Monstro44122 said:
Wil Mireu said:
Monstro44122 said:
I think that actually covers all your questions, pretty much?
In spirit, yes, and the answer is very helpful. Unfortunately, I'm still a bit in the dark.
I'm planning an adventure where a prison ship has had a mutiny while passing a space station. The captain comes to a full stop so as to leave the ship hanging in space with red alert klaxons going. The characters come across the prison ship en route to the space station. So, how far away is the prison ship from the station? 1,000 km, 10,000 km, 1 million km? What's realistic? I mean space is pretty big, so if the distance is large enough, the two events are likely to seem unrelated. The characters might not even spot a red alert ship en route if the ship takes three days to come to a halt, right? Also, if the characters are headed for the station, can they stop to investigate this prison ship or are they hurtling along at such insurmountable speeds that stopping to investigate would be otherwise ridiculous? I'm trying to keep in line with the realism of the game, but physics is putting part A of the adventure one AU away from part B and I want them within a few km. I get the impression that I'm out of luck on this one, but then, it seems as though, if I'm out of luck, the whole genre of "stuff you encounter in space" goes out the door with it along with about a third of the Campaign Guide.
Am I missing something?
"Passing the space station" isn't really enough to go from. If you are looking for something along the lines of realism, we'd need further information. But try this:
Space stations tend to be somewhere for a reason. So more than likely it's orbiting something (an asteroid, a moon, a planet, a gas giant, etc, etc).
"Passing" it can mean all kinds of things, depending on the destination of the prison ship. Plus don't forget that everything in space is constantly in motion. So assuming the prison ship came to a stop relative to the space station, they will continue to drift apart as time goes on. How much this affects distance depends on exactly where your station is. If it's orbiting a far-distant object, chances are its orbital velocity will be quite slow. If it's closer in to the system's star, it will be much faster. If it's just out in the middle of nowhere, it will probably be in the slower range.
It's probably also safe to assume that any course changes/corrections would be input into the system within a matter of minutes, so the ship would automatically come to a halt as it took hours or days to decelerate.
The PC's ship will have it's own sensors going (probably both active and passive modes) while traveling in-system, so they'll have a bit of notice, though they may actually zip by and have to come back to the ship. But there's plenty of naughtiness you as the ref can do with their minds while that's happening.
Plus, ships are going to be squawking transponders all the time too. Depending on how well you want your system to be run, you could even say there are designated lanes for intra-system traffic, and that spread throughout the system are traffic satellites where ships file their flight plans and the satellites update planned traffic patterns based upon their transponders and transmissions. Perhaps you have a law stating that a ships transponder has to broadcast its position every 2hrs, and that signal is picked up by traffic satellites, compared to their flight plans and then rebroadcast to all local traffic so their computers can plot their paths and can alert their flight crews to any potential collisions, emergencies, etc. You could even have the traffic satellite broadcasting a possible alert for the vessel and the PC's ship is vectored to the position of the other ship to investigate as a possible emergency.
You are right, space is friggin vast. But so are the oceans, and the airways. Commercial traffic fly in corridors for a reason. Space traffic would be the same. Granted the corridors might be a bit more 3-D, but the concept remains the same. Because space is so big, if you want a chance of rescue, you are going to have to tell people where and when you are going, what path you are flying, and when you expect to get there. So 'stumbling' upon scheduled traffic is expected. Still, the unexpected will always happen at the worst times (yay! an adventure!), so just go with the flow. Who schedules a disaster?
. Because yeah, that's a pretty huge problem with Traveller (it's been covered in a thousand "near-c rocks" threads without any real resolution - theoretically there's nothing stopping you from attaching M-Drives to a small asteroid in the outer system and accelerate it to ridiculous speeds so that it hits a planet with enough force to obliterate a hemisphere). 
