GURPS Space: Stardrives

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Diomedes

I Boarding actions aren't really affected by stardrive, unless you want them to actually occur in FTL.

FTL drives can be a marvelous excuse to make almost any improbable thing you want happen.

For example, let us consider a system of hyper-sailing.

Hyperspace is an unfriendly and complicated place and ship's do very little other than keep themselves in it. To actually move they catch hyperwinds with their hypersails.

Again, all sensors are passive-only and fairly low resolution. Navigation is a system of dead-reckoning and not particularly precise. The whole thing does have the virtue of being relatively cheap.

If one hypersailor wishes to conduct hostilities against another the only possible weapon is a projectile with it's own hyperfield grid.

You could build a miniature ship with AI guidance but a simple sphere is much cheaper. You shoot it other ships with gun that uses compressed hyper-medium.

A projectile does not do actual damage to the target ship. It seeks to crash the target's hyperfield. When this happens the ship "sinks" back into normal space.

Sinking or uncontrolled re-entry is very traumatic. Sparks jump out of the control panels, magnetic fields fluctuate wildly, computers go crazy, superconducting storage loops discharge, _bad_ things happen to fissionable materials and anything with more stored chemical energy than olive oil spontaneously combusts.

Generally a ship that sinks will be "dead" in normal space for quite a while, until the doubletalk generators can be brought back on line.

Fitting a hyper-sailor with conventional weapons can be quite difficult. Small-arms ammo can be kept in explosion-proof boxes and heavier weapons can be kept in automatically ejecting compartments next to the hull but sometimes those won't work. You'll have to do without them if you sink whether your precautions work or not.

What can you carry? Hyperdense cutlasses and compressed air guns shooting monowire shurikens maybe? Unpowered armor that can protect from these things should be too massive to be attractive.

A ship that is fully confident that it will never "sink" can carry more but even a controlled re-entry probably puts some limits on that.

A pirate doesn't actually need them anyway. After he's sunken a ship back into normal space he can make a controlled re-entry and then board and storm, shiver some timbers and say "Arrr!" a great deal.

This has the benefit that ships can't assault defended planets so interstellar war is quite limited but Pirates can hunt down merchantmen and raid undefended worlds as well.

Major worlds can sit tight behind their orbital defenses but unless they send out a hyper-navy to hunt down hyper-pirates their interstellar trade will suffer greatly.

There, I think that shows that an arbitrary thing like ftl can be tailored to do almost anything you want and heavily influence the setting in other ways.