I take it the probes cannot detect other warp points.
What skill checks would be required to develop a priority list for the information from the other warp points? Likelihood of life, other warp points, useful resources?
thanks
They can, they just need to know where to look. You need data on the star's mass, planets, etc in order to run the calculations on where warp points might be.
Think of it like a probability plot. Knowing the star's mass and type will get you anything that's 90% or more likely to have a warp point. Knowing the mass and location of the planets will get you 70% or more likely. Detailed scans of the planets will get you 50% or more likely to have warp point. Below that, it'll be a wild point, and it's unlikely to be found except by accident.
Skill checks are Astrophysics. Your ship's computer will crunch numbers on the entire system and eventually come up with the answer. PCs can use some fuzzy logic to speed things up a bit, using hunches, etc.
How many fully fueled probes do we have on board the Stargazer?
The ship has however many you want to allocate space for. Each one takes up 5 tones of capacity.
You have four 100 ton bays allocate for parasite craft. You have the two smaller ships owned by the crew, and two shuttles (each 50 tons). So you have at least 100 tons you can allocate if you want to put the shuttles in one bay together, and load up the other bay. You can add in more by stuffing a few in the other bays. Alternately, you have 200 in the the large cargo ship, and can deploy them as needed and refuel as needed and have them jump themselves from system to system.
Do the probes only use passive?
How many probes would cover the system?
Probes use active and passive. Their active is pretty limited though (only about 1000 km), so picking them up in active mode means you have to be active or passive and within about 5000km. One probe will cover the entire system... in a decade. The more you use, the faster they cover it. One per planet would cover the planets in a month (two for gas giants, or 1 month if you send 2 per gas giant). Asteroid belts would require a variable number depending on which orbit (2 for orbit 0 to get a 1 month, 200 for orbit 20 to get a 1 month). Note that all of these are surveys, not detailed scans. Detailed will take decades.
BTW: Your mission parameters are fairly open. You are not required to fully scan each and every system. Especially dead end systems. Just an FYI.
good to know. I'm at a conference this week with limited time to post until Saturday. Please DMPC me.
cheers
I've just been at the US embassy and applied for a student visa - which meant I stood in line for a few hours. Currently the urge to sit down and just play pokemon is quite strong - but I'll try to check in on the game. Just so you know if I don't post today : )
I'm back home. Can we establish a standard operating procedure for surveying new systems? I can't remember all of the constraints to attempt to calculate an optimal number of drones. And I hate the GM waiting for decisions like marching order.
I've a perception that it would be better to scout a system with passive sensors, so we could potentially find sentients before they find us. I used to work for the US Navy on submarines. If true, then we should drop a number probes into a system with a high probability of warp points and scan passively until we rule out anything obvious. We might skip this protocol if the system is simple with a low probability of warp points and sentients.
If my perception is completely daft, then we launch our parasite ships and drones and bang away on active.
Bottomline, I'm completely comfortable with the GM deciding how many probes are appropriate to drop and survey per system.
cheers
Your perception is correct, however, binary and trinary systems make this hard. As I posted in the game thread, you can't calculate warp points without knowing the mass in the system. You don't have to know it exactly, but you need a good ball park. This is problematic for multi-star systems because you need to have the mass information for all systems in the constellation.
Most stars in binary or trinary systems aren't very close, we're talking usually 18 to 40 hours at light speed. This means that it's several weeks travel between the stars, and long delays with two-way communications.
So, SOP as I understand it for a single system is drop a bunch of probes in (usually about 5 or 10) and do passive scans. No problem on that, that's why I've been giving you 'two weeks of scanning and you find this...' along with likely warp points.
For binary and trinary systems, you need to develop an SOP. You can either send the probes off to the other systems, wait for them to passive scan and return to dump data, or you can split up the three ships and send them off with the probes, so there's a human to control the probes. Then they can make the decision to transmit data or carry it back. I'm assuming you don't want the probes blasting off heavy prolonged data broadcasts without someone deciding it's safe to do so, and by the same token, you'd have to use a wide area broadcast to send them new orders since you wouldn't know exactly where they were in the other system.
Ok. Cool. So the parasites leading a pack of drones is reasonable.
We should also have a contingency SOP for the parasites to jump or hide if they are not jump capable, if they encounter something dangerous.
Cheers
My craft does not possess jump capabilities, but the other does : )
but its faster so should take sun far away
Sorry for the delay, a rather large tree fell on my house! But I should be able to get a post up later today!
Aouch!
Yep... Guess who needs a new roof.
Or.... you could leave it there and pretend to be a druid :P?
At least it looks like it didn't go trough much more then the roof, so that's something. Better then what Saruman got!
Ouch. Pretty house and area, otherwise.
Yeah, just roof damage luckily. Though it cracked pretty much every strut and joist in the thing. The tree is supposed to get removed tomorrow.
And I actually made that Druid comment to my SO yesterday, and it didn't really fly. :P
And thanks for the compliment Aramis. It is a really pretty area, and I am quite found of the house... even if it is a little leafy right now.
SO?
Significant Other
Not Superior/Supervising Officer : )
BTW: The map has nothing to do with spacial relationships. 11 is not closer to Masterson. That's just where I dropped it on the map as we expanded.
Just to confirm, you guys are going to finish the detailed scans on Beta and Charlie stars, then go to 11, yes? And get some water samples from the liquid planet.
Just to confirm, you guys are going to finish the detailed scans on Beta and Charlie stars, then go to 11, yes? And get some water samples from the liquid planet.
Yes
Ah, good to know that there's no spacial nearness.
Affirmitive.
And take a nice hot bath too. For science of course!
My family is taking a week vacation without Internet starting next Monday July 13 and returning the 20th. Please DMPC me.
I had thought to survey the warp points in order, so now 2-4 before returning to the others. But it's just a plan.
cheers
any chance we can do a time jump now to the next interesting system,
Sorry, buried at work, will get something up tonight or tomorrow.
Guys I hate to be a pain but this is the Discussion thread for this game, this is where all blue posts go. I logged on and thought something had happened in game, only to find a Discussion about old English.
Yeah. Sorry bout that : )
@Current situation - Aramis is currently on vacation, so we won't hear from him in a while. So we should probably start to figure out how to proceed on our own!
I'm thinking we could have Ynja's ship take a look. It is the smallest craft we got that is jump-capable (least likely to be seen) that still has some decent sensors (I think).
Or we could drop in a few more probes ?
that would be a great we take the ship and head in to see whats there with out risking the main fleet. We take a probe as a cry baby at the jump point.
GM is the Jump Jump 1?
I was assuming you'd all continue on with Aramis.
The jump is always just a jump.
Jump 1 takes 4 weeks of available fuel.
Jump 2 takes 3 weeks of available fuel.
Jump 3 takes 2 weeks of available fuel.
Jump 4 takes 1 week of available fuel.
Jump 5 takes 0.5 weeks of available fuel.
We should not make Cat our spokesperson here, might get awkward once everyone realizes she is named after a 'Com-Hee' :P
It might not matter, but Ivan Lazarev doesn't sound any less 'Com-Hee'...
Poke Poke, all I ahve is Ynja sending data back to the main ship.
What are you guys doing? Continuing to gather data, or what? GM is waiting on PCs.
References for speeds...
Maximum Safe speed in system : approximately 0.25c (quarter the speed of light), or 74,948,115 meters/second (roughly 75,000 km/sec, or 270,000,000 km per hour, or just under 300 million kilometer's per hour).
Time to reach at various accelerations :
1G : 88 days
5G : 18 days
10G : 9 days
50G : 1.75 days
100G : 21 hours
200G : 11 hours
300G : 7 hours
400G : 5 hours
500G : 4 hours
The upper limits on ships is also based on size, so, Ynja's ship has a higher 'safe margin' than the exploration vessel does. A shuttle has a higher upper speed than a battle ship which has a higher upper limit than a dreadnought does. This is due to surface area, the bigger your surface area, the more likely you are to hit debris due to being less able to jig in flight to avoid them.
Ynja's ship can go over the 'safe speed' by about 15%, a dreadnought can only go about 80%. Maximum safe speeds depend on local conditions, however. So someone who knows the local conditions can 'push it' more than someone else.
Acceleration, beyond a certain point, is only really good for tactical reasons. The difference between 100G and 500G is a couple of days travel time over a long distance. That is, they'll reach the same speed, taking roughly the same time to traverse the distance, it's the accel time and decel time that is longer for the slower drive.
For warships, this is obviously much more important. High G's allow much greater tactical flexibility. The higher the G's, the faster you can generate DV (delta velocity, or change in velocity). The group with the highest acceleration can generate the highest DV has the advantage in a tactical situation. They can dictate whether an encounter happens or not.
This is why only Military ships usually have accels greater than 50 to 100G. That's because non-military generally doesn't need it. Note, anything over 10G is generally considered deadly if there's a compensator failure. 10G and below can be survived if there's a failure. Although survival means you live, not that you're happy about it.
Sorry, I've been a little slow on and around this weekend since my brother came over and visited. Always when such a thing happens I keep telling myself that I'll find an hour or two to go trough and post in my games, but it always ends up being about twenty minutes of frantic posting right before I go to sleep instead.
I'll try to better myself or, failing that, at least tell you when I predict that I might get busy.
Let's start with the later, just to be sure!
Next weekend, the 25-26th, I am going to clean out an old apartment without internet. But hopefully I'll still have plenty of time to post regardless : )
On the 11th of august, I am travelling abroad to study half a year as an exchange student. There *should* be internet at my destination, but due to fluid living arrangements and all the stuff happening at the start of the term, I also might miss a day here and there then : )
cool got it, I that clears up what we will do.
@Ynja - The Captain is still away on his vacation : )
Hmm.
So the thing is at the same distance to us (14h away) but seems to be growing?
Something very large but very slow? (compared to what the sensors expect)
Asteroid fort? Habitat?
Hmm.
Maybe we should take a closer look, if only to satisfy our curiosity.
And maybe our probe should shuffle a bit away from the jump point before relaying anything, just to be sure!
good idea
I'm back from vacation.
With all the humdinger discussion, I would like to confirm our current situation. The three PCs are in Ynja's ship using passive sensors in the system that we detected the humdinger transmissions. They have sent at least one transmission back to the Stargazer. They have not detected jump capable ships and are having difficulties decoding the transmissions without the tech on the Gazer.
Am I missing anything?
Would it be appropriate to bring the Stargazer into the system now using normal protocol of passive sensors? Can I assume that Stargazer has used the time to top up their fuel bunkers and consumables from Pantry?
cheers
Ivan is with you too, so two PCs on board Ynja's ship.
We are also having some difficulties getting a sensor reading on one of the systems ships, that seem to be approaching us
Yes, you can assume they are topped up.
However, PCs in thread said to wait to see what was coming.
That's now been posted... so, if Stargazer comes through, it'll be face to face with something...
On the other hand, it has no update on what is there...
OK I'll wait for Ynja and Cat's reaction in system...
Good luck with that
Hey Captain, if things work out can we ask the neo-southerners to transfer to us some digital copies of their entertainment?
We have movie night covered for years...
Looks like some sort of weaponized stack of needles. Might explain the difficulties with identification : )
I remember seeing a spacefleet that looked somewhat similar to old american cars (complete with a flag on the front and cooler figures!). Might have been a demotivational ... or an old album cover. I have to look into it!
Now I can concentrate on the game instead :P
Err who are the "Mylthani comm techs" in system, is that done the side of worm whole GM,
We are the only ship in system with one probe, only me and Cath are on the scout.
They just scanned the prob and targeted it. Not the scout yes, and we are 14 hours away from the probe so my hope is well outside the sencer range.
We are still on tight beam so we would have told mother not to come in system. As I said pass on info as it came in.