Re : Starship agility (2735)

Brian G. Vaughan writes :

>In _Starship_Operator's_Manual_, there is an extended description of the
>gyroscopic system used to control a ship's heading.  It seems that everyone
>has been assuming the extra power used for agility goes to the thruster plates.
>Perhaps it goes to this gyroscopic system.  Agility, then, would be properly
>a measure of a ship's ability to change heading, rather than direction.

Excuse me, but you can not use gyros, to change the movement vector of a
ship. The only thing you can do, is to turn the ship around is gyros. You
can handle the gyros a fixpoint, around which the mass of the ship can be
turned. After the turn, the ship can use its thruster plates, to change
his movement vector. The advantage of the gyros, is the possibility to turn
the ship, without changing its movement vector. But the agility is
nevertheless dependent on the maneuver drives, because only this drives
can change the ships movement vector. And only the change of the movement
vector is necessary, to dodge attacks (i.e. take a Ship with a hull
configuration of 5 (ball). It can turn around its gyros, to change the
direction in which the maneuver drive shows, but it will not shorten its
profile against attacks. It must use its maneuver drive, to dodge incomming
attacks).

>If this is the case, then, I suppose, changing direction of movement, for the
>purposes of navigation, would only be a matter of thrusters; agility would be
>irrelevant.  Agility would become important in combat, however, in aiming
>spinal mount weapons, and in making extremely rapid direction changes, as in
>dodging missiles.

On purpose of navigation, its much better to use the gyros. You can manipulate
them much more exact. And, using  the description in the Ship's Operator
Manual, the gyros have enough mass, to turn a ship in fractions of a second.
The more mass, and the more rounds per second a gyro has, the faster you
can turn the ships mass. Small thrusters for changing the ships heading
are slower and even not as precise (think of the fact: every use of a thruster
to turn a ship left, needs a use of a thruster to stop this turn).
In so far you are right to say, gyros have affects on agility, but the
maneuver drive is much more important.

At last a big disadvantage og gyroscopes :
They are big masses, which rotate on thousands of rounds per second. If
a gyro ever leaves its location, it will destroy the ship in quaters
of seconds. (Hey Scott Kellog, it could be a work for, to calculate
the energy which would be freed ? ;-))

Comments ?

Juergen

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Juergen Kirsch
Institut fuer Informatik, Universitaet Bonn
Germany
[email removed]