[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I disagree about blink-warp though. I try and visualize how a blink-warp ship interacts with the normal universe and it's all gibberish.

Yes, me too. That's why I specified that I liked the game mechanics of the Stutterwarp, not the technobabble. I'd pick different technobabble, like an Alcubierre drive of some sort.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

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.

One of my long-term projects is making a 2D projection of a "subway map" style of near star map, based upon an 8 light year jump limit, and leaving all of the red dwarfs and whatever brown dwarfs I could find info on in place. It is definitely more complex than 2300AD's map, but still results in interesting choke points. They are just on a larger scale than in 2300AD, where every route is essentially linear. And it still has lots of obscure and remote systems to hide in, and doesn't orphan any interesting systems (IIRC Fomalhaut is one example, as anything shorter leaves it inaccessible). There are numerous spots where a cluster of systems is only accessible to the rest of the map through one or two of them, for example. And there is a Great Ring Route that includes Sol. It's turning out nicely.

I was frankly surprised that nobody seems to have done it before. I'm using Astrosynthesis and some data from the Lair of Evil Doctor Ganymede. The hard part is getting it into a 2D display. It would be nice if I could find software that would spit out a subway map automagically, but I can't, so I'm doing it by hand.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

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.

Well, we can pontificate about what such a system would look like. Really, it would just need an insanely powerful and efficient reaction drive of some sort. In short, a torch ship. But make it not spew radioactive death. Then, designing an appropriate stardrive is much easier.

I have just never been willing to allow such a ludicrously unrealistic reaction drive, is all.

An idea that I toyed with was some sort of ladderdown power source. There is a triology of indie-published books on Amazon (the first is titled Torchship) that seems to use one, in addition to Will McCarthy's Bloom. But those are pretty fringe. They also have follow-on implications that are rather dramatic. Similar for other forms of mass conversion.