Ships Drives

[fusor]

And if, for the sake of your argument, we accept that at face value, it would nearly ensure that planets would prohibit starships from ever landing on a planet due to their inherent deadly capabilities from their maneuver drive. How do you justify hundreds of "doomsday" vehicles landing and taking off daily from the primary starport, let alone all the other spaceports a high tech industrialized planet is going to have?

Any mundane means of transport can be used as a weapon (as things like 9/11 and the recent Nice attack showed all too well). If you have measures in place to ensure that can't happen then the risk is minimised (pilot training/certification, security vetting, psych evaluation, drive limiters, the general assumption that the vast majority of people aren't maniacs, sensors on the lookout for rogue ships, etc).

Thing is, it almost certainly HAS happened in the OTU at some point in the past. Some terrorist group probably tried it once upon a time, and it either worked and caused massive devastation or it was foiled in time. Either way, there are probably measures in place to prevent it from ever happening again.

 

[theodis]

Thing is, it almost certainly HAS happened in the OTU at some point in the past. Some terrorist group probably tried it once upon a time, and it either worked and caused massive devastation or it was foiled in time. Either way, there are probably measures in place to prevent it from ever happening again.

Except, that you just can't stop a relativistic kill impactor. Not only is it upon you the moment you detect it, but even if you somehow could manage to detect it using an ultra-tech gizmo, you still would not be able to intercept it, since due to relativistic time dilation effects, the projectile would never be exactly where your sensors tell you it is.

 

[Reynard]

As to asteroids as a doomsday device, ladies and gents, let me direct you attention to GDW's 1980 ASTEROID. Your intrepid crew and Sasha the wonder dog must intercept and destroy a computer controlled mining asteroid before it reaches Earth. Yeah, they been there they done that.

Go on the idea anyone who has THAT kind of resources to equip any rock just to put it on a slow track collision course will not be attacking a world without resources to track and defend itself from such.

 

[phavoc]

Actually, he has a point here. The physics behind that fact are explained at great length on Winchell Chung's "Atomic Rocket" site http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php Just read under the topic "reactionless drives". There also was a large discussion on the Traveller Mailing List about 20 years ago. It basically boils down to this: Having no need for reaction mass, a reactionless drive - any reactionless drive - can accelerate forever, provided there is energy. So you just strap a thruster plate, some solar panels and an RTG on a rock, accelerate for a year or so at 1G (or 10 years at 0.1G - it really doesn't matter) and you have a relativistic kill impactor. That's a "Planet Cracker Done Real Cheap" and was/is a great concern among the old Traveller grognards and the more scientifically inclined SF authors.

I didn't get that from his statement. Ortillery-style weapons, or really anything dropped from orbit, isn't a new theory, and I woudln't think it would be considered an aspect of Traveller either. Why? Well, they've had how many thousands of years of space travel and nobody has been vaporizing biospheres with orbital attacks. Or at least if they did it I don't recall reading any materials talking about it.

Pinpoint strikes from orbit (aka ortillery) is established. Using starships and calling them doomsday weapons, however, is not.

I took away that reactionless drives are somehow doomsday weapons, not that you use the starship itself as a weapon. If it happened, or even if accidents happened and wiped out tens or hundreds of millions, only shuttleports would be allowed on planet and starships would have to dock in orbit at highports, or wait for transport. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it happening? I would say no, aside from the rare accident or incident.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

That’s my point. Right there. It becomes a war of imagination between the GM and the Players,

We call it storytelling, and it is absolutely the ref's job. The specifics of an M-drive is well within the ref's management - we are certainly not going to give a specific, scientifically-grounded explanation for them. That really would be counter to the game.

Guys, after having read through this thread, I am still not exactly clear why an argument has erupted over this, but please take it down a notch.

Storytelling is the GM’s job; coming up with playable numbers is the Game Developer’s job. It’s the Game Developer’s job to parameterize everything the players interact with. You do it for Guns, you do it for Swords, you do it for Armor, you do it for Comms, you do it for Computers... but when it comes to the bits and bobs of Science Fiction Engineering, you wave your hands in the air, and complain, “Let the GM sort it out!”. You have to make the bits and pieces Engineer PCs play with just as specified and constrained as a Sniper Rifle; but they’re not.

 

[Reynard]

"Any good starship is also necessarily a good Faraday Cage (to keep out dangerously powerful natural and artificial RF sources), which should outright prevent anyone on a vessel from being killed that way."

So, the way these conversations have been going here, Larry Niven must now recall all his works for their reality inaccuracies and apologize? With this revelation, his book sales will plummet as readers have now been reminded he can't write a science fiction without making things up and purposely disregarding real science. He'll never get new, hip, science savvy readers and his book career is dead. We'll have to take Arthur C. Clarke and a few others down too.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Reaction Drives could work, if you had enough fuel.

Yes, but you literally can’t have enough fuel. You’re forgetting about the Rocket Equation.

 

[fusor]

Except, that you just can't stop a relativistic kill impactor. Not only is it upon you the moment you detect it, but even if you somehow could manage to detect it using an ultra-tech gizmo, you still would not be able to intercept it, since due to relativistic time dilation effects, the projectile would never be exactly where your sensors tell you it is.

True, you'd probably have to know about it beforehand, but it's quite possible to intercept things going below 100 or 1000 km/s. It's not terribly practical to have it going so fast that time dilation is kicking in (which practically is above 95% of lightspeed - you'd have to launch from a totally different system lightyears away to do that!). And also time dilation doesn't work like that anyway - you'd still know where it is, there's no 'uncertainty principle' going on there.

You'd want to detect it before it got to its maximum velocity anyway though (that's the other thing, for most uses going a few thousand km/s is more than ample to cause massive damage, you wouldn't want to go at relativistic velocities unless you wanted to cause some planetary-scale damage).

 

[Reynard]

"I took away that reactionless drives are somehow doomsday weapons"

There was a scifi anthology that had a story featuring humanity finally inventing a working FTL drive. Pomp and circumstance and the ship is off to a new world. Soon they turn around and head home with all they discovered only... the solar system is decimated. Seems the drive causes stars to go nova.

 

[fusor]

Storytelling is the GM’s job; coming up with playable numbers is the Game Developer’s job. It’s the Game Developer’s job to parameterize everything the players interact with. You do it for Guns, you do it for Swords, you do it for Armor, you do it for Comms, you do it for Computers... but when it comes to the bits and bobs of Science Fiction Engineering, you wave your hands in the air, and complain, “Let the GM sort it out!”. You have to make the bits and pieces Engineer PCs play with just as specified and constrained as a Sniper Rifle; but they’re not.

No game has ever "parameterised" things to the extent that you want to see. You want detailed technological breakdowns of how everything works so that if PCs are ever in the situation where they have to fix something or take something apart they know exactly what and where everything goes or should go, and that's utterly ridiculous.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

As to asteroids as a doomsday device, ladies and gents, let me direct you attention to GDW's 1980 ASTEROID. Your intrepid crew and Sasha the wonder dog must intercept and destroy a computer controlled mining asteroid before it reaches Earth. Yeah, they been there they done that.

Go on the idea anyone who has THAT kind of resources to equip any rock just to put it on a slow track collision course will not be attacking a world without resources to track and defend itself from such.

Actually, there are very good arguments against strapping motors to rocks for the sake of making kinetic kill devices: Rocks are NOT “free”, Citizen!

 

[fusor]

There was a scifi anthology that had a story featuring humanity finally inventing a working FTL drive. Pomp and circumstance and the ship is off to a new world. Soon they turn around and head home with all they discovered only... the solar system is decimated. Seems the drive causes stars to go nova.

Oo, I remember that one. Was it an Arthur C Clarke story? Asimov? Niven? Can't recall who exactly. They got to Alpha Centauri then realised that the star was suddenly going unstable for no reason, got out of range just in time, and on the way home (using STL) they realised that using the drive destabilises stars. It had one of the most chilling last lines I've read in a story - they looked ahead at Sol and watched it flare brightly as they caught up with the light travelling out from their departure.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Actually, he has a point here. The physics behind that fact are explained at great length on Winchell Chung's "Atomic Rocket" site http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php Just read under the topic "reactionless drives". There also was a large discussion on the Traveller Mailing List about 20 years ago. It basically boils down to this: Having no need for reaction mass, a reactionless drive - any reactionless drive - can accelerate forever, provided there is energy. So you just strap a thruster plate, some solar panels and an RTG on a rock, accelerate for a year or so at 1G (or 10 years at 0.1G - it really doesn't matter) and you have a relativistic kill impactor. That's a "Planet Cracker Done Real Cheap" and was/is a great concern among the old Traveller grognards and the more scientifically inclined SF authors.

I didn't get that from his statement.

Well, I was being curt. This was, in fact, my point.

Ortillery-style weapons, or really anything dropped from orbit, isn't a new theory, and I woudln't think it would be considered an aspect of Traveller either. Why? Well, they've had how many thousands of years of space travel and nobody has been vaporizing biospheres with orbital attacks. Or at least if they did it I don't recall reading any materials talking about it.

You can’t use badly written fiction to justify other parts of badly written fiction. Instead, you can write good fiction that doesn’t need justification. The solution to this problem is to constrain the performance of Reactionless Drives somehow so that they simply can’t perform at all well particularly close to C.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

I have to admit some fuzziness on this point because ship's combat not getting into delta v's of ships and the near impossibility of getting a matching velocity so you could fight.

A Traveller Ship’s delta-v is its acceleration in “g”s times the rate of fuel consumption by the Power Plant times the available fuel. Give it enough solar panels to power the Maneuver Drive a little, and its delta-v is infinite.

 

[theodis]

And also time dilation doesn't work like that anyway - you'd still know where it is, there's no 'uncertainty principle' going on there.

Sorry, my mind went elsewhere - long day. I meant lightspeed lag. Your passive sensors would tell you a tiny instant before impact that something is going on, your active sensors wouldn't do much better if the projectile is moving nearly as fast as the fastest signal. You could use an X-boat though, stationed in a monitor system one or two parsecs in front of mainworld to warn them that something fast is coming their way. As for intercepting - well, a laser moves at c, fire control taken into account - slightly slower. Too slow for a RKI meaning business.
But, as was pointed out. It never happened since the Vilani discovered jump drive in -9235, so it clearly isn't an issue in canonic Traveller.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

But this strand of argument really is a huge can of worms that has been argued over many times before without resolution.

And it’s the Game Developer’s job to prevent games from having “cans of worms” like this. And it’s not like Mongoose can plead ignorance, either, because the problem is ages old.

 

[Reynard]

"Oo, I remember that one. Was it an Arthur C Clarke story? Asimov? Niven?"

Now you're piquing my memory. It was destabilization. Not sure the author but it was in one of those collected anthologies from the Science Fiction Book Club. It still haunts me as I imagine being on that crew.

"Rocks are NOT “free”, Citizen!"

Oh the rocks are free but building a weapon isn't, as the ship design rules prove. Somehow spending a fortune to build a shipyard of some sort to strap a rocket to it seems the work of a retro mastermind with a personal grudge or the incredible rock chucking of Arachnids from Starship Troopers.

 

[fusor]

You can’t use badly written fiction to justify other parts of badly written fiction. Instead, you can write good fiction that doesn’t need justification. The solution to this problem is to constrain the performance of Reactionless Drives somehow so that they simply can’t perform at all well particularly close to C.

They don't need to get anywhere near close to C to cause the ship into a devastating kinetic-kill weapon. Lightspeed is 300,000 km/s - a ship going at 1000 km/s is going to cause ridiculous damage (even an airburst if it breaks up in the atmosphere would wipe out a large area at those velocties at the very least).

 

[theodis]

And it’s the Game Developer’s job to prevent games from having “cans of worms” like this. And it’s not like Mongoose can plead ignorance, either, because the problem is ages old.

Yes, but it's not like Mongoose had a saying in this matter. Traveller canon belongs to Marc Miller and he has to agree on any large changes to the setting.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

"Any good starship is also necessarily a good Faraday Cage (to keep out dangerously powerful natural and artificial RF sources), which should outright prevent anyone on a vessel from being killed that way."

So, the way these conversations have been going here, Larry Niven must now recall all his works for their reality inaccuracies and apologize? With this revelation, his book sales will plummet as readers have now been reminded he can't write a science fiction without making things up and purposely disregarding real science. He'll never get new, hip, science savvy readers and his book career is dead. We'll have to take Arthur C. Clarke and a few others down too.

A reader isn’t told by Larry Niven to survive in his universe. It’s the pre-written, fore-ordained trials and tribulations of the characters in the book that make it entertaining.

Tabletop RPG isn’t the same thing as works of fiction. Players and GMs have to depend on the information given to them, and have to form plans based on that information. That’s not something a member of a work of fiction’s audience has to do! Because the role of information is different between the two mediums, fiction authors can get away with a lot of crap that Tabletop RPG authors simply can’t. Information in a Tabletop RPG has to be actionable, because, at the spur of the moment, a player may come up with a clever plan, one that the GM was not expecting, and when the GM, desperate for some plausible constraints for that plan, turns to the book, all he currently gets is flowery language. If, instead, that technology was given some practical constraints to begin with, the GM and the player would at least have some common ground with which to put that plan into action. Instead, just like the Game Developer threw their hands into the air, the GM does.