[gurps] Slow warp drive setting

[Zan Lynx]

On 10/15/09 4:42 PM, Jon Lang wrote:
> Bret Indrelee wrote:
>> My first thought is this means the drives will interfere with each other.
>>
>> Similar to the jet wake from a modern air plane, the drive would create a
>> gravity wave which interferes with other nearby drive systems. You would
>> need clear flight lanes in order to operate the drives, and want to define
>> what happens in the presence of 'bad gravity'. Defining the failure mode
>> will do a lot to define the setting.
>
> Right.  Failure could potentially range from "the bubble dissipates,
> and you lose the pseudo-velocity that it was providing" all the way up
> to "the bubble collapses catastrophically, atomizing your ship in the
> equivalent of a nuclear explosion".  I like having the latter option
> in play when large amounts of pseudo-velocity have been built up;
> doing so means that you can't just accelerate all the way to your
> destination and then turn off the drive, and it also means that
> attempts to use this drive to throw rocks at a planet would more
> likely result in high-orbit explosions of said rocks: still nasty, but
> less likely to be planet-killers.
>
> That said, warp bubbles probably don't produce tidal effects the way
> that mass does; so the way in which warp bubbles interact with each
> other doesn't necessarily correspond to the way in which they interact
> with gravity wells.
>
>> The second thought is missiles are now just gravity drives set to
>> over-thrust such that they create these disturbances. Fire off a salvo of
>> Grav Missiles to interrupt the opposing ship's drives. The other ship
>> presumably must out maneuver the disturbance or become disabled and ready to
>> be boarded. You might be able to fudge it such that boarding actions between
>> ships becomes practical.
>
> The "explosive at high pseudo-velocities" business would tend to
> interfere with the boarding actions bit, which is a shame.  Maybe warp
> bubbles that share the same pseudo-velocity tend to merge and split
> readily.  That is, it's the relative pseudo-velocity that matters in
> determining how destructive a collision between two bubbles is, and if
> the relative pseudovelocity is close enough to zero, the respective
> drives may be able to maintain their bubbles' integrities when they
> collide.
>
>> I think you need a way to detect Grav at FTL speeds in order to be able to
>> operate at those speeds. This works well with the idea of Grav Missiles, now
>> your detection system is Nav and Tracking.
>
> Perhaps.  What would be the effects of "flying blind" when
> superluminal (and badly blue-shifted when borderline subluminal)?
>

I don't think you would be flying blind inside the bubble. Photons would 
reach the surface of the bubble, enter the bubble space and become part 
of it. They would then be detectable as normal. There would be no blue 
or red shifting or time distortion because the ship isn't moving: the 
space around the ship is moving.

-- 
Zan Lynx
zlynx at acm.org

"Knowledge is Power.  Power Corrupts.  Study Hard.  Be Evil."