06-16-2021, 11:26 PM | #31 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Jump Distance
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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06-16-2021, 11:29 PM | #32 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Jump Distance
Quote:
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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06-17-2021, 09:26 AM | #33 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Jump Distance
Quote:
Really, I'm totally serious. If you want a lot of people to call your stuff hard SF leave out the blaster pistols. A generic expansion of that principle is that you can have lots of superscience as long as you make it large and inconvenient which Traveller does. Making ships refuel frequently even if you can't or won't explain why that's necessary is an element of that.
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Fred Brackin |
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06-17-2021, 07:38 PM | #34 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Jump Distance
Quote:
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-- MA Lloyd |
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06-17-2021, 11:54 PM | #35 |
Join Date: Nov 2013
Location: near Seattle WA USA
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Re: Jump Distance
Another thing in the categorization of science fiction is the style of the stories.
Is the protagonist the greatest hope to free the universe from evil? And traveling around in a spaceship powered by chemical rockets (except for the obligatory faster than light superscience) and fighting the forces of evil with slugthrowers? Is the protagonist an ordinary detective who was horribly wronged by powerful corporate villains, who travels in a personal spacecraft that has no obvious constraints on its mobility other than the needs of the story? The first example is mostly hard science in its technology, but it's a space opera story. The second example (from Jack Vance) is space opera technology but human scale storytelling. |
06-18-2021, 01:08 AM | #36 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Jump Distance
Um... no, it wasn't. Early rules had things like rules for using your drive exhaust as a weapon(it counted as a plasma/fusion type weapon and was hilariously broken), the fuel consumption rules in Beltstrike (exhaust velocity somewhere around 10c IIRC), and the solar powered jump drives in the Annic Nova.
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06-18-2021, 08:08 PM | #37 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Jump Distance
Quote:
There's a mention of fuel being consumed for manoeuvres in Book 2 (1977), which is gone from the 1981 version (and never mentioned in HG) in favour of the simple 'N tons of fuel per month'. Later additions started more strictly defining things, which is where we get such dubious things as fairly small fusion reactors consuming tons of hydrogen every month, with the text allowing people to interpret that as using all of it for fusion reactions.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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06-19-2021, 07:13 PM | #38 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Jump Distance
Quote:
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Fred Brackin |
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