Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 12-01-2017, 03:22 PM   #101
Cpt_Clyde
 
Cpt_Clyde's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Ottawa
Default Re: Playability of STL Only Interstellar travel in GURPS?

In facing a similar problem for my new TL10 campaign I came across this thread..... which did not seem to offer any solutions. So this is what I came up with:

In my setting there are jump drives which allow interstellar travel (and use fuel), but I wanted viable fuel dependent STL travel within systems. I have decided to take the "miles per second" (mps) speed of each ship as written in the Spaceships book series and simply turn that into the number of AUs the ship can travel to before running out of fuel. This simulates very high efficiency fuel consuming engines which can then be treated as "reactionless drives" for travel time and combat calculations since it is assumed the engine is always boosting for half the trip and decelerating for the rest.
This seems to give nice travel times (for my purposes). For example, the "Outlander-class Deep-space freighter" from SpaceShips2 would have a range of 90AU. In our solar system this ship could get to Pluto (40AU away) and back to Earth without refueling.
Another example: The Kiev-Class Farhauler with 20AU range could reach Uranus (19AU) before refueling, but would be cutting it very close trying to get to Saturn (9.5AU) and back.... it may have to refuel at Jupiter on the way back to be safe.
Now looking at speeds in the above examples the lumbering Outlander has an acceleration of .01G. According to the reactionless drive travel time chart in Spaceships it would take about 9months to complete the round trip to Pluto. And the Farhauler with it's acceleration of 1.5G could get to Uranus (19AU) in 10 days.
In Contrast, this make closer planets like Mars (.5AU away from Earth) only take 2 days to reach at 1G acceleration or 27h at 3G so now the solar system is closer to a Fantasy setting's travel distances between towns/adventure-sites.

This would not however make interstellar STL feasible, only interplanetary travel.
Hope this helps someone.

Last edited by Cpt_Clyde; 12-01-2017 at 03:44 PM.
Cpt_Clyde is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 08:18 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.