Vote Your Canon #4: Jump Torpedos (consensus: NOT)
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AnotherDilbert
SOC-14 1K
LBB2'77 didn't say anything about whether small vessels could jump. It just regulated how to build ships. Note that there is no minimum size for ships, just a maximum.
Jump was later restricted to 100+ Dt vessels, so jump torpedoes are no longer canon.
Jump was later restricted to 100+ Dt vessels, so jump torpedoes are no longer canon.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Please get your facts right. 77 CT explicitly allows jump torpedoes.
LBB2 77 edition page 18 i.e. rules as written:
LBB2 77 edition page 18 i.e. rules as written:
Not voting in this one.
'77 says yes, but all subsequent edition or rules have prohibited them. They're clearly inconsistent with the OTU as written.
That said, I don't think they break Traveller itself (when considered as a rules set, rather than a rules set and its setting).
'77 says yes, but all subsequent edition or rules have prohibited them. They're clearly inconsistent with the OTU as written.
That said, I don't think they break Traveller itself (when considered as a rules set, rather than a rules set and its setting).
They sort of make my head hurt thinking about them, so I like to leave them out. I mean, a random missile, pops into existence and flies towards you ...
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
And stops to hand you a telegram...
Candygram!
Well, yeah. They're not weapons, they're message transmission devices.
They can kind of work under the assumptions of '77: no power plant and no minimum computer, if you can offload the course-plotting and drive control to the launching vessel and you can scale jump drives downward from Size A using the formulae that yielded the Drive Potential Table. Short-ranged ones are absurdly cheap, too, when the prices are calculated that way.
Once you add the power plant and computer requirement, they stop being "torpedo-sized" and become "small-craft" sized. At that point, the 100Td minimum jump-able hull size requirement becomes untenable and things get messy (under LBB2 assumptions, at least).
Which totally could be a nuke.
It starts getting too messy ... I mean, now I can attack other star systems ...
Personally the communications thing doesn't bother me, the starship rules, don't exactly support it either, though I don't really want to go there.
Maybe. Canonically, they consist of a jump drive and its fuel, a jump-cassette reader, a tape recorder and radio transmitter to broadcast what's on the tape. And that's it.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
There are two aspects to this.
1. Minimum jump drive volume.
2. Minimum hull size.
1. Minimum jump drive volume.
2. Minimum hull size.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
For manned ships...
Sure, except we all know it could be a warhead as well.
By messy, I mean that while you can extrapolate jump drives smaller than Size A (they're 2.5% of ship tonnage per Jn, plus 5 tons), you can't do that for maneuver drives (they're 2% per G, minus 1 ton*; a 2G drive for a 50 ton hull would be zero tons, anything smaller would have negative volume).
LBB2 doesn't include the tools needed to build small craft. (HG does, but that's a separate issue.)
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*I'm working from memory here and might have the precise % wrong; the important part is that "minus 1 ton" part. Below an output of 100g-tons, the drive tonnage becomes negative.
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Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
That depends on whether you are penalized for non sophont calculations, and consciousness during transit.
It doesn't, no. I mean the proper way to look at engines is as a pump, and they pump the energy from the fuel into work. Easily enough just to assign a minimum size. In theory, it is totally doable, except it also changes some stuff about how everything works, suddenly it MAD in space, and the navy is relatively pointless. It still does some stuff, but we're more modern age power projection than age of dreadnoughts.
Oh, sure, you can invent some other system for scaling down the maneuver drive size, or declare a minimum size. But then you'd have a subset of drives that didn't work the same way as everything up to (but not including) Size W-Z drives, and would need to justify bending the curve at that point, instead of cutting everything off at 100 tons before the pattern starts looking weird.
Exactly, thus the headache begins ...
Hard call. I haven't voted yet because I rather like and dislike the concept at the same time, and I cannot make up my mind. 
They are definitely de-canonized "officially" after CT'77, but part of me still likes the idea. Sub-100 ton J-Boats were a thing in TNE, with a sigificantly increased chance of misjump and loss of the craft.
UPDATE: I went with canon (even though I know MWM has specifically de-canonized them).
They are definitely de-canonized "officially" after CT'77, but part of me still likes the idea. Sub-100 ton J-Boats were a thing in TNE, with a sigificantly increased chance of misjump and loss of the craft.
UPDATE: I went with canon (even though I know MWM has specifically de-canonized them).
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