Evacuating during a jump

[parmasson]

I am sure it has come up before but I have a question that needs some input . . .
Two characters want to escape from the ship of the bad guy. The ship carries a 20tn ship's boat and the characters have a way of opening the bay doors. What happens to the ship's boat and its passengers once they exit the ship? Do they simply return to n-space, are they pulverized into a fine red mist spread over 470,000km or do they get "stuck", not able to exit the ship because of the jump bubble? What if they were in vacc suits? I read the article by Graeme Batho and on the surface it looks like the non-starship would be ripped to shreds. Any ideas?

 

[far-trader]

Welcome aboard parmasson

The general understanding (i.e. the characters would know if they have any experience with starships) is that both ships would probably be utterly destroyed as soon as the boat breached the protective barrier (about 1m from the ship's hull) while in jump space. There might be a chance the ship itself would survive but it would be badly damaged in that area (jump space penetrating inside the hull), likely misjump, and damage the jump drive. If they (had) attempted to escape just as the ship was jumping they would probably be ok in the boat and the ship would have a chance of misjumping as if it were using a drop tank. Looks like they need another escape plan

 

[aramis]

IMTU, based upon DGP's SSOM, the opening of the hatch for an internal one would basically open more than a 3m hole in the grid, and jumpspace will intrude if it can do so without being less than 1.5m from a lanthanum grid line, more specifically, one that was charged during jumping.

An exterior one, however, would either:
1: have grapples with the needed hull grid
or
2: have the needed hull grid.

(the standard assumption IMTU is that such small craft hulls do in fact carry such a grid as standard equipment, but one might not want to trust it to work...)

In case 1, opening the grapples will simply allow J-space to each the small craft, and since the grid nexuses near an airlock, you'll need to manually get the shuttles airlock and some hull out, but the shuttle is toast; hollowed out.

In case two, assuming a competent architect, the grid will be capable of both attatched and separated operations, so neither one will be automatically destroyed.... but both will automatically misjump!

IMTU, anything not protected by a jump field precipitates in chunks no bigger than one cm spheres, unless a misjump occured.... and anywhere in the same jump range of any part of the jumpline.... and in the same timeframe from entry as they would have had had they jumped intentionally from there and misjumped.

 

[The Hinterworlds Rambler]

IMTU, Jumpspace for anything else besides travel equals DEATH. A ship in the described instance would disperse atomically into the "nothingness" of Jumpspace. So get back in there and fight off those boarders!

 

[Chuck Anumia]

IMTU, all Star Travellers know that J-Space is only 1.5 Meters from the surface of the ship.

Anything that touches the grid becomes disintegrated into its basic molecular structure.

There is a possability of a misjump occuring due to the disruption of the Grid so I allow a roll vs misshap at impossible level of difficulty. (it is kind of like hitting the probability button on the ship from hitchhikers guide to the universe).

 

[veltyen]

To start with any type of misjump is likely to make it brown trousers time.

Oh. Not that kind of evacuation.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

I think all agree that (canonically) it would be on the level of cats and dogs living together ("What do you mean by 'bad'?") if you break the J-bubble. If you go with something non-catastrophic to the primary ship, though, just make sure a NPC is the first one out the airlock. And make sure the results are in clear view to all behind....

 

[parmasson]

Thanks for all you input.

It has been ten years since I have run or played CT and I forgot most of our old hose rules.

The game result,
The characters realizing that trying to leave would be suicidal they decide to fight. Fortunately for them the crew is a bit thin due to a battle with the local authorities. Unfortunately for them they are armed with only sabers a single 4kg explosive charge, and their wit. One character decides that he will risk climbing out along the surface of the ship open an exterior airlock in the engineering section, pop the charge in and then another character will use his computer skills to open the interior door by remote. Very touchy, very dangerous. The three enemy engineers succumb to the "what was is that over there" syndrome and BOOM! Once they are in control of the engineering section, out goes the air, pop goes the bad guys and they now have possession of a 600tn Sub. liner that is wanted by three local systems, an angry crime boss and, the Imperial Navy for piracy.

One of their other ideas was to flood the bridge with hydrogen and then hope for a spark. I said there was no way to vent hydrogen inside the ship without busting a pipe.

Does hydrogen have a smell?

 

[womble]

Explosive in engineering sections in J-space. Risky. 4kg of plastique is enough to level a house.

Control of the engineering section wouldn't be enough in and of itself to allow control of the ship at that ease of operation; there will be bridge overrides for the automatics. Doesn't mean that manual solutions an't be applied, but that does involve more crawling through the ship winding hydrant spanners and disabling automatics (preferably in ways which the PCs can later fix with relative ease).

Hydrogen doesn't smell, and you're right that there won't be a handy "Route hydrogen into bridge environmentals" procedure Again with the explosion, how mauch damage do they want to risk, considering that loss of control of the J-field is certain death?

 

[Fritz_Brown]

4kg?! Did things go dark after that went off? You might want to revise how much boom-boom they had in their posession (for future reference). I think an entry charge (for blowing doors off hinges) would be less than 1 pound. A flash-bang grenade would have been better.

But, it worked, and your players are happy. For a while....

 

[Jame]

Wouldn't there be sensors to detect leaking hydrogen or other gasses? Or are you assuming that the sensors are dead?

Couldn't you have handheld sensors after a certain point?

 

[veltyen]

A 15m radius frag grenade holds arround 0.2 kg of high explosive material. A claymore on the other hand holds arround 0.7 kg.

For entry purposes generally you are looking at ounces, depending on how loud you want the entry to be.

 

[parmasson]

Thanks fellas,

Boom scale adjusted.

I never spent any time in the military and neither did my players.

 

[veltyen]

Civilian. I have a close friend with an agricultural demolitions license. Cool stuff, makes me appreciate amfo a lot more.

 

[Horatius]

Back on the Escape/ evacuation thing.

Could you construct an escape pod specifically designed to be used in Jump space? The pod itseld wouldn't need a jump drive, but it could have a protective jump grid and a power plant independent of the primary vessel. the pod and the ship would share power under normal circumstances, but when the pod becomes active, its hull grid would become charged and allow a semi-smooth transition into the jump envelope. After it clears the envelope of the ship it would be ejected from jump and return safely (I use safely only as an alternative to being killed) to n-space. Just a thought.

Incedentally, when I did my EOD training, I was taught that a claymore was composed of 1kg plastic explosive and 788 BB's in a pre-segmented plastic case arranged in a directional arc covering approximately 60 degrees.

 

[far-trader]

The escape pod idea is not a bad one, just fraught with possible misuse and canon busting problems. So it would be fine to do for your own game if you give it enough thought but it won't work in the OTU.

There are some (iirc) canon reports of experiments by the IN to launch craft while in jump space, both with their own jump drive and without. The experiments all ended with the small craft being destroyed and very often (again iirc) with the launching ship also being destroyed.

The way OTU jump works is you open a hole and fall in. After that nothing else can get in and you can't get out until the hole at the other end opens, usually where you wanted and a week later.

 

[parmasson]

The biggest problem I saw was that the PCs would be TWO DAYS out in jump space.
Just for sake of argument say you make it back into regular space. Great, there you are one light year out in the absolute zero of deep dark space with no jump drive and lot of time on your hands. (No ship that we use out of the CT books would be large enough for an escape vessel with a J drive.) In retrospect it was a really bad idea and I am glad they were too afraid to try it. Even if they were successful they would have been dead in a couple of weeks. If I am going to preside over the death of an entire party of adventures I would really rather it involve something cool like a mishandled two megaton fusion bomb.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Dan, if you maintain a jump field, could the escape pod simply precipitate out of J-space where the original jump was aimed? Since, that's where it was going anyway? Because you would stay right there, it wouldn't save you if the ship was going bang - so I don't really know if it would be worth it....

 

[far-trader]

Hmm, again it seems unlikely in the OTU. The thing is it seems as if jump is locked in as soon as you set it up and any change to the grid or field after that means misjump, death or total destruction depending on the degree of change. Also don't forget that according to the OTU rules the smallest sustainable jump field is built around a 100ton ship. Anything smaller just implodes seems to be the implication.

So in the OTU the only jump lifeboat that might work would have to be the same size as the ship carrying it and fit entirely within that ship. Bit of a problem

An idea (not sure this will go where you want) that might work is a cocoon within the ship with it's own jump grid supplemental to the main hull grid and initialized and maintained by the jump drive. This would be a place that crew and passengers could retreat to if the main grid was found to have leaks due to damage. Of course the powerplant, jump drive, some fuel, life support and computer should also be in this cocoon. The problem is the likelyhood of it being useful is vanishingly small and it would cost extra.

Now then for MTU/YTU I've long been tempted to allow carried craft to serve as lifeboats for jump mishaps, in a fashion similar to the above. This adds one more justification for the carrying of small craft and the fact that their hulls seem to cost the same despite not being jump capable and so presumably not needing the jump grid.

If I were to use it, I'd say the craft can't seperate or launch while in jump or it is destroyed and the ship would be subject to a catastrophic misjump. However it would give the crew and passengers a place to retreat to in the case of a catastrophic misjump that destroys the ship. Basically the result of ship destroyed meaning uninhabitable while in jump and destroyed on emergence. So the crew and passengers hole up in the carried craft to ride out the danger and then when the mess drops out of jump space they are safe but stranded in the lifeboat(s).

Something like that

 

[mike wightman]

I like the idea of a "jump refuge" - especially for larger ships.

Putting the smallcraft "lifeboat" as close to the jump drive so that the machinery can maintain the jump bubble around what's left of the mainshp plus the lifeboat until jump exit.
You would then have a functioning smallcraft in which to make planetfall - but no more jump drive

Some interesting adventure seeds there...