My Wormhole Map: Traveller

[dragoner]

For my setting I have tried to keep it realistic.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Lets look at this Scout/courier as an example:

it is streamlined, the Scout/Courier in this setting looks like this, and it has vertical landing and take off capability, to move rapidly in an atmosphere, it is streamlined and for that purpose it has engines in the back that is its rear engines push it through an atmosphere when fast atmospheric travel is desired. When it is in space however, it uses its vertical landing and takeoff engines to move through space, those engines are pointed downward under the floor of the ship and pointing at the ground. When it moves through space, you are seeing the ventral view if you are following it, it accelerates top first through space, there is no air resistance so their is no reason why this spaceship could not have this orientation, and it saves me the work of redoing the interior floorplans as well. What do you think? Not very "Star Warsy" but then again this isn't Star Wars, there is no artificial gravity, no reactionless drives, and no FTL other than via wormholes. Can you see anything wrong with this setup? Since the Draconian Empire is substituting for the Imperium in this setting, we'll assume this design is of Draconian manufacture, the Earth government has a few of these, acquired second hand and has copied the design and manufactured a few of their own as well. The Earth forces tend to rely more heavily on the bravery and skill of their pilots than their technological superiority over the Draconians. The Draconian Empire is at tech level 15 While the Earth forces are at tech level 14, a lot of this tech is copied and stolen from the Draconians.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Here is my first Spaceship for the wormhole campaign:

 

[dragoner]

I have loved the Type S since it was the Icarus on the Planet of the Apes:


However, the Serpent is a better design for realism. The wedge shape of the Type S means it is not the best for aerodynamics. Changing orientation in space so that the thrust is from the bottom is fine, except for the nozzles being on the rear.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

I have loved the Type S since it was the Icarus on the Planet of the Apes:


However, the Serpent is a better design for realism. The wedge shape of the Type S means it is not the best for aerodynamics. Changing orientation in space so that the thrust is from the bottom is fine, except for the nozzles being on the rear.

It is easier to change that little detail than to redo the floor plans of the ship. If I did a "tail sitter" and tried to squeeze in staterooms, the bridge and other things onto multiple skinny levels rather than just two as exists now, that would be very awkward. Star Frontiers had a scout ship where they did that. Do you remember the Assault Scout?

Here is another scout ship

These ships would fit well into a campaign with wormholes, because they don't have FTL drives. None of the starships from Star Frontiers did, instead FTL was a property of the Universe, if anything exceeded 1% of the Speed of Light, it went FTL. The big problem with this is that it violates Einstein's Relativity, because it assumes an absolute velocity, that a ship must reach before going FTL, and a velocity of 1% of the speed of light, is only that relative to a certain frame of reference.

 

[dragoner]

I played the boxed set of Star Frontiers, Volturnus, and all that, when it came out; we did not find it doing anything significantly better than Traveller, so that's where it ended, pretty much. Nice looking ships though. The Type S doesn't really need the deck re-aligned, as in realistically, it wouldn't be accelerating for 2G's all the time, so in 0 G, no need to have it one way or another.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

I played the boxed set of Star Frontiers, Volturnus, and all that, when it came out; we did not find it doing anything significantly better than Traveller, so that's where it ended, pretty much. Nice looking ships though. The Type S doesn't really need the deck re-aligned, as in realistically, it wouldn't be accelerating for 2G's all the time, so in 0 G, no need to have it one way or another.

Another use for the low berths, in a world without artificial gravity, if you want to accelerate your ship continuously at 2-g, you go into the low berths so your characters won't feel the acceleration. Alternatively maybe a new equipment item, a G-suit, basically it is an exoskeleton filled with fluid so that your blood doesn't pool at your feet when you stand up, allows you to move about the ship while its accelerating at high gee. It allows you to pilot the starship.

 

[dragoner]

Blood pools at your feet due to the vascular system's inability to pump against the G forces. The truth is, at the end of the day, for the player, none of those things sound fun. If you want to do stuff like that, cool, except I can see why they were left out of the original game.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Blood pools at your feet due to the vascular system's inability to pump against the G forces. The truth is, at the end of the day, for the player, none of those things sound fun. If you want to do stuff like that, cool, except I can see why they were left out of the original game.

Its easy to do the hand wave magic is technology thing. Artificial gravity was invented for television and the movies, because they did not want to trouble themselves with simulating zero-gravity conditions, but since we're not producing a movie, it costs us nothing to imagine there is no convenient "switch on" artificial gravity" also a lot of other things appear if you assume artificial gravity and carry it through the whole setting logically and consistently. What else could we build if we could conveniently switch on and off gravity as we wished, if we could increase it and lessen it as desired, we could build vehicles that could accelerate quite suddenly! There is no reason to limit ourselves to 6-g acceleration, with artificial gravity, we could just as easily have starships accelerate at 1000 gs if we want, we could have grav cannons that can accelerate projectiles without those projectiles feeling that acceleration. Traveller doesn't use this technology that way, but Alternity did have gravity weapons. Gravity goes through anything, its hard to conceive of a shield or armor that could stop a gravity beam.

 

[Morrus]

Gravity goes through anything, its hard to conceive of a shield or armor that could stop a gravity beam.

My fictional gravity shield stops your fictional gravity beam.

Turns out it’s not hard to conceive.