DangerousThing
SOC-13
If you've ever had chronic depression, you might think otherwise.
Had my depression be diagnosed early enough, I might not have to take anti-depressants today.
Small ship universe
- Thread starter Old_Dr_Skull
- Start date
If you've ever had chronic depression, you might think otherwise.
Had my depression be diagnosed early enough, I might not have to take anti-depressants today.
Agreed!
Or, even more importantly, had to live with a close relative and/or spouse who is in a major depression.
Who says they have that? I don't remember them being styled as evil vampires...
Old_Dr_Skull
SOC-10
The Zhodani commando in Adventure 7 "Broadsword" has a turban, cheesey evil mustache, black power armor and a dracula cloak. I just alsways picture him when I hear Zhodani.
Yep, that's a Zho!
Maybe it's how you can tell Social Standing, only got a mustache, you're a Prole. Got a mustache and turban, you're an Intendant. Got the whole kit, mustache, turban and a spiffy cape, you're a Noble. Probably not, but it does amuse me to think so.
That is pretty much what every depiction of a Zhodani Noble looks like. Funny thing is we don't really see what Intendants and Proles look like or wear much. I am guessing they don't get the cool capes, though they may still have the mustaches and turbans.
Maybe it's how you can tell Social Standing, only got a mustache, you're a Prole. Got a mustache and turban, you're an Intendant. Got the whole kit, mustache, turban and a spiffy cape, you're a Noble. Probably not, but it does amuse me to think so.
They do, in my opinion. Beats the heck out of jailing some psychopath and then letting him go so he can do it again. I'm just pointing out how an outsider might feel about it. Being born Zho sounds comfortable, if a bit bland, but selling that to an outsider ...
Case in point.
At the risk of taking this off-topic, I might point out that "we will reprogram how you think to what we feel is proper" is fundamental to religion; they just phrase it a bit differently, and their tools aren't as refined. Make no mistake: if they had the tools ... well, inasmuch as there are hints of religion in Traveller canon, let's just say that the "one right way" attitude is not unique to the Zhodani by any stretch.
From the Zhodani perspective, "what you are thinking inside your mind" is a potential source of great individual pain. If you harbor deep-seated resentments, if you are overly self-critical and suffer from incessant self-doubt, if you desire something so badly that you are entertaining thoughts of antisocial behavior to achieve your desire, then from the Zhodani perspective helping relieve you of that psychological pain and internal conflict is every bit as right and proper as treating a physical injury. The idea that "free will" and privacy extends to being free to suffer or to plot harmful behavior is one of the things Zhodani just don't understand about Imperial society.
Let's not forget that a skilled Tavrchedl telepath might be able to read the minds of half a dozen people for a couple of minutes each per day. The kind of all-invasive broadband monitoring of the whole population that Imperials are appalled to imagine is simply not possible. The Mind Healers will have to use perfectly mundane means to identify and locate potential patients. Mind scanning is going to be the last step in a long and tedious procedure.
Hans
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BlackBat242
SOC-14 1K
The ideas of "free will" and "privacy" are considered antisocial thoughts in Zho society... at least for proles.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Really?
I don't remember reading that in any of the alien modules dedicated to the Zhodani.
Don't get sucked in by Imperial propoganda.
Exactly!
What mike said! LIke I said they seem to have a much more rational society compared to the Imperium.
Neither do I. I don't think it exists, but I've not read MGT AM:Z...
It strikes me that there should be a way for ships to be better between TLs - for example, if Imp shipbuilding is generally TL 15, but Zho ships are TL 14, the Imperium would have a small technical advantage. But then again, if most Imp builds were TL 11 - 13, but most Zho builds were 12 - 14, there would be less of an advantage...
(And maybe the Zhodani tangent should be taken elsewhere; it's got good points but it's a sidetrack.)
(And maybe the Zhodani tangent should be taken elsewhere; it's got good points but it's a sidetrack.)
Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
First, how did a thread on small vs large ships get dragged into Zho politics? :nonono:
o:
EDIT: OK, I don't really disagree with Hans' statement that the ships never get near most of that emptiness. I think I disagree that you can therefore ignore the statement "space is a whole lotta empty", since it's still true on a local level.
I searched for a thread like this, and I'm glad I did, as this is what I was looking for. (Though I was hoping for something canonical, too.)
I disagree, Hans, as a lot of that empty space exists just between planets. Think of how much volume there is just in the shell around Earth, described by the distance at which the moon orbits. If you can jump almost anywhere on one half of that shell (let's assume you can't jump to the backside for this), that's still an incredibly large surface for a defending fleet to watch/defend. Now, if every GPS satellite is also a secret meson gun........
o:EDIT: OK, I don't really disagree with Hans' statement that the ships never get near most of that emptiness. I think I disagree that you can therefore ignore the statement "space is a whole lotta empty", since it's still true on a local level.
Ummmm..... a lot. A really huge, gargantuan number. Or, of course, you can pay those three guys a lot of overtime ... for the next 30 years. :rofl:
Now, imagine, if you will, not only a small ship universe, but a small planet universe. In MTU, it's only been 480+ years since colonization (across 8 sectors), and even assuming a 5% population growth rate, many of the planets don't even score into the millions, and almost none into the billions (almost exclusively alien worlds). I have polities that consist of a single four-system cluster, up to the 208-world United Trade Federation - and that's just in the 1+ sector I have mostly finished (24 polities in that area, plus loads of non-aligned systems). The UTF can buy lots and lots of nice purty, big ships. Little Hickory has 15 ships "up to battleship in size" - hence searching for this thread to see what I meant by that.
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Fritz:
Hans is, surprisingly enough, very right about most of that space being ignorable.
Most ships will never get more than 3 LS from a planet... except when using the "Stars generate gravity well interference with Jump"... and then you have 50+ stars in the marches that have over a week of N-space travel time for the average merchant from dejump to mainworld, presuming no masking effect, merely entry/exit interference.
By masking effect, I mean "you can't jump to the far side of the massive object." In which case, many of those worlds become faster to spend the two additional weeks to jump past and then back to the correct side for half their year.
There's no point in going N-space in system, even, for most of the ships. It's faster for many GG to simply jump to/from them, rather than go via N-space M-Drive, even at a sustained 5G's... Note that 8 days at 6G is only getting you about 48 AU... and at 1G, it's not even getting you out to Saturn.
Oh, and in T4 and T5, your M-Drive cuts out somewhere around 12 AU...
Drive Rating ________ 1G ______ 2G ______ 3G _______ 4G _______ 5G _______ 6G
AU in 1 day __________ 0.12 ____ 0.25 ____ 0.37 _____ 0.50 _____ 0.62 _____ 0.75
AU in 2 day __________ 0.50 ____ 1.00 ____ 1.50 _____ 2.00 _____ 2.49 _____ 2.99
AU in 3 day __________ 1.12 ____ 2.25 ____ 3.37 _____ 4.49 _____ 5.61 _____ 6.74
AU in 4 day __________ 2.00 ____ 3.99 ____ 5.99 _____ 7.98 _____ 9.98 ____ 11.98
AU in 5 day __________ 3.12 ____ 6.24 ____ 9.36 ____ 12.47 ____ 15.59 ____ 18.71
AU in 6 day __________ 4.49 ____ 8.98 ___ 13.47 ____ 17.96 ____ 22.45 ____ 26.95
AU in 7 day __________ 6.11 ___ 12.23 ___ 18.34 ____ 24.45 ____ 30.56 ____ 36.68
AU in 8 day __________ 7.98 ___ 15.97 ___ 23.95 ____ 31.94 ____ 39.92 ____ 47.90
Hans is, surprisingly enough, very right about most of that space being ignorable.
Most ships will never get more than 3 LS from a planet... except when using the "Stars generate gravity well interference with Jump"... and then you have 50+ stars in the marches that have over a week of N-space travel time for the average merchant from dejump to mainworld, presuming no masking effect, merely entry/exit interference.
By masking effect, I mean "you can't jump to the far side of the massive object." In which case, many of those worlds become faster to spend the two additional weeks to jump past and then back to the correct side for half their year.
There's no point in going N-space in system, even, for most of the ships. It's faster for many GG to simply jump to/from them, rather than go via N-space M-Drive, even at a sustained 5G's... Note that 8 days at 6G is only getting you about 48 AU... and at 1G, it's not even getting you out to Saturn.
Oh, and in T4 and T5, your M-Drive cuts out somewhere around 12 AU...
Drive Rating ________ 1G ______ 2G ______ 3G _______ 4G _______ 5G _______ 6G
AU in 1 day __________ 0.12 ____ 0.25 ____ 0.37 _____ 0.50 _____ 0.62 _____ 0.75
AU in 2 day __________ 0.50 ____ 1.00 ____ 1.50 _____ 2.00 _____ 2.49 _____ 2.99
AU in 3 day __________ 1.12 ____ 2.25 ____ 3.37 _____ 4.49 _____ 5.61 _____ 6.74
AU in 4 day __________ 2.00 ____ 3.99 ____ 5.99 _____ 7.98 _____ 9.98 ____ 11.98
AU in 5 day __________ 3.12 ____ 6.24 ____ 9.36 ____ 12.47 ____ 15.59 ____ 18.71
AU in 6 day __________ 4.49 ____ 8.98 ___ 13.47 ____ 17.96 ____ 22.45 ____ 26.95
AU in 7 day __________ 6.11 ___ 12.23 ___ 18.34 ____ 24.45 ____ 30.56 ____ 36.68
AU in 8 day __________ 7.98 ___ 15.97 ___ 23.95 ____ 31.94 ____ 39.92 ____ 47.90
Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
Tsk, tsk, Aramis. Darning with faint praise.
Earth would be 4.24LS. [(Earth diameter *100)/LS] And, that (or, even 3LS) makes for a huge surface area, compared to the surface area of the planet (about 10,000 times the surface area - 100^2). A lot of that might not be "empty", per se, but it is sure going to feel that way. I'm just pointing out that you don't have to count the billions and billions of cubic kilometers between planets to have "space is pretty dang empty" be true and affect your calculations.
Isn't that canonical? The star is a mass, isn't it? Therefore 100d, right?
o:I agree with all the rest of that stuff. You gotta do what you gotta do. Some places are more of a pain to get into than others.
Pffft. You kids with your newfangled toys! Now, get off my lawn! :smirk:
Isn't that canonical? The star is a mass, isn't it? Therefore 100d, right?
Well, kind of... Canon says it's the case, but makes no mention of it outside of JTAS articles until T4. It's quietly ignored.
There are two aspects: the exclusion zone, and the no travel past the zone effect. The former is blackletter canon; the latter is argued a lot, but appears to me to be canonical.
Both are blatantly ignored in the rules and adventures, being explicitly added in a JTAS article. And they put many a mainworld well inside the jump limit. And, if you have to trace the route for the entire jump, not just the entry/exit points, as a form of quantum collapse, then most of these systems become "Jump past and to the side, then jump back at them" to minimize travel times, because you can be up to 90° off on their orbit from them at closest dropout, and in a further orbital distance...
Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
Which is one reason a lot of people came up with the "everyone jumps to here, then drives to the port, then drives to there and jumps out" idea, I think. Sort of like Standard Arrival Routing (STARs) at airports, with most of the jump arrivals/departures being over the poles (relative to the system plane, of course) so masking is minimized.
Oh, face it, sonny, if your destination insystem is much more than 10 AU, you might as well make a micro-jump.
If you can ...
Many cases, the ecosphere is well inside the large star's 100 diameter limit.
