Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark Caliber
Alright, I'm not going to be able to do any math, but I'm familiar with how vectored thrusters are used currently and we should be able to adapt that knowledge to this situation.
Harrier Jump Jets and V-22 Osprey* use vectored thrust for vertical take off and landings. So temporarily they can use the thrust to 'hover' and once airborne, they switch the thrust so that they can propel themselves forward.
The other more common application of vectored thrust is to enable jet fighters to turn faster. But once they have completed their maneuver, the thrusters are reset for straight thrust.
As in real life, starship designers would not use vectored thrusters, unless the craft being designed has a specific function that would require the use of a vectored thruster.
So yeah. Straight thrusters do work "more effectively" than vectored thrusters.
That's also why spaceships employ very low powered maneuver thrusters that reorient the ship and then employ a very powerful main drive to alter the course of the ship.
* Yes, I know that the V-22 uses propellers, but those propellers are vectoring airflow (like a jet turbine vectors airflow) in a similar principle.
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I have it that gravitic drives are inherently 3D thrust vectoring and that making them not doesn't really save you anything .
Maneuver drives I have work on slightly different principles and the bulk of the drive (about 80%) is a mostly normal gravitic drive , the important bit (the thruster plate that creates the point in space these drives interact with) doesn't compromise the 3D thrust vectoring properties in any way .
This then makes most Traveller design standards believable .
The advantage of 3D thrust vectoring for spaceships (other than vertical landing etc) is that they can control their movement very precisely making docking etc something the typical pilot can manage regularly . Without 3D thrust vectoring docking at starports (especially given the enormous variety of design of both ship and port in Traveller) would be so dificult and time consuming that trade world probably girind to a halt except for advanced A.I. controlled bulk freighters of specific design with a starport also carfully kept to standard design and that isn't Traveller .