Re: FT3 DEVELOPMENT QUESTION: FTL

from GURPS The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Adapted by Robin
Johnson
(available freely on the web)

FTL Drives
Some of the most popular drives of the Galaxy, in decelerating order of
speed:

Bistromathic Drive
Invented very recently by the noted engineer Slartibartfast, this is the
newest and fastest method of interstellar travel, and much more
expensive
than other drives. The drive uses parascience to apply Bistromathics,
the
curious mathematics that take place only in restaurants, to the body of
a
flying saucer, causing quick, interstellar zipping without any need for
dangerous messing about with improbability factors. The Bistromathic
Drive
itself is a glass cage decorated as a restaurant, in which robot waiters
serve artificial Italian food to robot diners, who scream heated,
carefully-scripted arguments with one another, tell friend-of-a-friend
stories on database, and generally partake of a wholly artificial social
evening -- Bistromathic vibrations propel the ship at speeds that make
Hotblack Desiato look like a slow mover on tax-collection day.

The starcourse for a journey by Bistromathic Drive is usually determined
beforehand. Each ten minutes for which the drive is activated before FTL
travel takes place, to a maximum of one hour, gives the astrogator +1 to
his skill. Anybody present may enter the bistro set and attempt to help
by
rolling Carousing -- a success gives +1 to Astrogation, but a failure
gives
a -1 penalty. The astrogator then rolls Astrogation (Bistromathic
Drive),
further modified by -1 for each full 100 parsecs of starcourse. If the
roll
succeeds, the ship travels at 5,000 parsecs per minute to within .1 AU
of
its destination before the drive stops. If it failed, the ship stays
where
it is and the procedure must be started all over again. A critical
failure
renders the drive totally defunct for 1d x 30 minutes.

A Bistromathic Drive costs $20,000, masses 4 tons and bulks 6 cubic
yards,
including the whole restaurant set with robots. One drive engine is
required per 1,000 tons of ship mass. The drive engine draws .01 MW per
ton
of ship that it serves.

Infinite Improbability Drive
This drive uses an artificial improbability generator -- powered
essentially by a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain, an atomic vector
plotter
and a strong Brownian Motion generator such as a nice, hot cup of tea --
to
create a field of Infinite Improbability around a flying saucer, causing
near-impossible, utterly ridiculous things to happen, such as the whole
ship zooming across space to its destination in a matter of hours. The
drive's effective speed is 30,000 parsecs per day (1250 per hour). The
"heart" of the drive -- the infinite improbability generator itself --
is
very small, and can be taken from the drive and carried for security
when
the ship is parked (weight 1 lb.). The whole drive, including normality
shields and improbablometric equipment, masses 1 ton, bulks 2 cubic
yards
and draws .1 MW per cubic yard of ship volume while in use, and costs
$10,000. Because of the heavy power requirement for large Improbability
vessels, many ships have capacitors to store energy from a smallish
plant
and relay it to the drive, at a higher power output, for the fairly
short
journey time.

The hull of the ship must be normalified by Improbability Proofing or
there
will be seriously strange effects on passengers and cargo. Nobody is
quite
sure how the Improbability Drive works as it was never actually designed
--
the first one simply popped into being when a Demogranian astrophysicist
calculated the odds against it ever existing -- so Mechanic rolls to
repair
a damaged drive are made at -4 or more. A protective Normality suit must
be
worn when tinkering with the drive.

The time for any journey by Improbability Drive is the time required to
charge up the field generators to Infinite Improbability and charge them
down to normality again, during which time the starship is charging
across
space in a straight line, pretty much regardless of what is in the way.
Halfway along the journey, the ship reaches Infinite Improbability and
occupies every point in the Universe -- each character on board must
make
his Improbability Tolerance roll (base throw 3d vs. HT) to avoid some
minor
effect: his hairstyle changes, his towel is swapped for someone else's,
or
something equally apparently trivial. On a critical failure, the effect
is
strikingly weird and unpleasant -- gain a severe delusion, vanish from
everybody else's memory. Only on a critical success will there be a
noticably beneficial effect.

Before each journey, the required Improbability Factors -- the odds
against
the journey happening successfully -- must be calculated. This takes
30-IQ
minutes for a crew member or 5 minutes for a computer, and requires an
Astrogation (Improbability Drive) roll, modified by -1 for each 100
parsecs
to travel. A failed roll throws a ship badly off course, sending it to
an
entirely random and somewhat improbable location -- a critical failure
shifts it in probability, sending it to a slightly alternate dimension.
Probability Hopping
Some Infinite Improbability Drives can make interdimensional probability
hops on purpose -- this is no big deal in today's
technologically-demented
Galaxy. Unfortunately, it's difficult to predict which dimension you're
going to end up in. A probability course must be determined, which takes
the same time as plotting a starcourse, rolling for Astrogation
(Improbability Drive)-4. If the roll fails, the ship stays where it is
and
the time and energy is wasted; a success puts the ship in another
dimension, at a point roughly corresponding to where the ship left the
old
universe. Only if the Astrogation roll was made by 4 or more will the
ship
end up in a dimension something like where the astrogator wants to be. A
critical failure causes damage to the drive.

No continuous power is drawn for a probability hop, but it uses a large
amount of energy -- 1 MW-h per cubic yard's volume of ship to hop. The
probability hop feature doubles the mass, size and cost of the
Improbability Drive.

Quark Drive
This drive fires a stream of sub-atomic particle-waveforms as a
faster-than-light jet to the rear, propelling the ship forward at
literally
impossible speeds. A quark engine bulks 1 cy, masses 1 ton, costs
$10,000
and can propel 1,000 tons of starship mass at 30 parsecs per day, or
2,000
tons at 15 pc/day or whatever. Quark engines can be stacked to a highest
attainable speed of 15,000 pc/day (if the ship's laden mass is less than
1,000 tons, treat it as 1,000 tons when deducing how fast a quark drive
can
carry it). Draws 1 MW power per ton of ship. A ship with quark engines
requires no manoeuvre drive, but unfortunately it steers like a cow. All
Piloting rolls for delicate manoeuvring are made at -2.

An Astrogation (Quark Drive) roll is required for each day's travel by
quark drive, modified by -1 for each 10 parsecs travelled. On a failure,
the ship ends up 2d parsecs off course; on a critical failure, roll
Piloting-5 immediately or the ship has crashed!

Black Hole Drive
This is possibly the most esoteric-sounding faster-than-light drive that
isn't actually esoteric. The Black Hole Drive is a large tank of
Incredibly
Strong Glass containing a captive Black Hole whose incredible gravity is
artificially vectored to suck a ship through space at FTL speeds. Black
Hole Drives are hugely expensive and very bulky, though they have
effectively no mass because of how the Black Hole is suspended. Their
biggest advantage, though, is that they require no power at all -- thus,
they can be used to keep costs down and profits up on extremely large
ships. The Black Hole Drive is the brainchild of Leovinus, the Greatest
Genius the Galaxy Has Ever Known, and the first one ever was built into
his
infamous Starship Titanic, which utterly vanished ten seconds after it
took
off.

A slight drawback to the Black Hole Drive, however, is that it puts a
starship in danger of Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure or SMEF, the
technical term given to what happened to the Starship Titanic. A roll to
see if SMEF occurs must be made whenever the drive is damaged in combat
(roll +2 for Medium damage, +4 for Heavy damage or +6 if the drive was
destroyed), or upon any critical failure of Mechanic or Engineer skill
with
this drive (if skill is below 11, roll +1 for each point below 11; roll
-1
if skill is 20 or more). Roll 3d and add modifiers; on a result of 17 or
more, SMEF happens. The ship sways a little, wobbles a bit, veers wildly
and vanishes utterly into the ever-whirling eddies of the space, time
and
probability; in the temporal anomaly that follows it will be mashed up
--
make one Heavy damage roll for every 1,000 cy of drive, using the table
on
page 95 of GURPS Space -- and fooped out to a completely random point in
the WSOGMM. GMs are urged to use their imaginations.

A Black Hole Drive that bulks 1,000 cy (a cubic glass cage of side 10
yards) can propel 1,000 tons of ship at 100 parsecs per day, or 100 tons
at
1,000 pc/day or whatever. 10,000 pc/day is the limit. Bigger drives
multiply the effect. Dedicated monitoring circuits sound an alarm if
things
go wrong -- negligible power requirement, though they won't work if
power
fails. The drive itself will work if power fails, though Engineer and
Mechanic rolls on it will be at -3 without the monitoring circuits. An
Astrogation (Black Hole Drive) is required for each day of travel; a
failure sends the ship 1d parsecs off course for each point by which the
roll was missed.

Each 1000 cy of Black Hole Drive cost $1,000,000. No STL manoeuvre
engines
are required for a ship with Black Hole drive.

Flare Riding
A smaller application of the same technology used in Black Hole Drives
is
for riding stellar flares with a heat-sink. A heat-sink has a mass of
over
two hundred thousand billion tons, contained within a black hole
suspended
in a Nil-O-Grav field that, thankfully, negates the most of it. It is
not
in itself a drive, but it allows a ship to be manoeuvred to within a few
miles of a star without melting or anything. When the heat-sink is
switched
on, the ship can catch and ride the stellar flares that burst out from
the
star's surface.

An Astrogation (Flare Riding) roll will get the ship to a particular
destination within 12 parsecs; a failure flings it 2d parsecs in a
random
direction. The ship's speed is one parsec per hour -- and at any
distance
from the star, the ship can be stopped dead simply by switching off the
grav field around the heat-sink and rocketing the ship's mass, rendering
it
effectively immovable. A flare rider arriving at a star will typically
have
to wait 3dx10 minutes for a suitable flare.

It's easiest to ride the flares of a yellow sun -- the flare rider's
Astrogation roll is made at a penalty of -1 for each spectral type
warmer
or cooler than "G" of the star he is riding. Flare riding is mainly done
as
an expensive and exhilarating hobby, but it can be done for FTL
transport
-- zig-zagging from star to star across longer journeys. But flare
riding
is dangerous -- on any critical failure of Astrogation skill, the
heat-sink
becomes a short-lived black hole. It undergoes emergency termination of
existence immediately and the craft takes Heavy damage. A heat-sink
bulks
one cubic yard, and has an effective mass of only 20 tons when the grav
field is on. This requires a power input of 200 MW -- if power is cut
off,
or the grav field fails, the ship's mass will suddenly increase by
2.00x10^14 tons and its speed and manoeuvrability will drop accordingly.
Likely the heat-sink will have to be abandoned so that the ship can get
to
the nearest spaceport at any speed. A heat-sink costs $9,000. A
spacecraft
must be built with winged streamlining to be capable of flare riding.

Hyperdrive
Using a hyperdrive engine to position a flying saucer at N dozens of
points
in the Universe simultaneously, flipping it huge distances through the
fabric of space and time while it stays in exactly the same place is the
oldest-known and least imaginative way of outrunning your own light.
Techno-froods and parascientists consider the hyperdrive rather pathetic
as
it makes no attempt to actually accomplish the impossible, but rather
circumvents the light barrier from the comfort of a dimension with less
responsible speed limits. Hyperdrives are rather cumbersome and slower
than
the modern parascientific drives, but affordable. Governments and
corporations use them in large ships like spaceliners, freighters,
miners
and constructors; many privately-owned ships use hyperdrives simply
because
they're cheap.

After a flying saucer "foops" into hyperspace, it is temporarily missing
from the universe; no time passes on board, but days or weeks go by
outside, before the ship "wops" back into reality. The external time
delay
between the wop and the foop is longer for heavy ships than it is for
light
ships -- one parsec's travel in hyperspace causes a delay of one hour
per
thousand tons of a ship's total mass. Hyperdrive engines can be stacked
to
give a greater range or shorter delay, but each additional engine gives
-1
to Astrogation skill as they must all be carefully synchronised. The
external delay can also be decreased by travelling along a hyperspatial
express route.

The starcourse must be configured into the hyperdrive before the ship
foops
-- this takes one minute for each hour that will be spent outside of
real
space, and requires an Astrogation (Hyperdrive) roll, modified by -1 for
each day of skipped time (long-distance hyperdrive ships usually "skim"
across the Universe in a successive series of easy, short hops). A
failure
of this roll scatters the ship [numer of hyperdrive engines] dice of
parsecs in a random direction, and skipped time is refigured depending
on
the actual distance hopped. Ships can neither foop nor wop within .1 AU
of
a stellar mass or .01 AU of a planetary mass in real space -- when it
wops
out of hyperspace, the ship will appear at any so allowable point about
.01
AU away from its target (or as close as possible, if this is even
further).

As no shipboard time is ever actually spent in hyperspace, the drive has
no
continuous power requirement, though a hyperhop requires energy of .01
MW-h
of energy per ton, per parsec (capacitors must be bought separately). A
hyperdrive engine bulks 3 cy, masses 2 tons and costs $8,000.

The few seconds that pass on board the hyperdrive ship while it kicks
itself into hyperspace and recomposes itself in reality are unpleasantly
like being drunk. And what's so unpleasant about being drunk? Ask a
glass
of water. Anyone not seated in a SlumpJet hyperspace crash-couch must
roll
HT or take 1d Fatigue and, if the roll is missed by 5 or more, 1d
injury;
any regular hyperspace hopper knows to curl himself into a foetal ball,
giving +4 to resist. Hyperspace starfarers age slower than their
groundside
fellow-beings, become isolated from mainstream culture and have
interesting
times keeping track of their birthdays. Payrolls on hyperdrive
freighters
have to be seen to be believed!
The Hyperspatial Express Route
Hyperspatial express routes, or hyperspace bypasses, are
specially-charged
multi-dimensional tunnels leading along established transport routes.
These
allow hyperdrive saucers to hop ten times as "quickly" as normal -- that
is, time delay between either end of the hyperhop is reduced by a factor
of
ten. An Astrogation (Hyperdrive) roll, modified as for usual hyperspace
astrogation, is required to use the bypass successfully, but greater
distances are easier to travel since the difficulty of the roll depends
on
journey time delay. A failed roll sends the ship off course, scattering
no
further than it would be possible to travel through unbuilt hyperspace
in
the calculated time delay -- so astrogational errors become much less
inconvenient if you use the express route.

Hyperway service stations with shopping and shipyard services are
constructed every 100 parsecs or so along the express route. Note that
not
nearly all inhabited stars are linked to the bypass at all: at present,
the
bypass connects only the rich, technologically forward star clusters of
the
Central Galaxy, with links to the outlying development zones of the
western
spiral arm and to the Government research centres at the Frogstar, far
to
Galactic east. Hyperspace bypasses are built and maintained by the
Galactic
Hyperspace Panning Council, which tolls $1 per parsec's bypass travel.
The
Council is run by Vogons and is likely to build bypasses wherever it
likes,
demolishing any unfortunate worlds that happen to be in the way.

Charm Drive
The charm drive is not particularly powerful, but is compact, pretty and
cheap. It works with a crystal, farmed in the Bambleweeny system, that
is
attracted towards the light of stars. A charm drive that bulks .1 cy,
masses .1 ton and costs $3,500 will propel a ship at 12 parsecs per day;
one charm engine is required per 1,000 tons of a ship's mass (charm
engines
cannot be stacked to give cumulative speeds). Draws .1 MW per ton of
ship
mass. A ship with a charm drive requires no manoeuvre engines: within a
star system, the drive gives acceleration of 1 G.

A roll of Astrogation (Charm Drive) is required for each day of
interstellar travel by charm drive. On a failure, the ship heads towards
a
different star from the one intended, travelling for 1d hours in the
wrong
direction. For an interplanetary (in-system) journey, 2dx10 minutes are
wasted on an astrogation failure.

Bad News Drive
Originally built by the Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor, this
drive
is a model example of the application of parascience to accomplish the
acknowledgedly-impossible. Bad news obeys quite its own laws of motion
and
travels faster than light -- and with some work, its energy can be
transferred to the body of a starship. Bad news is gathered by sub-ether
radio receivers and concentrated in a condenser at the rear of the
flying
saucer, then relayed to a transmitter at the nose which broadcasts it
forward, by as many media and in as many languages as possible;
parascience
and the curious kinematics of bad news give a negative reaction (get
it?)
which pulls the ship in the same direction. A Bad News Drive comes in
two
units, the condenser and the transmitter, of 1 ton and 1 cy each. Each
unit
consumes .1 MW per ton of ship mass when the drive is in use. The drive
costs $6,000 in all.

A ship travelling by Bad News drive moves 2d parsecs per day. An
Astrogation (Bad News Drive) roll is required for each day's travel: a
failed roll shifts the starship exactly backwards, 1d parsecs on a
normal
failure or 3d on a critical failure. The main drawback to this drive is
that the ship will be unwelcome wherever it lands: all reactions made to
crew members will be rolled at -1 or worse for at least the rest of the
day. A ship with this type of drive cannot use any stealth equipment,
and
is easy for other ships to detect.

Ships with Bad News Drives don't absolutely require manoeuvre engines,
but
the dodgy dynamics of Bad News make it difficult to control exactly.
Piloting rolls are at -3 or worse when trying to manoeuvre a ship
accurately with Bad News Drive alone. This doesn't include normal
take-off
and landing, but it does include docking at an orbital space station
(tractor beams may help here).

A Bad News drive astrogator is at +1 to his skill for each -5 points he
has
put into the Odious Personal Habits disadvantage, and -1 for each level
of
Charisma.

On Sun, Nov 1, 2015 at 11:49 AM, Jon Tuffley <jon@gzg.com> wrote:

> Continuing the very useful discussion on FTL, I'm going to get my long
> pointy stick out once more and prod the ListMind Collective again to
keep
> things going…..
>
> How many SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT styles/concepts of FTL travel can we
come
> up with between us from SF movies, TV and literature?
>
> To start things off, I'd say we have the Star Trek model (which is
> ironically looking like it just MIGHT be the most plausible, in the
form of
> the Alcubierre Drive) in which the ship forms a warp bubble of
spacetime
> around itself and can then go very, very fast through normal space
because
> it is "stationary" in relation to the spacetime inside its bubble….
in
> terms of game effect, the ship just turns on its warp drive and
"fwoosh",
> it's off the table. Only ships with warp engines can travel FTL.
>
> Then you have the Star Wars approach, the classic "hyperspace" drive
which
> again requires a ship to be equipped with hyperspace engines, which
can
> seemingly be engaged at almost any time - fire up the hyperdrive and
you're
> off into FTL, but there is still a significant flight time (hours,
days or
> weeks) in hyperspace to reach your destination.
>
> The BSG model is probably closest to the "semi-official" GZG verse
version
> of "jump", the ship winks out from normal space and immediately (as
far as
> the crew are concerned) arrives somewhere else. Once again, ships need
to
> have jump engines to do this, or be carried in something bigger which
has
> jump capability.
>
> Babylon 5 has the measurable-flight-time-in-hyperspace model with
fixed
> Jump gates that can open a jump point that allows any ship or small
craft
> to enter and exit hyperspace, but add the twist that large ships
> (particularly warships and explorers) can create their own Jump Points
if
> they carry the necessary engines.
>
> Then you have all the others like Collapsar Jumps (take a looooooong
> run-up in normal space towards a Collapsar, hit it just right and pop
out
> somewhere else…) and several other flavours of jump point concepts,
both
> naturally-occurring and artificially produced.
>
> Interestingly, the only series I am aware of that actually has more
than
> one type of FTL travel (as I recall, at least three different
methods?) is
> Brian Stableford's old "Hooded Swan" books - quite fun as I recall
them,
> though nowadays they would quite likely be categorised as "Young
Adult" SF….
>
> OK, feel free to add to this list with any personal favourites,
wherever
> they come from……
>
> Jon (GZG)
>
>
>
>