Greetings from Trinary..another one shot

Greetings sentients!

Well its been a wee while.  The group is now entering into new territory as one of the players takes over the reins and takes us through his 'Helix' game set in the Megatraveller rule set.  As we had a spare weekend some of triedout the Cepheus engine in my nascent setting of Trinity, a game set in the 25th century as humans start to expand out from the Sol system.

The Navigator's Lament: The Bouncy Ball in 8 Dimensions

    Most citizens in the Imperium just accept that the Jump Drive works, and in a week they can go Somewhere Else.  Well, it’s not that easy.  What is a Jump Drive, really?  A Jump Drive can project matter “sideways” into alternative dimensions.  For convenience, it shoots streams of the same fuel we use for our fusion power:  hydrogen.  Some fuel is consumed for the high energy requirements of shooting matter “sideways”, but some is the matter itself.  The fuel and matter used have to be the same because energy production and the tossing of matter with that energy are in intimate contact and can’t be separated.

     Okay, great, so it can shoot matter into other dimensions.  But what good is that?  The Jump Drive is attached to the ship itself, only the hydrogen goes elsewhere.  But by shooting the matter, there is an impulse or reaction similar to bouncing a perfectly spherical rubber ball on the pavement.  Our ship shoots up, and lands somewhere else.  The hydrogen shoots opposite, and will eventually make its way back into normal space, but it also in a perverse way is “carrying” the ship at the same time.  Its trajectory matches in some dimensions with the ship but not others.  Also, you'll get only one bounce, not many.

      This would be easy to see if you were an 8-dimensional kid with a ball, but not so easy for us navigators.  We have to envision it more abstractly, with 8-dimensional matrix algebra, figuring out action and reaction with 8-dimensional geometric vectors we can’t really see directly.  Of course, a computer is helping us calculate all that in only a few hours…

      We get a certain view as we Jump, but our 3-dimensional brains can only really see "pavement", so the Jumpspace looks to us like a swirly, marbled, mother-of-pearl jumble.  It hurts our eyes to look at it for too long.

      The math gets weird.  If the engines are built for it, if they can convert large masses of fuel at once for more power, you can shoot more fuel, go further.  The bounce seems to fix into discrete intervals which more or less fit our parsecs, and curiously matches the general distribution of stars.  If you are the proud owner of a Jump-6 drive, you can program jumps of up to 6 parsecs.  Strangely, it doesn’t take 6 times as long as a parsec.  We would think a ball bounced 6 times higher takes longer to go up and fall down again.  But the bounce is more like a swinging pendulum in this respect.  Galileo looked idly at a swinging chandelier in a chapel and discovered that, to only small variation, a swing took exactly the same time no matter how wide the swing.  This started modern time-keeping.  So it turns out we are always talking about a week, give or take.

      Of course, things can go wrong.  You want to make a nice, perfectly spherical “ball” of hydrogen, and the math says it must also be of “even density” and “smooth”, but I can’t even begin to explain what these 8-dimensional factors mean in real terms.  All your calculations are based on shooting a spherical ball of hydrogen behind/next to your ship to control where you are going to rejoin normal space.

      But what if that ball is not perfectly “spherical” or “even” or “smooth”?  Then, over at universities with nice big calculus difference-engines, you can calculate the variations, small or large, in our return points.  In practice on-board we can only do straight navigation and figure out that we veered from our ideal return spot.  If the engine sputtered or mis-performed, then the misshapen lump of hydrogen could send our ship to a totally different star or even wreck our ship from sideways torsion.  Embarrassing.  Probably even fatal.  This is where you need your engineer to maintain the engines and avoid such embarrassment.  A clean ship is a happy ship!

      One extra note:  small nicks in the bouncy ball make a ship veer off in another direction, but a gap of hydrogen in the dead center makes the ship go in the right direction but fall short of the mark in a combination of space and time.  If the volume of hydrogen is adjusted to make up for the difference in mass, then the ship will bounce to the right spot in space but still with a measurable time difference from the previous predicted time!  It takes much more energy to generate a gap of no hydrogen in a sphere and, as the hydrogen reasserts itself, a time-displacement results even if the ship has no net motion.  This is more energetic and finicky, and a fledgling Time Corps is being set up to investigate this phenomenon.  But so far we are at a primitive stage similar to the earliest days of rocketry.  Both launching pads – and astronauts – are blowing up on us.
 

Last Wee while

Hi there, we havent been able to pull the whole team together the last two plays so we did some one shots.  First a Fantasy based on Traveller mechanic
and secondly a game using the Uncharted Worlds system...enjoy

Down below;

Off into the wild blue yonder;

See you in two weeks for our regularly scheduled mayhem
Cheers and Game On!
Steve

Quickstart for Traveller Mongoose 2nd-ed.

Ah, finally I figured out how to Rudely Intrude into this blog.

I bought Traveller Mongoose 2nd-edition, and hoping to attract live newbie players (remember newbies?  It's all old men in Traveller) I wrote a quickstart summary of the game.  You might glean from it the dice-rolling differences of Mongoose 2.
http://downstat.homestead.com/files/Traveller/Traveller_Quick_Rules.doc

Unlike Classic Traveller, armour [there are British spellings throughout this edition] doesn't affect the roll but is a straight number to subtract from damage.  Rolls with high "Effect" may still do at least 1 point of damage.  Also there is a varying Range number for each weapon but this Range is consistently divided by 4, or doubled, to show the different range bands (Close, Short, Medium, Long, Extreme) with a consistent DM in each band.  Sometimes you pick up 3 dice to roll instead of 2 (keep the 2 highest or the 2 lowest) but it strikes me as unnecessary complexity when you could just apply a DM.

There is a far-out new bar with science-fiction décor in Toronto called the See-Scape bar, and they feature board games, video games and special events, but RPGs are harder to spark a following, though at one time there was a Sunday group or two.  I hope to give them nothing but pure SF RPG, none of that fantasy shields and potions crap.

http://www.seescapeto.com/

Greetings all

Hello out there in cyber ether land.  Came across this article from a blog about the 'attitude' of early Traveller as opposed to what happened post 1980. Click the link and enjoy...

http://spacecockroach.blogspot.co.nz/2016/05/what-is-proto-traveller.html

Onward and backward...

So with STARLIGHT in the can the group can look forward to playing in a slightly different style..1977, or at least trying to capture the spirit of what playing in 1977 was like.  Unfortunately I will never know the heady rush of those eary unexplored days as Traveller came to me around 1983 with the Starter Set, so I was swallowed up in the Imperium and all of its goings ons.  So watch out for more tidbits and videos as the group move onto this next game. Game on! Steve

A Subsector of my Own

Hi oh Sid here talking out to the void that is the internet
Over on Google + we had some talk of making sectors and I was happy to sit back and see what others could come up with. But over the Christmas period i went into the city with my family for some Christmas cheer and there I was listening to buskers play their music then one of their songs hit me with feelings of isolation but also excitement at the possibility of what we could find out there in the universe (no I wasn't high but it does sound like I was).
So when I got home that night I used all my 2 year 1 month and 12 days of experience playing Traveller and started making a subsector that kind of reflected the feeling i had that night and come up with the Hansel subsector this was the 1st time I made a subsector I tried as best as i could to do it by hand. I have no real plans of what I'm going to do with this subsector it was just something to convey a feeling I had also it was something fun to create and see what I could possible come up with some day.

 

Landfall

The night sky had just settled down.  It was punctured now by small fast moving peices of heaven falling into the atmosphere. 'Pretty' she thought.  Then she saw a large bright flare off toward the east and realised what she was watching.  The battle above Fyn was not over yet, some poor people just had their life extinguished and what was left of their ship would now rain down on Fyn, or go floating off into the depths of space. She shuddered as she considered either of these fates for those poor souls that had survived the firefight and now faced a horrible end.  Fire or ice - it was a bad way to go.  As she watched more remnants arced across the night sky - she couldnt help wonder at its beauty but felt another shudder coming on as she considered those above her.  She turned to move into her ramshackel cabin, a loud boom heard over head, turned to see a large firey object bearing down, arcing towards her and her farm, closer and closer until it streaked past , landing somehwere in the northwest feilds.  Sighing and lowering her head and saying a silent prayer for the poor departed she made note to check out the damage in the morning, not much to do about it now.  If there was a fire the sensor bots would alert her.  With that she went inside .

Sector 77

Hi there, under the Classic Traveller page I have started to outline my next campaign, using mostly the LBB of 1977 as their base/inspiration.  Cheers
Steve