Dear Folks –

I may be a little late to this iteration of the argument, sorry.  ;-)

Has anyone mentioned limiting thrusters by “gravitational drag” (or similar handwave)?

I always figured that if thrusters are magic-tech, it should be easy enough to “un-magic” them…

IF they work by dragging the ship along the star’s gravity well (like an ant crawling along the surface of the ol’ “rubber sheet” that’s dented by a bowling ball)

THEN no-one (read: no player) should object when you say, “Oh BTW, they max out at [some reasonable velocity I can live with as a DM]”.

Which could be 1% of lightspeed for a 1G drive, up to 6% of lightspeed for a 6G drive. (Craig Berry, are these numbers reasonable in comparison to your solution?)

…and we’re done.

END.

;-)  ;-)

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David "Hyphen" Jaques-Watson ..at.. Beowulf Down (Tavonni/Vilis/SM 1520)
http://www.tip.net.au/~davidjw                    davidjw@pcug.org.au
"I file things in historical order, with a hashing algorithm of gravity"