LeperColony
Traveller Card Game Dev Team
Is there a particular reason why acceleration is limited to 6g in Traveller?
Why is acceleration limited to 6g?
- Thread starter LeperColony
- Start date
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
D6 
Anything else is in-game colour
If Marc had built the game around 2D10 instead of 2D6 we'd have...
2-20 range of stats instead of 2-12
9 basic careers plus Other and a draft roll of 1D10 instead of 5 plus Other and a draft roll of 1D6
D100 or D10 x D10 tables instead of D6 x D6 tables
Jump 10! instead of Jump 6
...and misjumps of D10 x D10 for up to 100 Parsecs!!
And of course, 10G maneuver drives
Anything else is in-game colour
If Marc had built the game around 2D10 instead of 2D6 we'd have...
2-20 range of stats instead of 2-12
9 basic careers plus Other and a draft roll of 1D10 instead of 5 plus Other and a draft roll of 1D6
D100 or D10 x D10 tables instead of D6 x D6 tables
Jump 10! instead of Jump 6
...and misjumps of D10 x D10 for up to 100 Parsecs!!
And of course, 10G maneuver drives
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Actually...
In T5 is not so limited. It goes up to 9G, so I suspect there may be some truth in Far-Trader's comment.
In T5 is not so limited. It goes up to 9G, so I suspect there may be some truth in Far-Trader's comment.
Oh yeah?!? Well, acceleration IMTU goes up to 11!
LeperColony
Traveller Card Game Dev Team
Why is there a hard cap at all? Why not make a soft cap based on tech capabilities. I understand the point of the jump cap, but the reasoning behind the maneuver ceiling is a little less clear to me. Especially since changing the way acceleration works could actually give fighters a reason to exist.
So that PC-scale battles have at least some chance of staying on the gaming table.
Even with this, a 6G ship can accelerate to an uncatchable vector after only 2-3 turns of movement (a vector of 18 hexes gets you off a 4' x 6' table PDQ...
In the case of Jump Drives, given the percentages, you can't build J8 and J9 designs, period, without use of drop tanks. Which didn't exist in the original CT design.
In fact, given the 70% J7 would require in fuel, and the 17.5% JDrive, and 10.5% PP, and the 2/35 of Jdrive and PP in crew SR minimum space (for 1.6% more), and the 2% bridge, you're at 101.6% of hull tonnage, before the +6 Tons drive base tonnage, +4 tons minimum additional crew tons, and any guns, or the 1% maneuver drive, or the 70T PP fuel. (Note that this is based upon finding the underlying formulae in Bk2 - there are hiccups, but outside of 3-4 drive sizes, these formulae work.)
And, given the percentages for MDrives being so low, one could fairly easily hit "strawberry jam time" thrusts with the 1% per G with a -1T base.
A 6G, J0, P6 vessel, uses 2% bridge, 6% MD, 9% PP, and 0.86% drive crew running this up...
A 1000Td ship doing 25G's would be doable, I think... if we simply extrapolate the percentages
249T MD25
375T PP25
250T PPF
_20T Bridge
__1T Mod 1
_88T 22xSR (Co PNM 18xE)
_17T Cargo
Bt 20G's is not something one can survive for 20min at a shot... 2-3 minutes, sure. Not 20 sustained. (150 for a couple seconds is survivable... after a fashion...)
6G is about the limit for what humans can survive for extended periods.
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far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Oh yeah?!? Well, acceleration IMTU goes up to 11!
Yeah, but your Engineer always dies under mysterious circumstances.
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Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
I think FT has the true answer - the use of D6 in the game.
The best 'rationale' I've heard is that TL15 hasn't developed grav plates and inertial compensation that can handle more than 6g, so while higher g forces exist (obviously) they are not routinely used in spacecraft.
Jump 8 vessels can be built using LBB5, but there is a natural limit there that makes the J6 limit nonsensical - I eradicated that IMTU a few months after I got LBB5.
The best 'rationale' I've heard is that TL15 hasn't developed grav plates and inertial compensation that can handle more than 6g, so while higher g forces exist (obviously) they are not routinely used in spacecraft.
Jump 8 vessels can be built using LBB5, but there is a natural limit there that makes the J6 limit nonsensical - I eradicated that IMTU a few months after I got LBB5.
LeperColony
Traveller Card Game Dev Team
I think the Jump ceiling makes sense for the OTU. Increasing the rate of interstellar travel will consequently diminish the decentralized nature of Imperial society.
By way of contrast, having one static maneuver speed cap just seems kinda odd to me.
By way of contrast, having one static maneuver speed cap just seems kinda odd to me.
Instead of the wonky semi-derived formulas from LBB2, I'd use the clear-cut formula from LBB5. 3m-1 is the percentage of the ship that needs to be devoted to maneuver drive factor m. MCr 0.5 per ton. Easy.
P.S.: Of course, I am very much in the "LBB2 to the dustbin of history" camp anyway...
LBB5 can't be used to explain the "why" elements of the design limits - Bk2 can.
ArcaneFlash
SOC-10
FFS 1 pg 77, TL20 compensated Gs is 9, max Accel/workstation: 10G/11G.
Metagame - obviously the d6 influenced a great many Traveller elements.
My personal in-game "why" is that grav "thruster" plates, which are effectively warp drives that twist space to propel the ship, can't warp space more than 6g worth without tearing space. IMTU, the principle behind jump drives was revealed by accidents involving pushing gravitic thrusters to higher performance levels. Of course *chemical* thrusters or other reaction drives can go faster than that, but the convenience of reactionless gravitic drives keeps them the dominant form of propulsion.
My personal in-game "why" is that grav "thruster" plates, which are effectively warp drives that twist space to propel the ship, can't warp space more than 6g worth without tearing space. IMTU, the principle behind jump drives was revealed by accidents involving pushing gravitic thrusters to higher performance levels. Of course *chemical* thrusters or other reaction drives can go faster than that, but the convenience of reactionless gravitic drives keeps them the dominant form of propulsion.
This, and the D6 reason mentioned too.
How so?
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that LBB2 scales really nonsensically in more than one place - most egregiously with the fact that a power plant's fuel consumption is unrelated to the size of the power plant - I don't see where it explains anything.
Because you are looking solely at it as it pertains to your use.
The Bk2 design tables, aside from a small (and probably intentional) hiccup, are formulaic derivation. The process of Bk2 and the progressions encoded in those tables can not, at this point, be distinguished as to cause/effect on the design limits of 6G; chicken and egg... but given the forumlae encoded in them, we can extrapolate and see that J6 is the maximum possible under the Jdrive formula. Given that limit, and the table based approach, the table being limited to 6 prevents people trying to do the "impossible" of fitting J7 in a Bk2 hull. It also caps the MD and PP, since they use the same performance table.
We can also see that a similar formulaic approach to MD would create unreasonably high combatant speeds 20G monitors, 15G J1 warships, etc.
I'm also reasonably certain that the limit is linked to the d6; the d6, the formulae, and the table based approach all combine together in Bk2 to produce the otherwise unexplainable lack of 7+ on the table.
Bk5 can't explain any of those, because we know for a fact that those 6G J6 limits were in place prior to it being written. In this case, the limits predate the rules by several years, and so Bk5 is meaningless in explaining the limits themselves - which is the whole issue being asked. (Note also that a J7 design under Bk5 would be doable — 8% JD, 8% PP 8% PPF, 70% JDF 2% Bridge, 1% staterooms = 97%)
Nor can MT explain them - it's further removed by no longer having any practical reason not to include higher, as MT's fuel formula can support J9.
I suspect the CT Bk2 fuel rate for JDrive was chosen for simplicity of calculation - portable calculators being rare when it was written - and the table choice as well. The hiccups may be a copyright dodge, a miscalculation, or both; in either case, the table gives better performance than formulaic, not worse, so formalization produces no errors, just inefficiencies.
No, because I take "explain" to mean "make sense from an in-universe viewpoint". Which is the only value of "explain" of any interest to me. Whether arbitrary limitations are imposed by formulas, tables, or flat out rules is not.
P.S.: I also happen to think that way less thought went into the LBB2 system than you apparently think it did.
You're arbitrary "in-universe only" leaves the explanation impossible.
Many game settings do things for entirely mechanical reasons having nothing to do with the universe.
There have been several possible explanations mentioned in this thread, so it's arguably very possible.
I'm not interested in soulless number crunching of a ship design system I do not use (because I find it inelegant, limited and inconsistent with the universe it is supposed to emulate.)
EDIT: Actually, I'm not interested in soulless number crunching period.
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