02-20-2019, 06:01 AM | #11 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS
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02-20-2019, 06:05 AM | #12 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS
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For long distances you'll have your small FTL scout or yacht carried by a larger vessel, and if this is at all common it'll be a standard procedure.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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02-20-2019, 06:13 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS
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Also, if you're using that naval model, destroyers are fleet boats and FTL that's faster than that of the battleships is wasted, as they'll be moving as a group. Cruisers are the scouts and would need fast FTL speeds, but destroyers wouldn't.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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02-20-2019, 06:20 AM | #14 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS
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I'm curious as to whether the high cost of total automation would be worthwhile in this case.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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02-20-2019, 06:45 AM | #15 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS
I suspect you get better results if you cap the speed gain from size at some point. That sort of thing happens all the time, as different limiting factors take over.
If you want to create a fighter and carrier paradigm, increasing the FTL speed of the fighters is a little odd, unless you intend for battles to be fought with carriers parked in different systems sending fighters back and forth to each other. Also, with many paradigms you end up with the "Carriers" being nothing more than fuel tankers and cargo ships, so watch out for that.
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02-20-2019, 11:08 AM | #16 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS
You'd get the Alternity Star*Drive setting.
The purpose there was to isolate small PC ships in a frontier sub-setting. The mostly barren area between the Core and the frontier (or whatever it was called) would have been more than year's trip for PC ships and they couldn't carry enough food and would have broken down without their yearly maintenance. Gigantic ships could jump 10x as far per week and thus link the Core and the Frontier together. It worked to produce the isolation that TSR wanted but put a pretty sharp damper on PC importance generally. Want to warn your homeworld that the Evil Corporate Cruiser is coming? You can't get there before it does.
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02-20-2019, 12:49 PM | #17 | |||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS
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If I had ships with very small payload fractions it might be different: total automation of all workspaces and NAI "officers" might mean having no crew habitat at all. But I was at a payload mass fraction of 70% or better, so it obviously wasn't going to work. I'll take a look after breakfast and get back to you.
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02-20-2019, 01:19 PM | #18 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Denver, CO
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Re: FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS
I would expect a couple of interesting results:
1: Carriers would become a real big deal. 2: Ships would have some kind of connection device or coupling connection. For some applications, staying together is much more important than speed. You don't want your big ship to jump in-system with no support, so attach a few (dozen) small ships to it's hull and have them ready to detach. This is not necessarily a military application, but for an exploratory mission, everybody may want to arrive together and not 3 days ahead of the supply cruiser. Similarly, having all the ships show up at the same time may be better than being fast. Even with an exponential slow-down, having all 30 invading ships show up at the SAME time instead of over the 5-minute span which is the closest you can get with careful weighing may be worth a full 2-day delay in the plans. Even with careful weighing and math, it may be impossible to time things better than a few hours when systems are days apart. And that can be an eternity in battles. If these connections double as some kind of emergency towing and/or rescue attachment and are standardized, that's a bonus. |
02-20-2019, 01:22 PM | #19 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS
My small freighter cost G$207,307.69 per "compartment" of cargo space, and the large freighter G$189,233.33 per "compartment"; the passenger ships cost G$368.846.15 per passenger compartment and G$358,677.78 per passenger compartment. So total automation is more expensive than more/bigger ships as a way of increasing payload, in the situation I modelled.
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02-20-2019, 03:26 PM | #20 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: FTL rate of movement for GURPS SPACESHIPS
And in which even 30-ton "fighters" take a couple of days to travel one light-year and a month or so to travel the typical distance between a habitable planet and its nearest neighbour among habitable planets.
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