[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by acrosome

(SNIP)

So, where does this model fail?

Well, one place is that it doesn't innately make your tramp cargo ship able to land and take off from planets easily and cheaply. Under this pseudovelocity warp model there would almost certainly be trans-shipment in orbit to some sort of system for launching/landing the cargo. So you would need a ship's shuttle or somesuch for landings. Due to my sensibilities I personally find this to be a feature rather than a bug, but opinions will differ. You will never somewhat realistically get your tramp freighter to land on or take off from an inhabited planet cheaply, unless you resort to unfortunate things like reactionless drives or antigravity, because any remotely realistic drive that can do it spews radioactive death.

Yep, and I also consider this a "feature" and not a bug, because it gives the GM some dramatic options, without upsetting the players too much.

A lot of science fiction settings present the spacecraft owned or operated by the main characters as a special haven.
The Doctor has the TARDIS
Blake's 7 had Liberator
Star Trek has the Enterprise
Star Wars has the Millennium Falcon
Firefly had Serenity
The Expanse has the Rocinante

If the players must drop to a planet's surface with a shuttle, it can get wrecked, or taken over, or otherwise interfered with, and that can offer some fun drama.

However, because it doesn't mess with the ship, the players are a lot less likely to get really upset by the situation.

Plus, flying a shuttle down for difficult landings gives the pilot character more to do, and it offers other options such as air-drops, evacs, and other fun things. And all of that is in addition to the fact that it just makes sense.

Originally Posted by acrosome

Another is that pseudovelocity drives realistically would not be able to be used to simulate gravity, so while zooming all over the place these ships are still in free fall. Thus you probably either need artificial gravity (which should leave a bad taste in your mouth, and usually leads to heartrending stuff like antigravity and antigravity drives)... or spin gravity in your ships. 2300AD tended to have spin gravity in its ships, FWIW. To me this is an annoyance, but a minor one. I would prefer to have crews deal with high Gs, etc.

I don't have any problem with spin habitats. They make spacecraft look like spacecraft, and not aircraft.

A pencil through a doughnut becomes a rational design, as do extensible habitat pods. That also means you put the bridge in the artificial gravity section (since the crew spends so much time, there), and not in the central fuselage.

That allows you to put a big cargo-lift down the middle of a cargo spacecraft, with doors that open into cargo holds around the perimeter, and the nose of the ship is a big air-lock that opens directly into a station.

As for high-G burns, yeah, The Expanse uses those to enhance the drama during crises, and that's pretty cool because it makes space feel like space. But I think it's worth the sacrifice to give that up, if it avoids other issues that create real problems for the setting.

Originally Posted by acrosome

This system also does lack the need to refuel your ship often. Which is a major bummer. Unless, like Traveller, you introduce an entirely arbitrary fuel need to fuel the warp drive.

You mention the need to discharge coils, below, which is (effectively) the same thing.

The authors of The Expanse didn't even worry about fuel. The Roci has enough fusion pellets to fly for 20-30 years.

However, the crew still needs air, ammo, water, food and (especially) coffee, and that takes them back to a base (usually Tycho Station), periodically, and forces them to interact with people, there.

Originally Posted by acrosome

And finally, the one that really does annoy me. I would prefer to have the full range of starship ordnance available, but it turns out to be very difficult to have various ballistic attacks connect with a warping ship, so you are left with only one: warp torpedoes. This is also what 2300AD does- and in fact all of them are detonation lasers, too. This is particularly apropos if you use an Alcubierre drive as your technobabble, since the warp field tends to destroy any matter that crosses it, converting it into a shower of radiation. Beam weapons might work, too, at least canonically by the combat rules in Spaceships, but when you're talking about ships maneuvering at 1000Gs it gets hard to believe that combat closes to distances where they might be useful.

Yeah, close-quarters battles do not happen with stutter-warps/blink-warps, which is kind of a shame, and nobody's going to board one that isn't already in orbit, somewhere.

Not that CQB is all that realistic, anyway, but it is fun. :)

Originally Posted by acrosome

Finally, I personally would like one aspect of interstellar travel which, again, IMHO 2300AD got right. I don't want to just be able to warp from any system to any other system directly. When you can do that all warfare degenerates into massive Mahanian battles, which I find uninteresting. I want there to be strategic "space lanes" and allowance for maneuver. Putting a limit on how far an interstellar drive can go in one jump does this naturally. There will be strategic systems that one needs to transit to get to others, etc. In 2300AD a warp drive developed a "charge" as it was used that would lead to destruction of the ship if it traveled more than 7.7 light years. (And after playing around with Astrosynthesis I have decided that 8-10 light years works well on a real near-star map, depending upon just how complex you want your options to be, without orphaning any of the more interesting systems.) After that, the ship HAD to drop down into a gravity well to the point that the drive didn't work in order to "discharge" it's drives. This meant that transiting a system also involved finding a planet at which to discharge your drives, so for instance military bases might be made at convenient planets.

This substitutes for re-fueling, well enough, I think, and I liked it for that reason, also.

Now then, when the GDW design team created the Near Star Map for 2300AD, they deliberately chose to leave out a bunch of the red dwarf stars, because they wanted the various "Arms" to have distinct travel paths.

The presence of red dwarfs allowed multiple routes to all destinations, although the initial push out to Wolf359 still required a tug, unless someone wanted to take a really long way around.

That creates a bunch of poorly-patrolled systems -- and some not patrolled, at all -- well away from the main space-lanes, but with access to them.

I think the decision to drop those red dwarf stars resulted in some real missed opportunities. If a ship wanted to slip around quietly and try to avoid patrols, that's pretty tough in the canon Near Star Map, but inclusion of all the stars makes that possible.

There are all sorts of other shenanigans people can get up to, with remote star systems well off the beaten path.

Originally Posted by acrosome

This need to discharge a drive after a certain distance can be used with any drive, not just the warp drive, of course. And it so perfectly forces more interesting interstellar travel (space lanes, a reason to drop closer to planets when transiting a system, etc.) that I highly recommend it. It also has interesting tactical features, too. For instance, if you try to attack another system that is more than half the total distance possible you can't retreat back to your system of origin without finding a planet at which to discharge drives (which will probably be defended).

Just my $0.02.

Agree wholeheartedly!

Originally Posted by acrosome

[MANIFESTO]

(SNIP)

Yeah, that's a lot.

Any GM must make tradeoffs, but it's best to try to sacrifice as little as possible from the list of desirable features. I think the 2300AD stutter-warp does that better than anything I've seen, thus far.