Well, again, Uso hasn't been really reading what I wrote and only made the assumptions he wanted to use. My limiting factor to tactical jumps in combat is a simple give-and-take for the advantage gained along with a classic "the engines cannae take much more o' this, Keptin!"
Sooo... yeah. Going back to topic.
Wes said:
Here's my suggested changes to anti-FTL:
- Only planets can project AoE Anti-FTL fields (we need to figure out a good max range).
- Ships can still project Anti-FTL fields, but they are single target only.
- A ship can only use one Anti-FTL field at a time. Because of SCIENCE.
- Anti-FTL fields can only be used successfully on ships of the same or smaller size class.
- Anti-FTL fields don't stack
- These is no counter to an Anti-FTL field*
*Side effect: Because CFS/CDD will no longer be more effective against Anti-FTL, we will only need one FTL system on future ships. This means we can remove CDD from the CFS as has been suggested in this thread.
Long dissertation ahead:
I suggest we base off the AoE Anti-FTL range of planets by inspiring ourselves from
Hill spheres.
L1 through 5 are Lagrangian points. L1 and L2 probably illustrate what boundaries Earth's Hill Sphere has.
What are Hill spheres? They are the gravitational sphere of influence of planets; the maximum distance at which each individual planet's gravitational influence is stronger than the more distant sun and planets.
Following the above notion, Earth's Hill Sphere is 1.5 million kilometers in radius (5 light seconds), which is a fairly big playground considering Earth's moon is only 1.3 light seconds away from the planet. A ship dropping out from FTL would be 5 minutes away from the planet if it went at 5000kps. Perhaps enough time for any friendly forces present to respond to the attack the way Wes previously wished his defense networks would do.
5 minutes wouldn't be that long a time either, since more defending vessels would either be protecting installations maybe midway in the Hill Sphere, or guarding the perimeter proper. In this case, it'd probably be a lot better than the present Interdiction drive 499 light seconds in term of pacing and center most defense actions around points-of-interests like planets rather than any other random spot.
That's for Earth. Jupiter's Hill Sphere stands at 0.35 AU (roughly 175 light seconds) so in the case of gas giants, the distances to be crossed is a lot more significant and
long - considering that'd end up taking nearly 3 hours to cross with that same 5000kps thrusters I mentioned earlier... ouch.
That does make me wish we still had some viable access to low-end FTL travel to make that more manageable - more on that later.
* * *
Convenient technobabble for the above could be that while a superluminal drive can endure entering certain gravity masses (such as that exerted by a star) but react poorly to being exposed to two major gravitic forces at the same time (a star's
sphere of influence + a planet's Hill sphere) which would be why most superluminal vessels would drop from FTL speeds in order to close on such a body.
I suppose space stations could simulate their own Hill Spheres through an anti-FTL effect and via the same concept not be based on a planet, though they would need be based in a star's
SoI to keep in theme.
As for single ship targeted Anti-FTL, I'd vote for the graviton beam to be repurposed to not only serve as our tractor beam equivalent, but also as something which would simulate the same effects. I like this a lot more than a vague single-target anti-FTL concept because it's an established object/technology that kind of goes in the same vein as the gravity mass idea. It can be hit, destroyed, and it's the best thing before actually striking a ship's FTL drives with weaponry.
In light of my above suggestion - if taken - we'd need to establish just what Anti-FTL means.
- Does it mean no FTL propulsion while under the effect?
- If so, then the only way to go back to superluminal speeds would be to physically exit the zone.
- Does it mean that an actual hyperspace event still needs to be generated, but will be just delayed?
- In that case, anti-FTL is really just a speedbump to departure, regardless of where a ship is. There will be a need to figure out how a ship going at FTL will behave when entering a anti-FTL zone, and how restarting FTL propulsion in that zone to cross through some part of it (either for movement or escape) will work.
* * *
I'll admit that I find it hard to justify, in that light, actually having ships with two separate FTL systems. The gimmick of saying that CDD is for use mainly in star systems feels weak. I like 'warp speed' style FTL, but not enough to be blind to the inconsistency.
Another point of concern is how this may mean that shuttles, to operate well, will require fold drives of their own to acceptably travel in a star system alone. Fold drives have been ingrained to have such high speeds that I'm mentally balking at that idea.
Finally, there's also the problem the Hill Spheres of gas giants like Jupiter will offer. 3 hours to get from the Hill sphere's boundaries to the gas giant itself (aside from the fact that such action would usually be undesirable) is
really long. It really makes me wish that some faster alternative would be tastefully available.
Here's my thought on that. Shuttles and ships have thrusters. Those thrusters provide those ships with the necessary propulsion to give them speeds that are on a scale acceptable for navigating around planets, moons, asteroid belts and serviceable in combat - like my often mentioned 5000kps.
Shuttles and ships also have access to gravimetric engines (at least in regard to Yamatai, like in one of my earlier posts in this thread) that would serve to render space 'more slippery', allowing ships to travel at faster speeds provided the proper investment be made so that a 'tactical jump'-like burst of speed in ship-to-ship combat would have the proper caveats so to not be overpowered: from warm-up times/required time to generate proper 'warp bubble', wear-and-tear from quick combat activation, to compromising gravimetric shielding in favor of higher speeds.
Inside a planet's Hill Sphere, that would allow them their sublight speeds listed in our ship stats, such as the common 0.33c - going at 100 000kps would quicken travel across Earth's Hill Sphere from 5 minutes to 15 seconds; and travel across Jupiter's hill sphere in 8m45s. The former is a lot quicker, but not exageratingly so, and the latter makes for much better story pacing in comparison to almost 3 hours.
Outside the Hill Sphere, crafts with gravimetric drives would be able to go to near-lightspeed (almost 1c). In that fashion, they could acceptably travel through a star system in an acceptable traveling time value while still being inferior to a vessel capable of super-luminal speed. For example, if a Yamataian FTL vessel would fold out around Sol's Kuiper belt and then send a shuttle to Earth, it'd take that shuttle roughly 7.5 hours to cover a possible 55 AU distance (depending on planetary alignment)
A shuttle taking 5 minutes to launch from Earth and get out of its Hill sphere to then take 7.5 hours to get to the outer reaches of Sol's Kuiper belt sounds decent enough to me.
* * *
Finally, I'd motion to generalize somewhat the FTL method used for the setting. Interstellar traveling tech could be measured on the same speed-basis, but use different visuals to achieve it.
This would make it possible for me to use the warp-style FTL like CDD, Wes to use the teleportation-style fold (as seen in the classic-Macross anime series), and other people to use the wormhole-style FTL portals (like seen in the newer Macross Frontier anime). Launch visuals would be different for cosmetic/imagery purposes, but they'd all still essentially do the same thing - thus giving Wes what he wants, and giving the rest of us that would like to use different imagery what we want too.
