Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me... Later?

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tolcreator

Mongoose
Astronomers discover 3rd nearest star system to earth...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/11/nearby_stars_astronomers_discover_third_closest_star_system_to_earth.html

A binary brown dwarf system. So... just how many brown dwarf systems are out there? How dense are they? And... can you scoop fuel from them? If so, maybe they should be noted in traveller maps!

Apparently there are 3 classes of brown dwarf, L, T, and Y, all going off the end of the familiar OBAFGKM:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf#Classification_of_brown_dwarfs

It's a shame it's not LYT instead of LTY, or you could end the mnemonic with "You Tease".
 
In August, 2011, scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered six "Y dwarfs"—star-like bodies with temperatures as cool as the human body.
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Cricky.

I think some of them would be skimmable.
 
I wonder how violent their atmospheres are? The sun has all those coronal mass ejections, flares, magnetic fields out the wazoo, all to worry about before you ever get incinerated from the heat/crushed by the gravity.

Even if you can't skim from the star tho, it might have planets, and even if it doesn't it probably *does* have comets... comets you can mine for water/ices and set up a refueling station. With such low heat from the "star", you'll probably get water/methane comets orbiting quite close, instead of way out in the kuiper belt/oort cloud.
 
So... just how many brown dwarf systems are out there? How dense are they? And... can you scoop fuel from them? If so, maybe they should be noted in traveller maps!
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With the advantage of looking from multiple directions, and several centuries of sky-scanning, you'd expect brown dwarves to be pretty well catalogued inside imperial space.

In the fringes - like the trojan reach - less so, because even if their location is known to one party, it's not necessarily shared - and when empires fall, charts are lost. You can certainly refuel from them, and it makes knowing where they are very valuable - since they're a lot safer to use than a deep-space fuel dump as they're easier to find after an innaccurate jump.

I would imagine that old Sindal Star-Guard era maps showing co-ordinates for brown dwarfs in otherwise blank hexes are worth quite a bit of cash to the gentlemen of Theev....
 
Well, A Gas Giants atmosphere is incredibly dangerous, as well as a dangerously high Gravity to small objects like a ship trying to skim it.
Couple months ago, me and my brother looked at a probes orbit of Jupiter. The Probe travelling fast, small and just watched it get thrown around violently in to new orbits. Then I remembered about Traveller and fuel skimming and thought how is that even possible, after seeing a probe travelling faster then Jupiters own motion chuck this small thing that barely even came near it, all over the place. Knowing about gravity is one thing, seeing it in extremes and how it acts on a object like a probe will just want you to throw up.

Any way, going to my point. Skimming Gas Giants in Traveller is a relatively easily affair compared to the real universe. So, you may want to keep that in mind with Brown Dwarfs too. Think it would be easy to skim one, but have a couple more risks involved, like timing it right so you skim whilst it shouldn't give a X-ray Flare.
 
tolcreator said:
I wonder how violent their atmospheres are? The sun has all those coronal mass ejections, flares, magnetic fields out the wazoo, all to worry about before you ever get incinerated from the heat/crushed by the gravity.
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The Sun has all that because of the energy created by fusion. Brown's don't have that going on...
 
coldwar said:
Well, A Gas Giants atmosphere is incredibly dangerous, as well as a dangerously high Gravity to small objects like a ship trying to skim it.
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Saturn's gravity is only .91 G's...
 
coldwar said:
Well, A Gas Giants atmosphere is incredibly dangerous, as well as a dangerously high Gravity to small objects like a ship trying to skim it.
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A starships contra gravatic drive makes little things like that something the computer compensates for. Its the 100,000kph wind gusts inside the atmosphere that the pilot has to worry about.

As to Brown Dwarves. They are everywhere. One of the things in 2300 is that the three arms of space which were limited by the need of ships to discharge stutter warp drives are in fact not arms but wide open to expansion. The game had to ignore the brown dwarves everywhere and keep the old maps or expansion would be in a sphere not along three limited routes.

In traveller there are a vast number of stellar bodies not shown on the maps. They only highlight the main world in each hex, the density of objects in an area a parsec cubed is a bit higher than one :wink:
 
Captain Jonah said:
Its the 100,000kph wind gusts inside the atmosphere that the pilot has to worry about.
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Winds in Saturn's upper atmosphere can reach speeds of 1,800 kilometers (1,118 miles) per hour near its equator which is higher than winds on Jupiter. Where did you get the 100,000 kph figure from?
 
I think skimming something like Neptune or Uranus is preferable to a Saturn, Jupiter or Brown Dwarf if possible.
 
"After this exercise, the WISE team found that 33 brown dwarfs can be found within 26 light-years of sun. In the same volume, 211 bona fide stars live. There are therefore roughly six stars for every dwarf." http://www.space.com/16112-brown-dwarf-stars-sun-rare.html

So, roll a '1' on a die on your Traveller maps for every empty hex to see if there's a brown dwarf.

"Another debate is whether brown dwarfs are required to have experienced fusion at some point in their history. Some planets are known to orbit brown dwarfs: 2M1207b, MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb, and 2MASS J044144b. Brown dwarfs may have fully convective surfaces and interiors, with no chemical differentiation by depth." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf

These could be Wayjumps especially for lower jump ships if they are consitered skimable. Would change the face of how we see Mains in Traveller.
 
There are therefore roughly six stars for every dwarf
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So, roll a '1' on a die on your Traveller maps for every empty hex to see if there's a brown dwarf.
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That'd put in a dwarf for every three stars, more or less - if half the hexes have 'proper' systems and one in six have dwarf stars.

One other issue for the brown dwarf is locating it. Yes, a TL12 astronomical institute with a couple of years on its hands will find any local dwarves with no real trouble. Cletus and Jim-Bob on their Pop-1, butt-end-of-nowhere agri-world will not, and, if they're in a new area of the galaxy (for them) nor will the player characters on the half-busted S.S. Mortgage Deficit unless there's someone to sell them the co-ordinates.
 
Cletus and Jim-Bob aren't searching for stars, they're using astrogation data purchased from sources that did all the original work such as the TL 12 institute. One major duty of various scout services is discovering new systems and constantly updating known ones. Merchants, from large corporations to the mom and pop tramp freighter are too busy making money to be sun hunting. Much cheaper to buy the maps.

There's another phenomenon out in space that has interesting repercusions to space travel, rogue planets. Much harder to detect because they aren't radiating bodies. Even brown dwarfs put out if only miniscule infra-red signatures. Rogue planets would need detection by gravitic method which become more sophisticated and accurate at higher tech levels. These can be scientific curiosities or the base for pirates on the edge of a solar system.
 
Cletus and Jim-Bob aren't searching for stars, they're using astrogation data purchased from sources that did all the original work such as the TL 12 institute. One major duty of various scout services is discovering new systems and constantly updating known ones. Merchants, from large corporations to the mom and pop tramp freighter are too busy making money to be sun hunting. Much cheaper to buy the maps.
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Which is fine for Imperial Domains, but less so out in the sticks like the Trojan Reach, where the Scout service has no jurisdiction and may even get itself shot at if it pokes its nose into some regions - which means that some regions may not have had reliable surveys done.

There's another phenomenon out in space that has interesting repercusions to space travel, rogue planets. Much harder to detect because they aren't radiating bodies. Even brown dwarfs put out if only miniscule infra-red signatures. Rogue planets would need detection by gravitic method which become more sophisticated and accurate at higher tech levels. These can be scientific curiosities or the base for pirates on the edge of a solar system.
Cletus and Jim-Bob aren't searching for stars, they're using astrogation data purchased from sources that did all the original work such as the TL 12 institute. One major duty of various scout services is discovering new systems and constantly updating known ones. Merchants, from large corporations to the mom and pop tramp freighter are too busy making money to be sun hunting. Much cheaper to buy the maps.

There's another phenomenon out in space that has interesting repercusions to space travel, rogue planets. Much harder to detect because they aren't radiating bodies. Even brown dwarfs put out if only miniscule infra-red signatures. Rogue planets would need detection by gravitic method which become more sophisticated and accurate at higher tech levels. These can be scientific curiosities or the base for pirates on the edge of a solar system.
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And can be just as useful - if it's an icy world, the ice is probably one of water, methane or ammonia, all of which are efficient sources of H2 for jump fuel. Of course, the closer to a system you get, the less likely it is not to have been noticed, even by the illegal copy of TomTom System Mapper on the S.S. Mortgage Deficit.
 
And now we run up against the thousands of years of history of the OTU.

Given that the Trojan Reaches (to use locarno24's example) has had interstellar travel pretty much continuously for the last 2000-3000 years, it would be reasonable to suppose that every BD that exists within the sector has been cataloged.

The Aslan, with their thirst for land will certainly want to have every possible planet mapped and "owned" even if it orbits a burned out old Brown Dwarf.

Relating it to Pirates of Drinax - The Drinax archive probably has pretty comprehensive data on Brown Dwarfs.
 
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