Fred's Propulsion Brainstorming

[Fred]

Here's my goals:

Thank you Wes! Finally receiving concrete feedback from you is relief, actually.

- Replace all FTL systems with an improved version of hyperspace
Note that this not a Yamatai thing but a site-wide thing.

Well, ouch. That's going to see more resistance and controversy than simply introducing a new technology that most could eventually upgrade to (which was my approach).

The new hyperspace could be usable from planets, maybe not to them, though. It would not be faster than current hyperspace speeds. Because FTL would now be exclusive to hyperspace, there would no longer be FTL combat.

That seems potentially flawed. FTL combat is essentially brief spurts of superluminal speeds (which hyperspace is capable of providing) to get into a certain position. In ship-to-ship combat calculated in a distance of light seconds, even AUs, the speed fold drives provide the same benefit: effectively line-of-sight teleportation.

The way I could 'fight' against it being used in combat was to give a charge time. But over shorter distances, it needed to have an acceptably low charge time to get in places nearly as handily as CFS, and yet not fast enough to really be something you'd use in combat for any reason other than premeditated escape or tactical withdrawals.

Disposing of the intra-planetary scale and going for the intra-stellar speed scale is doable... but it's important to understand how it will trivialize distances in a starsystem even more. A 1-second jump will end up having you travel 1054 AU in a second (for a 1ly/m fold drive).

- Limit STL to .40 globally (due to relativity concerns)

This is definitely a retcon. Not one I have a lot of problems with, but just pointing it out.

- Eliminate doublers and triplers. I never liked that clause in the speed limitations anyway.

The actual concept those were supposed to represent was 'boosting engines'. GMs can arrange boosting power to most ship system in their plots, or so I figure.

If you want them out, I see no problem with it. But I still expect people could in plots boost power and break the envelope by roughly 25%.

- Eliminate the current "nebula = anti-FTL" rule

Without CFS and only hyperspace, there's not much choice about that anyhow.

I do not want to:
- Nerf small ships by making them slower as Fred suggested

Wait, I said that where? Oh.

I was just following some opinion I heard from Zakalwe a while ago, about big ships supposedly being the fastest because they could be the ones to mount the biggest engines. It gave carriers transporting vessels more sense.

After all, you can have smaller vessels shine by giving them a much higher realspace/relativistic speed than the bigger ones while making the large ones ponderously slow in that regard; and yet make the large ones (again, carriers) valuable for being able to mount very powerful fold drives.

As for my approach to sublight...

I just think that relativistic speed in ship-to-ship combat is a big thing (anything above 0.1c, really). It's actually just shy of what we consider FTL combat, seeing ships go so fast by comparison of beam weapons and the reactions of the people aboard said starship.

I figure the cruising speeds for a ship traveling is just not the sort of speed you can really afford fighting at... and typically, engine power should be the largest power consumption element aboard a ship.

Anyhow, those are just ideas being thrown around.

I think we might need to have some sort of handle on how fast ships can speed up based on their class - it doesn't make a lot of sense to have them go from .00c to .375c instantly, does it? I would be willing to lower STL speeds too, if it was done in a way the gameplay didn't suffer (allowing in-system folds?)

Well, while tossing and turning in my bed yesterday I thought up of a few things.

Realspace propulsion:
Provide a meter per second speed for our sublight engines. It's useful anyways, especially considering if we enter a planet's atmosphere (instead of giving out an arbitrary number like 'Mach 20'). Give the sublight engines the ability to go to relativistic speeds themselves - they need it to reach cruising speed out of combat - but make conditions to use them during combat stringent so that it ends up being used sparingly.

My suggestion is to make power demand for using the sublight engines at their peak be high enough to possibly seriously limit the combatant wishing to use it.

example: In Starfleet Command 3, if you accelerate and warp to a destination in a combat area (a mid-combat warp), during the warp, your shields and beam weapons are down. You can also do high-energy maneuvers like a quick spin around, but there's an cumulatively larger probability that your ship will suffer damage from that due to hull stress.

Hyperspace propulsion:
Apply a charge requirement for any kind of fold maneuver. Have the hyperspace hardware be useable pretty much everywhere a CFS could also be used. Choose wether or not you want in-system folds to be somewhat slower to make the "minimum charge hop" be more limited in distance.

The tug-of-war between interdiction and counter-interdiction has gotten a little convulted. For those reason, I suggest that the limitation for a ship to be able to use FTL be power. Forming the event necessary to make a fold jump requires power - methods of interdiction increase the power being required to achieve that.

When charging for a fold, there will be a larger power requirement to form the conditions necessary to jump under interdiction, so it will take significantly more time... but it won't be absolutely impossible.

When in a fold, the charge was already expended to fold and most of the ship's available power is being used to sustain hyperspace. Encountering the mass shadow of space-time style interdiction in hyperspace would usually impose a power demand to correct the field that is just not possible, so the vessel would generally immediately defold at the coterminous realspace location (probably the edge of the interdiction field, in realspace).

* * *

What do you think of that, Wes?

 

[Zack]

Interdiction and Acceleration can solve all of the problems without requiring much change to the site and how it operates.

Increase the use (or perhaps effectiveness?) of interdiction would effectively prevent anyone from hyper spacing TO a planet. But once there they could easily use anti-interdiction to hyperspace FROM a planet. I would suggest changing the interdiction rules to something like: Planets generate a natural anti-FTL field .5 au in radius that has enough strength to block hyperspace travel.

Limiting STL speed can be done by using acceleration as a value or at least including it. The easiest way might be to actually merge them both and have ships use a max change in velocity stat. Max Delta V <= .4c in 5 minutes. This would let the players know how much acceleration a ship has to use, and how long it takes to get to 'max speed' (aka when fuel runs out or engines need to be shut down for cooling off)

That looks a bit complicated but think of it this way. Guys who want star trek type RP just ignore the acceleration thing anyways and have a 'top speed' for their ships which satisfies the limit STL directive. It also solves the 'ships need to accelerate' problem and the 'realism' problem at the same time. GMs that want complexity then get to have their pilots manage their Delta V budget. Yeah you can doge the shots but you won't be able to forever. This REALLY gives pilots not only something to do but makes a good pilot super-critical to the starship. It also gives starships a good reason to carry solar sails and other 'remassless' drives because you don't want to run out of fuel and be stuck drifting off into space.

Then of course we just strip out the parts we don't want, doublers are banned, the interdiction rule is changed (easy to do right now), CDDs are removed, and small ships remain un-nerfed. The only required retcon relates to the CDD removal and to a much lesser extent doublers.

I would like to ask what you intend to do with weapon systems that use FTL devices like the Sharie or the Vogel? Will weapons be limited to .4c as well?


Edit: In space the ship speed is not going to be dependent on the size of the ship IE: battleship or speedboat, but the size of the fuel tank.

It is also absolutely critical that rules are enforced here. Allowing someone to break a rule by 25% in certain circumstances will almost instantly open the flood gate for more 'doubler' type devices that break the rules intent.


Another edit: We probably should set the distance of the natural anti-FTL field of a planet to match the time we want a battle to take. at .5AU if the ships are already traveling at full speed when they arrive it will still take something like 12 minutes for them to hit the planet's atmosphere.

 

[Wes]

I don't think it should be about charge time, since that's the domain of the ship and people could just build (or should have already built) ships to compensate for it and eliminate charge time. Instead, it'd be better to say "hyperspace portals(?) take X amount of time to form" or "it takes X amount of time to enter hyperspace (during which you can still be shot at)" and be done with it.

Subspace-accelerated features of weapons would be eliminated, and I would rather just not allow hyperspace weapons. It's cooler to have ships come in person to shoot stuff.

 

[Fred]

A delay to forming a portal could work... but would a ship need to be stationary while the jump point for being formed? Charging (something which is presently done) is already an implemented feature too so circumventing it might not be so obvious - additionally, it allows you to remain mobile too. Additionally, would a portal being formed take more time if the said portal takes you much further away (differentiating the type to forming a portal between a mid-system fold and a intra-stellar fold).

I'm also leery of depending too much on interdiction. Interdiction, though common in militaries, is not an universal feature for all vessels in the setting. I think this needs to work without needing interdiction.

Interdiction, in my mind, should give an extra edge; more control on a space engagement for the one whom can field it. Tossing it everywhere makes it unexceptional. There's a way to implement constraints in engines technology which will have them be of 'balanced' use enough so to make interdiction field by contrast exceptional and effective rather than "Ho Hum" commonplace.

I'm no expert on Star Wars but I don't get the impression interdiction is all that common there. They have it here and there, with one type of star destroyer being specialized in interdiction use.

Example: When the Plumeria was escaping Hukka after having bombed it, there was a fleet including hundreds of SMX ships which could have had all used their interdiction technology to supposedly stop the Plumeria cold from ever leaving.

A ship in a similar situation now would have had been able to dart around making evasive maneuvers while trying to charge up their fold drives against the interdiction generated, buying time until they could make their escape.

It is a very powerful dramatic tool. An interdiction-capable vessel will already involved a "Oh shit" reaction since they might have torn you out of hyperspace or they are preventing you from escaping quickly.

 

[Zack]

I would think saying 'hyperspace portals take X amount of time to form' is something that could be abused by people taking advantage of the NTSE forum to get ships that can enter hyperspace faster.

You could roll that into new interdiction rules, but getting interdiction rules used by GMs is going to be the only sure way of getting what you want. The rules don't require star ships to have interdiction as planets and other bodies generate natural interdiction which will prevent star ships from warping to a planet but not necessarily away from a planet.

Also how can you possibly remain stationary in space? You will always be accelerating in relation to something.

 

[Fred]

Mmmm...

Well, what I see wrong with hyperspace portals forming is how you're effectively more or less making a wormhole event going into hyperspace. If an hyperspace portal forms, doesn't that make it, in itself a stationary thing? If the ship keeps moving around while the portal is forming, then once the portal is formed it might not be close to the ship, requiring the ship to go fly into it.

Or maybe involving the possibility of another ship flying into it. Then bringing in other questions like 'is the time to forming an hyperspace jump related to the distance covered?' and 'what happens if you jump in an hyperspace portal you did not form?' and 'does an hyperspace portal close up after you pass through it? does it last for a limited amount of time?'

By comparison, I felt my 'charge, flash and gone' approach was somewhat more elegant and less troublesome.

 

[Zack]

The portal would have to be spherical, to encompass the entire ship, and it would have to match velocity with the ship, to prevent the ship from being only partially taken in.

The way we've done it in the past has been a hyperspace event takes with it everything within a certain distance of the generator (ship and anything in range included)

 

[Fred]

Centering the sphere on the ship would work, I guess. Also solves the notion of that space-time bubble thing I mentioned - in fact, probably makes it redundant.

I just wonder what it'd end up being like while the ship was preparing to jump. Like an expanding soap bubble, then a flash as the ship jumps and then nothing left behind?

What about any vulnerabilities during the formation of that hyperspace portal? I mean, even if it takes a delay to form up if there are no limitations tied up to it then a ship can just keep fighting while forming an hyperspace portal and poof, gone. Then it reappears elsewhere a la teleportation and just keeps fighting.

I'm talking in deep space conditions, without interdiction fields. I really felt there was a constraint that was needed without needing to depend on interdiction fields themselves.

 

[Nashoba]

If you are going with the bubble it would probably form at its designed distance from the ship. And the field strength would increase until it reached the point necessary to take the ship into hyperspace.


That said, I must say that your work here Fred has been good. This change will accomplish what Wes wants which is to eliminate FTL combat.

I had been hearing that there was talk about slowing down the speeds in SARP, which I have always thought were too fast. This won't have that affect. I personally do not like the hyperspace fold travel method as it is the fastest version in the SARP LY's in minutes. I have never in any gaming system used combat at FTL speeds. So this change won't affect that in my plot.

My biggest question is when this goes into affect how existing technology will be affected. For example can this sensor track a ship in hyperspace? My initial thought is know because we have a different sensor that is used to track Hyperspatial events. Which means my upcoming plot is going to have to be reconned.

Ks-MIES-E3013
Subspace Mass Detector

Range of 20 LY
Faster than light
Good for finding large ships or fleets of ships.
Cannot identify types of objects.

 

[Fred]

Today's speeds are actually much slower, Nashoba.

The Sakura gunship was a vessel with a distorsion speed of 300 000c and an hyperspace speed of 20 ly/m.

The Plumeria is now around 21 000c and 1 ly/m.

It was a substancial reduction. Speeds are certainly faster than we need in a star system, but wether it is CDD or Fold, we've already sort of determined that any FTL jump inside a star system is almost practically like teleportation at those distances.

If you feel those speeds were too fast, perhaps what we can do is suggest Wes to stick Hyperspace speeds at the CDD/CFS intra-planetary standard (maximum 2.5 ly/h) instead - it's already an established figure. However, I find it very unlikely that you'll be able to sell him the idea - I think he greatly prefers extremely quick travel across the SARPiverse rather than 'sailing for days to reach a destination'.

As an addendum, I'm starting to think that the revised hyperspace could look a lot like how warp speed was presented in the Star Trek (2009) movie. That's... actually kind of cool from where I sit as a visual reference.

As for the said sensors... I think they'd work. The terms subspace and hyperspace seem interchangeable terms in sci-fi. However, if speeds remain on the ly/m scale, then seeing ahead at 20 ly is going to be a more limited observational benefit.

 

[Vesper]

In regards to SW interdiction is uncommon (relatively speaking) for several reasons:

1) The generators are expensive, large, and require a lot of power. As a result they can only fit on cruisers and such (bearing in mind the Interdicter class cruiser, the smallest one to carry a mass shadow generator, is ~620m in length and is solely devoted to the generator. It only has laser cannons for defense.)
2) The generators cover a fairly small area (a few ten thousands of km) so their placement has to be well thought out to either force a enemy out of hyperspace or keep them trapped in realspace.
3) The generators can only operate for a few minutes at a time before having to shutoff for cooling (which takes several minutes as well) before they can be brought on line. Again, this means that their use requires a lot of tactics and thinking for them to be effective. Also, within SW there is no 'divert power to engines' to bypass a mass shadow (natural or synthetic). If you come across one and you don't let the computer drop you out of hyperspace you are going to die. Or at least take serious damage. There isn’t any way around it.

Within the SARP none of the above is true. They are comparably cheap, small, and low power (at least enough that they can be found on anything larger than 60m in length). They also cover a huge area and can be maintained essentially indefinitely. Lastly ships more or less ignore inhibitors, at least as far as combat is concerned. If a ship is dropped to 1-2kc (as seems to be the case now) by entering a inhibitor field its going to get to you in a fraction of second or just go through the whole thing in slightly longer. They are essentially useless because they have no meaningful affect on combat.

Edit: I’m sorry, I just checked the anti-FTL page and note that the things only drop FTL to 1/4th of normal. So their even more useless.

If the things worked, at all, a lot of the issues you are having with speeds and combat would be resolved.

Fred, yes those reductions where large but they didn’t really have a effect. No one really payed attention to speed beyond the tech folk then and now no one pays much attention to speed beyond the tech folk. It amounted to some accounting changes. Overhauling the entire FTL system will have significant changes and I do not see them being worth the cost.


Also, since you guys do not seem to have considered it, fiddling with how much power it takes for STL/FTL will have serious affects on things. If a Aether/Hyperspace tap/ CDDA powered ship has any trouble powering STL/FTL you have made antimatter and fusion power completely obsolete in one stroke. If the above trio cannot provide enough power for a ship to travel at STL/FTL without much trouble than AM and fusion have absolutely no chance to compete. They are several magnitudes lower in the power output department at least. This seems to be going against your desire to use alternative power systems Fred.

 

[Fred]

Fold Drives already require a charge time. That is nothing new. If there is a power source discrepancy, it already exists.

What is new is a Fold Drive's ability to make smaller jumps, with a smaller onset, making them nearly as versatile as CDD-style propulsion... just not enough to be of significant practical use once in a starship skirmish.

Furthermore, while I appreciated the method of the charge time, the alternative Wes proposed with the onset being that of forming the fields required to make an hyperspace jump. Personally, I still find charge times a much simpler and elegant answer to the problem... but it essentially works either way - and abuse is still possible in each respect as well.

Seeing some of the problems inherent with interdiction, the concept of anti-interdiction and such... it seemed far preferable to me to have interdiction inflict a much greater lag-time before a vessel manages to jump. This delay can be of great dramatic use, and can buy the time needed for opponents of the vessel attempting to flee to have the chance to disable its engines, seize it in a graviton beam, or some such. It's open-ended, it's not an absolute, and can invariably do the job interdiction is supposed to do while allowing a possible escape from it.

 

[Wes]

Here's my suggestion:

- Merge CDD drives and Hyperspace Drives
- Ships keep their old CDD/CFS speed as their new hyperspace speed.
- Minimum time for ALL SHIPS to enter hyperspace is 15 seconds + charge time (you can charge in advance though).
- Anti-FTL fields increase fold time to 1 full minute + charge time
- FTL weapons not allowed

 

[Doshii Jun]

Glad this isn't retroactive, or Miharu would be a dead plot.

 

[Nashoba]

And how will charge time be calculated? A factor of the distance? Class of the ship? Bigger ship longer charge time?

 

[Soresu]

I should point out, since we more or less consider anything going beyond 1c FTL or so, Torpedoes would be nerfed...again, hard as a result. 12c is comparatively fast, and could be construed as an FTL speed. (Even if we're talking about especially primitive civilizations just now starting FTL Star Flight.)

I also wonder how this would effect Teleportation Modules currently in use by the Mindy series.

EDIT: Also, let's please, for the sake of avoiding headache after headache, and frustration, avoid making calculations constantly on speeds, times, and distances simplicity is often best. Some on here think making large order calculations is easy and or fun. Others don't.

 

[Fred]

@Nashoba:
Well, it needs to be quickly available, but long distances have to be covered decently too.

The current figure Wes and I have come up with is that an hyperspace jump would take 10 minutes to cross any 10 light year increment of distance.

We've discussed alternatives, like 1 minute for every 10 light years, or 1 minute per two light years. Isn't fixed yet. To be honest, Wes expressed that he didn't have a solid idea and could leave it to the ship designers.

Me, I think it needs to be further ironed out, but I've not yet come upon something I think would be ideal.

* * *

Teleportations would probably work fairly decently if they were a effectively were a 1-second 1c jump that takes 30 seconds to charge. Just that would probably have them working how they are supposed to - even if that's a sizeable distance reduction.

I mean... we don't really use them 3 AU away anyhow.

 

[Zack]

Here's my suggestion:

- Merge CDD drives and Hyperspace Drives
- Ships keep their old CDD/CFS speed as their new hyperspace speed.
- Minimum time for ALL SHIPS to enter hyperspace is 15 seconds + charge time (you can charge in advance though).
- Anti-FTL fields increase fold time to 1 full minute + charge time
- FTL weapons not allowed

I assume interdiction will have other effects as well such as
- you can not hyperspace into an interdiction field without being destroyed (We need to discuss HOW the ship is destroyed by this as well. Preferably it does not re-enter normal space at all and is merely crushed into a infinitely small ball. If it does re-enter normal space then FTL weapon possibilities are opened up)
- Interdiction fields pull ships out of hyperspace?
- Anti-interdiction removes the effect of one interdiction device in its AOE?
- Interdiction blocks teleportation?
- Planets generate their own interdiction field?

There are really no inherit problems with interdiction, or anti-interdiction. We just need to work out all of the rules for using them. It should be far more effective than the botched speed reductions we went through last time. I would like to see the interdiction game carried over into the new FTL rules. Having more depth in combat is good for this setting in its current state.

@Vesper: Anti-matter and fusion power are obsolete in this setting as far as a main power source goes but they do have their uses. A fusion drive system can also double as a power plant, and cooling device. As a main power system it won't operate anywhere near as well as hyperspace tap or aether (just like anti-matter or any other power plant besides aether/hst) but it does have its uses. I tend to think if it like the battery in a car, not enough to power the car but an important part of the device.

Remember, we are bending space and time with FTL drives. They basically require entire planets being converted into energy and exotic matter in order to have any chance at functioning. As such aether and HSTs are the only option to power them.

If we want to get rid of aether and HSTs I would think the best bet would be to fold them into the FTL drives themselves IE: they would become self powering as a product of the FTL action but unusable for powering a ship because it would require a FTL event. That is a conversation for another time though.

@ Soresu: c is the speed of light in a vacuum. 1c is 1 x the speed of light in a vacuum. FTL means Faster than Light. 12c then would mean 12 x the speed of light in a vacuum. So yes, by definition 12c is a FTL speed. You are also going to find that fighting without FTL at all is going to make well designed torpedos the dominant space weapon.

 

[Soresu]

@ Soresu: c is the speed of light in a vacuum. 1c is 1 x the speed of light in a vacuum. FTL means Faster than Light. 12c then would mean 12 x the speed of light in a vacuum. So yes, by definition 12c is a FTL speed. You are also going to find that fighting without FTL at all is going to make well designed torpedos the dominant space weapon.

Kinda knew everything you just said there buddy.

 

[Wes]

https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=guide:ftl-revised

This is still very much a WIP.