GURPS Spaceships: Murphies, their fixes and alternatives

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

Are you sure? The only limit regarding thrust I see in the Basic system is that you have to acheive at least a +0 acceleration bonus (p. 60). AFAICT from the rules on Acceleration Bonus (p. 54) if you don't Drift and expend any thrust at all, you have a +0 bonus (the table provides a thrust amount needed for each +2 of bonus, and you have to halve that to get a +1.)

OTOH, the SS3 requirement for a velocity change of 1 hex/turn does create this problem.

Interesting, I hadn't seen the +0 there, but I think there's...well, two problems with that, actually. I don't think there's a definition anywhere of how you achieve a +0 acceleration bonus, for the smaller one.

The larger one is that every maneuver other than the two drifts requires you to accelerate. And when I asked about Hold Course, which is the only maneuver that fails to specify how much you have to accelerate, I got back that it required an acceleration bonus as well.

Originally Posted by cmdicely

Since the amount of delta-V a ship can burn in a turn is timescale-dependent, doing this either leaves dodge ability as scale dependent, or creates a new Murphy wherein in Dodging a ship can burn fuel more rapidly than its engines otherwise allow. So I'm not sure this improves anything.

What you need to do is to adopt a constant number of G's of thrust and a constant time (like 1 minute, not number of turns, like 1 turn) over which it must be applied in order to qualify for dodge, allowing the time to be made up of a sequence of turns prior to the attack (including the turn of the attack) if the time is longer than the shortest turn scale.

I agree that you do need to require a minimum thrust as well as a minimum delta-V, I should have mentioned that constraint.

I don't think you need to worry about the time-scale of the burn, because it will necessarily be shorter than the 20 second turn and possibly shorter than the 1-second turn.