Grav vs. Contragrav

A thread of 2 messages, 24 November 1993 to 25 November 1993, in the order they were sent.

#6378 Grav vs. Contragrav

Glenn Myers · 24 November 1993

Hi All,

Now that I've had a chance to use BL for a while, I really think it is a great
improvement over MT.  I know I trashed some aspects of it previously, but I've
made it past those constraints.  I'm still hoping FF&S will permit me to fix
things.  Having the benefit of Loren "not Weisman" Wiseman on the TML helped me
perservere until I grasped the new system. It is nice to know what is errata
and what is obscure. In the later department please consider the following:

I have a question concerning grav/contragrav vehicles.  What has really changed
from CT & MT to TNE.  I always thought grav created a force which could be used
for propulsion when it pushed around in a gravity well. The force became less
effective as the gravity became less.  In TNE, the contragrav appears to negate
up to 99% of gravitational forces.  Does this cause any changes in how vehicles
can move.

Is any of what I've assumed true?  Has there been any change at all?  I had the
impression that grav actually imparted some maneuver capability.

Every time I think about this MY BRAIN HURTS.


TTFN

Glenn

- ----------------------------------
| Glenn E. Myers                 |
| [email removed]                |
| QA software engineer           |
| Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. |
| [phone removed]                |
- ----------------------------------

#6383 Re: TML nightly: Msgs 6374-6378 V64#17 (bundle 520)

Arthur Green · 25 November 1993 · reply to #6378

Glenn sez ...

>Bundle: 520
>Archive-Message-Number: 6378
>From: Glenn Myers [email removed]
>Subject: Grav vs. Contragrav
>Date: Wed, 24 Nov 93 14:27:09 EST
>
>Hi All,
>
>I have a question concerning grav/contragrav vehicles.  What has really changed
>from CT & MT to TNE.  I always thought grav created a force which could be used
>for propulsion when it pushed around in a gravity well. The force became less
>effective as the gravity became less.  In TNE, the contragrav appears to negate
>up to 99% of gravitational forces.  Does this cause any changes in how vehicles
>can move.
>
>Is any of what I've assumed true?  Has there been any change at all?  I had the
>impression that grav actually imparted some maneuver capability.
>
This is as far as I know a big change from MT (where grav vehicles flw
round on thruster plates or some such -- all they needed were power
plants). I think Classic Traveller didn't mention anything about the
technical details -- starships had manoeuvre drives which allowed ships
to move around in normal space and could have been rockets or rock-
slingers or gravitic drives.

I find this kind of retcon a big problem -- an awful lot of background
and existing flavour and maybe history needs to be modified because of
this, although I believe most of this dates from the MT days. I always
regarded the ability to direct gravitic forces as one of the reasons
why we had small fusion power plants: they used a grav generator
running off a "spark plug" to initiate the fusion reaction.

This is one of the reasons why I haven't yet done anything with TNE --
there's an awful lot of background to fill in first (particularly since
I'm not too keen on the post-Virus background anyway). Another problem
is that I got a bunch of blank pages in my copy of TNE -- one of these
days I'm going ot sort out replacements for them (in fact, if I post a
list of the missing pages, could some kind soul send me some
photocopies?). To GDW's credit, this is the first time I've ever seen
any production problems with their stuff.

 -  Arthur Green
    University College Dublin Computing Services
    Email: [email removed]          Tel: [phone removed]
                                    Fax: [phone removed]