Traveller and modern electronics

[warellis]

Regarding Traveller and its ruleset and setting, how much of that is dependent upon having semi-low-G accelerations like up to 6 Gs at best? Would ships having higher accelerations change things a lot in the setting?

(And yes I know that's actually pretty high but compare that to say Honor Harrington where ships can accelerate up to 600 Gs.)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by warellis

Regarding Traveller and its ruleset and setting, how much of that is dependent upon having semi-low-G accelerations like up to 6 Gs at best? Would ships having higher accelerations change things a lot in the setting?

It would probably just make the KE weapon problem worse though it might speed up combat.

Out of combat it's not very long to the 100D limit even at 1G. At 100x that it'd just make getting in and out of atmosphere and orbit a proportionately larger section of the trip. spending less than 168 hours in Jump now, that would speed up the setting generally. It'd get all sorts of traders more trips between mortgage payments and make the frontier sectors closer to the Core.

[jason taylor]

Speaking of that I was wondering what the CoH for a Traveller based "Corporate Samurai" type(say the techie in a Nobles Huscarl band).

I came across the dead thread, Code of Honor (Hacker's) but it did not have what would be appropriate for a cyberwarfare culture that had existed for thousands of years into TTU.

[OgreMagi]

So Cold Fusion makes water as a byproduct. Why do Jump Drives consume water at all?

[Pomphis]

I am not aware of cold fusion producing water. Where does the oxygen come from ?

And jump drives don´t consume water but hydrogen.

[robkelk]

Fusing hydrogen usually produces helium - or so I was taught in Astronomy 101.

So if your ship has a fusion power plant (do any ships have fusion plants in any Traveller universe?), it's using the same raw material that the jump drive uses.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by robkelk

So if your ship has a fusion power plant (do any ships have fusion plants in any Traveller universe?), it's using the same raw material that the jump drive uses.

Fusion power is the norm in all editions that I am familiar with and very explicitly so in Gurps Traveler. You see some fission at relatively low TLs.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Pomphis

And jump drives don´t consume water but hydrogen.

Canon does have wilderness refueling from planetary water sources or ice. Perhaps the point that OgreMagi overlooked was that those ships also contain a refining plant to crack the water into hydrogen and oxygen, liquifying the hydrogen and keeping it for use as fuel, while discarding the oxygen.

(Maybe save some of it for life support, but I don't remember any canon rules giving a life support cost discount for ships with fuel refineries. Oxygen is only part of the life support cost anyway, so it wouldn't be a huge savings compared to the fuel costs.)

[warellis]

Is Traveller a setting where ship weapons far outpace ship armor, with maybe only lasers being able to protected against but stuff like missiles or railguns being too difficult to armor against (due to mass penalties with heavy armor)? Kind of like the Expanse or the Aliens-verse.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by warellis

Is Traveller a setting where ship weapons far outpace ship armor, with maybe only lasers being able to protected against but stuff like missiles or railguns being too difficult to armor against (due to mass penalties with heavy armor)? Kind of like the Expanse or the Aliens-verse.

Let's see (answers will usually be phrased in terms of Gurps Traveller)....

1. Railguns are not used anywhere in ship-to-ship combat in Traveller to my knowledge. Traveller ship combat normally takes place at very long ranges such as tens of thousands of miles.

2. Non-military ships basically never have enough armor to do more than stop micro-meteorites and common personal weapons (DR100). Generally only major military ships have enough armor to stop turret lasers. The very first version of Traveler ship combat (Book 2) didn't even include the concept of armor.

3. In Gurps Traveller missiles given the opportunity to achieve their maximum velocity (which can be hundreds of miles per second) will penetrate almost any armor on a direct hit. This is not true in all versions of Traveller.

4. Traveller capital ships fight with "spinal mounts" which are huge energy weapons that he ships are built around). It is extremely difficult to armor against a spinal particle beam and with the higher tech "meson gun" armor is ignored. Only the "meson screen" is effective there. Star Trek or even Star Wars style force screens are not known. Even the much less useful "black globe" is rare.