonplace.

The combination of 3 day jumps and twice the jump rating on commercial traffic would be a 4 fold increase in travel speed and probably 3x increase in communication speed (X-boats can only use the extra space to get to Jump 6 ).

 

[Condottiere]

Warp and space folding drives are options.

But it wouldn't be the Third Imperium setting.

 

[ProfGrizzlyJon]

I think that the Advantage could be tweaked better:
Decreased Fuel: This drive uses 5% less fuel then normal.

I would prefer to see it closer to 10 or 15%.

I created rules for Jump Thrust (which shortened travel time). During play test, it has a significant advantage and is amazingly oppressive when scaled to sector-sized governments.

As a one-off, it is ok.

As an add,
Jump Thrust allowed the jump rating to be applied to speed and not distance.
1) Jump-2 covered a parsec in 74 hours +/-, but used the same amount of fuel as a 2 parsec standard jump.
2) Below TL-16, Jump Thrust converts a normal J-drive into a One-Shot Drive and requires significant overhaul to return it to normal.
3) Misjumps under Jump Thrust had a larger impact on the duration spent in jumpspace. Effect 0 meant that the duration was longer than expected.
4) Plotting a Jump Thrust jump was one order of difficulty harder, so making a fast getaway was extremely risky.

I am debating writing an article for submission to JTAS about it (and the Chokari patron involved)

 

[ProfGrizzlyJon]

Warp and space folding drives are options.

But it wouldn't be the Third Imperium setting.

Prototype skip drives are more economical and in milieu.

 

[Vormaerin]

Ultimately, house rules come down to 'what are you trying to accomplish?' 3 days or 7 days in jump takes the same amount of gameplay time. So the purpose of making that change is to change the setting in some fashion. We would have to know what you want to accomplish by the change to give useful advice about whether that change would have the desired effect.

 

[Shadowblayde99]

Ultimately, house rules come down to 'what are you trying to accomplish?' 3 days or 7 days in jump takes the same amount of gameplay time. So the purpose of making that change is to change the setting in some fashion. We would have to know what you want to accomplish by the change to give useful advice about whether that change would have the desired effect.

I have the Marches Adventures 1 to 5. Looking at the Traveller map, the distances between the adventures are quite large e.g. Mithril to Gorram is 6 jumps in a J2 ship. I think it's about the same for travelling across a subsector.

If adventures are located a subsector apart then characters have about 7 weeks doing nothing. It would cost 120,000 credits to do 6 jumps in a J2 ship (I think). That's a lot of time and a lot of cost to commit to before the adventure even starts so why would a traveller do this? For comparison, sailing from London to America in 1700's took about 7 weeks. You wouldn't want to do that, have an adventure for a couple of weeks then sail back, adventure for a few weeks ....

My options then are either to make adventures much closer together by changing the map, change the systems the adventures take place on, or make it cheaper and quicker to get from one adventure to another.

Do other groups travel from sector to sector or subsector to subsector? How do others feel about travel times for characters and the cost?

 

[Vormaerin]

There's two questions here. First, how to best use pre published adventure collections. Unlike Secrets of the Ancients or The Traveller Adventure, the Marches Adventures are not written to be played in sequence. So you either have to adapt the adventures to where the PCs are or run other adventures that lead the PCs naturally to the where you need them to be for the next adventure in the set. You are right that the PCs are not naturally going to just travel from Mithril to Gorram. You have to lead them. If you want to move the adventures so they aren't so far away, keep in mind that the maps only show the biggest/best world in each hex. You can add other worlds or even other stars to let you fit in more adventures in a smaller area. Think of the Expanse show. The map would just show Earth. But there's Mars, the Belt colonies, and more where you could put adventures. Or decide some of the map spots are like Alpha Centauri. Sure, the main system has the world shown on the map. But there's Proxima Centauri that is 0.21 light years away. Put a planet over there and its a jump away from Alpha Centauri without changing parsecs.

Personally, I run my campaign in an area of about 2 dozen systems that are spread over two subsectors, but the vast majority of the systems are near the middle of the area. So there are a few systems that are kind of far, but mostly the players can get to whatever system they want without it being insanely far. I like this because the players make repeat visits to worlds, have recurring storylines, and so on. If I want to run something inspired by a published adventure, I just rewrite it to suit one of the worlds in the area. Or for some place like Mithril, I might just say "hey, there's this backwater nowhere planet you haven't bothered to visit before. Guess what? Now you are " Obviously, a bit more effort like that, but worthless unpleasant planets are easy to add to any map.

 

[Vormaerin]

Oh, the other thing you can do is make travel cheaper if your players are starship-less. The prices are set to make transporting people profitable for PCs with merchant ships who are picking up last minute travellers. But you can have Exspacia.com that sells cheap starfares if you book in advance. Or you could ditch the Dumarest inspired low berth that kill 10 to 20% of the users and use Aliens style hypersleep pods where you can expect to get to your destination. Then PCs might travel for pretty cheap, like Cr700 per parsec.

If the PCs do have a ship and they are trading, you can easily lead them by rigging the cargo rolls so they get cargoes that they'd want to take in the direction you want them to go.

 

[Condottiere]

As I recall Traveller Companion, there was a suggestion of differential hyperspace streams.

That could create hyperspace super highways, cutting down on fuel consumption, possibly time spent.