Problematic canonish technology

[alex_greene]

It's too drastic a reduction, forget commercial implications, regardless of costs, starwarships are going to penetrate very deeply into the hinterland, and wipe the floor with the monitors.

That's an old argument, done to death.
The answer is "So? They can do that anyway by setting up relay chains of cache stations in empty hexes adjacent to systems with gas giants, and keeping them supplied with regular supply runs from fleets of Jump-capable tankers."

 

[Vormaerin]

I am sure there are any number of interesting and viable alternative FTL drives you can house rule in if you prefer them. There are several already built for Traveller derived rules, for that matter.

 

[Condottiere]

It's a question of time and effort.

Star Trek's warp drive is effortless; setting up relays of tankers through a subsector of space is not, and subject to discovery.

 

[alex_greene]

It's a question of time and effort.

Star Trek's warp drive is effortless; setting up relays of tankers through a subsector of space is not, and subject to discovery.

Just like every supply chain in a time of war.
Which is why we have ship types such as Escorts.

 

[Condottiere]

You basically have the Vargr raiding the Capitol.

 

[alex_greene]

You basically have the Vargr raiding the Capitol.

Another tired argument, done to death.
I've learned one thing about Traveller - unless the Referee decides to make it the theme of a scenario, it doesn't happen. And if it doesn't involve the Travellers in the centre of it all, it doesn't happen, because why do you think we get bored by Grandfather's Monologue so easily?

 

[k0k0pelli]

I can see concerns about TL16 drives in that it is reasonable that organizations can start to use them as prototypes and such but I am not sure I see the reason for so much concern from a military standpoint. A military will not build an entire fleet using prototype drives, you have maintenance, reliability, logistics to worry about.

TL17+ I generally consider "science fiction" inside the Traveler universe. Sure they may understand the theory but it is still a long way from being put forth in a practical application. Hop/Hyper/skip drives are TL17+. When they come out it will cause a monumental and likely rapid shift in economics and warfare but this is not a state likely to happen within the time of a campaign in the Traveler universe.

I suspect that once one of these techs, especially hyperdrive, is made commercially feasible it will be like the invention of the airplane. We went from the first flight to refined aircraft carriers (F4U) in under 40 years. It was an extremely rapid period of advancement and change and rippled around the world. The invention of an advanced drive would likely be rapidly copied by other forces in the universe either through research, reverse engineering, or espionage. That would maintain the balance of power such as it is.

Collectors honestly would not make a big difference militarily. You could move more ships and such but the week without any m-drive maneuvering to recharge has a significant effect on flexibility and logistics. There are uses but it would not have a huge military impact where battleriders are the main strategy. From a commercial standpoint it opens more practical long range trading but would not impact the viability of the traditional J1, J2 traders. The savings in space for J1-2 is not enough to offset the slower trading cycle (3 weeks vs 2 per jump). J4+ it would have an impact commercially I think but mostly at J6.

Energy shields in their current implementation are probably broken, it should account for mass.

 

[Condottiere]

Specific to the Lyman Drive, which subverts fuel requirements, it's introduced below technological level sixteen.

It's a different game if you use it as presented in the article.

 

[Vormaerin]

Collectors aren't really a military tech, but they would substantially alter the commercial situation. The fact that high jump ships are not viable commercially at the moment is a pretty significant fact about the way the setting works. I'm not sure why you think that collectors would slow down jump rate that significantly. It takes a week to charge them up and not in an atmosphere.

But big freighters aren't normally landing on planets or docking inside space stations anyway. You would jump to the 100D wall, dock at starport, do your week's activities, and off you go.

For a 2000t freightliner, you'd be reducing J2 fuel space from 400t to 40t. So that's +160k per jump in cargo revenue. And it is -200k in fuel costs per jump (or -40k if you have your own refinery on board that can process unrefined fuel fast enough to not slow you down (so at least a 4 ton processor for this size ship, allowing you to process all the fuel in 5 days). That's pretty significant, imho. Add in the fact that Jump 4+ freighters become profitable, and you've got a quite different situation than you have currently. It might actually make CT's per jump shipping costs make sense! It would make downports less important for actual ships. You'd have a lot more highport action and they would have mainly external docking ports.

Collectors make exploration and long distances more viable, too. Not only are higher jump ships practical, but you can refuel in deep space. So all you need is power plant fuel (or batteries) and you can cross any rift with even low jump ships (albeit slowly).

Is any of that bad? Not particularly. But there's zero chance that collectors would be a curiosity if they were a known tech. They wouldn't completely replace traditional jump fuel in commercial and private shipping, but they would likely be the dominant form of fuel source.

You'd basically only use traditional jump fuel if you needed to be able to jump more than twice a month or intended to spend most of your real space time on a planet. Maybe a few other edge cases.

The biggest limit on its application is that it is Tech 14 and a lot of commercial ships are currently built at tech 10 to 12.

 

[Geir]

Another thing with Collectors, if I remember right from T5, is that they're only good for about 100 jumps (charges?)... of course when I went back to look, I can't find the reference... maybe I hallucinated it.

 

[alex_greene]

You could move more ships and such but the week without any m-drive maneuvering to recharge has a significant effect on flexibility and logistics.

No more so than a ship having to sit in a starport berth for a week to do trade, etc.

 

[Geir]

Another thing with Collectors, if I remember right from T5, is that they're only good for about 100 jumps (charges?)... of course when I went back to look, I can't find the reference... maybe I hallucinated it.

Ahaha, not hallucinating this time... (keeping in mind that T5 is a different ruleset). T5.10 book 2 p.189-190:
Canopy Degradation. A canopy degrades with use and
rapidly degrades when abused. A canopy functions normally
until it has cycled through 100 charges. Thereafter each
charge cycle after 100 takes an additional day. The 150th
charge cycle lasts (7+ (150 -100) =) 57 days.
A deployed canopy subject to acceleration receives
the equivalent effect of ten charges. A canopy is capable of
charging without regard to proximity of stars or worlds.

 

[k0k0pelli]

No more so than a ship having to sit in a starport berth for a week to do trade, etc.

Significantly more. While in dock you are not charging, while flying to dock you are not charging. Crew takes shore leave, cargo needs to be unloaded, the broker needs to find the next load, etc...

You might be able to cut the travel and dock time to 3-4 days but not below that IMHO unless you use an AI crew.

EDIT:
IMHO if a commercial ship could cut their dock time to below a week they would already have done so. Time is money. I do agree it has a significant impact on longer range commercial traffic however and said as much.

 

[k0k0pelli]

No more so than a ship having to sit in a starport berth for a week to do trade, etc.

Also of note that particular line about the charging period having a significant impact on logistics was meant to be about military use, though I suppose it has applicability to commercial. Technology that requires a military ship to go without maneuverability for prolonged periods would be a significant detriment in a war is what I was thinking about.

 

[k0k0pelli]

I'm not sure why you think that collectors would slow down jump rate that significantly. It takes a week to charge them up and not in an atmosphere.

But big freighters aren't normally landing on planets or docking inside space stations anyway. You would jump to the 100D wall, dock at starport, do your week's activities, and off you go.

`It takes a week of normal space travel to fully charge an accumulator and accumulators do not work in jump space, in an atmosphere or on a ship expending thrust.`

I suppose it is a distinction in my interpretation there. I do not see dock time as normal space travel. logically you are not deploying accumulators in dock.

EDIT: Jump 2 freighters will have over 50% cargo generally. adding an extra 18% is nice but not huge. A jump 2 collector costs a MCR per 100 tons of ship. So that 2000 ton J2 freighter would be 20MCR more expensive on a ~800MCR ship. This is not an insignificant amount of additional cost to be paid for. J6 is really where collectors shine and there it has a significant impact, but I am still not convinced it would have a significant impact on conventional bulk cargo and small traders, which is generally J1 with a much smaller contingent of J2.

 

[Vormaerin]

They are J1 and J2 because that's all that is even remotely profitable without subsidies because of the space dedicated to fuel. Given that population of most planets in the Third Imperium setting is pretty low, being able to skip all those C & D starports with a few tens of thousands inhabitants or less would thrill the large carriers. They would all be high jump ships skipping from Pop 8+ world to Pop 8+ world if they could. That's how it works in the real world. Frankly, that might explain why there are so many crappy ports along mains. Because mains wouldn't really be a thing.

MCr20 would add about Cr80k to the monthly mortgage of a ship. In return, you are getting about 155 tons of additional cargo at Cr1k each for each jump (so 2/month). And saving on fuel costs. That's a no brainer for any shipping corporation. It gets a bit sketchier on scamp free traders. You are only saving about 13 tons and the cost of 20 tons of unrefined fuel. That's probably not worth it since one of the free trader's few advantages is landing on ass end of nowhere planets with crappy downports as their only trade support. But, while those free traders loom large for PCs, they are not going to be what carries most trade.

Regarding using it in "dock", they would absolutely design starports to have docking arrangements that allow collectors to be deployed, even if that meant big sea urchin designs. Though without actual data, the optimum design isn't clear.

Collectors absolutely are not viable for military. As I said, if you need to be able to jump more than 2/month as an important feature, you can't use collectors.

 

[john_q_traveller]

I don't hate any of these technologies. I hate dropping technologies into a setting and then not having them affect anything. If shields are a thing that are effective, there should be shields in use in the materials. If you can burn off all the fuel before jumping so that the fuel's former volume doesn't affect your drive requirements (aka drop tanks) then that should be radically altering ship designs and travel behaviors.

In this regard Traveller, or at least MgT and the Third Imperium are well and thoroughly broken. Character creation alone means that there are not enough able bodied sapients that survive long enough (and avoid prison long enough) to become experienced professionals for the economy to function. Spending 20 years in a career without being able to advance any skill beyond level 4, but being able to go from four to five in less than a year (assuming you make the EDU roll) post-career makes as much sense as having to completely restart training a skill if an EDU roll is missed. My opinion on missiles in a setting with high-powered lasers is discussed at length in another thread, the use of cargo cranes in ships that can control gravity is amusing, literally everything to do with computers makes no sense after about TL 6, economies of scale are practically non-existent, the progression of arms and armor is completely unrealistic, damage scaling in general is so broken I can't even, and what happens to the hydrogen during jump may well be one of the greatest mysteries of the Traveller universe.

I could go on about the inconsistencies of the setting with the available technologies for days. MgT, more than any other system or setting I have ever enountered, relies on the liberal application of handwavium. The group I play with and I still enjoy it though (granted, with lots of house rules). Maybe that's because for me, "canon" in the context of an RPG is a very loose notion. I view any RPG system / setting as a starting point for a system and setting that works for the group using it and the story they are telling.

 

[alex_greene]

Research ships would love collector tech, batteries, solar panels. Same goes for picket ships.
There's more kinds of ships than military / police / criminal ships, you know.

 

[alex_greene]

I was imagining large ships coming into a system, finding a nice empty spot in the habitable zone a million kilometres from any world, staying there for a week, two weeks, charging up as the ship's fleet of auxiliary ships shuttle back and forth with the homeworld, trading, setting up a circus, whatever, then Jumping out as soon as business is concluded and the last sublight craft are back tucked into their hangars.

 

[Vormaerin]

In this regard Traveller, or at least MgT and the Third Imperium are well and thoroughly broken. Character creation alone means that there are not enough able bodied sapients that survive long enough (and avoid prison long enough) to become experienced professionals for the economy to function. Spending 20 years in a career without being able to advance any skill beyond level 4, but being able to go from four to five in less than a year (assuming you make the EDU roll) post-career makes as much sense as having to completely restart training a skill if an EDU roll is missed.

Character creation for player characters is designed to create characters suitable for adventuring. It is not at all intended to be an accurate reflection of how a normal career would go. Games do this all the time. Making every village priest into a cleric in D&D is the same thing. Similarly, all xp systems are massively accelerated in pretty much every game in existence. As well as completely divorced from any actual learning method humans use.

Missiles and lasers together are a pretty standard sci fi trope. No more or less stupid than the whole WW2 in space design that is so widespread across all sci fi media. People like space fighters even if they are ridiculously unlikely to be a thing.

There's certainly a lot of stuff that, in the absence of any actual information on how it works, leaves a lot of questions. Worse than any other system? I doubt it, save maybe that it is more detailed than most. If you just do space fantasy and don't even try to explain what's going on, its certainly less likely to cause questions to arise.