On Fri, May 08, 2020 at 04:29:49PM -0700, Vareck Bostrom wrote:
>
> ============================================================
>
> I'm not sure why Traveller ships would ever be "in orbit", they can
> just station keep at any particular point but that leads to the
> question of why not just land to rendezvous with the air/raft. If
> the ships were in orbit then the air/raft would have to accelerate
> to the ~8 km/sec orbital velocity to meet the ship and would then be
> in orbit itself anyway.
This all depends on how anti-gravity works IYTU, (In Your Traveller
Universe). The particulars fall here: does the anti-gravity device
consume energy to keep the ship in position or not. If it consumes
energy the reason for using orbit is obvious. If it doesn't consume
energy, there are still reasons to use orbit assuming that the device
can fail or has an off switch. The list had a discussion about this in the
past. I think we were asking if ships with Contra-Grav would have
bother to have landing struts. At the end of the day, again, it
depends on the magic of anti grav.
Hmmm. If you just float on a-grav, I suppose you don't need to use the struts.
The case where, in any event, you'd need to use the struts is when you need to turn off the power source for the a-grav. That would mean you were not going to be able to hover (unless the Traveller ship build system has figured out how to do ether flyers, cloud skiffs, and liftwood gunboats...).
It's funny I never thought about that.
It's also funny that the scout courier, in MT terms, has a longitudinal deck layout (no big deal as such)... when in MT terms, it has to overdrive the 1G motor hard (5 min max) to hover horizontally. It can hover vertically with no issue, so one would think a vertical deck arrangement would be good (less stress on engines during landing). Of course, the downside is don't land anyplace with cyclonic winds or your vertical scout might well make an excellent sail....
>
> It's difficult to shake the feeling that the traveller setting
> really doesn't understand any of this, a ship is either in space or
> on the surface of a planet despite the vague attempt at vector
> movement rules at one point.
>
CT doesn't mention how anti-grav works in any detail and that was
probably the smartest move. Other versions of Traveller go into more
detail. The downside to this approach is that it opens the door to
smart-a** players to figure out which physics rules can be broken.
Well, in the absence of some answers, CT can be broken too.
Any game can be broken. I guess the question is 'where's the benefit?' - if you break the game, you may well see the game end. How is that a win?
It is interesting how aspects of the game have been expanded on, then that has been changed, sometimes without much explanation. Though removing drives as weapons was probably wise.
I took the "Do ships have landing struts" discussion to a friend who's
a Physics professor at the University of Buffalo. He understands
General Relativity and Quantum mechanics where I don't go much past
Newtonian physics and Special Relativity. There were a few relevant
themes in our conversation:
Quantum Mechanics:
You *could* be a fuzzy pink elephant. However, that being unlikely, you could only be said fuzzy pink elephant for an infinitesimal small time period. ;)
I've taken a lot of math (continuous and discrete) but I had a friend who has 4 degrees doing some 20 page 400-series physics work and about half the stuff on the page I couldn't even identify, let alone follow (never did Hamiltonian transforms and there were a lot of other operators I was unfamiliar with). That's some deep voodoo.
* According to current physics, anti-gravity is impossible so this
entire conversation is really moot;
But there are some problematic things with our current models, so we could well be wrong in some ways.
* But, good Science Fiction is a lot harder without anti-gravity
because you lose the *"shirtsleeve environment"* that we're all used
to;
- Most planets not practically habitable for humans (for a wide variety of reasons)
- Space too big to travel across system-to-system except at glacial speeds and even that would require great resources or breakthroughs in hibernation or digitalizing consciousness.
- Robots may well make better space explorers
- Space is the harshest environment we know and we're really not well suited to longer term ventures off our world
- We may never meet another sentient race, even if they exist (now, before, or after us) or even get to talk to them
- We all lose to entropy
- Spaceship fights are either a single joust or a long stern chase unless you have a major drive breakthrough
- Warp drives may be theoretically possible but no clue to how to engineer such a beast
- Worst of all: No lightsabers! (LoL)
* The side that argued that the energy consumption is zero is
technically correct since the energy cost is m*g*(delta-h) and
delta-h is zero;
* There's also merit to the argument that anti-grav uses energy. The
idea is that your landing strut assembly is storing energy like a
spring. E.g. your landing struts change shape as they support more
and more of the craft on the ground and you could actually measure
that change in shape as you loaded more and more mass into the cargo
hold of the ship.
That's curious.
At the end of the day I think that my friend said since it's
impossible, yet necessary, you handle it the way you want to. That's
your job as Referee right. But if you want to be a good story teller,
be consistent.
Ding!
There's a truth there. Writers spend a lot of time building massive, complex systems (trade, vehicle building, system building) and we *know* that the real math is really complicated. Nobody has even published a really good set of tools that was deemed official and complete and free or errata. We build these fraught systems, then we try to 'fix them' in many small ways, and each likely risking further problems elsewhere. One of the enemies of consistency is complexity. Another is changing narratives and understandings between rule versions. And then there is the 'let's throw in this cool thing that breaks previously established rules' <ahem-jump-ahem-torpedo-ahem>.
I think it doesn't matter, in a sense, what set of rules you use as long as:
a) You have a way to make the work doable without a lot of mistakes
b) That method leads to consistent outputs
c) And that you are happy with the flavour created by the output of your system
You were referring to a single aspect of the game (and indicating consistency is a good idea). That same policy really needs to extend more generally.
I do not go with the H.G. Wellsian Cavorite mechanism of anti-gravity
IMTU. I find it easier to be consistent in a universe where
anti-gravity motors consume fuel when they are working. Thus ships
at 200km above the surface of a size 8 world stay in orbit case the
power to their G drives go out.
I've never used, in play, black or white gloves, disintegrators, and the other 'magic tech'. I'm not even fond of grav belts and personal fusion guns. And psionics... fun, but about as real as the Force, real witch powers, or scientology's aliens. I like things things to have a feel of plausibility and comprehensibility. That veneer is part of the flavour of the game I'd like to play or GM.
I would add that the concept of ships hovering at low orbital heights
such that they are reachable by grav vehicles is valuable and a
potential way for a non-streamlined ship to offload cargo to the
surface on a world with no high-port facility.
Like all the real backwaters with type X starports.
This also provides a
solution to the "I can ride my air/raft to low orbit by the rules but
how do I get into my ship?" If you can remote control the ship then
move it to a parking place and just rendezvous with it by air/raft.
Yes, that seems sensible.
Finally, people don't have have much inertial mass so if you could get
to 150km above the Earth, you wouldn't need much energy or time to
reach orbital velocity.
--
Chris
__o "All I was trying to do was get home from work."
_`\<,_ -Rosa Parks
___(*)/_(*)_____________________________________________________________
Christopher Sean Hilton [chris/at/vindaloo/dot/com]
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