Drive Train for Starships

[Polaris]

Gentlemen,

A situation came up in our last T-20 game which we were unable to resolve well. Thus I am asking for your collective wisdom (esp from Hunter et al.).

During combat, my Chief Engineer tried to overpower the manuever drives (page 163 IIRC) in order to make the ship more agile in the face of a missile attack. The rules say that the ship then gets the maximum possible agility based on the Drive-Train of the ship. [I am paraphrasing but I think that is fairly close.]

Question: What is the drive-train of a starship? NO ONE (including the GM) would find rules for that (or the maximum agility for a starship....in our case a standard Far Trader) anywhere. Your help on this would be greatly appreciated before we have to meet again.

-Polaris

 

[Tom Schoene]

The language is "the vessel's drive train or maneuver drive" For spacecraft, use maneuver drive; drive train would apply only to smaller vehicles.

That means agility can never exceed the ship's maximum acceleration. For a Far Trader, which has a max acceleration of 2g, max agility is also 2.

 

[Polaris]

Tom,

Thanks a lot. That wasn't clear (at least that 2-G meant that you added two to the agility) until just now.

-Polaris

 

[vegascat]

Consider agility as power taken from the manuver drives used to turn and twist the ship by directing the thrust other than straight to the rear. The pilots piloting skill can decrease the amount of thrust taken from driving the ship ahead. A pilot on a 2G scout with a skill of 0 would be able to use an agility of 2, but not be able to affect the path of the ship. A pilot with a skill of 2 on that ship would be able to use an agility of 2 and change direction by 2 G. On a 6G ship, the pilot should have at least a skill of 6.

 

[Polaris]

Vegascat,

That I was aware of, but in our case we have a real hot-shot of a pilot (so it wasn't a problem). Our engineer (my character), however, overloaded the maneuver drives to try to dodge incomming missiles (since Far Traders don't have anything in the way of armor or shields) and we were not able to figure out how much agility we should add.

The answer, of course, turns out to be 2, and I appreciate all of you clearing that up for us.

-Polaris