Origin of Sentience for jump space
- Thread starter Vormaerin
- Start date
Geir
Emperor Mongoose
Yeah, I think we're all fairly certain it crept in after CT, and given vampire ships, after TNE almost for sure (unless 'fully sentient, aka conscious intelligence negates the restriction). It could be an obscure reference in some odd adventure. Given the lack of m-drive, 'pilot' seems like an essentially unnecessary skill or position.
Yatima
Cosmic Mongoose
I think most importantly, wherever it crept in, it is a transplant from Niven that makes no sense at all given the accepted model for how J-Space works in Traveller. Unless you're choosing some alternate tech for your own campaign, of course.
This is something I'll just ignore as out of step with the rest of the line.
J
This is something I'll just ignore as out of step with the rest of the line.
J
alex_greene
Guest
Put it in the category where we recently put the 1000D M-Drive limit.
Arkathan
Emperor Mongoose
That absolutely NEVER made any sense to me. A gravity well that can keep planetoids and planetesimals in orbit more than a light year out, but you can't use your M-Drive on a jaunt to Pluto. No. Just. No.
Sigtrygg
Emperor Mongoose
It already made it to the file...
to which i will add that I could see this being used in many a bespoke ATU, but it has no place in the OTU Third Imperium as defined by existing canon.
PsiTraveller
Cosmic Mongoose
I seem to remember reading something psionic related that mentioned the need for brains for Jump travel. Future tech research combining the two leads to Jump distance being increased. 36 hexes max rings a bell. But I am currently looking through my books and cannot find that passage.
alex_greene
Guest
... I bet it most recently started with Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.
You had to have a sentient pilot to stand in the studio holding on to the prop platform while staring as the blank screen and pretending there's a bunch of pretty pretty lights showing like you're on drugs or something. Plus one of you's purple, and one of you is the odious Kevin Sorbo.
And there was a guy who was totally Jason Momoa before Jason Momoa, and he never leveraged that into a lifetime of hair product endorsements and the lead role in Aquaman.
But yeah, you had to be sentient to pilot FTL in Andromeda. Or play the role of someone who is.
You had to have a sentient pilot to stand in the studio holding on to the prop platform while staring as the blank screen and pretending there's a bunch of pretty pretty lights showing like you're on drugs or something. Plus one of you's purple, and one of you is the odious Kevin Sorbo.
And there was a guy who was totally Jason Momoa before Jason Momoa, and he never leveraged that into a lifetime of hair product endorsements and the lead role in Aquaman.
But yeah, you had to be sentient to pilot FTL in Andromeda. Or play the role of someone who is.
I saw the rule in a Challenge magazine a couple days ago (I bought the pdfs). It states that the issue is solved by TL 11.
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
That's the difference between agrav and "thruster plates" ≈ M-drive in MT; agrav is limited, thruster plates available at TL-11 are not.
MT RM, p65:
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This is the quote from T5:
"The Imperial express boat system carries government, business, and personal messages across the empire with high efficency and relatively low cost. Links in the route are 2-, 3-, 4-, and occasionally 5-parsecs. Pilot/astrogators are selected primarily for their astrogation skill: to guarantee
successful jumps every time."
CordwainerFish
Emperor Mongoose
Huh - guess I need to relearn how to parse XML and find those 5 hex links.
T5 also has an amusing anecdote about a crew that finds an experimental hop drive and installs it on their ship. Which proves amusing because it is almost impossible to make the Astrogation check (14+ in Mongoose Traveller, probably worse in T5. Roll 11d6 under your Target Number, which'll be somewhere between 15 and 25 depending on your competence) and an experimental TL16 Hop Drive doesn't have a Jump Governor. So it always jumps 10 parsecs unless you can make an astrogation check to successfully hit an intervening sun or planet to drop you out of jumpspace early.
CordwainerFish
Emperor Mongoose
I wouldn't be shocked, because the published Xboat routes in general don't make a lot of sense. There are worlds in sensitive locations, both on the Xboat network and within four parsecs of each other, that are ten vertices away from each other. Worse, the network itself is not connected - there are at least two sections that do not join with the main grid.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
If it weren't for the hundred tonne minimum, we could make seventy tonnes work in Mongoose.