Looking for some clarifications for 2300 AD

[Iron Guardian]

Currently reading over the 2300 rulesbook and am a little confused on a few things:

1) What the heck is the Population multiplication number which is part of the UNP#?

2) Reading the description of Stutterwarp travel made it sound instantaneous with travel time just a matter of how long it took to get to warp point and the time to get to destination. I understand how to calculate travel distance in light years, but now I see that each stutterwarpship has a maximum lightyear speed per day...ergo, if distance = 5.55 light years and speed is 1.85 ly/day, that would be 3 days in warp space then? Thus, the initial description is in error or very misleading if I am understanding things right.

3) Is there any errata available for 2300 AD yet that is in some semblence of order?

Thanks for any help and assistance...possibly more to come as I read further!

 

[Hopeless]

On page 19 the second from last digit of the UWP for T2300 is the number used to multiply what would be the normal value for the Population of that nation giving you a more accurate idea of how large that population actually is so Britain whose code reads B899747-C Ri, In, 8,4 has a standard population value of 7 meaning a population of between 10 million to under a 100 million the multiplier this being 8 means they have a population of around 80 million oh boy i hope I got that right!

Unfortunately I know even less about stutter warp than you or pretty much anyone else since I'm more of the you jump and arrive there instantly its just that everyone back home won't see evidence of your arrival until either your ship's transmissions reach Earth or they see you there with the aid of telescopes or Hubble and others of its type catches sight of you.

 

[Elrick]

1) Assuming it works the same as population modifiers in Classic & MegaTraveller, it is a multiplier to the population code. For example, if you have a UPP with a population code of 5 (hundreds of thousands of people) and a multiplication number of 4 it means 400 thousand people.

2) The way I read it your example is right. Stutterwarp isn't instantaneous (I hope not anyway - I'm working on a scenario which relies on the characters having to take 2 days stutterwarping between two points). See page 263 of the rulebook which talks about shiups taking anything from 2 days to 2 weeks to stutterwarp between stars. Then look at a discussion of sub-FTL stutterwarp speeds for in-system travel on page 265.

3) There's a thread on this board for errata. See: http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?f=89&t=50754

 

[Iron Guardian]

Population Rating Multiplier -- ahhh, I had researched earlier references to it through Search, but that didn't help...don't remember it from Classic or MegaTraveller...definitely helps though I think the entry for France is an error -- if I recall, Population Rating = 5 with multiple of 1, but example Cities had populations in the millions (unless "peasants - Soc. Standing 9 or less - don't count ).

Stutterwarp -- Pretty much what I thought...just that the write-up earlier in the book covering the early research implied instantaneous travel (teleport-like) from the descriptions given. Still figuring out the mechanics covering stutterwarp being used as a "manuever drive." I also seem to understand for the longer travels, you have to go pretty much travel system by system rather than "jumping" into empty space followed by "jumping" into next system as you need a solar body to activate the drive if I recall rightly.

Errata -- Also as I figured...was just hoping a master listing was in the works to avoid redundancies that crop up in errata threads.

Is the ultimate supply catalog supplement also useable in 2300 or is the Frontier gear book being used in its stead?

 

[Captain Jonah]

The RAW (disregard the description):
A stutterwarp operates at three speeds: FTL, sub-FTL and orbital. FTL speed is the listed speed of the vessel in light years/day. Sub-FTL speeds are used when the vessel has passed the stutterwarp shelf and are arrived at by multiplying the listed speed (in LY/day) by 0.645 to get the speed in AU/day.
Orbital speeds are used after the ship has hit the Wall and are useful for little more than transfer orbits. Ships at orbital speed must subtract the world’s surface gravity from their warp efficiency rating and then multiply the new number by 10,000 to determine their speed in kilometres per hour.

Or to put it another way.

Say your courier has a Stutterwarp rating of 2. It therefore has an FTL speed of 2LY a day, so a 6LY trip takes three days. Sub FTL speed is the Stutterwarp rating times 0.645 or in this example 1.29 AU/Day. An AU is 150,000,000 km so our example ship would cover 193,500,000km per day. The orbital speed is a slow 10,000KM per hour.

So a run from one world with a 110,000,000km shelf to a world 5 LY away which has a 75,000,000km shelf takes a total time of (13.6 hours plus 2.5 days plus 9.3 hours = 82.9 hours or three and a half days). Shuffling around in orbit and any landings will add another few hours to this total.

Stutterwarp discharge time is roughly 30 hours.

The fastest ships take less time to make an FTL trip than it takes to discharge afterwards, every ship must spend between one and two days discharging inside a 0.1G gravity well which is what limits the travel times since no matter how fast your ship is you still need to cross the shelf and discharge.

Simples :wink:

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Reading the description of Stutterwarp travel made it sound instantaneous with travel time just a matter of how long it took to get to warp point and the time to get to destination. I understand how to calculate travel distance in light years, but now I see that each stutterwarpship has a maximum lightyear speed per day...ergo, if distance = 5.55 light years and speed is 1.85 ly/day, that would be 3 days in warp space then? Thus, the initial description is in error or very misleading if I am understanding things right.

Don't have that game. But depending on science and sci-fi used, the passengers inside the ship will barely age. But time on the planet they see ahead of them will appear to speed up as their ship zooms through the on-coming lightrays from the planet.

The crew see the planet as it looked years ago, at the beginning of their trip. When they arrive at the planet, they see it as it looks in the present.

 

[Captain Jonah]

Say you were 6 LY from earth and heading there with a Stutterwarp rating of 1.0

On the morning the trip starts you could pick up the broadcasts from Earth that were 6 years old having traveled at light speed to get to you. So you could eat breakfast watching Earth TV from 6 years ago.

Then the following morning the programs would be only five years old. The third day four years old.

Over the 6 day trip you could catch up on 6 entire years of your best soaps or series :lol:

You would be 6 days older and probably suffering from brain damage from 144 hours of daytime soaps :roll:

Say you were heading to somewhere that had been attacked and wiped out by the bugs. As you closed in you would be recieving broadcasts from years ago before the attack, then you could recieve news reports from the first attack to the last survivors no longer being able to broadcast. That should put you in the right frame of mind for a serious bug hunt.

 

[Iron Guardian]

Sounds like a bonanza for historians...can just sit there and record up to 7.7 light years worth of planetary history. Or soap-opera addicted aliens invading the planet demanding new episodes of cancelled series (shades of Futurama!! ).

Guess I will continue reading and see what else needs clarification, and figure out an efficient way of correcting errata (thanks for the link!!).

 

[GJD]

Stutterwarp -- Pretty much what I thought...just that the write-up earlier in the book covering the early research implied instantaneous travel (teleport-like) from the descriptions given. Still figuring out the mechanics covering stutterwarp being used as a "manuever drive." I also seem to understand for the longer travels, you have to go pretty much travel system by system rather than "jumping" into empty space followed by "jumping" into next system as you need a solar body to activate the drive if I recall rightly.

Stutterwarp works by lots and lots and lots of micro jumps, each a couple of hundred yards long, but many thousands or millions per second. It's not like traveller where you jump once and stay in jumpsapce, a stutterwarping ship is still in real-space for the majority of the travel time. Although each individual jump occupies a non-zero timescale, it is effectively instantaneous, and it's the very brief cycle time between jumps that slows the ship down.

If fluff terms there is theoretical upper limit on how quickly energy can cycle through the drive and command instructions be sent to the engines to shape the drive field and so on, that limits the cycle speed. Plus the age and type of drive (old commercial, new military and so on) determines the length of each jump. Newer, faster drives cycle quicker and have longer jumps, so result in a faster travel, older, slower drives have less cycles and shorter jumps. All of this is abstracted in the game rules, but it makes nice chrome for a campaign game.

It also means that there is no velocity change as a ship stutterwarps, so courses have to be plotted to bring ships in on a complimentary vector tor the destination world so that when they do drop out of stutterwarp the ship's vector isn't at orbital velocity of the planet just left but straight down towards the surface of the planet just arrived at...

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

Universe uses the stutterwarp. And crewmembers need a gravity web surgically installed so the G force does squoosh them. Psionic navigators, too.