10 hours is more like what I'd have thought. In MT, you could probably (unless the task was invariant in some way) be able to take a cautious approach, drop difficulty to Easy (3+) and just take 20 hours. Given MT's higher skill levels as a rule, Routine isn't all that dangerous and you aren't going to easily score an exceptional failure even at Routine. 

I'm curious what ocean refueling means... am I floating my ship? Or am I hovering on grav and just letting a big vacuum tube down?  Can I land on a nice sandy beach and suck from the lagoon? How about an inland freshwater lake? Or even (scandal) someone's remote reservoir? And there's not exactly much to say about the effects of taints, the odds of sucking up flaura, fauna or soils/bacteria, etc. 

It's funny.... we always had PC ships with scoops.... but I never ever recall anyone going someplace where they couldn't at least buy unrefined fuel. So this is all sort of new to me after all these years. 

Tom

On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 2:05 AM Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


On 11Oct2020 1403, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 10, 2020 at 8:41 PM Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com
> <mailto:xxxxxx@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     Also, MgT2, p.147 says it takes 1D hours and a Difficult Pilot
>     check to
>     do a gas-giant refuel. Thus the Companion isn't just making the task
>     more detailed, but also much harder and more dangerous.
>
>
> Wow... that's much faster than I recall. of course, that doesn't
> include processing time. Maybe I remember 'time to skim and process'
> vs. just the 'skim'. That may never have been quantified in CT.
>
> What does 1 hour mean?
> 1 hour from orbit?
> How high of an orbit?
> Is that impacted by thrust or do all ships skim at 1 G?
>
> That feels fast to me, but maybe it always was and I felt it was a
> 6-24 hour kind of process but now I doubt I ever saw a quantification
> of the skimming's timing.
The Azhanti High Lightning description (Supp. 5) gives the round trip
for a fuel shuttle as three hours. That would make sense for PC-size
ships as well, as the AHL's fuel shuttles are 400 DTons each. As with CT
in general, them doing this is assumed to be a routine operation, with
no rolls for failure. In an emergency the AHL can make a fuel skimming
run itself, and this does run the risk of damage to the ship, but the
odds of losing the ship are quite low, and generally the effect is the
loss of some fuel capacity until the ship is repaired.

MT Bk.3 says (p.88) that it's a Routine (hazardous) skill check (Pilot,
Navigation) to skim a gas giant, taking 10 hours on average. Refuelling
from an ocean is faster, safer, but no easier: Routine (Pilot, Sensor
Ops), averaging 5 hours, and this also risks the ire of local
authorities if they've decided you can't just slurp up all their water.

TNE says gas giant refuelling takes about 10 hours and is an average
piloting task (and average tasks in TNE are really easy unless you're
unskilled or have terrible skill+attribute), and failure merely means
you take longer. Catastrophic Failure (which will only happen if the
pilot is really terrible, or the Referee has decided the task is
unusually hard for some reason) means damage to the ship,. but the rules
don't say exactly what (up to the Referee, presumably). Ocean refuelling
is no harder and takes about 2 hours.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>

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