02-24-2020, 03:02 AM | #31 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Found a site with worked numbers. https://space.stackexchange.com/ques...-get-you-there
These are all from earth The Moon / Luna: Closest to Earth (Supermoon): 356,577 km Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 2h 22m 12s Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 3h 20m 24s So turnover at 1h 40m gives you 42m to stop it. Should be doable if it isn't a warship with armor and point defenses. Mars: Closest to Earth: 65 million km Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, no deceleration): 1d 7h 58m 5s Travel time (at 9.80665 m/s2, decelerating halfway): 1d 21h 13m 1s Turnover at 23h, gives about 9 h to stop it. That all sounds like you can with procedures and pre planned interceptors deal with it. Lots of possibility for complacency, budget cutting and such to make it a PC problem that they have to make do. |
02-24-2020, 03:15 AM | #32 |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
What about the case where the rogue ship doesnt degenerate?
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02-24-2020, 04:18 AM | #33 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Quote:
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02-24-2020, 06:10 AM | #34 | |
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Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Quote:
the coolant drops the energy part of the equation. Its odd, but I can see settings where it is the right option.
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02-24-2020, 08:46 AM | #35 | |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Quote:
"You need to find a way to stop the attack before the authorities do, or their methods are going to vaporize the (VIP/MacGuffin/PC's) on board" can also work.
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02-24-2020, 09:34 AM | #36 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Quote:
The reactionless+coolant causes conservation laws to be breached, certainly, but doesn't actually give the ships different performance from a rocket. (Potentially a very good rocket, but nonetheless.) Also, kinetic energy increasing as the square of velocity doesn't actually pose any problem for rockets, just for people getting confused looking at them. You can derive the rocket equation without making any reference to conservation of energy.
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02-24-2020, 10:41 AM | #37 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
In general, if you're using reactionless drives, you're throwing realism out the window, and they also don't actually do a great job of emulating most fictional genres (there are edge cases like The Forever War), so I find it simplest to just remove reactionless drives, and replace with techs that do a better job. The usual candidates are:
Last edited by Anthony; 02-24-2020 at 10:50 AM. |
02-24-2020, 02:12 PM | #38 |
Join Date: Apr 2015
Location: Pennsylvania
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
The simplest way to prevent a fast ship from being a WMD is to remove it's kinetic energy entirely. Pull out the psuedo-velocity design switch. This allows you to get from place to place without long periods of down time, but you can't wind a ship up to relativistic speed and wipe out cities.
In my own in-development setting, I'm toying with the idea that the superscience behind reactionless drives is very sensitive to relativistic effects, and their performance drops off drastically as speed increases, before just not working at all at some point. I haven't put anything down on paper (divide by some power of the Lorentz factor, mayhaps?) yet. But, as people have pointed out, there's no real way around the fact that something SM +6 or bigger at orbital velocity is already carrying enough energy to do some real damage. |
02-24-2020, 02:22 PM | #39 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Quote:
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident. |
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02-24-2020, 03:20 PM | #40 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Coolant [Spaceships]
Quote:
My earnest advice is that an inertialess, reactionless, pseudovelocity, or FTL drive cannot be made convincing, and the more you try the more you draw attention to the exact spot that you want players to look away from. Get over heavy ground as light as you can. Tell players the operational characteristic of your superscience as briefly and baldly as possible, flush the pseudoscientific rationalisation, and pass quickly to some other point of interest, such as technoninjas, pirate catgirls, and the Neo-Confucian Space Empire. Players don't worry about physics problems while their techo-youxia are flirting with the guards on the air-gangway of a pirate-catgirl space-cruiser.
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Tags |
sci fi, spaceships |
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