General How does maneuver drive propel?

[Grav_Moped]

That does raise the question.

Exactly how do deep space drives work, assuming it's an off shoot of ye gravitational motor?

When the reactionless "only need EPs" maneuvering power becomes unavailable ... you can always fall back on reaction maneuver drive power (also known as HEPlaR, nowadays).

already answered. Gravity M Drive

They work by taking Energy Points made by the Power Plant and turnung them into Gs, just like the tables in the rule books say they do. Maybe they're Power Points instead of Energy Points, depending on what rule set you're using. Same idea though -- it works. Why? Rules say so, that's why. Ooh, look over there -- a Xeno-Squirrel!

 

[Condottiere]

If you can induce a black hole, the spacecraft would be independent of other gravity wells.

Possibly, the inverse of inertial compensation.

 

[Grav_Moped]

If you can induce a black hole, the spacecraft would be independent of other gravity wells.

Possibly, the inverse of inertial compensation.

And probably weaponizeable. Would do interesting things to game balance....

 

[Condottiere]

As a booby trap.

 

[coliver988]

If you can induce a black hole, the spacecraft would be independent of other gravity wells.

Possibly, the inverse of inertial compensation.

I think the Alan Dean Foster Flinx series projected a black hole in front of the ship to fall into. It has been a few years since I read that series (and he's probably added more since I last checked)

 

[Condottiere]

You'd need to project it in front of the spacecraft.

Speaking of pulling yourself up with your bootstraps, you could have a tractor beam five hundred tonne bay placed in front of the spacecraft primary hull, and use that to pull the spacecraft.

 

[aramis]

Yup, I neglected to go back and include 𝛾 in the relativistic calculation

Well the energy output of a LBB2 power plant can be rated however you want, so yes, the scout ship produces 1,000TW.

which will have at least 100GW waste heat, and probably more like 9,000TW waste heat.

If we give the plant the power to make the Ve reasonable, we wind up with Hw in levels that fry everyone aboard.

Thermodynamics is a nasty master.

 

[aramis]

And probably weaponizeable. Would do interesting things to game balance....

Any advanced maneuvering drive is inherently a weapon. Repeatedly stated by Isaac Arthur (Physicist, EoD survivor, and youtube/nebula creative)

I seem to recall Winchell Chung also making similar sentiments, and Isaac has quoth Winchell a number of times and referred to Winchell's ProjectRho.com.

Doug Berry's also mentioned it, and the late and much missed Don McKinney as well.

 

[Peter Newman]

Any advanced maneuvering drive is inherently a weapon. Repeatedly stated by Isaac Arthur (Physicist, EoD survivor, and youtube/nebula creative)

I seem to recall Winchell Chung also making similar sentiments, and Isaac has quoth Winchell a number of times and referred to Winchell's ProjectRho.com.

Doug Berry's also mentioned it, and the late and much missed Don McKinney as well.

There are many earlier reference too. I saw it first from Larry Niven, in his 1966 short story "The Warriors": "A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive." When the Kzin first encountered humans their telepath scanned the (pacifist) human crew and learned that the ship had "no weapons". The Kzin captain realized that a good light pressure drive is a very powerful laser about one second before it vaporized him and cut his ship in half. It is a good thing for Earth that one of the humans was Belter, and that he had missed out on Earth's strong conditioning for pacifism, since Kzin are (will be?) sophontophagists in 2360 AD.

The earliest example I know of is from 1928, in "Buck Rodgers", where the Han ships drives are also their main weapons.

 

[Leitz]

So, to summarize ten pages: M Drives work on handwavium and it seldom matters in the game. As long as your universe keeps it internally consistant then you can have dog fights in space, or not. Nice.

 

[Condottiere]

You'll want one for atmospheric reentry.

 

[Marcatlas]

So, to summarize ten pages: M Drives work on handwavium and it seldom matters in the game. As long as your universe keeps it internally consistant then you can have dog fights in space, or not. Nice.

Actually ALL M Drives in Trav have your ship acting in Newtonian manner in a vacuum which means NO dog fighting type of movement you see in star wars.

 

[mike wightman]

Except in Mongoose Traveller...

 

[Spinward Flow]

Actually ALL M Drives in Trav have your ship acting in Newtonian manner in a vacuum which means NO dog fighting type of movement you see in star wars.

But DOES enable Newtonian physics dog fighting movement like you see in Babylon 5 when using Star Furies!

 

[mike wightman]

Newtonian almost, but not even close to the timescale and velocities of typical Traveller ship combat. You could contrive a scenario like this where both sides are at effectively zero velocity with respect to each other and then use ten second turns with the mm movement scale adjusted accordingly.
Note that they don't use laser weapons though.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Note that they don't use laser weapons though.

In Traveller terms, Starfuries are armed with plasma weapons.

 

[mike wightman]

Very low velocity plasma weapons.

 

[Dragoner]

Any advanced maneuvering drive is inherently a weapon. Repeatedly stated by Isaac Arthur (Physicist, EoD survivor, and youtube/nebula creative)

I seem to recall Winchell Chung also making similar sentiments, and Isaac has quoth Winchell a number of times and referred to Winchell's ProjectRho.com.

Doug Berry's also mentioned it, and the late and much missed Don McKinney as well.

I include it in my game, a vehicle can flip and burn with its drive doing a hit like a fusion gun.

 

[Spinward Flow]