Re: hyperspace (was: cloaking device rules)

Mike Miserendino writes:
@:) joachim wrote:
@:) >To me, FTL means going really fast.
@:) 
@:) I prefer jump/displacement drives myself, based on theoretical
@:) physics.

  While jump drives or jump points make for great special effects,
I've never cared much for the idea in games.  Well, actually I never
thought about it much until I played X-Wing, in which no spacecraft is
ever travelling extradimensionally in any important sense.  Sure, we
can assume that Star Wars ships travel through "hyperspace" and that
that is something different from normal space but: they get there the
normal way, by speeding up.  I like that because it means they can be
shot at on the way out, while at the same time it doesn't introduce
any weirdness like catastropic FTL effect damage.

@:) >All you have to do is get yourself going _really_fast_ and you'll
@:) >get away from the people who are shooting at you.
@:) 
@:) If all that matters is going really fast by just hard acceleration
while
@:) less than light speed, you will probably not outrun the majority of
the
@:) weapon systems available.

  Oh, I disagree!  Let's say you could accelerate yourself by, hm,
2000 mph/s.  You've just outrun a bullet (Paul or other tank
afficionado please correct me if I'm wrong) and the Kravak are out of
the game.  In FT terms, if you can accelerate by 36 m.u./turn, you can
outrun almost anything.  In the real world, I would think that you
might not be able to out-accelerate a laser or other beam weapon but I
bet you could get outside its effective range (or targeting range)
pretty well.  Modern laser and particle weapons have pathetic ranges
and even the best theoretical ones within technological reach (H-bomb
powered X-ray lasers and so forth) dissapate extremely quickly.  So
anyway I bet you could outrun pretty much anything, if you could just
run fast enough, but not (yet) faster than light.

  
@:) Not to mention the incredible forces placed on your crew

  Yeah, well this is a good point but that's why ships carry so many
people - so that when half of them get crushed there are still enough
left to run the thing.	The cap'n has a _really_ cushy chair, of
course.
 
@:) or the possible effects of your drives output in it's
@:) environment

  What's with the people on this list?	First it's "FT is destroying
the natural splendor of our forests" and now it's "FTL is destroying
our space environment"!  Well, I know there are a lot of Brits on this
list and I can't speak for them, but here in AMERICA we eat enough
McDonald's to pretty much insure that we won't have to live through
the environmental mess we're creating for our children to clean up.  I
propose the same culture for my FT universe, so our drives can be as
dirty as we want.  By the way, we impose a tax on starships that get
better than 20mpg.

@:) Most FTL drives decribed in sci-fi like jump drives, warp drives,
@:) etc. remove some of the effects of normal space acceleration like
@:) high g-forces, but they tend to have very undersireable effects
@:) when they malfunction.

  This is a good point, and it might be interesting to include a
possible failure of some kind of anti-inertial field.

@:) >That's what FTL means to me.
@:) 
@:) If I use FTL in a FT scenario, I plan to incorporate the FT rules
@:) to simulate that chance of failure when making a hasty departure,
@:) otherwise players might abuse FTL if it was too easy.

  Yeah, but we've done a fair amount of FTL and we have not been
impressed by the FT rules.  The first couple of times your fleet
destroys itself because you miscalculated a turn are fun, but that
wears thin after a while.  The risks for getting a heavily damaged
ship out of formation and into FTL turned out to be so great that we
pretty much stopped using it.  Since we hate not using all available
rules :) we felt forced to come up with a replacement.	I would like
to know whether anybody else finds the FTL rules a bit too destructive
- maybe we just had a bunch of statistical flukes and gave up on it
too soon?

-joachim