Archive through August 13, 2002
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Archive through August 13, 2002
Hey, guys: freighters cannot use Dash Speed!
If you look at the table on page 128, there is a Dash speed entry for Aux engines, Standard engines, and Fast engines; there is no entry for Freighter engines.
If freighters could do Dash speed, it would make piracy impossible and convoys obsolete. Freighter-class engines are built cheap and economical, and therefore do not include Dash capability.
oops, mixed up aux and freighter engines for the start there
Quote:you still get to take 3.831 days to get from Earth to our nearest star, making it one awefully long shuttle journey.
Neglecting the New Warp Maths involved, this isn't so bad anyway. 7 people spend a week or two in space in the real Shuttle (y'know, the Nasa thing that's got cracks in it), and that's certainly not more comfortable than an SFB shuttle.
Heck, I've spent 14 hours on a flight from LA to Sydney sitting in a cramped seat with just a few trips to the loo, and there are millions of others prepared to do likewise. These things can be done, if that's all you can afford. Add a few sleep drugs and it's trivial.
as SVC pointed out when we first discussed doing the trip at warp 2.5 (~40 hours). that's about what he spends each way going to origins. not fun but tolorable for a once-a-year buisness trip
Which is why I expect that the larger a shuttlecraft is, the more it's going to look like a Winnebago internally. Long-range shuttles need more accomodations than a comfy seat!
The small fry have to carry the small, irregular cargos, The Harry Mudds of the galaxy depend on finding the unusual cheaply on one planet, and knowing they can sell it for a major profit elsewhere. That is their niche.
The other major use for interstellar/long-range shuttles is to transport passengers whose needs can't be accomodated by regularly scheduled flights -- i.e. "corporate jets".
Military/governmental needs are fairly obvious, but the two categories above should cover 90% of the civilian applications.
Dare I say the word "Runabout"? They could have been a staple ship for ages before you know when.
Talk about a Winnebago. Though not a shuttle, it would be a small craft.
In fact, a civilian version of the Fedx with a smaller or single engine. Switch the Cargo and Hull. A warp 6 ship.
the Fedx _is_ a civilian ship.
there may have been cheaper versions of it, but it's not to likly, if you need the speed you want the full speed engines, if you don't need that much speed you can probably make more money carrying a large load (standard freighter or aux freighter)
As for Mudd, a shuttle really isn't going to have the legs that he would need, he probably has a full starship, possibly a retired FedEx (or a retired earlier version of the FedEx with slower engines)
at normal speeds (warp 2.5) a shuttle will take about three months to travel one F&E hex, and someone like Mudd wouldn't be able to afford dash-packs.
within a capitol hex the shuttle speeds are tolorable, but outside of that only people who aren't concerned about when they get somewhere would use shuttles, and they probably want more space (think an early version of the Jingos :-)
then again Harry Mudd could be in that catagory
Ahh right. I ment non-commercial. I really ment a ship similar to the FedX in size.
And Harry Mudd was more likely sporting a Free Trader don't you think?
A winnebago....
Well, at least we know what happened to at least ONE Carnivon....
David, I may be the only one but could you give a little more elaborated explaination on how you derived the various warp speed / time factors? I know you put a lot of work into it, but I never have understood the full explaination.
Some things confuse me and I don't know what you accounted for, things like what warp scale did you use the TOS or TNG one, why did warp 7 work out better than warp 6 as a max, and I thought the F&F 6 mo/6 hex movement was a patrol situation, not a flank speed situation.
I'm sure these are things that you probably covered and discussed with tptb earlier but I don't know if you have publicly ever laid out the full demonstration of the complicated project you did. I'm not questioning your work, just currious & hoping to learn more.
Robert
Robert, no problem. it was discussed here but I'll try to rehash most of the reasoning. The data here is not presented in the order it was discussed or decided.
starting facts: when hexes and speed are refered to F&E is the referance.
1. the TOS warp formula is speed=warp^3*C
2. normal general war era warships can move 6 hexes per 6 month turn (I'll go into a little more detail on this fact a little later)
3. under special conditions warships can travel ~100 hexes per turn (in F&E it states unlimited movement, but during the debate SVC ruled that there really is a limit, just so high that it's not worth specifying in the game)
4. a F&E hex is 1650 LY across.
5. the TNG warp scale (whatever it is, I've never bothered to learn) is not within the licence so can't be considered.
Problem #1
the problem with calling the speed in #2 the patrol speed with some higher speeds routinly available is that there are cases (the Hydran expedition for example) where ships are obviously going as fast as they possibly can, but are limited to 6 hexes per turn.
This is made worse by the fact that a ship could move 6 hexes, retreat 1 hex, then retrograde an additional 6 hexes, then react two hexes and retreat one more for 16 hexes of movement in a turn (and carriers can do the retrograde twice per turn for 22 total hexes of movement)
In addition strategic movement allows a ship to move up to 100 hexes in a 6 month turn.
Fix #1
invent Dash Speed to be used for this strategic, retrograde, and retreat movement. it's so much faster then normal movement that in all but the most extream cases (the hyperactive carrier group) you can fudge the times and say that over the small distances involved it's essentially instant. This was done by defining dash speed to be a speed that will cover 150+ hexes in a 6 month period, limited toa strategic speed of ~100 hexes by the fact that the ships need to stop at a base every 6 hexes and refuel. this means that the 6 hexes of retrograde movement will take ~7 days which is an acceptable fudge over a 6 month time period.
This lets us ignore reserve, reaction, retrograde, retreat, and strategic movement for determining ship speeds. (and we don't have to explain whya carrier group can cover 22 hexes in a turn without strategic movement, but the hydran expedition can't cover the 8 hexes between hydran and federation space in a single turn)
for full details on the limits of dash speed and why it's not used more see GPD p 128. the short version is that ships useing it are almost blind so they don't use it when there's a chance of being ambushed.
problem #2
now that we only have to worry about 'normal' speeds let's look at those.
12 hexes a year (6 per turn) is 19,800 C which would be warp 27, fast ships (7 hexes/turn) can do 23,100 C or warp 28.5 (and dash speed works out to warp 80ish)
early on in the discussion (before the invention of dash speeds when the number of hexes of travel we had to account for was significantly higher) I posted a chart of ship speeds that accounted for the desired movement with warp numbers up in the 30-50 range.
the reaction was a fairly dramatic 'what in the world are you talking about, speeds of warp 20-30?!?!?!, never. the E cruises at speed of warp 7ish' (paraphraseing heavily and emphisys probably skewed)
there was serious talk by TPTB of just defining speeds to be warp X and not having any formula at all, during this time I kept tinkering with different ways to tweak the warp formula to produce numbers in the range that were desired and still keep it based on some formula.
finally I hit on a table that SVC identified as producing warp factors that were in the right range. the table that is published in GPD is that table with a couple tweaks
tweak #1. aux dash speed was tweaked to give a higher instantanious speed with heat limits on the engines to limit it to the known 6 month speed limits.
tweak #2. the warp factors for Dash and Fast Dash speeds were arbatratily changed to keep the numbers from being too high (on the origional chart they were in the 20ish range)
Also the early romulans are defined as not having tactical warp, but must have engines capible of speeds in excess of TOS warp 20 to fight the early rom-gorn and rom-fed wars.
I even did calculations to figure out how fast subspace radio is based on the fact that the E was at times 'two weeks' out of contact with starfleet HQ (actually several varients of subspace radio, depending on different assumptions). the decision was made instead to leave subspace radio undefined and up to the discression of the GM
so...
Fix #2
A. Define the TOS warp speeds to be 'tactical' warp. this means that all fiction that refers to speeds of <3.2 to be correct. the fiction (and rules) also refer to the process of disengageing by acceleration as a transition to 'high warp'.
B. Define high warp to be a new formula (which I have been told not to reveal, but I'm sure someone can reverse engineer it if they really want to ;-) that has all tactical warp < high warp 1, with a formula that produces reasonable warp factors for the ships. then for convienience drop the term 'high warp' and just refer to 'warp factors'
So the end result is that where we used to have 1 type of warp and a bunch of stuff that happened at undefined higher speeds we now have three fundamental types of warp (with many variations of capability within each type).
1. Tactical Warp.
Requires 'warp engines' on the ship.
Useable in a tactical situation with rapid response to the controls (ships are controllable on a hex grid of 10KKm hexes)
Produces significant amounts of power that the ship can use for other purposes if it's not all used for movement.
Required to power Photon Torpedoes.
2. Warp
Technicaly High Warp, but the term is seldom used, while the term 'warp' is also commonly used refering to speeds in tactical situations the actual version refered to is almost always clear from the context.
Can be powered by Impulse engines.
Even the slowest possible setting is significantly faster then the fastest Tactical Warp.
Has been around longer then Tactical Warp (hense the naming confusion).
Cannot be controlled as precisly as Tactical warp. The exact limits are still undefined (see additional comments below)
Combat is not possible above warp 1 (why is undefined at this time)
3. Dash Warp
Much faster then normal warp.
Extreamly taxing on the ships systems, requires additional supplies and repairs frequently when used.
Effectivly blinds the ships sensors so is never used when heading into uncharted territory or when there is any possibility of being ambushed.
Warp control limits (infered by SFB rules, it's very possible I'm wrong with some of these)
1. it appears as if a fleet can stay togeather (there are no rules about fleets being scattered when they arrive, but they could stop offmap and regroup)
2. the minimum movement is several SFB maps.
3. there is some reason that fleets don't fly in at high speed and drop out of warp on top of the enemy fleet/base. the reason for this is unknown, but whatever it is it's significant that there are no recorded instances of a fleet dropping out of high warp on top of it's target (unless I'm forgetting some senerio/fiction)
4. the Tac Intel rules imply that ships are detected out to a range of a few hundred hexes, that's significant at tactical speeds, but not at higher speeds so there must be a reason for slowing down so early.
as for your point 3: I always assumed that High Warp bubbles interacted/interfered with each other unless precisely tuned before being engaged -- if two opposing fleets/ships (or fleets which otherwise have not coordinated their tachyon parity and modulation frequency [insert some such technobabble here]) travelling at high warp happen to meet in deep space, the High Warp bubbles fold and the ships drop into tactical warp whether they like it or not... (of course if this happens with friendly fleets, the computers just bleep at each other and off you go again 
) Large gravitational fields (including positional stabilisers) have the same effect, which is why you'll never have enemy maulers popping out of High Warp at range 1 from your StarBase/homeworld.
Basically I envision the warped space bubbles which make faster-than-light travel at High Warp possible to be a) large (at least a couple of SFB maps in diameter) and b) fragile. Tactical warp bubbles enevelop individual ships only, and do not collapse each other even at range 0. (Dash Warp would be even larger and more fragile -- which is why you'd never want to use it where you're going to run into enemy traffic (in addition to its rendering sensors inoperative).
The need for fleets to coordinate their High Warp movement also addresses point 1: that's what makes fleets fleets, otherwise they'd knock each other out of High Warp, and due to small inconsistencies in vectoring arrive scattered as heck. Presumably, the commanding ship's computer would coordinate data for all others -- this might also have something to do with the Command Ratings which limit the number of vessels able to participate at any one battle at a given time....
As to your point 4: I would think a reason to slow down early (not always though, or you'd never see scenarios start at WS 0) would be to prepare for fighting (arm weapons, pre-program the battle computers, test systems, etc. -- we can assume there are safety reasons to not do these things at High Warp). Also, do the Tac Intel rules specify that these ships detected a few hundred of hexes away are going slow? I can see the computer saying "5 size class 3 vessels just whizzed by at warp 7, vector 34.6 Mu. They're out of range again."
Excellent work on the warp-speed logic, David. What you do is much like translating metrical poetry -- take a pre-existing mass of incongruous words/data, and make them fit each other so neatly and seamlessly that the reader could never suspect that the result comes from hard work and much invisible scaffolding, instead of being a simple, effortless, natural expression.
To expand on Orbis' comment, if you add the idea that warp fields blind sensors with the possibility of very slight variance in speed and direction (or error in measuring the distance between distant objects), you'd have to stop to figure where you are. After a few thousand light years, the tiniest error would leave you a few million km off of your target. When you're close, you have to slow down to tactical warp to let your sensors get accurate readings. Perhaps a fleet also gets somewhat scattered due to this and has to find each other.
Orbis, thanks, and good thoughts on the fragile warp bubble thing. I was trying to think of reasons, but was leaning towards the incoming ships being vunerable, but couldn't justify that nobody in recorded history had ever taken the risk (so what if you loose half your fleet if you catch the other guy completely unprepared)
with your warp bubble idea it can explain WS0 as two groups of ship on patrol who's bubbles contact each other, dropping both to tactical warp without warning
I'm still not really happy about the tac-warp stuff, if scouts are an advantage in identifying fleets at long range there should be time to make use of that data, otherwise why list the seperate levels of intel if the opposing ships are going the flash through all of them in so little time that you can't react?
a thought on this, if the effects of large planatary fields and positional stabilizers is significantly larger then the ships warp bubbles that could explain why ships who 'bump' can end up at close range, but bases are never surprised (is there any senerios/fiction that has bases/planets surprised, other then by deception?)
another thought is that WS0 is still battle stations (everyone awake and at their duty stations) just without quite as much time to prepare. this means that even at WS0 you have had several min of warning, but aren't quite ready yet (and the rules for complete surprise tend to support this)
Just what problem is all this "huge fragile bubble" nonsense supposed to solve?
Forced out of warp? Nonsense.
Dropped out of warp without warning? Rubbish.
If you are wondering why a ship going warp 7 doesn't just zip right by one doing lower speeds, it's because the high warp ship is extremely vulnerable to weapons fire. This is already defined in the SFB background. We don't need any of this other nonsense to solve that "problem" (which has already been solved) and it only creates other problems we do not need.
SVC, I thought about that approach (extreamly vunerable to weapons fire) by saying that shields don't work, but the EY ships have armor, and the early romulans don't have shields so unless there is some damage multiplier (every point of damage you take is multiplied by 10*warp factor for example) the romulans would gladly send a slew of ships in at high warp to get a couple to point-blank range before they could be fired on more then once.
David Lang. The Early Roms have shields, unless you are referring to the pre-Y65 era.
David: It's a lot more than shields don't work; the ship is even more vulnerable than if it had no shields. Don't try to solve this problem; I solved it ages ago. We do not NEED an "approach" to this issue. It has already been approached, bypassed, overcome, buried in a deep hole, and covered over. The ship is "extremely vulnerable to damage when traveling over speed 31" and cannot sneak by an enemy as it would be wrecked, crippled, or destroyed. No need for more definition than that. You can assume, if you want, that each point of weapons damage is multiplied by ten if the ship is that fast. Whatever floats your pontoon, but we do not need to solve this non-problem. It's already solved by "extremely vulnerable".
Andy, oops, forgot the Y1 changes to the ships, I thought the roms got shields and warp drive at the same time.
even so my point is that without some sort of damage multiplier I don't see why the romulans wouldn't have swarmed a target accepting one shot of damage on the way in in exchange for a mauler/plasma-R shot at point blank range with little or no warning.
or if you don't like the romulan example, think about a hydran fusion/fighter fleet decelrating to a stop within a klingon fleet then launching fighters, yes the klingons will kill a bunch of fighters in the 8 impulses before they can fire, but the survivors will be at point-blank range and will result in a lot of exploding klingon ships (remember the 'take their best shot and then blow them up' approach to hydran tactics)
or a kzinti fleet slowing to a stop inside an enemy fleet and firing drones from all directions (even speed 8 drones will hit if they're on all sides of you)
forget this namby-pamby put your ships on that edge of the map and I'll put mine on this edge of the map and we'll go from there, instead one side puts their ships in place and the other moves into any position they want with the stationary forces getting to shoot at any of the ships at the best range possible.
or if nobody agrees to be the stationary forces and both sides don't agree to slow down early then starting position needs to be random
the koffman retrograde is impossible if all the enemy needs to do to defeat it is to make a short hop with high warp and close the range (or overshoot and reverse the situation, with the retrograding forces now approaching their enemies at high speed with their rear shields forward)
in all the senerios the reinforcements arrive on the map edge, they don't appear in the middle of the battle as they slow down from moving ~22,000 hexes per turn to tac warp speeds of <32 hexes/turn. there is a reason for this stronger then mearly 'I don't want to get shot at first' unless that one shot would be super devestating. and it must be devestating even to ships with armor and no warp engines (to account for the roms) there are just to many advantages for to many fleets if they can ambush their enemy this way and don't have to work to close the range, it may not be a common tactic, but it wouldn't be an unknown one.
Exactly. forces appear at the map edge just outside of weapons range from each other because they are "extremely vulnerable" at higher warp factors.
David, thanks for the summary & explanations. I caught most of the original discussion, but with the back and forth and working on other things I never did get it laid out as well as you did there.
Oh, and as for subspace communications speed, the various times that it takes is easy.
Subspace communications in the core worlds of any empire takes place using various repeater stations. They may be communication arrays, starbases, planets, or what not, but they not only take in and generate their own message traffic, but also pass and boost any subspace communications traffic they receive.
That is at the inner parts of an empire. At the edges or even more, in hostile territory, there are no stations like that nearby so the originating source (ship or whatever) has to first get the signal to the communications network. The network can prioritize and compress and all sorts of things that most originating sources can't do as well, but they also have the power to transmit at faster speeds also. (Yeah, it's a fraction of a warp factor, but when you are talking the difference between warp 13.X and warp 13.X+2 that is a LOT.)
Additionally, the network can work around trouble spots. There is a ion storm between one point and another, fine, work around it, but if a ship (for example) is on the outer borders and there is an ion storm between it and the nearest communications station they either may have to wait, try to get through (g'luck!), or send to the next closest communications station which may be hours or *days* farther.
And none of that even accounts for network traffic loads, admiral's messages being more important than crewmen's messages, or commercial communications.
Basically, units like ships can get around regional delays with only a small change in overall time however subspace transmition is straight line from station to station and the routing times required will cause the transmition time to vary.
Robert
Communications travel at the speed of plot.
The speed of plot?
Quote:The speed of plot?
however fast the GM decides it needs to be
SVC re: ship vunerability
Ok, I'll revise the comments at the end of my origional post and submit it to Gary to possibly be published in MPA
anyone else have comments or questions on the issue? If we're going to publish an explination of this issue lets get everyone's questions answered at once