Ships with mass?

[FallingPhoenix]

It seems to me that it would be relatively easy to give each ship component a mass number of some kind, then compare the total mass to the drive size on a table to get final acceleration.

This would allow for easier adaptation to more "hard" sci-fi settings and would also give a good way to prevent every ship in the world from having 9G acceleration without increasing the M-Drive volumes.

Are there difficulties to this that I'm missing? Because I'd love to have mass values for ship construction.

 

[Nerhesi]

It's one of those things from the "power that be" - I dont think construction will change. I definitely know that M-drive space % will not change and thats that. I've come to accept it because the paradigm is changing it seems..

You want greater than 9G, you pay it in flesh using rocket boosters

 

[FallingPhoenix]

It's one of those things from the "power that be" - I dont think construction will change. I definitely know that M-drive space % will not change and thats that. I've come to accept it because the paradigm is changing it seems..

You want greater than 9G, you pay it in flesh using rocket boosters

I thought it was just M-Drive volumes that were unchangeable, that's why I thought one of the benefits of having a mass to things could easily reduce the accelerations a bit without changing that.

It could also add an additional consideration when trying to max out armour...

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

This would allow for easier adaptation to more "hard" sci-fi settings and would also give a good way to prevent every ship in the world from having 9G acceleration without increasing the M-Drive volumes.

Traveller was never meant for "hard" sci-fi, whatever that is.

 

[Nerhesi]

It's one of those things from the "power that be" - I dont think construction will change. I definitely know that M-drive space % will not change and thats that. I've come to accept it because the paradigm is changing it seems..

You want greater than 9G, you pay it in flesh using rocket boosters

I thought it was just M-Drive volumes that were unchangeable, that's why I thought one of the benefits of having a mass to things could easily reduce the accelerations a bit without changing that.

It could also add an additional consideration when trying to max out armour...

You're correct in that it is the volume, but it is also the performance. We can't simply get around that by introducing other aspects that allow us to tailor it to what we would like to make sense.

Because if we did go to mass-based system, we would have to dump volumes anyways. No reason to complicate the system by having both volume and mass based components, and have them affect performance and so on

 

[Condottiere]

I always thought mass might be more important to stabilizing hyperspace transitions than volume.

 

[FallingPhoenix]

This would allow for easier adaptation to more "hard" sci-fi settings and would also give a good way to prevent every ship in the world from having 9G acceleration without increasing the M-Drive volumes.

Traveller was never meant for "hard" sci-fi, whatever that is.

If you can't define it, how can you say Traveller wasn't meant for it?

 

[FallingPhoenix]

Because if we did go to mass-based system, we would have to dump volumes anyways. No reason to complicate the system by having both volume and mass based components, and have them affect performance and so on

I agree with this, I was just under the impression that jump drives have been defined as working based on volume, so for settings like 3I, you'd have to keep the volume part. This might also be a "backwards compatibility" issue.

Volume also gives you a better size idea for making deckplans.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

If you can't define it, how can you say Traveller wasn't meant for it?

Marc Miller says that Traveller is not hard sci-fi. He said it 30+ years ago.

 

[FallingPhoenix]

If you can't define it, how can you say Traveller wasn't meant for it?

Marc Miller says that Traveller is not hard sci-fi. He said it 30+ years ago.

Well, right. If you're talking 3I, I totally agree that it's not hard sci-fi. But MGT says it is "intended to be used for any science fiction setting its players devise," so a small addition that doesn't seem to me to add much complexity, but allows for "hard" sci-fi, would be a good addition.

 

[Reynard]

MegaTraveller introduced and later edition followed up with adding mass to ship construction as well as realistic thrust, detailed power use and a few other micromanagement which added a feel of 'hard science'. In many ways, this is why a greatly appreciated Mongoose going back to classic K.I.S.S. construction rules.

 

[phavoc]

If you can't define it, how can you say Traveller wasn't meant for it?

Marc Miller says that Traveller is not hard sci-fi. He said it 30+ years ago.

Shawn, I'm very disappointed in you. You have completely trained the forum to expect your default response to be "it's up to the referee" or somesuch response. Does this mean you are going to start contributing to the discussions in a more meaningful way???

MegaTraveller and even some of TNE moved towards a more science-based rationalization of at least some of the aspects of the technology. GURPS also took on some areas and tried to better align things with real rather than pseudo-science.

If you look at parts of T5 (when you can do so without your eyes rolling back into your head) you can also see some attempts at providing more hard science into the background.

I would say Star Wars is far more space opera than Traveller. Traveller actually does try to put some science into the background, but often the attempts fail because there is too little effort, so it comes off as something that is often the worst of both worlds and just generates more questions than settles them.

 

[FallingPhoenix]

MegaTraveller introduced and later edition followed up with adding mass to ship construction as well as realistic thrust, detailed power use and a few other micromanagement which added a feel of 'hard science'. In many ways, this is why a greatly appreciated Mongoose going back to classic K.I.S.S. construction rules.

I do like the simplicity of the system. I just suggested tracking mass because it seems like it would add a lot to the game (from my perspective) without a lot of additional effort. You just give each part one additional number and then throw a table in at the end of the construction chapter (or wherever best fits) that gives correlates a range of mass with a size of M-Drive and you get an acceleration value. Even if it were relatively large ranges so that the table only divided up by whole G values, this would stay simple for those who liked simple (and those who wanted to could probably ignore mass completely and just do it the old way), and it would give a really good baseline if someone wanted to interpolate their own partial G-values.