sub-100 jump
- Thread starter DED
- Start date
They had similar jump torps in the Poul Anderson books. They were not generally used because they were not secure. The torp would jump into a system and its radio beacon would go off. It was then a case of who ever got there first could pick up the messages held in the torp.
They would be fine, if you were the only person at the receiving end- okay for a small colony world's mail or covert message drops from agents on a world to a orbiting torp at the edge of the system which then jumps to a deep space rendevous point. May be a remote science station (possibly in deep space, or some dangerous location) that periodically sent data dumps via message torp to its commissioning science foundation.
I think they could be introduced as cannon, but for limited uses. The xboats won't use them, not secure. Commercial concerns won't use then for the same reason, and the navy won't use them as they are not secure, and the navy in battle can't guarentee to be at the end system to pick up the messages. A courier boat can try somewhere else if the fleet is not at the contact point.
Cheers
Richard
They would be fine, if you were the only person at the receiving end- okay for a small colony world's mail or covert message drops from agents on a world to a orbiting torp at the edge of the system which then jumps to a deep space rendevous point. May be a remote science station (possibly in deep space, or some dangerous location) that periodically sent data dumps via message torp to its commissioning science foundation.
I think they could be introduced as cannon, but for limited uses. The xboats won't use them, not secure. Commercial concerns won't use then for the same reason, and the navy won't use them as they are not secure, and the navy in battle can't guarentee to be at the end system to pick up the messages. A courier boat can try somewhere else if the fleet is not at the contact point.
Cheers
Richard
And that may, perchance, be the best reason to keep a person on board; to handle the problems that may crop up now and then. In earlier versions of the game, misjumps were a 1 in 36 kind of thing; extremely unreliable, but TNE made them automatically successful unless you did something to give a risk.
Surely jump has enough potential problems that a person is generally the cheapest or most efficient method of dealing with those problems.
OTOH, maybe all those scouts consider being an X-boat pilot "job security" and fought to retain it, even though it's not necessary.
But anyway, your data, even if piloted by a human, is only as reliable as the pilot. What's he going to do, resist boarders? Whatever you can think of him to do to protect his data, a computer or other automated system can do it faster.
This really is a can of worms, whether jump requires a person and why, and if sub-sized ships are allowed and why. All that stuff really requires some careful thought on the mechanics of jump space, and keeping inconsistencies and loopholes from popping up.
That's something you might want to post about, Martin, so we can pick it apart (to death?) for you.
Surely jump has enough potential problems that a person is generally the cheapest or most efficient method of dealing with those problems.
OTOH, maybe all those scouts consider being an X-boat pilot "job security" and fought to retain it, even though it's not necessary.
But anyway, your data, even if piloted by a human, is only as reliable as the pilot. What's he going to do, resist boarders? Whatever you can think of him to do to protect his data, a computer or other automated system can do it faster.
This really is a can of worms, whether jump requires a person and why, and if sub-sized ships are allowed and why. All that stuff really requires some careful thought on the mechanics of jump space, and keeping inconsistencies and loopholes from popping up.
That's something you might want to post about, Martin, so we can pick it apart (to death?) for you.
That result opens up a can of worms.
If I had an Imperial fleet, I'd always have a 'Message Launcher' ship with lots of torps aboard. Load them with data, program them with a target point, and have them delete all data (melt the data core, whatever) if they misjump. Then just salvo them (even if failure odds are 50% or 75%, you can easily beat those odds). This makes communicating key data via torpedos viable.
Now, the only case where they cease to look good is where P(success) * number of torps required to essentially gaurantee success statistically = more mass than an equivalent ship. If that isn't the case, jump torps still look pretty darn good.
And it'd make lifeboats with jump drive an option as attractive, perhaps.
If I had an Imperial fleet, I'd always have a 'Message Launcher' ship with lots of torps aboard. Load them with data, program them with a target point, and have them delete all data (melt the data core, whatever) if they misjump. Then just salvo them (even if failure odds are 50% or 75%, you can easily beat those odds). This makes communicating key data via torpedos viable.
Now, the only case where they cease to look good is where P(success) * number of torps required to essentially gaurantee success statistically = more mass than an equivalent ship. If that isn't the case, jump torps still look pretty darn good.
And it'd make lifeboats with jump drive an option as attractive, perhaps.
Yes, but if jump torps are expensive (in my assumptions I make them cost the same as an equivalent jump drive plus a bit more (because they are essentailly just a jump drive)), then they won't be viable for routine communications. Which keeps X-boats and couriers viable and yet allows jump torps for emergency messages.
According to my calculations a failure rate of 1/36th is enough to make an X-torp network more expensive than an X-boat network.
Not if you have to pay for them.
Hans
Rupert Boleyn
SOC-12
IIRC this 1 in 36 thing was only the case if poor fuel was used, etc. - it looked like a 1 in 36 thing until you chacked out the DMs.
daryen
SOC-14 1K
IIRC this 1 in 36 thing was only the case if poor fuel was used, etc. - it looked like a 1 in 36 thing until you chacked out the DMs. </font>[/QUOTE]That is correct.
The base roll to misjump was 13+ (i.e. a 0 in 36 chance to misjump). There was a +1 modifier if unrefined fuel is used, which is where you probably got the 1 in 36 thing.
The cool thing is that you can freely use unrefined fuel in the scout ship (or "naval" ships) as they had counteracting modifiers.
DED
SOC-12
Yes. I don't remember what the basis of scouts and military vessels getting around this. Perhaps it was assumed that fuel purification plants were on those ships. That was a MT creation right? I don't remember if that was in HG or not.
Let's face it, if an interstellar shipping company had a consistent misjump rate of 2.78%, they'd probably be out of business pretty quick. Just look at NASA's 2% catastrophic failure rate with the shuttle. There are those in the US Congress now considering dropping human spaceflight altogether. The trick, for CT at least, is to stick to refined fuel. Save that unrefined junk for desperate folks.
I coulda sworn that jumping was a task, and that if you rolled a 2, that was a misjump, and then you rolled again to see how bad the jump was. Having bad fuel and being in a well and other stuff like that would give you DMs or more dice to throw, and you really didn't want to roll high.
Minor misjumps were simple time errors; you arrived at a different time than you wanted. The time could be 5-10 days, though there are "fiction" accounts of jumps taking longer. Major misjumps caused you to do the 1D6D6 roll for distance, and gave you a result between 1 and 36. And rolling really high would destroy your ship, but you had to have thrown 3 dice for that result; you had to really be desperate to wind up with 3 dice.
Unfortunately, I don't have my books here so I can check them.
Minor misjumps were simple time errors; you arrived at a different time than you wanted. The time could be 5-10 days, though there are "fiction" accounts of jumps taking longer. Major misjumps caused you to do the 1D6D6 roll for distance, and gave you a result between 1 and 36. And rolling really high would destroy your ship, but you had to have thrown 3 dice for that result; you had to really be desperate to wind up with 3 dice.
Unfortunately, I don't have my books here so I can check them.
daryen
SOC-14 1K
Yes. I don't remember what the basis of scouts and military vessels getting around this. Perhaps it was assumed that fuel purification plants were on those ships. That was a MT creation right? I don't remember if that was in HG or not.</font>[/QUOTE]The numbers I quoted were from Book 2 (The Traveller Book, actually). I assume the naval bonus was for implied purification plant; the scout bonus was probably for implied purification plant and "hardiness".
In MT, it was changed to be a task. The base operation is again automatically successful unless using unrefined fuel without a purification plant (or within 100D). There are no "naval" or "scout" modifiers; that was pure CT.
I can't speak to TNE or T4, but my base understanding here is that unless you are taking chances, there is no possibility of a misjump.
