Can ships collide entering / leaving the drift?

[Senko]

I was thinking about this and the fact the drift is plane in its own right not a hyperspace where you don't see anything else while traelling which got me wondering can ships collide? That is . . .

SHIP A BOUNDARY SHIP B

If ship A transitions into the drift at the same spot as ship B do they merge and explode or is it shunted to a nearby open space like teleport/plane shift? Similar if Ship A transitioned and appeared in front of Ship B with them both heading in opposite directions is there any safe guard to prevent this?

[Nefreet]

Drift Navigation wrote:

For a starship to engage its Drift engines to either enter or exit the Drift, it must remain stationary with its conventional thrusters turned off for 1 minute.

Given the vastness of space, it's a GM Narrative level of improbability that two ships will materialize within one another, and if they do, it's likely to be part of the story =)

[Garretmander]

Yeah, I imagine the likelihood of that being so remote that it just doesn't happen. Except maybe once or twice in the 300 years absalom station has been around.

And even then, I'd think the collisions happened in the material side of things.

[Senko]

Garretmander wrote:

Yeah, I imagine the likelihood of that being so remote that it just doesn't happen. Except maybe once or twice in the 300 years absalom station has been around.

And even then, I'd think the collisions happened in the material side of things.

Perhaps but just picture a capital city and the traffic flowing in/out of it. That's how I see Absalom station and the like sure in the galaxy odds of you running into another ship are remote but in proximity to THE guidance beacon and hub of intersteller activity. I can't see them not having safety rules without having incidents.

[Garretmander]

Senko wrote:

Garretmander wrote:

Yeah, I imagine the likelihood of that being so remote that it just doesn't happen. Except maybe once or twice in the 300 years absalom station has been around.

And even then, I'd think the collisions happened in the material side of things.

Perhaps but just picture a capital city and the traffic flowing in/out of it. That's how I see Absalom station and the like sure in the galaxy odds of you running into another ship are remote but in proximity to THE guidance beacon and hub of intersteller activity. I can't see them not having safety rules without having incidents.

I imagine the rules are something like: go 10,000 km in any direction before engaging your drift drive.

[Nefreet]

And Absalom Station is only 5 miles diameter.

I foresee a lot more collisions occurring due to mundane piloting errors than Drift travel.

Things are pretty far apart in space

[John Mangrum]

There is a canonical example of a starship suffering a collision as it jumps into the Drift -- but in that case, it was a planar bubble full of debris pulled in from an elemental plane, likely as a direct result of the ship's Drift-jump.

Conversely, pilots can't control precisely where they enter or emerge from the Drift, so collisions can't be planned.

[Telok]

If there is any correlation between points in the drift and points in real space then you'll have people building space stations in the drift, for traffic control if nothing else. Because if there is a place in the drift that maps to absolom station and collisions are at all possible, then by statistics and the law of very big numbers a ship will pop out of the drift inside absolom station.

[breithauptclan]

This sounds more like a plot point rather than a rules question.

[Claxon]

Definitely plot driven. There are no rules to support collisions happening or failing to happen.

[Senko]

Hmm i do not like this. Oh well thanks for the replies

[Ascalaphus]

What are the odds that a random Drift jump pulls a piece out of a derelict pre-Gap superweapon, thus starting an adventure path? One in a million?

Nine out of ten plots start with some one in a million chance happening.

[Senko]

Ascalaphus wrote:

What are the odds that a random Drift jump pulls a piece out of a derelict pre-Gap superweapon, thus starting an adventure path? One in a million?

Nine out of ten plots start with some one in a million chance happening.

In the words of the late, great Terry Pratchett . . .

In the fragile reality of Discworld, and with the gods who like to play games, a million-to-one chance succeeds nine times out of ten. Traditionally, one has to say "it's a million-to-one chance, but it might just work!" to invoke this rule.

I think the same applies here.

[Alangriffith]

Senko wrote:

I was thinking about this and the fact the drift is plane in its own right not a hyperspace where you don't see anything else while traelling which got me wondering can ships collide? That is . . .

SHIP A BOUNDARY SHIP B

If ship A transitions into the drift at the same spot as ship B do they merge and explode or is it shunted to a nearby open space like teleport/plane shift?

Pact Worlds book page 150 has more on the drift, and specifically states the opposite to this scenario isn't possible ("two ships can't exit the drift onto exactly the same point into material plane space, and a ship won't exit into a solid object"). It doesn't say anything about your scenario of going *into* the drift at the same spot, so technically this is still up for debate. I'd personally argue that as the Drift beacons and engines are linked to a sentient god (Triune), that this is at least equivalent to the control of a spellcaster, so you would shunt like with teleport spell does (that or it simply isn't possible to transition into the drift at the exact same spot as another ship).

Quote:

Similar if Ship A transitioned and appeared in front of Ship B with them both heading in opposite directions is there any safe guard to prevent this?

This one has an actual rules answer. As a ship must be stationary for 1 minute with thrusters off to enter or exit drift (core rulebook pg 291), they can't be heading in opposite directions. Ship A is stationary, which cuts down the odds of collision by a lot.

(moving off the rules and into opinion, one could argue if ship B is moving at top speed and ship A jumps out right in front of it that a collision is still possible. I'd personally rule that, as the ship combat rules don't allow ships to ram others on purpose without the special thrusters in a ramming prow, that avoiding collision with a stationary craft is always possible so ship B would never hit A.

[Alangriffith]

Senko wrote:

Garretmander wrote:

Yeah, I imagine the likelihood of that being so remote that it just doesn't happen. Except maybe once or twice in the 300 years absalom station has been around.

And even then, I'd think the collisions happened in the material side of things.

Perhaps but just picture a capital city and the traffic flowing in/out of it. That's how I see Absalom station and the like sure in the galaxy odds of you running into another ship are remote but in proximity to THE guidance beacon and hub of intersteller activity. I can't see them not having safety rules without having incidents.

Pact Worlds book page 151 states that the Drift is "technically coterminous with the Material plane, meaning that a given point on one plane corresponds to a point on the other, yet these points are hopelessly scrambled, - two points apparently a mile apart in the Drift might correspond to locations thousands of light-years apart on the material plane". So there's no point on the Drift side which has heavy traffic, as all the points leading near Absalom Station are vast distances apart.

Combine this with what I referred to in my previous post about you not exiting the drift onto the material plane inside a solid object or at the same spot as another ship, and there's pretty much no collision risk on either side despite the traffic (except arguably on the material side if ships are speeding around when other ships pop out of the drift in front of them - a simple speed limit near the station would solve that one, if you don't rule such collisions are so improbable they never happen anyway).

[Telok]

Well that's nice. Although it does make military early warning defense impossible. I suppose it would depend on how large an area each 1:1 mapping is. Would you need your drift drive core in a specific cubic yard of the drift that maps to another cubic yard of real space , or is it more like a cubic mile of space?

It does however raise the usual implications for drift piracy and entering the drift directly from being landed on a planet. Naturally if you run everything on plot logic then none of it matters, everything works by plot even if it didn't work that way last time.

[Metaphysician]

I think one can safely assume that the intent is for Drift Drives requiring the ship to be in space ( ie, not landed ) in order to function. Simplest logic: when you activate a Drift Drive it attempts to shift everything with X meters into the Drift. Normally, this consists of just your ship ( and maybe a trivial amount of space dust and cosmic background radiation ). Do this while landed, and now you are also trying to take umpteen thousand, or million, tons of rock, too. Not a good idea. Most obvious outcome is "your drive just burned out from overheating", though I'm sure a GM could imagine other creative and horrible results.