CosmicGamer said:
I'm no science whiz. This is how I always thought of it, but I could be wrong.
Aerodynamics and/or constant thrust.
G force isn't everything. Some cars can produce more G-Force than some planes! If the world has an atmosphere and the ship has lift surfaces... Even if it is just a wedge body with no wings I think it produces some lift.
Speaking of cars, think of a very fast car hitting the top of a steep incline and going airborne before gravity brings it back down. Now think many, many times faster. It is 1G of constant thrust not maximum speed. Unless you have 1G of drag, I think you can use a really long "takeoff" with that constant 1G thrust building up more and more speed until you reach an escape velocity.
From what I've read this is the best answer. If force can be applied continuously you can move at any speed, no matter how slow, up. Eventually you reach a point far enough away from the center of the planet that even your low thrust is enough to overcome the gravity gradient.
The lifting body design would help, but from Classic Traveller, and all game systems for the Imperium setting since, the vast majority of ships do not have wings.
Overclocking or other ways to temporarily boost the thrust are, imo, lazy game design and lazy GMing. And it will come back and create problems. Why can't the ship do this burst of speed at other times? Where does that "extra" energy come from and can it be applied to something else? Why don't the villians chasing the players use that trick? To me it causes more problems than it solves.
Other ideas floated like not going to a heavy planet (like Terra itself) or not filling up the ship are huge GM headaches as well. Its in Imperium setting that such ships regularly visit 'heavy' worlds, and even if you're not using that setting, its in the rules. Mass isn't figured in Mongoose Traveller (but is to an extent in Classic and in GURPS) so you just can't "reduce the load" to get off the ground - the very mass of the ship is holding you back. Sure, you can handwave away the problem but again that is lazy GMing. Its sure to come up later, especially when the players are trying to outrun bad guys at some point and the GM says they have to stand and fight; the players are going to ask, rightly, why? Just say they get away - that handwave worked before, why not now?
I'm not saying you have to calculate everything out or have a degree in physics, but if you're playing a science fiction game in the first place you and your players probably want some degree of reality, or at least internal consistency. Its better to know how you think a ship lands and takes off before it becomes an issue.
So a ship can take off vertically, if it doesn't have wings, slowly, gaining speed as it climbs just because it has that much less gravity gradient to fight with each meter it climbs. It also makes a slow arch in the sky as the world rotates under it (if the world rotates). Its like the ship in the Empire Strikes Back, that huge ship taking off from Hoth after the empire invades, like a balloon being released.
For a more dramatic launch, say like the Millenium Falcon lifting off from Mos Eisley, ships have built in boosters, like attitude control jets. Since time is money to traders, and most other people, these jets would be commonly used. They have a physical fuel reserve, even if its just water converted to steam, so you know how and why it works. And thats important so when the players want to divert power to weapons later, they know they can't use the handwaved overclocking technique for the drives.
