Re: [FT]SML question

At 4:37 PM -0400 6/18/01, Richard and Emily Bell wrote:
>
>It cannot be that restrictive a limit, or some things become 
>difficult. Thrust 2
>must be practical for a merchant (the sample cargo ships all have 
>thrust 2), so
>the time to get far enough out of the star's gravity well (and back in,
on the
>return trip)can not be an overly significant amount of the total 
>trip time.  If
>it takes several weeks to get to the jump threshold (at thrust 2) 
>and only a few
>days to get to the destination star, it would be unusual to see a cargo
ship
>with less than thrust 10.  The capital cost, and loss of cargo space is
>unimportant, it gets to the jump threshold in only a twenty-fifth of
the time,
>and could make two (or more) trips before the slower, cheaper vessel 
>(with more
>cargo space) gets to the first jump.  Thrust 2 only makes sense if 
>the distance
>jumped does not depend on thrust, and it will be a very long trip 
>with no stops.

Remember there are fast cargo ships, slow cargo ships and things in 
between. The faster ships of old were liners and banana ships. 
Everything else tended to be slower and more conservative. Bulk 
carriers aren't going to go that fast from inside to the outside 
anyhow.

Being able to FTL into systems makes system defense pretty much
hopeless.

I sat down and calculated the time it would take to get from One side 
of the NAC to the other due to a thread on the Atlanta FT list...

From:  Ryan Gill <rmgill@m...>
Date:  Fri Apr 13, 2001  3:08 pm
Subject:  Re: [fullthrustgroup] Star Maps and Star Nation locations...

The longest successful jump was 7 Light years, that was with
a specialized scientific research craft. That ship tried a
longer jump and never returned.

Figure a bit over a Parsec (1 Parsec is = 3.3 Light Years) 
is about the standard for civil shipping 4 LY in other
words. Military grade FTL drives are a bit better, put them
at 5 LY. Anything further is too risky and isn't really done
unless you have a fast courier. Also included is recharge
time between one FTL hop and another. ~6 hours is what the
book says (I was recalling an hour, sorry...).

Some of these systems are right at or under a parsec. So a
quick jump from one to the other is easy. A long trip from
one side of the NAC Mu Arae (9:-3:-2) to GJ 1289 (-2:7:-3)
is about 11.7 parsecs or 396 Light years. If we can do that
in 4 LY hops we are talking about 99 hops and probably about
594 hours given no drive failures or other problems. That
comes out to 25 days worth of travel.

Merchant vessels with passengers tend to only do their FTL
hops at night when the passengers are sleeping since it does
take a bit out of you. The books describe it as a very
sickening feeling.

The 25 days worth of travel is about right for what you'd
expect for such a scale on the map. It does make for a good
ability to move around, however, its not a quick thing.

What it means for any campaign is that Big nations like the
NAC/ESU/NSL/FSE is that a large portion of their forces are
spread out. Fighting them is going to be a daunting task
unless they are tied down with some other major conflict.
You don't want to fight a major nation if they can bring
their entire weight of force against you.

Just like the US fighting great Britain during the war of
1812. We weren't close to challenging their dominance of the
Atlantic or the Carribean, we were able to sting them and
make them unhappy with fighting us when they were concerned
about the Continental war. We had to make it come to an end
before they finished with the Frogs and Napoleon.

>The preponderance of thrust 2 merchants strongly implies that it only
takes a
>week to get to the jump threshold of a planet, anything more, and it
pays to
>have higher thrust cargo ships (this assumes 1000km to the MU and 1000
seconds
>to the turn).

Well, given they can continually thrust the whole way and don't have 
to bring velocity to Zero to FTL, I don't see it taking more than a 
day or so to reach the FTL Limit. Get fancy with your final jumps and 
you can conserve that velocity on the other eventual end of all of 
your jumps.

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