Hull damage and jumping
- Thread starter Ran
- Start date
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Short answer, no. Which is silly of course
That's the tricky bit isn't it. The easy answer is the "jump drive" damage is in some way/part hull grid damage (so damage results only in shorter jump range not misjump chance) and any simple "hull" hits are those that miss the grid or any other vital systems and only make a hole in the hull and result in loss of internal atmospheric integrity.
Imperial Planetologist
SOC-12
That depends. If you have a hole in your ship's hull, and you jump successfully, then no it didn't. If you have a hole in your ship's hull, and you misjump, then it may have.
As referee I might impose a modifier to the roll for malfunction or misjump if a ship attempts to jump with obvious battle damage like a holed hull, but often the modifiers from the situation sort it out for me without slipping my thumb on the scale.
I guess that depends on whether or not you use this gird thingy or not, too. I'm old school and don't IMTU.
But...since there isn't anything mentioned in High Guard about how warships damaged in action are just stuck there because they can't jump I figure it must be ok for LBB2 ships, too. So there must be some measure of safety standards built into the grid. Redundancy and all.
But...since there isn't anything mentioned in High Guard about how warships damaged in action are just stuck there because they can't jump I figure it must be ok for LBB2 ships, too. So there must be some measure of safety standards built into the grid. Redundancy and all.
beowulf2044
SOC-12
Or, it could be rationalized that ship combat damage that effects jump performance is damage that is inflicted upon the lanthiam grid; too much damage and the ship is no longer capable of jumping. This also makes for a great sceanario where an Engineer has to go EVA in the middle of a ship-to-ship engagement to repair the grid, all the while hoping that the moment he does, the rest of the crew will wait for him to get back aboard before initiating a Jump sequence (not to mention trying to hang on and hope the damn pilot doesn't decide to try some evasive manuevers while hoping not to be hit by ship level incoming fire).
Some Engineers just don't get paid enough.
Some Engineers just don't get paid enough.
That makes me wonder: no one's ever asked this during a game, but what would happen to the engineer who is outside trying to bang out the dents in the grid if the pilot panics and hits the jump button?
Can you EVA while in jump? Any ideas on that? And if there's something dangerous about that, does that mean if there's a hole in the ship when it jumps does some awful jump space weirdness get into the ship and start melting crew into the bulkheads or something?
Can you EVA while in jump? Any ideas on that? And if there's something dangerous about that, does that mean if there's a hole in the ship when it jumps does some awful jump space weirdness get into the ship and start melting crew into the bulkheads or something?
G. Kashkanun Anderson
SOC-13
Well, as I recall, it does take at least a few minutes for the capacitors to power the ship up into a jumpable condition. So any engineer out there on the hull that late in the game is probably some kinda death wishin' maniac anyway.
The most primitive jump drives just created a spherical n-space bubble around the ship; presumably there would be enough room for a little bit of EVA'ing in that setup, so long as you don't let yourself get too close to the forbidden zone, event horizon, or whatever it is the edge of the bubble is called.
Jump space lies only a meter or so beyond a jump grid equipped starship, as I recall. So there's not much room for an EVA in that setup, although perhaps the "gap" could be extended or retracted depending on how much power is applied to the grid? According to the JTAS (the web version), people have survived direct exposure to jump space; but the odds of such a thing actually happening to you are probably something in the one-in-a-trillion range.
And ships with a breach in the jump grid will not jump, as I recall. And you do not want to be on a ship that experiences a grid breach during jump, precisely because of the things you describe happening. :devil:
Andrew Boulton
The Adminator
It happened in one of my games. Nerve-wracking, and the guy was never quite the same after...
as long as you stay less than 1m off the hull, yes, you can EVA during jump. I wouldn't recommend being there at transition, tho'...
Well depends on your GM. Recent editorial by Loren Wiseman over on the JTAS GURPS is a good for a laugh, indicating how most players/gamers take everything to the Nth degree. His old story of being wakened in the middle of the night at a convention when someone called his room asking for his ruling in their game on what jumpspace looked like is still one of my favorites (different editorial).
I picked up FASA's Rescue on Galatea a while back and was re-reading it and it deals with some previous happenings inside the Far Frontiers sector. The Shadowsand system is left-overs from a super-nova and the nova left planetismals that are rich in eka-metals. Apparently some rebels took over the mining complex so the Protectorate Marines were called in. On one of the planetismals you could "see" the black hole without any interference (not sure how realistic that is) but everyone else died except two NPCs one of which is now suffering from some sort of schizo-disorder. Oooh, spooky
Sounds like a gamer-solution, though probably not one that everyone would buy. I'd probably use it, to keep things interesting. No the writer wasn't one of the Keiths, so take that as you will.
I noticed lots of Space Zombies in the Forbidden Tech of the Second Imperium thread, so maybe jump-wraiths or the equivalent. Maybe something left-over from the last D&D session if the GM got screwed
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Maybe a good adventure seed would involve jumping with a holed ship and something creepy and alien gets trapped in our dimension as a result. Some nasty critter that flickers in and out of realspace and the crew has to figure out a way to get rid of it given that they are now trapped in jump for a week?
OH, NO, not the attack of the Electric monster from Johnny Quest. NNOOOOO.
Been there and done that, except it survived the Jump. Crews went out to investigate the non responding ship. It went aboard theirs. They ended up getting back to the spacestation before it killed them all. Then it headed down planet (after eating everyone, and power supplies) and eat them too.
Then we showed up to check on the planet for the MegaCorp that owned it. (We knew nothing about the above.) Long story short, only one PC made it out alive. He got the monster gone too.
Oh, don't forget the B5 episode that had the same thing. It was scared and just wanted to go home.
Dave Chase
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Just because there is nothing new under the sun is no reason to not do it again. There's plenty of other suns out there
Patron Zero
SOC-13
The take I applied IMTU was that one had to wear a specifically designed vac suit that gave the user protection-insulation from the effects of both the jump field as well as jump space itself.
I was applying the 'argument' about the presence of 'jump fire' being a hazard, which any old spacer worth his salt will tell you, that said flames that burn in the cold of space are the beads of sweat shaken off the backs of unseen imps and devils that inhabit such a domain.
