There are at least two Trav versions that talk about the ship having to radiate heat via the hull into normal space. MGT says explicitly that due to this, stealth in space isn't possible. (just read it in MRB)
Missing Tech in OTU
- Thread starter BardicHeart
- Start date
There are at least two Trav versions that talk about the ship having to radiate heat via the hull into normal space. MGT says explicitly that due to this, stealth in space isn't possible. (just read it in MRB)
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
Note my emphasis. It's perfectly possible to do, even at quite low TLs - it's called insulation. The big question is how long you can maintain it for and whether that time can be expanded at high TL to cover approach/battle durations - but it don't break any laws of physics in the short term.
Unless it's an inherent part of building starships - just like nuclear shielding is an inherent part of building nuclear powered ships - you'd still use it in a civilian version...
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Problem there is you're still stuck with the unbelievable belief suspender snapping totally free and zero volume magic tech you're trying to avoid to explain how it works
You've just changed what you're calling it.Given the heat that Traveller ships routinely put out the radiator area required for believable tech is far greater than that available. At the very least you'd need huge deployed arrays which would take a lot of volume, be very pricey, be very prone to damage, not be useful at high-g, etc. etc.
You're simply trading one fantasy as you call it for another
Precisely. As Far Trader points out, in real life Traveller vessels would need massive radiator requirements. So all ships must, by inference, already have some sort of heat sink technology otherwise they'd be cooking their crews within hours. Its already fantasy, so why not let the magic work in both directions?
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the 'magic' tech that isn't mentioned is a form of an infrared superconductor ( super heat pipe ) and a near super insulator.
Given those things, directing heat in a particular direction, away from known enemies, is easy to explain with radiators and Lambert's cosine law.
The gotcha is Trav's non-existent heat management toolbox. But to play around with that subject, we'd need a level of gearheadedness that the majority of people would rather avoid.
I am also beginning to think that Trav ships might not radiate as much heat as people believe from power plants, etc.
power plants would operate at 90% efficiency based on direct conversion experiments taking place today, and I feel that a monolithic power plant is not the norm for Trav ships so much as its a convenient abstraction.
M-Drives' power comes from dedicated plants which are shut down when not in use ( cold start to idle prior to planned vector changes or when general quarters are sounded ...warm start for actual power draw ). This would allow for ships to run quiet with only life support and sensors drawing power from their own source with other systems' power plants remain at idle giving a vastly lower signature. For silent running, power plants could all be shut down and sensors/life support could be run off caps ( near 100% eff. )
of course, reaction drives dump their waste heat out with the exhaust, so no worries there.
reactionless drives have to dump their waste heat in a magical fashion.
Either way, there should be a large signature from it.
power plants for weapons come online when GQ is sounded and are ready for warm-start. Full power-up occurs when weapon triggers have been unlocked.
I wonder how low a ship's IR signature can be brought down if using such ideas. Maybe low enough to make detection problematic after directional radiators are aimed away from those looking.?
here's a couple of links that might be of interest concerning this stuff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIRCM
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/ir.htm
http://sourceforge.net/projects/osmosis-project/
Given those things, directing heat in a particular direction, away from known enemies, is easy to explain with radiators and Lambert's cosine law.
The gotcha is Trav's non-existent heat management toolbox. But to play around with that subject, we'd need a level of gearheadedness that the majority of people would rather avoid.
I am also beginning to think that Trav ships might not radiate as much heat as people believe from power plants, etc.
power plants would operate at 90% efficiency based on direct conversion experiments taking place today, and I feel that a monolithic power plant is not the norm for Trav ships so much as its a convenient abstraction.
M-Drives' power comes from dedicated plants which are shut down when not in use ( cold start to idle prior to planned vector changes or when general quarters are sounded ...warm start for actual power draw ). This would allow for ships to run quiet with only life support and sensors drawing power from their own source with other systems' power plants remain at idle giving a vastly lower signature. For silent running, power plants could all be shut down and sensors/life support could be run off caps ( near 100% eff. )
of course, reaction drives dump their waste heat out with the exhaust, so no worries there.
reactionless drives have to dump their waste heat in a magical fashion.
Either way, there should be a large signature from it.
power plants for weapons come online when GQ is sounded and are ready for warm-start. Full power-up occurs when weapon triggers have been unlocked.
I wonder how low a ship's IR signature can be brought down if using such ideas. Maybe low enough to make detection problematic after directional radiators are aimed away from those looking.?
here's a couple of links that might be of interest concerning this stuff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIRCM
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/ir.htm
http://sourceforge.net/projects/osmosis-project/
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That's a good point. Very well, I'll concede that it can be done. Now I ask you, why would you WANT to do it with civilian ships that are designed to dock with space stations or land in starports? I would think that you'd really prefer to keep your starship exterior closer to that of its surroundings when you load and unload.
Hans
imo there has to be an impermeable radiant barrier, in both directions, otherwise the crew would die. there's is the ir signature going away.
I'm not really a gearhead, but could folks humour me here for a moment and explain whether my premises are wrong.
The ISS has an approximate internal (heated) volume of about 1000 cubic meters. It has a distributed structure with lots of surface area and uses solar panels for power. To keep internal temps under control at 1AU it has 156 square meters of radiators.
A MGT 100t scout ship has around 1400 cubic meter volume of which about a third is fuel, so we can semi-ignore that assuming perfect insulation to keep the H2 liquid. So volumes are roughly similar, however the surface area isn't. It could still technically dedicate 156 square meters of its 4-500 square meter hull surface area to flip up directional radiator panels, amongst the sensors, hatch doors and so on, to handle the ship's electronics heat bleed and life support...
However, it also has a fusion plant running at 90% efficiency and in addition a reactionless manoeuvre drive both of which will be producing huge amounts of heat when in operation, and which can only be dumped (AFAWK) via radiators. I have no idea what the KW or MW output of an Imperial Scout's PP is, let alone its M-Drive, but I'm pretty sure that during normal operations the combined heat output of these two systems will be far greater than the ship's remaining surface area could handle, even if it was all dedicated to radiators.
The problem only gets worse the bigger the ship. A 400t SDB would be hard pressed to radiate just the life support heat build up, let alone moving, turning on its gravity or firing a weapon. There's even more complications depending on the local star and how close you are to it.
Extendible/foldaway radiators don't work, since once you get up to Destroyer class vessels you'd need tens of thousands of square meters of radiant area, let alone a for a Tigress Dreadnought. And as mentioned earlier they wouldn't be practical if travelling at speed, manoeuvring or taking fire. A warship could never afford to have large expanses of vulnerable radiators. Carrying large volumes of heat sink material doesn't really work either, again assuming PP outputs in the MWs and not caring about the tonnage knock-on effect.
So if my reasoning isn't flawed, all Traveller vessels (even a scout or far trader) need some sort of magic heat dump to allow it to actually function as a plain old ship. Otherwise it will become a sauna death trap. Once we have a magic heat dump (whatever it is), IR stealth becomes a doddle and those detection ranges fall back into the realm of verisimilitude.
Or am I massively wrong?
Not massively wrong, Pete. And the PP on a type S should be around 500-550 MW.
Given the radiators in FF&S, someone worked out that the AHL has only enough surface area for power for 1G.
Error of note: The LHyd - it's a massive heat dump just bringing it near vaporization.
There are two possibilities...
1) Some form of magic heat dump
2) Heat-n-chill cycles, ala John Ringo's ASS Vorpal Blade (Looking Glass series)
That is, you have some working fluid with a massive specific heat. You pump heat into it whilst doing normal operations. At some point, it's near saturation, and superheated fluid... and you go find a patch of air, water or ice in which to shed that heat, shut down the drives, and re-crystalize most of your working fluid.
Given the radiators in FF&S, someone worked out that the AHL has only enough surface area for power for 1G.
Error of note: The LHyd - it's a massive heat dump just bringing it near vaporization.
There are two possibilities...
1) Some form of magic heat dump
2) Heat-n-chill cycles, ala John Ringo's ASS Vorpal Blade (Looking Glass series)
That is, you have some working fluid with a massive specific heat. You pump heat into it whilst doing normal operations. At some point, it's near saturation, and superheated fluid... and you go find a patch of air, water or ice in which to shed that heat, shut down the drives, and re-crystalize most of your working fluid.
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I'll take a swing at it for a type 's';
top side area type 's' ~450 m2** @ albedo~.75 @ 1au absorbs about 154Kj/sec from solar radiation
life support ( extended life support+grav+inertia comp )* for 1400m3 ~10.08Mj/sec
(grav= ~7mj/sec....inertial= ~2.8mj/sec.... ext life support= ~.28mj/sec)*
computers/comms/sensors ~ .6Mj/sec
total min power ~10.7mj/sec
~1.2mj/sec waste heat from power plan to supply the needed power
~11.88mj/sec
this assumes that 100% of the input power is waste heat as opposed to some/most of it doing useful work
so, the ship must dissipate approx. 12mj/sec when coasting and with any weapons powered down
radiators at 1000k ( dull red ) dissipates ~.0567mj/sec/m2, thus the ship would need 212 m2 of 1000k radiators ( less than a quarter of the type 's' surface area )**
radiators at 2000k ( red-orange ) dissipates ~.9072mj/sec/m2, thus the ship would need ~14 m2 of 2000k radiators ( less than 1/60th of the type 's' surface area )**
*I went with FFS1's power requirements, otherwise, MT's requirements were 10 times greater..~100mw for a type 's' at 1400m3 just for life support, grav and inertial.
**type's' surface area was taken from book 7 which gave a length of 37.5m and a width of 24m. I figured the surface area as if the top shape were a triangle giving ~450m2 for the top and doubling that to account for the bottom.
can't help with reactionless thrusters...I don't use 'em because I think they help break the hardness of the science in the game....
of course things are much hotter if you let the power plants run at redline for extended periods of time.
get rid of grav and inertial to run much cooler when coasting in silence
top side area type 's' ~450 m2** @ albedo~.75 @ 1au absorbs about 154Kj/sec from solar radiation
life support ( extended life support+grav+inertia comp )* for 1400m3 ~10.08Mj/sec
(grav= ~7mj/sec....inertial= ~2.8mj/sec.... ext life support= ~.28mj/sec)*
computers/comms/sensors ~ .6Mj/sec
total min power ~10.7mj/sec
~1.2mj/sec waste heat from power plan to supply the needed power
~11.88mj/sec
this assumes that 100% of the input power is waste heat as opposed to some/most of it doing useful work
so, the ship must dissipate approx. 12mj/sec when coasting and with any weapons powered down
radiators at 1000k ( dull red ) dissipates ~.0567mj/sec/m2, thus the ship would need 212 m2 of 1000k radiators ( less than a quarter of the type 's' surface area )**
radiators at 2000k ( red-orange ) dissipates ~.9072mj/sec/m2, thus the ship would need ~14 m2 of 2000k radiators ( less than 1/60th of the type 's' surface area )**
*I went with FFS1's power requirements, otherwise, MT's requirements were 10 times greater..~100mw for a type 's' at 1400m3 just for life support, grav and inertial.
**type's' surface area was taken from book 7 which gave a length of 37.5m and a width of 24m. I figured the surface area as if the top shape were a triangle giving ~450m2 for the top and doubling that to account for the bottom.
can't help with reactionless thrusters...I don't use 'em because I think they help break the hardness of the science in the game....
of course things are much hotter if you let the power plants run at redline for extended periods of time.
get rid of grav and inertial to run much cooler when coasting in silence
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BardicHeart
SOC-12
Pretty much... I was curious to see what others thought would be fun to include, things that seemed to be missing from what they would expect to be there. Instead, much of the discussion seems to revolve around a debate about what amounts to "why Traveller isn't possible." I fail to see why debating all the things that aren't possible in Traveller helps make the game better.
And this is why physics students should never be allowed to write sci-fi. They write physics, not fiction. If I took the contents of the last couple of pages of this thread and included it in a game and tried to market that game... I'd end up like the guy who wrote a RPG, printed 10,000 copies and still has 9,950 copies sitting in his garage (true story). You can't market a game that looks like a physics book. Most players don't care about the laws of thermodynamics, or how much waste heat a starship does or doesn't generate. Try, for just a moment, to imagine Star Wars with a plot that included Han Solo saying "Well, I was going to modify the Millineum Falcon to make it this really cool smuggler's ship, but I couldn't quite work out the equations for the thermodynamics, it doesn't have enough space for the necessary radiators for the additional power so I'm stuck with slow ship that radiates heat like a small sun... " at which point the audience is drifting out of the theatres. Its just not sellable to anyone except a small minority of gearheads... and not to offend anyone, but those are usually the same grognards most players quietly wish would stop showing up for games. Sci-fi games are escapist entertainment first and foremost, if you want a successful game, that has to be rule One. Rule Two is you keep enough hard science to keep the game believable to the majority of your audience... which eliminates the physics grognards who will always find something to nitpick about. The rest is fiction, it is fantasy... and more importantly is the plot, the story it tells. Star Wars was the success it was not because it had a belieavable universe, but because it told a story that swept up the audience. Its hard to sweep up players in a gaming session when they're busy tripping over physics formula's that contribute nothing to the story. Some times you need realism... for example, one major flaw in Fading Suns is that body armor is insanely effective while guns are virtually non-lethal... it detracts from the story. Jump drives contribute to the story. Calculating how much heat a ship may or may not produce does not. The debate is all speculative anyway because no one knows if ship are using cold fusion or not, nor at what heat efficiency they operate at, nor what sort of technology may exist to compensate for the heat, or if it has some sort of heat sink that allows it to "store" the heat for the 6 hours or so it takes to go from the planet to 100D, which all the time you'd need to hide your heat signature from IR sensors.
Then again, I'm reminded of something I read once. "Early science fiction authors imagined a world that wasn't possible according to the scientist of their day... and those same scientist have spent the last century making their fiction into reality."
Who knows, maybe someone actually will invent a jump drive someday. Maybe they'll invent a cold fusion reactor that operates at 90% efficiency or above. Maybe someone will invent a device that converts some or much of the remaining heat into electricity ( http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/n...10/09/09/a-new-player-in-waste-heat-recovery/ ). At TL 15 the only thing I'm certain of is that things won't work the way they do now. New ways of doing things, including new operating principles will have been discovered and that opens up a wide field of possibilities.
It would be nice to see some of this discussion turn towards figuring out how things might be possible, rather than focusing so much energy and heat (pardon the pun) on the impossible.
"Science Fiction" vs. "Science Fiction"
Traveller attempts, whether deliberate or not, to satisfy both sides of that debate. Neither side is badwrongfun. I, for one, feel slighted by BardicHeart's opinion that my position in that debate would cause other gamers to silently wish that I would just go away.
"..... keep enough hard science to keep the game believable....."
Different people have different levels of "suspension of disbelief" and usually in differing aspects of a setting or game.
"Some times you need realism..."
The trick is getting everyone to agree on exactly what areas that realism is needed. I suspect that there will never be a 100% consensus concerning that, so discussions like this 'heat and IR sensors' discussion is useful to even a handful of others, even if it is of no interest to everyone.
"It would be nice to see some of this discussion turn towards figuring out how things might be possible, rather than focusing so much energy and heat (pardon the pun) on the impossible. "
Which was exactly what my last post was attempting..... even if other gamers were silently wishing that I would just go away.
Traveller attempts, whether deliberate or not, to satisfy both sides of that debate. Neither side is badwrongfun. I, for one, feel slighted by BardicHeart's opinion that my position in that debate would cause other gamers to silently wish that I would just go away.
"..... keep enough hard science to keep the game believable....."
Different people have different levels of "suspension of disbelief" and usually in differing aspects of a setting or game.
"Some times you need realism..."
The trick is getting everyone to agree on exactly what areas that realism is needed. I suspect that there will never be a 100% consensus concerning that, so discussions like this 'heat and IR sensors' discussion is useful to even a handful of others, even if it is of no interest to everyone.
"It would be nice to see some of this discussion turn towards figuring out how things might be possible, rather than focusing so much energy and heat (pardon the pun) on the impossible. "
Which was exactly what my last post was attempting..... even if other gamers were silently wishing that I would just go away.
BardicHeart
SOC-12
I'm sorry if you felt slighted, my intention wasn't to offend anyone. But unfortunately its a truth I've observed all too often over the years. When it comes to writing a game to be marketed, you have to look at what is sellable. The reality is, the majority of players are just not as technical minded as has been the level of conversation here. Put another way, you guys are waaaaaaaay over the average persons head.
The problem is that since 1980 the gaming industry has been in a steady decline. In 1983 the 1st print run for corerule AD&D books was 200,000 copies IIRC, with total sales for a main book being around 1,000,000 copies sold. Currently, game sales, including AD&D, rarely exceed 50,000 copies total. Print runs for mainstream games are generally 10,000 copies. For small press games print runs are more typically 2,000 and sometimes even that is being overly optimistic. In 2009, for the first time, a game out sold AD&D (Pathfinder which is a d20 game published by Piazo). The jury is still out as to whether that is a good sign or a bad sign. The point of all this is that the market has shrunk and if the industry... the hobby... is going to survive, then RPGs have to have wider appeal and start drawing in new gamers (particularly younger gamers which now account for less than 1/3 of the market demographic).
Physics arguments don't have wide appeal. Sorry, but its the truth.
You are right, different people have different levels of suspension of disbelief and that's part of the difficulty in writing science fiction (whether we're talking games, books or movie scripts). Physics grognards tend to have a very low "tolerance", because of their education they see things wrong that the average person won't... and are thus bothered by things the average person doesn't even consider. On the other hand, go too far to the other extreme and you get levels fiction even the average person can't accept, Fading Suns is sometimes guilty of this, particularly when it comes to how it handles combat (which borders on the absurd). So who is the "average" person, that's the $64 question every writer asks themself... its undefined, but its one of the most important variable to consider. That's where the Art of writing comes into it, some writers very intuitively tune into that, others miss it completely (which is why we end up with movies like MegaFault and Terrordactyl on the Sci-fi movie... movies you have to make fun of cause NOBODY can take them serious). Other authors produce things like Star Wars which manage to captivate the imaginations of large audiences.
You are right, there will never be 100% agreement. There will always be some who think there's too much science involved (probably the same ones who think there isn't enough skin in it) and there will always be those who think the science isn't factual enough. Try to make either of those groups happy and you'll have a flop on your hands. The market you have to appeal to if you want to make enough money to keep in business is somewhere inbetween. So the trick is to avoid going to far in either the direction of Science Fiction or Science Fiction (nice way of hi-lighting it btw) and instead find the balance of Science Fiction (and if that gets quoted without the bold, someone is going to get REALLY confused! LOL)
I do appreciate the attempt, honestly I do. I especially appreciate your being fairly dispassionate, that is objective, in how you presented it. I'm enough of a gearheaded grognard to appreciate the math. Its just that I also learned a long time ago that if you show that math to say... 8 out of 10 people, you get a blank stare. It doesn't help make the game more enjoyable for them, it in fact detracts from it. For most people that sort of thing doesn't spark the imagination, it constrains it. It doesn't inspire them to tell a story, it distracts from it. That concerns me, particularly since I'd like to see this hobby and industry which has to one degree or another been a part of my life for 30 years, get a second wind.
When I started this thread, this is specifically what was on my mind. I'd read in various threads that some thought this or that was missing from Traveller. Sometimes, I'd even go so far as to say often, this turns out to be a case of things not being explained well enough rather than actually missing. Sometimes its best not to explain the science behind something... either because you can't (and you guys have illustrated in exacting detail some good examples of that), or because you run the risk that some discovery in 10 years, or 5 years, or next month will invalidate what you wrote. That can be rough on the shelf life of your product. There is a certain necessity for a degree of vagueness and "handwavium" in science fiction (again, whether we are talking Traveller, movies or books). But, on the other hand, sometimes suspension of disbelief can be killed by a lack of an explanation. For example, take the IR heat signature debate. There's two ways of handling it, and both require choice be made first. That choice is this... how are thing susposed to work in the game , not according to science but according to the intention of the game itself? Once you know that, then you can either try to explain it, or explain it away, with hard science. That's sometimes necessary, but often is the hard way to do things. What's easier, if you've the knack for it, it so give it a plausible explanation that actually avoids the technical science. Sometimes the smart move is to simply avoid the argument in the first place.
For example, prove a jump drive can't work (please don't anyone try, it was rhetorical LOL). You can't, nobody knows how a jump drive supposedly works in the first place. But the idea is plausible, the explanation we do have is plausible enough that most people never ask the question (admittedly that might not be the best example, but hopefully you get my point). Taking Virus as another example... lots of people hated it in part because there was no plausible explanation for it, as a result a lot of people asked questions for which there aren't answers and that resulted in the generally negative reaction. In science fiction you can never answer all the questions (in fact you can generally only answer a very few of them), one of the tricks to good fiction is making it plausible enough your audience doesn't think to ask in the first place. So going back to nanotechnology as another example, the problem isn't the hard science, nor is it that it isn't present in Traveller, the actual problem is that Traveller lacks a plausible explanation regarding the role of nanotech in the Traveller universe. I suspect that's all that's need for most things.
Give it a try, take the assumption that most ships aren't equipped for stealth operations... without resorting to actual science formulas... explain that in lay terms (for this purpose, forget what the rules do or don't say, just run with it as a creative exercise). Now, lets assume that as Game Authors (just for fun), we decide it would be fun and enjoyable if there was some stealth tech that would allow a properly equipped starship to avoid detection, or at least have a chance at it. Again, just as an exercise, in mainly lay language, explain how that might be possible, run with it. Feel free to put some limits on it (for example maybe it has a limited duration, or it only makes them harder to detect from certain angles, and so on). I'll be very curious to see what you come up with.
The problem is that since 1980 the gaming industry has been in a steady decline. In 1983 the 1st print run for corerule AD&D books was 200,000 copies IIRC, with total sales for a main book being around 1,000,000 copies sold. Currently, game sales, including AD&D, rarely exceed 50,000 copies total. Print runs for mainstream games are generally 10,000 copies. For small press games print runs are more typically 2,000 and sometimes even that is being overly optimistic. In 2009, for the first time, a game out sold AD&D (Pathfinder which is a d20 game published by Piazo). The jury is still out as to whether that is a good sign or a bad sign. The point of all this is that the market has shrunk and if the industry... the hobby... is going to survive, then RPGs have to have wider appeal and start drawing in new gamers (particularly younger gamers which now account for less than 1/3 of the market demographic).
Physics arguments don't have wide appeal. Sorry, but its the truth.
You are right, different people have different levels of suspension of disbelief and that's part of the difficulty in writing science fiction (whether we're talking games, books or movie scripts). Physics grognards tend to have a very low "tolerance", because of their education they see things wrong that the average person won't... and are thus bothered by things the average person doesn't even consider. On the other hand, go too far to the other extreme and you get levels fiction even the average person can't accept, Fading Suns is sometimes guilty of this, particularly when it comes to how it handles combat (which borders on the absurd). So who is the "average" person, that's the $64 question every writer asks themself... its undefined, but its one of the most important variable to consider. That's where the Art of writing comes into it, some writers very intuitively tune into that, others miss it completely (which is why we end up with movies like MegaFault and Terrordactyl on the Sci-fi movie... movies you have to make fun of cause NOBODY can take them serious). Other authors produce things like Star Wars which manage to captivate the imaginations of large audiences.
You are right, there will never be 100% agreement. There will always be some who think there's too much science involved (probably the same ones who think there isn't enough skin in it) and there will always be those who think the science isn't factual enough. Try to make either of those groups happy and you'll have a flop on your hands. The market you have to appeal to if you want to make enough money to keep in business is somewhere inbetween. So the trick is to avoid going to far in either the direction of Science Fiction or Science Fiction (nice way of hi-lighting it btw) and instead find the balance of Science Fiction (and if that gets quoted without the bold, someone is going to get REALLY confused! LOL)
I do appreciate the attempt, honestly I do. I especially appreciate your being fairly dispassionate, that is objective, in how you presented it. I'm enough of a gearheaded grognard to appreciate the math. Its just that I also learned a long time ago that if you show that math to say... 8 out of 10 people, you get a blank stare. It doesn't help make the game more enjoyable for them, it in fact detracts from it. For most people that sort of thing doesn't spark the imagination, it constrains it. It doesn't inspire them to tell a story, it distracts from it. That concerns me, particularly since I'd like to see this hobby and industry which has to one degree or another been a part of my life for 30 years, get a second wind.
When I started this thread, this is specifically what was on my mind. I'd read in various threads that some thought this or that was missing from Traveller. Sometimes, I'd even go so far as to say often, this turns out to be a case of things not being explained well enough rather than actually missing. Sometimes its best not to explain the science behind something... either because you can't (and you guys have illustrated in exacting detail some good examples of that), or because you run the risk that some discovery in 10 years, or 5 years, or next month will invalidate what you wrote. That can be rough on the shelf life of your product. There is a certain necessity for a degree of vagueness and "handwavium" in science fiction (again, whether we are talking Traveller, movies or books). But, on the other hand, sometimes suspension of disbelief can be killed by a lack of an explanation. For example, take the IR heat signature debate. There's two ways of handling it, and both require choice be made first. That choice is this... how are thing susposed to work in the game , not according to science but according to the intention of the game itself? Once you know that, then you can either try to explain it, or explain it away, with hard science. That's sometimes necessary, but often is the hard way to do things. What's easier, if you've the knack for it, it so give it a plausible explanation that actually avoids the technical science. Sometimes the smart move is to simply avoid the argument in the first place.
For example, prove a jump drive can't work (please don't anyone try, it was rhetorical LOL). You can't, nobody knows how a jump drive supposedly works in the first place. But the idea is plausible, the explanation we do have is plausible enough that most people never ask the question (admittedly that might not be the best example, but hopefully you get my point). Taking Virus as another example... lots of people hated it in part because there was no plausible explanation for it, as a result a lot of people asked questions for which there aren't answers and that resulted in the generally negative reaction. In science fiction you can never answer all the questions (in fact you can generally only answer a very few of them), one of the tricks to good fiction is making it plausible enough your audience doesn't think to ask in the first place.
So going back to nanotechnology as another example, the problem isn't the hard science, nor is it that it isn't present in Traveller, the actual problem is that Traveller lacks a plausible explanation regarding the role of nanotech in the Traveller universe. I suspect that's all that's need for most things.Give it a try, take the assumption that most ships aren't equipped for stealth operations... without resorting to actual science formulas... explain that in lay terms (for this purpose, forget what the rules do or don't say, just run with it as a creative exercise). Now, lets assume that as Game Authors (just for fun), we decide it would be fun and enjoyable if there was some stealth tech that would allow a properly equipped starship to avoid detection, or at least have a chance at it. Again, just as an exercise, in mainly lay language, explain how that might be possible, run with it. Feel free to put some limits on it (for example maybe it has a limited duration, or it only makes them harder to detect from certain angles, and so on). I'll be very curious to see what you come up with.
Insulation wouldn't work at all. Unless, you want the ship to melt from the inside out.
BardicHeart;
I don't worry about the state of the industry, nor do I worry about creating a product that pleases one demographic or another; I couldn't care less about publishing or being published, even in fanzines. So I don't think about making any one group ( or another ) happy for a successful product.
I feel that there should be explanations for things in-game, but in the absence of pre-stated rules, the best option in my opinion, is to follow known science fact for the sake of consistency. Otherwise there is a greater chance of creating unwanted follow-on effects in other areas as players seek to use generated information, no matter how trivial, in their schemes.
The reason most players don't concern themselves with the maths is that it is assumed that the game company did the maths for them and put the results into the rules and charts and tables.
Besides, young players usually want to model what they've seen in movies, and on TV which are usually inaccurate anyways..
and the numbers work, too
and there won't be any unintended consequences unless the game universe fails to follow known basic physics.
I don't worry about the state of the industry, nor do I worry about creating a product that pleases one demographic or another; I couldn't care less about publishing or being published, even in fanzines. So I don't think about making any one group ( or another ) happy for a successful product.
I feel that there should be explanations for things in-game, but in the absence of pre-stated rules, the best option in my opinion, is to follow known science fact for the sake of consistency. Otherwise there is a greater chance of creating unwanted follow-on effects in other areas as players seek to use generated information, no matter how trivial, in their schemes.
The reason most players don't concern themselves with the maths is that it is assumed that the game company did the maths for them and put the results into the rules and charts and tables.
Besides, young players usually want to model what they've seen in movies, and on TV which are usually inaccurate anyways..
Done in my earlier post.... super insulating materials, super heat conducting materials, directional radiators and careful power management.BardicHeart said:
and the numbers work, too
and there won't be any unintended consequences unless the game universe fails to follow known basic physics.
That expresses my feelings exactly.
But the sensor rules don't reflect that explanation. There's is nothing whatsoever about being able to detect a ship at umpteen light seconds if it happens to be radiating in your direction. No tatical options involving sensor platforms placed at 125 planetary diameters to spot pirates sneaking in with the side facing the defenders coooled down and the other side radiating heat like crazy.
Hans
depends on the ruleset being used
'official' rules, I don't know because I only have access to MT which are not so good.
Bruce Macintosh's definitive sensor rules allow for it in the advanced rules with "aggressive baffling" which gives a lower chance of detection by a single sensor platform at the cost of increased chance from others
http://traveller.mu.org/house/sensor.rules.html
http://traveller.mu.org/house/sciencesensors.html
http://traveller.mu.org/house/sensoraddenda.html
I suspect the the lack of 'official' rules for detailed sensors is abstracted as the result of ease-of-play needs
I doubt that it would come up very often in actual game play
'official' rules, I don't know because I only have access to MT which are not so good.
Bruce Macintosh's definitive sensor rules allow for it in the advanced rules with "aggressive baffling" which gives a lower chance of detection by a single sensor platform at the cost of increased chance from others
http://traveller.mu.org/house/sensor.rules.html
http://traveller.mu.org/house/sciencesensors.html
http://traveller.mu.org/house/sensoraddenda.html
I suspect the the lack of 'official' rules for detailed sensors is abstracted as the result of ease-of-play needs
I doubt that it would come up very often in actual game play
The rules already state real space heat dissipation. So no, insulation is out unless you are rewriting the basic game rules.
Except by logic, the hull has to be an impermeable barrier, otherwise the crew would cook in a hot part of space like a nebula or die from longterm exposure to cosmic rays, etc. .
The abstract of this discussion is the magic tech of the magic tech. :rofl:
