Acceleration/Speed Update

Well this is stararmy, if factions aren't fighting there is no conflict, and without conflict of any kind there really aren't any stories to tell.

This is a fight of GM rights to his setting, which in more ways is highly complicated since you have to licence your rights (unless its cluster flux).

Mind you I am a newer GM.

To make an Abwehran plot, I had to ask the FM and tell him the details.

To make any plot, I most likely be sending an Audit to Wes.

In the end I realize that anything in my plot can be interfered by Admin (the ruling senate body) or by the FM (who owns his house).

Remember who enforces the rules? Admins. They can break the rules if they wanted to, they can make more rules if they wanted to, we react by leaving or joining the site.

If rules mattered in the way you say, the only players in the end on this site would be you and your posse.

If players began flying ships into planets, Wes would most likely start wondering why all the lights on his map are falling off the map, which would launch an investigation causing a time portal causing those plots to be in the Cluster flux.

Eh. I'm kinda over this now. Said enough in the IRC. Wes'll say what he thinks.

Scot said:

This is a fight of GM rights to his setting, which in more ways is highly complicated since you have to licence your rights (unless its cluster flux).

Mind you I am a newer GM.

To make an Abwehran plot, I had to ask the FM and tell him the details.

To make any plot, I most likely be sending an Audit to Wes.

In the end I realize that anything in my plot can be interfered by Admin (the ruling senate body) or by the FM (who owns his house).

Remember who enforces the rules? Admins. They can break the rules if they wanted to, they can make more rules if they wanted to, we react by leaving or joining the site.

If rules mattered in the way you say, the only players in the end on this site would be you and your posse.

If players began flying ships into planets, Wes would most likely start wondering why all the lights on his map are falling off the map, which would launch an investigation causing a time portal causing those plots to be in the Cluster flux.

Click to expand...

So none of the rules matter?... I'm not buying it.

Uso, are you going to allow a player to actively attempt to fly a ship into a planet of that speed?

Am I going to actively allow a player to fly a ship into a planet of that speed?

There are reasons it doesn't happen, and it doesn't take rules to prevent it from happening.

Actually yes, I would allow a player to do that if they wanted too. The problem for me is that it is way, WAY to easy to pull off with how the rules currently are. Namely a player can pull off the entire attack from aiming towards the planet to impacting at full speed in less than a second or two.

You can take your pick of reasons for why this is, but ultimately I think it is because ships don't have to accelerate. If they did then people would get an opportunity to react.

This also ties in nicely to top speed in space. After all say the NSS neversail is flying along at its top speed. The moment it turns on its STL engines it will accelerate past that top speed. Top speed doesn't really make sense in this setting as ships can accelerate so long as they have remass. This of course becomes problematic when acceleration is instant.

Swapping out Top-Speed to mean 'acceleration', even when keeping the arbitrary top speed limit, solves a whole lot of problems in both game play, realism, and ship design.

Locking Topic until Wes has a chance to read and comment.

Acceleration is something that should be represented but then that means every engine system and ship mass would have to be calculated for the setting, which is a huge, and--to me--unnecessary task that is just going to distract me from roleplaying. So I'd rather stick with what we have or do a slow transition starting with the templates listing acceleration as a field.

I already have accelerations on my vessels, so I'm pretty much there man.

Wes said:

Acceleration is something that should be represented but then that means every engine system and ship mass would have to be calculated for the setting, which is a huge, and--to me--unnecessary task that is just going to distract me from roleplaying. So I'd rather stick with what we have or do a slow transition starting with the templates listing acceleration as a field.

Click to expand...

This assumes we let mass play a significant role in determining acceleration for ships; we're in a sci-fi setting so I suppose we could cheat and say the ships have a 'device' that lowers ships effective mass to near-zero or something. Kinda like mass-effect fields do in the mass effect game series, or how in the Andromeda tv series they do the same with their artificial gravity fields. That way, the change in reaction mass for ships that use fuel doesn't really matter either.

If ships have negliable 'effective' mass, that could explain why ships with normal thruster-like engines can produce huge accelerations in the hundreds or thousands of gravities and don't have to spend days or hours accelerating to reach their max speeds.

You could assign arbitrary acceleration limits for certain tech levels; in example 750g's for very advanced races, 500g's for advanced races and 250g's for standard races. There would be no speed limit except for lightspeed -- which would be more realistic. All ships could reach the same levels of speed; it would simply take less advanced ships longer to do so. It never made much sense to me that sub-light max ship speed was limited by armor tonnage.

Of course you could still have a speed limit of some sort and it doesn't have to be lightspeed; you could keep the 40% lightspeed shipspeed limit. I was under the impression that ships supposedly start to 'stretch-out' as they approach the speed of light. Perhaps they can't go faster due to hull-stress or something.