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General I need a Thin Veneer of Logic

gchuck

gchuck

SOC-12
Knight
Since the Ancients were ostensibly TL 21 to TL 25(or thereabouts). With the power systems they had available were they limited to J6, like Humanity, or could they 'jump' greater distances?
I've been poking around Traveller since '78, and I can't recall any 'nuggets' that exist that gave any kind of supposition on travel speeds.
Like the title to the thread, I just need a TVL.
 
gchuck said:
Since the Ancients were ostensibly TL 21 to TL 25 (or thereabouts). With the power systems they had available were they limited to J6, like Humanity, or could they 'jump' greater distances?
I've been poking around Traveller since '78, and I can't recall any 'nuggets' that exist that gave any kind of supposition on travel speeds.
Like the title to the thread, I just need a TVL.
Click to expand...

The Ancients had reached TL25 at the time of the Great War. Yaskoydray (and any other secretly surviving Draysaskin) has presumably continued to develop in TL since then.

Originally in CT the Ancients apparently had developed up to Jump-6 but then developed Portal technology that let them "gate" all over the place using pocket-universes.

Under the expanded T5 paradigm they would have been able to produce up to Jump-9 at TL18, but also could have developed:

Higher Order FTL Drives:
  • Hop-1 (10 pc/week) becomes available at TL-17, with up to Hop-7 (70 pc / week) available by TL25.
  • Skip-1 (100 pc/week) becomes available at TL-20, with up to Skip-5 (500 pc/week) available by TL-25.
  • Leap-1 (1000 pc/week) becomes available at TL-22, with up to Leap-3 (3000 pc/week) available by TL-25.
Other Travel, Power, & Drives:
  • Antimatter Power (TL19)
  • Matter Transport (TL19)
  • Planetary Core Energy Tap (TL23)
  • Portals (TL24)
  • Teleport (TL25)
  • Inertialess Drive (TL25)
Some other Technologies available:
  • Black (TL16) / White (TL20)/ Silver Globe (TL22)
  • Grey Goo (TL23) / Programmable Goos (TL24)
  • Practical Psychohistory (TL23)
  • Rosettes (TL24)
  • Many-capsule Dyson Spheres (TL25)
  • Event Manipulation (TL25)
 
whulorigan said:
Under the expanded T5 paradigm they would have been able to produce up to Jump-9 at TL18, but also could have developed:

Higher Order FTL Drives:
  • Hop-1 (10 pc/week) becomes available at TL-17, with up to Hop-7 (70 pc / week) available by TL25.
  • Skip-1 (100 pc/week) becomes available at TL-20, with up to Skip-5 (500 pc/week) available by TL-25.
  • Leap-1 (1000 pc/week) becomes available at TL-22, with up to Leap-3 (3000 pc/week) available by TL-25.
Click to expand...
This helps immensely!
I was at a loss to figure out how to adjudicate this!

Thanks
 
The trick with those higher order FTL drives is that they have bigger shadows.
Jump drive = 100 diameters from gravity wells
Hop drive = 1000 diameters from gravity wells
Skip drive = 10,000 diameters from gravity wells
Leap drive = 100,000 diameters from gravity wells

So to use the higher order drives you need to get further and further away from gravity well effects in order to work with "sufficiently flattened spacetime" to avoid misjumps (or the higher order equivalents.

At that point, you start doing things like using Jump-1 to either microjump within a system hex or jump to an empty hex, rather than muck about with maneuver drives that can't get you far enough away from a star in 1 week. Kind of like rocket staging (same principle involved).
 
The other interesting thing about the higher order FTL drives is that they just about guarantee a misjump because the task difficulty in dice is the number of parsecs for any order of drive. You basically have to get a spectacular success (spectacularly stupid) to succeed. I suppose the Many Dice rules have an interaction here.

Outsystem scatter gets quite large as well:
Hop outsystem scatter = +1/-1 pc
Skip outsystem scatter = random hex in sector 2 x Skip number distant
Leap outsystem scatter = random hex in sector Leap number x 1000pc distant

Astrogation task times are also quite long - 1h/pc to compute the transit.

There is also the "check astrogation" task, which takes 24h to do (regardless of distance) and is 1 die harder.

Iterated task resolution by the computer might be usable to help with this - each iteration reduces the difficulty by 1, or by half for TL16+ AI, but the time required isn't affected AFAICT.

I'm seeing conflicting information in the Astrogation rules, and I have to say I would likely house rule things a bit to make these drives actually usable. 1000h to compute a Leap-1 with no chance of success just doesn't seem right (or fun) to me, personally.
 
I had an idea a while back for a Jump Multimplexor.

Basically a Jump within a Jump. Never could explain how it worked and was supposed to turn a Jump-1 ship into a Jump-2 ship.

Was only supposed to work on the smaller ships until some damn fool tried it on a Jump-6 ship and went 36 parsecs in a week.

The news of the success trickled back slowly because everyone wanted it for themselves.

But once word got out...
 
Spinward Scout said:
I had an idea a while back for a Jump Multimplexor.

Basically a Jump within a Jump. Never could explain how it worked and was supposed to turn a Jump-1 ship into a Jump-2 ship.

Was only supposed to work on the smaller ships until some damn fool tried it on a Jump-6 ship and went 36 parsecs in a week.

The news of the success trickled back slowly because everyone wanted it for themselves.

But once word got out...
Click to expand...
Drunkboat -- Cordwainer Smith, 1963 (Project Gutenberg)
 
RogerD said:
I'm seeing conflicting information in the Astrogation rules, and I have to say I would likely house rule things a bit to make these drives actually usable. 1000h to compute a Leap-1 with no chance of success just doesn't seem right (or fun) to me, personally.
Click to expand...
I suspect the rules we see are for experimental use in a TL15+ campaign. If/when the Galaxiad is published I would expect usable rules for at least Hop drives?
 
Discovery of higher order drives is not a progression from jump discovery.

The Ancients were the first race in the galaxy to "discover" jump according to canon, and many races advance up the TL scale and never discover it.

A similar breakthrough is required for hop etc, again according to T5 canon.

I do not like the decimalisation of jump, I would have much rather gone with reduced fuel ay higher TLs (16+) until the jump 36 drive breakthrough (a jump 1 drive can misjump 36 hexes, find a way to control that and you have jump 36)

In an interview MWM mentioned the Hieronymus jump drive nexus that allows two jump drives to be linkes so that one drive is raised to the power of the other - a jump 3 and a jump 2 can operate as a jump 3^2 or jump 9.
There have been no game rules for this that I have seen so far, so do not know its limitations.

Back to the drive scatter of the higher order drives, the simple solution is a prescient psionic navigator or computer.
 
Given the portal system in SotA, I doubt that the kids were using jump/hop/skip for distance... but I have always assumed
  • Jump was an artifact of the Ancients
  • Jump was a 2d sheet crumpled in 3d space; some systems accessible by STL are subsectors away by jump.
  • There was a consistent plan tech-wise for the OTU.
Given recent (last 5 years) revelations by Marc, I was wrong on the 3rd count, and Marc's not been talking about the firsrt.
When I did the calcs for Marc for blocking jump routes, I was instructed to treat it as 2D space.
 
You could come to the conclusion that ecks boat routes aren't entirely tied to planetary populations, but also to the ease of getting there.

Jump streams could flow in a particular direction, possibly at a specific rate, and you could get somewhere faster if you knew where they are, whether permanently, or temporarily.

And figure out how to tack against the flow.
 
Condottiere said:
You could come to the conclusion that ecks boat routes aren't entirely tied to planetary populations, but also to the ease of getting there.

Jump streams could flow in a particular direction, possibly at a specific rate, and you could get somewhere faster if you knew where they are, whether permanently, or temporarily.

And figure out how to tack against the flow.
Click to expand...

You mean like "warp-lines" in some of the old Metagaming Microgames like Warp War and Holy War?
 
Not familiar with those.

But the stream concept isn't some exotic game mechanic, it's mentioned in Traveller Companion as jumpspace currents.
 
RogerD said:
I'm seeing conflicting information in the Astrogation rules, and I have to say I would likely house rule things a bit to make these drives actually usable. 1000h to compute a Leap-1 with no chance of success just doesn't seem right (or fun) to me, personally.
Click to expand...
My house rule would be that you compute the high-order as if it were low order (Leap-1 is computed as Jump-1)....
but the destination drift is an automatic 10% of the distance traveled.
Do a Leap-1, you're guaranteed to hit somewhere within 100 parsecs of the destination.
Do a Skip-1, you're guaranteed to hit somewhere within 10 parsecs of your goal
Do a Hop-1, you're landing either on target or an adjacent hex.

Since those ships are probably going to have the lower-order drives on board to handle the jump distance issue, that's not such a big deal.

Leave planet, get to 100D
Micro-Jump to get clear for Leap
Leap toward destination
Skip toward destination
Hop toward destination
Jump the final hex.

This gives reliable transit of 1000 parsecs in 4 to 6 weeks.
 
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