04-21-2018, 12:53 PM | #11 | |||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: 2300 ad tl
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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04-21-2018, 01:48 PM | #12 | |
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: 2300 ad tl
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That is pretty much as described in the description "When in thrust mode, large volumes of additional fuel are added to the re-ignition chamber, burned, and ejected as reaction mass." Also any actual thrust from the MHD part is likely miniscule. As example take the ship closest to a normal shuttle the Yinma-class Lander from the ships of the french arm. It has only a 0.5MW MHD reactor, that is really not much when compared to the energy you get even by burning that 1/6th of the mass as fuel. It uses thus 0.3 tons fuel/hour in the MHD engine. The total weight seems to be 175 tons base+225 cargo=400 tons loaded without fuel +25 tons fuel. So it is using 66 2/3 tons fuel for the landing/takeoff out of the 25 toms it has.. or more likely it has 25 tons for long term operation and 66 2/3 tons for interface work. Either way MHD uses 0.5% of the fuel/hour that the thruster uses. So most of the thrust comes from magic, the next highest component is the burned hydrox in the camber as a rocket engine and the last really small part from the MHD turbine exhaust. In case of the Yunma it is about: 92.6% magic, 7.4% hydrox burning and maybe 0.01% from maybe 20 minutes of the MHD. |
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04-21-2018, 02:06 PM | #13 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: 2300 ad tl
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Look at it this way. Combine the cybernetic stuff and biological enhancements of the provolutionists with the downloading of people's personalities and memories and what you have is not a cyberpunk game but a very early transhuman setting... |
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04-21-2018, 02:10 PM | #14 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: 2300 ad tl
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Serious answer I though you were implying thrusters were reactionless rather than superscience. But then neither of us have mentioned the fusion power plants which are superscience and the MHD turbine red herring. |
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04-21-2018, 02:26 PM | #15 | |||
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Re: 2300 ad tl
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The thrusters were listed by me as super science and named specifically thrusters because that is what they are called in game. Quote:
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04-21-2018, 05:55 PM | #16 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Re: 2300 ad tl
The feel I got from 2300 was similar to Firefly...
...the Core has extremely high tech but the outworlds don’t see much of it. Cyberpunk probably exists onEarth but most of the adventures are taking place on th frontier. |
04-22-2018, 07:13 PM | #17 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
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Re: 2300 ad tl
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In the 2300 AD setting, multiple polities existed and the main coalitions had set out in different directions from Earth. Each of them controlled their own "arms," or paths to and from various colonies. The Earth-based polities governed some colonies, others had gained independence, and many planets had colonies created by either the the main colonizing power or by favored clients. Friendly clients sometimes had their own colony worlds, corporations and NGOs had others, and sometimes paths ("fingers") branched off from the main polity's "arm" and led to those colonies. In a few cases, planets had been settled by rival powers, which resulted in considerable inter-colony tension, and sometimes even nasty little localized proxy-wars. So, yeah the core worlds (of which there were only two) had technological advantages, but the equipment available to the colonists partially depended on the initial investment made by the sponsor, as well as local conditions. In many cases (and this makes it my favorite setting), the writers recognized the impracticality (or even impossibility) of installing at the colony, from the get-go, an industrial infrastructure. That means the equipment used on each planet varied a lot, and depended on available resources and distances from the colony hub. So, yeah, I'd call the core planets TL10, with just enough super-science to have relatively inexpensive space travel and "slow" FTL speeds. (Even an unmanned, light and fast messenger drone couldn't travel much faster than about 1 ly in 12-24 hours or so, IIRC, but it's been awhile and my books are packed in boxes.) That said, I will note that, wholly unlike Firefly, privately-owned starships didn't really exist in vanilla 2300 AD. Most starships were owned by governments, NGOs (of which 2300AD had many) or large corporations. A few billionaires owned private yachts with stutterwarp capabilities, but that's it. No independent merchants struggled to keep flyin' in their ramshackle ships. If the PCs needed to travel, they booked flights and bought tickets. I'd agree that computers are retarded, by modern standards, and think the TL 7+1 suggestion is pretty good. Also, nobody had conceived of cell phones, at the time GDW created the setting, so radios were the best they could do. Most colony hubs had TL 9 available to them, but that dropped off as distance increased. I remember the vehicles mostly used hydrogen fuel cells, buildings used solar panels, advanced colonies had central powerplants of some sort, and guns outside the Core mostly used chemical propellants. I'd say a significant fraction of colony equipment qualified as the equivalent of TL8, but with far less integration of computer technology, and no information networking to speak of. The books noted that a lot of the small-arms used by the colonists were former military weapons that had been phased out in favor of more advanced replacements, and then dumped in the surplus market. In some cases, if the environment supported it and allowed for more self-sufficiency, the outlying colony areas might even use TL7 equipment -- especially if it was simple, durable, and easily maintained and repaired with the resources on hand.
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-- MXLP:9 [JD=1, DK=1, DM-M=1, M(FAW)=1, SS=2, Nym=1 (nose coffee), sj=1 (nose cocoa), Maz=1] "Some days, I just don't know what to think." -Daryl Dixon. Last edited by tshiggins; 04-23-2018 at 10:28 AM. |
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04-22-2018, 08:44 PM | #18 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: 2300 ad tl
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One thing about the tech that makes it seem primitive to us today is that most of what we see is stuff intended for explorers, wilderness colonists, and small military units operating with little logistics support, so it's rugged and doesn't depend on other pieces of gear to function. Massively networked, talks to all its friends, uses distributed processing over the whole unit, navigates by GPS and wi-fi hotspots, and so on stuff might exist in the core, but out in the frontier it's seen as unreliable, I think. People want self-contained equipment that works when the GPS sats are down, the comm sats are unreachable because of solar activity, and you're on your own and thus have no network.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." Last edited by Rupert; 04-22-2018 at 08:49 PM. |
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04-22-2018, 09:18 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Jan 2014
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Re: 2300 ad tl
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04-22-2018, 09:56 PM | #20 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: 2300 ad tl
I think it has - there are flight packs and HUD systems for your helmets that work for more than just really expensive aerospace fighters, so that's better than today in those areas. Hovercraft are common, and some blimps are used for cheap transport on colonies where the weather is agreeable and roading is limited, but these are more a slightly alternate tech line than higher tech. The aircraft are batter than ours - semi-functional hypersonic stealth, and useful SVTOL attack planes. Battery power density and robotics are good enough to allow combat walkers in the ~3m tall range that have enough armour that you need a plasma gun or AT system to kill them and not merely a 25mm cannon.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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